The Flaming Lips Demystified

The Flaming Lips are normal. Wayne Coyne, Michael Ivins and Steven Drozd are just humans with wives and children and dogs and mortgages. Heck, they hail from Oklahoma, work hard, play hard, and dress one leg at a time—though many nights dressing involves a 20-pound, shag-poly-blend pink-elephant suit.

But don’t let grown men dressed in animal costumes who smear fake blood on their heads fool you into thinking they’re shamans, sages or—in any way—above the fray. Despite all the press, films, interviews and myths hailing their freakishness, they don’t have super powers. Nor are they at war with “the mundane”—they don’t believe in that word. They believe truth is always stranger than fiction, and that every experience is part of the adventure. The Flaming Lips don’t have all the answers, and never claim to; they just ask really good questions.

“If we sink I wonder who will be in my lifeboat?” Ivins wonders, sitting in a glittering, mirrored ballroom aboard the cruise ship Paradise, wearing his built-on sunglasses and a Day-Glo-orange life jacket. Although he’s part of the main attraction for everyone onboard, the Lips’ bass player goes unnoticed while video-taping 700 other people similarly accessorized. Like everyone else, he’s listening attentively to the thickly accented Bavarian woman squawking various emergency scenarios through her megaphone. Disembarking from Long Beach, Calif., on the way to Ensenada, Mexico, iceberg fear is low. But engine fires, terrorist attacks and accidental torpedo strikes from naval submarines have everyone furtively scanning the room to see who they might be partnered with in case of a real-life remake of The Poseidon Adventure. I tell Ivins I’ve got his back if anything goes down and then casually challenge him to a game of shuffleboard on the Lido deck. Kliph—a former band stalker and now their touring drummer—warns, “He’s a shuffle shark.”

Ivins scoffs. “Well, I haven’t played in awhile, so I’m rusty.” When pressed on how long it’s been, he contemplates before deadpanning, “Two weeks.”

His rim shot echoes as Paradise’s engines kick to life and the Hues Corporation tune “Rock the Boat” helps ease the ship out of her slip, setting the mood from every cheap speaker. As we navigate back to our cabins, side-stepping a boa-strewn female body builder, a pair of Thai-speaking flame-jugglers, three Captain Stubings escorting one very hairy Julie McCoy, a posse of stilt-wearing, hula-hooping contortionists, several drug-sniffing German Shepherds, and the entire crew of Life Aquatic’s Team Zissou (drunkenly asking everyone if they’ve “seen Steve”), it becomes evident. The Flaming Lips are the sanest people onboard.

This three-day “Groove Cruise of The Pacific” is called Xingolati, and its organizers promise “an onslaught of peak experiences through an evolving sensual journey crossing over and dissolving boundaries.” Along with several Burning Man and Bonnaroo alumni acts like Medeski Martin & Wood, G. Love and Special Sauce, Banyan, and DJ Logic, The Flaming Lips have been tapped as the house band for this floating den of iniquity.

With such lofty aspirations for mind-bending splendor, it’s almost too obvious to have The Flaming Lips provide the musical backdrop. Throughout the band’s 23-year history, it has encapsulated all that’s difficult to define. Though “freaks,” “biker pirates,” “berserkers,” “aliens,” “lunatics,” “fiends” and “garish madmen” seem the stickiest labels, these trite monikers belie the underbelly of a far greater beast. Not to say there’s an unexplored side of The Flaming Lips no one has discovered; there isn’t. In fact, it’s the very extent of their accessibility and transparency that makes the Lips so exceptionally ordinary and ordinarily exceptional.

Maybe it was the absurdity of playing blackjack in the casino until the wee hours with G. Love, a priest and some castaways from La Cage Aux Folles, or maybe just the Dramamine, but my dreams centered on performance anxiety. More specifically, the apprehension of playing one note on a triangle at some fantastical Lips show on a cloud overlooking all of mankind. No amount of willpower can move my disembodied hand to strike a note. And not just any note—the note on which all others rest. Shamed and embarrassed, I leave the stage and begin the long panicked fall to earth sans parachute. Scared awake, I carry the dream guilt to my shuffle showdown with Ivins. When he learns how I ruined the cloud gig, he buys me a couple Pilsners and tells me, “Don’t sweat it, we’ve all been there.”

It turns out the court is occupied by various dreadlocked red-nosed clowns in thongs, so we make our way to the relative quiet of the upper deck. When the Lips play “What Star Wars Character would you be?” Ivins ends up R2D2, and with his calm, capable, unsung-hero demeanor and knack for doing the stuff no else wants to, it’s easy to see why. Overlooking the touristy shores of Ensenada, we sit on the abandoned volleyball court discussing the cult-of-personality comparisons that hang like albatrosses on all rock bands of critical notoriety, and also how people learn to coexist with their perceived selves.

“Take a band like The Who,” Ivins says. “There’s plenty cult of personality. But I think, even when they were starting out, they were rock stars just because of the way they played it and lived it. It wasn’t some plastic-model kit where you just take a cute guy and a cute gal and give ’em some songs, and you’re all good-to-go. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—I mean, I like Duran Duran as much as the next guy—but when it comes to us, we’ve always been conscious that our stage persona was an act. Especially since, in the beginning, we weren’t very good. But we’ve never been anything but ourselves, musically.”