Flaming Lips prepare to lead hometown Halloween parade

There's many a Flaming Lips fan out there who would gladly follow the group to the depths of Hades. Well, now a lucky 1,000 supporters will get that chance - or a close approximation, at least.

As we first discovered about a month ago, Wayne Coyne and his co-conspirators Steven Drozd and Michael Ivins will lead The March of a Thousand Flaming Skeletons through the streets of Oklahoma City on Oct. 27. But the band needs extras to fill out the planned legion of ghoulies. Interested participants need only pony up $25 and be on hand for the festivities, where they'll be supplied with a skeleton costume and a souvenir t-shirt. Oh yeah, and you have to be 18+ to hop aboard.

"I'm trying to get Flaming Lips fans from all over the world," Coyne said in our September interview. "People who have had recent deaths in their family, or people who have a death that's kind of haunting them, they can use this parade as a way of breaking through some kind of psychological thing. I know that sounds portentous, but I'm trying to give it a bigger theme than 'dress up in a dumb skeleton costume,' you know?"

That Wayne Coyne... always thinking on a broader scale than the rest of us.

These All Hallow's Eve festivities arrive in the midst of what might be considered a fallow period for the group. Their sci-fi holiday epic film Christmas on Mars should drop in March, but meanwhile there's a strange silence on the new-album front. Tomorrow evening, however, the group will be playing the Echo Project festival in Fairburn, Georgia - practically Paste's backyard. We'll be bringing the office laser pointers along for sure.