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Flaming Lips Information
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'The Flaming Lips' (formed in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1983) are an idiosyncratic and acclaimed American alternative rock band.
Although grounded in an indie rock/post-punk approach to rock music, the Flaming Lips are known for their lush, multi-layered, psychedelic-ish arrangements and their spacey lyrics and bizarre song titles. They are also acclaimed for their elaborate live shows, featuring animal suits, puppets, video projections and complex stage light configurations. In 2002, Q magazine named The Flaming Lips one of the "50 Bands To See Before You Die".
The group recorded several albums and EPs on an indie label in the 1980s and early 1990s. After signing to Warner Brothers, they scored a top ten hit in 1995 with "She Don™t Use Jelly." (Known in Australia as "Vaseline") Although it would be their only hit single, the band has maintained critical respect and, to a lesser extent, commercial viability with sonically majestic albums such as 1999™s The Soft Bulletin and 2002™s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.
History
Indie period
The Flaming Lips formed in Oklahoma City in 1983, reportedly after guitarist Wayne Coyne bought a Les Paul. With Coyne™s brother Mark singing lead vocals and Michael Ivins on bass guitar, the band debuted at an R&B bar.
Shortly afterwards, drummer Richard English joined the group, Mark Coyne left the band and Wayne assumed lead vocal and songwriting duties. This line-up recorded the debut album Hear It Is, released on the small label Restless Records in 1986. This line-up recorded two more albums for Restless 1987™ Oh, my Gawd!!!...The Flaming Lips and 1988™s .Telepathic Surgery.
Nathan Roberts replaced English as drummer and Jonathan Donahue (later to form the alternative rock band Mercury Rev) joined for 1989™s In a Priest Driven Ambulance. They would be replaced by guitarist Ronald Jones and drummer Steve Drozd, respectively, following that album.
During their Restless Records period, the band gained a significant cult audience, thanks in part to their bizarre concerts featuring bubble machines, confetti, balloons, hand puppets and strings of Christmas lights.
śShe Don™t Use Jellyť through Zaireeka
In 1990, the band was signed to Warner Bros. Records. In 1992, they released their major label debut Hit to Death in the Future Head to little notice.
In 1993, they released Transmissions from the Satellite Heart. The album gained widespread airplay on college radio stations. In early 1995, the Transmissions single śShe Don™t Use Jellyť became a top ten Modern Rock and received frequent MTV airplay. The Lips were even featured on the popular teen television series Beverly Hills 90210 and performed "She Don't Use Jelly" live on Late Night with David Letterman in March of 1995. The success of this record led to long stints of touring, including a second-stage headlining position on the Lollapalooza tour and opening for both the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Candlebox.
Clouds Taste Metallic was released to much critical fanfare in late 1995, though it did not achieve the commercial success of its predecessor.This was the last record and tour in which the Lips were performing as a "standard", although highly idiosyncratic, 4-piece rock band. The strain of the year-long Clouds tour added to the stress from the three years touring in support of Transmissions was a major factor in the departure of Ronald Jones in late 1996. He was said to be suffering from a severe case of agoraphobia.
In the meanwhile, a series of strange incidents (recounted in the 1999 song śThe Spiderbite Songť) beset the band. Drozd™s arm was almost needlessly amputated due to what he claimed was a spider bite (it turned out to be abscessed as a result of Drozd's heroin use) and Ivins was trapped in his car for several hours, after the wheel spun off of another vehicle, into his windshield.
The departure of Jones and a general dissatisfaction with standard "rock" music led to the three remaining members of the group to redefine the direction of the band with the experimental Zaireeka (1997), a four-CD album which is intended to be heard by playing all four CDs in four separate CD players simultaneously. The music incorporated both traditional musical elements and "found" sounds (as in musique concrete), often heavily manipulated with recording studio electronics. As part of the development of this project (and occasionally as part of the subsequent tour), the band conducted a series of "boombox experiments", where an orchestra comprising up to 40 volunteers with modified "boombox"-type tape players was "conducted" - directed to vary the volume, speed or tone of the tape they were playing (all of which were made by the band) - by the band's lead member, Wayne Coyne.
The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi
Though their experimental endeavors received some press, their real breakthrough came with the massively acclaimed 1999 release, The Soft Bulletin. Marrying more traditional catchy melodies with languid synthetic strings, hypnotic, carefully manipulated beats, booming cymbals and oddball, philosophical lyrics (sung much more strongly than on earlier releases), the album was one of the underground hits of the year, widely considered to be one of the best albums of the entire decade. Compared by many to the Beach Boys Pet Sounds due to the harmonies and orchestrated sounds, it also featured greater use of synthesizers, drum machines, sound effects and more studio manipulation. After this album was released, Wayne Coyne said that "if someone was to ask me what instrument do I play, I would say the recording studio." Realizing that an attempt to recreate this complex album live solely with additional musicians would be prohibitively complex and expensive, the group decided to tour as a three-piece and make extensive use of pre-recorded music to fill out the parts not being performed live by the members of the band. Perhaps most notably, this led to the decision to have Steven Drozd (ostensibly the drummer. but a talented multi-instrumentalist) play primarily keyboards and guitar live instead of the drums. This, in turn, led to a decision to utilize video recordings and projections of Steven playing the drums for some of their older, more "standard rock" songs.
