The Flaming Lips interview

Was there ever a thought that you should have been out here in LA or New York, or did you guys always want to stay based in Oklahoma no matter what?

I would say, in the very beginning, when you’re fifteen or sixteen years old, you don’t consider that as a dimension of people’s identity. And then I think right as we formed the band, the early eighties, this idea that a group would be from Oklahoma and would go to Los Angeles, that felt very inauthentic and poseur and all these other things that we hated at the time. We were really like band like, oh I don’t know, the Butthole Surfers from Austin, and Black Flag, and Husker Du from Minneapolis, so to us it was sort of like well we’re from Oklahoma, that’s cool like those bands. And so I think it was a culmination of just our mindset and what that seemed to mean to us. And then I think we would go around to places, we would play places like Austin or even Athens, Georgia at the time which was very hip, and they wouldn’t write very much about us, but in the little local paper they would say “You’re not gonna believe it, The Flaming Lips, as absurd as they are, they come from Oklahoma. Like wow, we’ve got to see this thing!”

And so I think we were just lucky that before we had really considered it as any kind of career, you know, we never thought we’d have a career anyway, it was already something that we thought well that’s kind of cool that we’re these sort of cosmic hillbillies, or however they were interpreting the idea that we came from Oklahoma. So I think we were lucky that it didn’t ever occur to us. But then at some point we thought well it’s kind of a good thing. And that would come and go. We’ve been around for twenty-seven years now. That would come and go as to whether that was good or whether it wasn’t. But I think at some point we decided yeah, we’re The Flaming Lips from Oklahoma.

You go to make a record like Embryonic, and from a listener standpoint it seems like every one of your album is experimental, like there must be a mad scientist vibe going on. Do your records feel experimental to you, or do they just feel normal and we’re the ones who are labeling it?

Well no, I think this constant looking at doing things that we haven’t done before, people throw around the word “experimental” and it does sound cool to say, I don’t know if it’s necessarily always experimental or just curiosity. I would say even a record like Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, I tried to tell people in the sense we were experimenting with pop sounds. We were listening to things like Timbaland and even Madonna and stuff like that, and saying let’s play around with those sounds. And in a sense I think everybody’s doing that. I think any artist with some energy and curiosity, they’re always hearing things and they’re going “What is that? I want to use that in my record.”

So I think that’s always happening, and then I think there’s an element of it really is just kind of thrilling to kind of be up there on the tightrope and not know what the fuck you’re gonna do. And in the end, I mean, it is just dumb music. I’m not trying to elevate it to any kind of grandiose thing. I think as the group goes, and as our producer Dave Friedman goes, I think we would rather spend a couple days going “Wow, this could be the greatest fucking moment ever!” and then it failing, than us sitting there trying to play it safe with things that we’ve done over and over, and say “Yeah, it’s pretty good, let’s go have lunch.”

For artists there really are these moments where you just get so absorbed in your own shit that you forget that there’s another world out there. And that’s just the nature of why you want to be an artist, is so you can get self involved, and it’s horrible.

Do you put limitations on yourself going into each project?

Not really. We always a little bit despise the things that we did, say, three or four years ago. In as much as I can know my own judgment, we’ve been making records since 1984, and so when I listen to records that we made in 1984, when I listen to them now, they sound utterly fresh to me, and they don’t sound like us at all, and I can easily listen to that music and go that’s cool, that’s bizarre, or that’s stupid, or whatever, and it doesn’t really feel like I’m even talking about myself. So whenever I listen to our music from the past, even when I hear a song from say 1999, The Soft Bulletin, it’s so old old to me now that it’s cool.

The things that don’t sound fresh to me, and I have too much of my own self awareness in how they were made, would be like the last couple things we did, At War With The Mystics or Christmas On Mars, stuff like that. Because I still know and can smell and feel and know the moments of all those things of how they were made, and it hasn’t dissolved into just a mysterious creation. And so I think we’re always saying well, we’ve done that for three or four years, let’s do something else.

But I don’t really know how much we really get to pick and choose. I know that the way we mostly go about working, and I’ve only been aware of this for the last three or four records, is we really are going in to make something that we truly believe in, cause you have to kind of have confidence that you’re getting ready to do something, or really just don’t ever leave the house.

When you first started crowdsurfing in the bubble, did you have any sense that it was going to become such an iconic thing, or that you’d be doing it for years to come, or was that just a lark in the beginning?

Well I think it was just a little bit of both. For myself, I always try to on one level, especially when we’re performing, I always try to think well, what are we doing? Are we playing to five thousand people, are we playing to a hundred thousand people? Sometimes we play festivals where there’s literally a hundred thousand people there, and you’re just trying to gauge what’s the potential of what we can do here.

So I considered this space bubble idea for awhile but it took me awhile to actually find one. When I did finally get it, I practiced a couple times in my front yard to sort of figure out I could actually do it, and you don’t really think about whether it’s going to succeed or fail that much. You kind of are so panicked about doing it. And then we did this at one of the Coachella shows, this was I think three or four years ago, quite awhile back, and these are big shows, there’s sixty or seventy thousand people there, so in my mind the whole time I’m thinking this is going to be great, you just go up and fucking do it. But then the minute you actually go do it, you think oh, well this could just be looked at as the stupidest thing ever. And you really are sitting in the middle of “I think I want to do this, but I only want to do it if people are gonna think it’s cool, but I think it’s cool, so I don’t care what people think.” You conflict about all these different dimensions of what people are going to think of it. So I did it, I walked on people’s heads, and I could see there was probably three hundred photographers in the pit there when I went to do it, and I could see them all jumping with glee, saying “Finally!”

