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Last year, the Flaming Lips issued one of the great challenges of the modern-rock era. The veteran Oklahoma psychedelic pop band released Zaireeka (Warner Bros.), a quadruple album that required listeners to assemble four CD players in a room, load a disc in each, synchronize their stereos and follow along as a wash of sounds and songs emanated from the amassed speakers. It required patience, resolve and, for most, the ability to gather friends and their boomboxes to take part in an unconventional sonic experiment that makes guitars zoom around the room, voices echo off the ceiling and melodies swirl, sputter and dissipate. "It wasn't something we'd planned," says Flaming Lips founder, guitarist and vocalist Wayne Coyne. "We've been a band for a long time, and what bands do is make records, go out and tour, hope the records can sell so they can live off them, take a couple of months off, make another record and do it all again. I thought it got boring after a while. I've had a lot of ideas about making records and doing concerts differently, and I thought that this was the type of idea we should pursue." Coyne began tampering with the paradigm two years ago, putting his pop career on hold to compose pieces of music designed for simultaneous broadcast on car stereos in enclosed parking lots. In Oklahoma City, he and his bandmates and friends gradually increased the number of vehicles involved from four or five to 40 or 50. To test this auto orchestra on a non-hometown audience, Coyne hosted an event in an Austin parking lot during last year's South by Southwest; thousands attended the performance, with reactions ranging from rapture to befuddlement. Coyne found the experience frightening. "Even though I thought the music part went really well," he says, "I really thought someone was going to get run over." Jettisoning the car-stereo concept, Coyne came up with a similar idea. In September, he traveled to the CMJ Music Marathon and invited attendees to bring boomboxes. Participants were handed tapes and told to press play on cue. About 150 people contributed to the composition, which proved safer than, though just as strange as, the parking-lot endeavor. At the invitation of the organizers of San Francisco's late-February Noise-Pop Festival, Coyne will bring an expanded audio experiment, involving 40 boomboxes, to the West Coast for a three-city mini-tour that includes Seattle and Portland. It's the latest development in an already twisted career. The Flaming Lips released their first album in 1985, earning a cult following with each new record over the ensuing decade. Signed to Warner Bros. in the early '90s, the band produced critically acclaimed, marginally commercial albums for the label until 1993's Transmissions from the Satellite Heart yielded a fluke hit two years after its release. Dubbed a "post-punk novelty single" by The Trouser Press Guide, the song "She Don't Use Jelly" boasted an irresistible, almost cloying guitar hook and bizarre, nonsensical lyrics like "I know a girl who reminds me of Cher/She's always changing the color of her hair." Suddenly, the Flaming Lips were headlining sold-out shows to thousands of fickle fans who'd heard the single on the nascent alternative radio stations that followed the rise of Nirvana. In a way, Coyne admits, the aftermath of "She Don't Use Jelly" spurred him to explore unconventional recording and performing methods. "With Zaireeka and the shows, people appreciate the ideas," he says. "With something like 'She Don't Use Jelly,' people appreciated it because of its popularity. They're not necessarily saying that they like your ideas. They're saying 'We like that one little song that you do.' "I'm not putting them down," he continues. "Popular music is fine. But I've had some people come up to me--more of your mall sort of audience--and say, '"She Don't Use Jelly" was the only song on that record that I like.' What could I say? 'I'm sorry'?" Like Karlheinz Stockhausen, a modern composer who attempts to create music outside the parameters of traditional instrumentation and theory, Coyne looks to expand on rock's vocabulary and preexisting conditions. Though he says that dividing the tracks onto multiple cassette tapes for playback on boomboxes isn't much different from recording dozens of tracks and mixing them onto a single album, he doubts that audiences find his invention satisfying. "If a guy showed up with two heads, everybody would look at him for a while, but I'm not sure it's an achievement of any kind," he says. "Just doing these things doesn't mean that we're succeeding." Still, Coyne criticizes those who don't approach Zaireeka with an open mind. Some inventive fans have mixed the multiple CDs onto one tape on their home 4-track recorders, circumventing the need for four boomboxes at the expense
of the surround-sound effects. "I wanted to present music that was four times as dense, as emotional, as loud and as sad as anything that music can do," he says. "The analogy I use is that I'm trying to give you four orgasms all at the same time, and what they want to do is take one orgasm and chop it up into four bits. I want more out of life. I don't want to divide up what we already have." |