In a further attempt to enhance the live experience for the audience and to more accurately reproduce the sound of The Soft Bulletin live, the Lips devised the concept of the "Headphone Concert." A low-powered FM transmitter was set up at shows, and the concert was simultaneously broadcast to small Walkman-style receivers and headphones available for free to audience members. This would, in theory, allow the audiences greater sonic clarity while still feeling the power of a full live P.A.. This concept was debuted in Dallas, Texas and at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas in March of 1999, and was subsequently used on the International Music Against Brain Degeneration Revue tour.
In the summer of 2002, The Flaming Lips joined bands Cake and Modest Mouse on the Unlimited Sunshine Tour. They also released the full-length Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots to much critical acclaim. Considered much more accessible than any of their previous albums, Yoshimi is widely considered to be The Flaming Lips' first critical and commercial success after nearly twenty years of existing as a band.
Recent Activity
After Yoshimi, The Flaming Lips released a series of EPs in the same vein of their previous album's robotic theme and containing remixed songs from Yoshimi, including Fight Test EP and Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell EP. In addition to their EPs, The Lips have been working for several years on a feature film entitled Christmas on Mars, with a predicted release date of Christmas 2005, though it should be noted that the film has been delayed two years already, originally scheduled to be released Christmas 2003.
Recently, they performed as the backup band for singer Beck on his Sea Change tour. In the summer of 2004, it was announced that the Flaming Lips would appear among the headliners on the 2004 Lollapalooza tour, alongside such legendary artists as Sonic Youth and Morrissey; however, the tour was canceled due to lack of revenue. Following the concerts' cancellation, the band entered Tarbox Road Studio with producer Dave Fridmann and began work on their eleventh album, tentatively titled At War With The Mystics, which is reported to be more guitar-oriented than Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi .
In 2005 the band was the subject of a documentary called Fearless Freaks, featuring appearances by other artists and celebrities such as the White Stripes, Beck, Christina Ricci, Liz Phair and Juliette Lewis. In that same year, the Flaming Lips contributed a version of Bohemian Rhapsody to the album Killer Queen: A Tribute to Queen.Also in this year, The Flaming Lips released the DVD VOID (Video Overview in Declaration), which chronicles all of their ventures into Music Video that have been produced since they signed with Warner Brothers in 1991. In October of 2005 The Flaming Lips recorded a cover of "If I Only Had a Brain" for the soundtrack of the video game Stubbs the Zombie, which features modern rock bands covering songs from the 1950s and 1960s. Additionally, the band released one new song, "Mr. Ambulance Driver", for the movie soundtrack of The Wedding Crashers.
Discography
Albums
*Hear It Is (1986)
*Oh My Gawd!!! (1987)
*Telepathic Surgery (1989)
*In a Priest Driven Ambulance (1990)
*Hit to Death in the Future Head (1992) (first WB album)
*Transmissions from the Satellite Heart (1993) #108 US
*Clouds Taste Metallic (1995)
*Zaireeka (1997)
*The Soft Bulletin (1999) #39 UK
*Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002) #50 US, #13 UK
*At War with the Mystics (2006)
EPs / singles
*"The Flaming Lips" (1984)
*"Drug Machine" (1988) (released on Sub Pop)
*"Unconsciously Screamin'" (1991)
*"Yeah, I Know It's A Drag... But Wastin Pigs Is Still Radical" (1991) (first WB single)
*"She Don't Use Jelly" (1993) #55 US
*"Due to high expectations... The Flaming Lips are Providing Needles For Your Balloons.." (1994)
*"Turn It On" (1995)
*"Bad Days" (1995)
*"This Here Giraffe" (1996) #72 UK
*"Brainville" (1996)
*"Race For The Prize" (1999) #39 UK
*"Waitin' For A Superman" (1999) #73 UK
*"Do You Realize??" (2002) #32 UK
*"Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots part 1" (2003) #18 UK
*"Fight Test" (2003) #93 US (Billboard 200 Albums Chart), #28 UK (UK Singles Chart)
*"Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell EP" (2003)
*"The Golden Path" (with Chemical Brothers) (2003) #17 UK
*"Mr. Ambulance Driver" (2005)
Compilations & Reissues
*A Collection of Songs Representing An Enthusiasm For Recording...By Amateurs (1998)
*Finally the Punk Rockers Are Taking Acid (2002)
*The Day They Shot a Hole in the Jesus Egg (2002)
*Shambolic Birth and Early Life Of (2002)
*Late Night Tales: Flaming Lips (2005)
Filmography
*Fearless Freaks (2005)
*Christmas on Mars (2005)
*VOID (2005)
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