Not to put down the other groups, big festivals like that a lot of groups are just thrown up there and they don’t really have a show that they’re prepared to do, it’s not their fault, it’s just the way that shows are put together. And I could when I stood up there in the space bubble, every photographer in the place was like “Oh cool, I’m gonna get that for my editors.”

And I really didn’t know how it went. And so the next day we were leaving Coachella, and on the front page of the newspaper, when we were checking out of the hotel, the front page of the newspaper, some local newspaper, this wasn’t even a music paper, has me on it in the space bubble. And that’s when I thought “Oh good, I think that’s gonna work.”

I’ve got to ask you about Stardeath and White Dwarfs. If I grew up having a rock star uncle I’d probably spend my whole life wanting to be around him, wanting to be him. Is that the dynamic that you and your nephew Dennis had?

No, not always. When Dennis was young, and I’ve always been a lot older than him, his dad is one of my older brothers, we’ve all loved music and art and these sort of ideas as we’ve gone along. So when he was really young he’d be at Flaming Lips shows and he was two or three years old, it was just a normal thing to him. But as he got to be a teenager, he kind of would get into his own music. I know he was into rap and stuff like that. I’m not against rap, I just know that there was a lot of music that was not very Flaming Lips-like that he liked. But as he got older, I was working on Christmas on Mars. You have to remember I started working on that in 2001, so quite awhile now. He was just starting to be like nineteen and twenty years old. And I was working on Christmas on Mars and he would just come over and help me. We had done music videos together. There’s a music video of us doing “Bad Days” when he’s like a chubby ten year old or something, and he’s in the video.

So he’s always been around me when we were sometimes doing recordings, sometimes doing music videos, and this would just be a normal Flaming Lips day for him. So when I started doing Christmas on Mars, I would just have him come over to my house or we’d go to these different locations in Oklahoma City, and he would just help me. And I think what he really saw was that it’s a lot of fucking work, you know, that you really do have to be thinking on your feet. It’s a lot of work, there’s a lot of humiliation, it’s art but there’s really a lot of work. I think he liked that or accepted that, and then a couple years later he became a Flaming Lips roadie, mostly as way to say well I’ve got to have a job, and I said well why don’t you just come out on the road with us, and again, I think he saw that as that’s cool, you can be a rock star, but the other side of that, it’s a lot of fucking work. And especially, if you’re a Flaming Lips roadie, you’re dying. You’re working your ass off. And I think he saw all the work that it takes and said “Oh, I can do that too.”

And I think that’s mostly what it was. I could see it would be easy to just show up at the shows and see me in the space bubble and signing autographs and be like “Oh I want to do that.” But if you can load in trucks with us starting at six in the morning and not get done unloading those trucks til four o’clock in the morning the next night and still like it, you’ll probably be able to make that work.

Everyone wants to know about the Dark Side of the Moon project.

Embryonic was set to come out a couple weeks into October. And so the month before your record comes out there’s just everybody who’s needing a B-side or an extra track, you do this for everywhere in the world. And I remember speaking with iTunes, I think we were in New York, we had one of those hectic days where we were doing The Colbert Report and I was doing interviews in between, and then I had this conversation with iTunes and they were wanting some exclusive tracks. And they were like, don’t you guys have like six or seven tracks laying around that we can do exclusive stuff with? And I said no, not really. We’ve not really had a moment. We’ve been on tour all summer or whatever. And they said well why don’t you and Stardeath just go in and record something when you get home. And I said well, I know cause Stardeath was with us doing all this playing, and I said well between us we really don’t have anything. And I said it, not as a joke, but just as a panic response, I said well why don’t we just record Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and you guys can release that. And it was like eh.

Then like a week later, iTunes and our manager, we all convened again and they said “Were you serious about that? Cause we checked into that and we think that would be a really cool idea. Would you want to do that?” And I looked at the schedule, and we have a friend who has a studio twenty miles south of here, and I thought well I guess we could do it. We’d given it a little bit of casual thought, like, could we really do this? And then when it seemed like we could do it and it could actually be put out, and Stardeath would want to do it with us, we got Henry Rollins with us, we just sort of proceeded to do it. An we really only had three or four days to do it in, anyway. It wasn’t like it could go on for six months of recording, which was what appealed to me about it. Here’s this iconic, elaborate record, Dark Side of the Moon, one of the most meticulously crafted pieces of space rock ever made, and here we are doing our version of it in just a couple of days, just throwing it together sort of punk rock freakout style. Which that’s why I kind of thought well if we can do it this way, I think I’d like not just the process, but maybe the music would retain something that the Pink Floyd music doesn’t have. I mean I love the Pink Floyd music, but I don’t think us just doing a rendition of it is interesting, and so I think throwing everybody into this intense couple of days of rearranging and playing and learning and all that made it, I don’t know, I guess intense.

Once we finished it we thought oh, well let’s put that out. And it all happened so quickly that you don’t think, does anybody even really care? And then the minute we got it done I realized oh, a lot of people like Dark Side of the Moon. I see now. Wow.

Learn more about The Flaming Lips at FlamingLips.com. Embryonic and Dark Side of the Moon are available in iTunes.

About Bill Palmer

Bill Palmer is the Publisher of iProng Magazine. His editorial contributions primarily consist of interviews with musicians and iPhone industry coverage.