A conversation with Wayne Coyne from 2002
The Flaming Lips frontman on backing up Beck, opening for Tool, and being "the spokespeople for death." Plus: a brief history of disastrous Lips shows in Toronto.
Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars (and the occasional classic-rock icon). This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).
This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please consider a donation via paid subscription, or visit my PWYC tip jar!
THE OPENERS
At Pitchfork, I wrote about the new album from the Calgary-bred, Cindy Lee-adjacent indie-rock band Preoccupations, who transport you back to that mid-’80s moment when post-punk was turning into pop music and every TV movie-of-the-week was about imminent nuclear holocaust.
For those outside Toronto who aren’t familiar with him, Dave Bookman was something of a John Peel figure in local radio lore, a deejay at alt-rock station 102.1 the Edge (and later Indie88) who carved out a space for independent artists on the airwaves even as station playlists grew increasingly restrictive and commercialized. We lost Bookie in 2019 to an aneurysm, and last Friday at The Garrison, an all-star cast of friends and admirers—including members of Broken Social Scene, July Talk, and Billy Talent—gathered for the second year in a row to pay their respects by covering the songs of an artist who Bookie championed throughout his three-decade on-air career: the late Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip. Friend-of-the-Sub (and bestselling Hip biographer) Michael Barclay has a thorough accounting of the evening over at his newsletter, That Night in Toronto, and here’s a clip of my highlight of the night—a U.S. Girl making a CanCon classic her own:
Notes on this week’s additions to the stübermania 2025 jukebox:
No Joy, “Bugland”: In a world overrun with landfill shoegaze, be more like Jasamine White-Gluz, who continues to make No Joy both more accessible and inscrutable, occupying the space where dream-pop morphs into hyperpop and vice versa.
Preoccupations, “Andromeda”: The aforementioned new Preoccupations album is full of songs about waiting for the world to end, and this one’s my favourite, an ominous yet ebuilient post-punky rocker that sounds like Interpol in a good mood.
M(h)aol, “Pursuit”: Something Soft, the excellent second album from this Irish art-punk outfit, is out today, and its tense opening track gradually shifts from brittle to unbridled, by smothering drummer Constance Keane’s increasingly agitated sing-speak in sheets of murderous fuzz.
Cola, “Mendicant”: Cola frontman Tim Darcy had a terrible, tumultuous winter—he was one of many musicians displaced by the L.A. fires—but on this stand-alone single, he and his mates get right back to indie-rock business-as-unusual, like an over-caffeinated Pavement going through an uilleann-pipes phase.
EKKSTACY, “keep my head down”: On the downcast closing track of his new album, Forever, this tat-slathered Vancouver dynamo is sounding less like an emo version of The Drums and more like a mumble-rap Mazzy Star. (Also check out “head in the clouds,” which I’m willing to wager he wrote after bingeing Smashing Pumpkins’ “Mayonnaise.”)
Lido Pimienta, “Aún Te Quiero”: Not too many singers can overpower an entire orchestra but, as ever, Lido is not to be fucked with. This mid-album standout from the Owen Pallett-produced La Belleza is like Björk taking on “The Imperial March,” and winning.
THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Wayne Coyne
The date: October 10, 2002
Publication: Eye Weekly
Location: I was at the Eye Weekly office; Wayne was calling in from Los Angeles.
Album being promoted: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
The context: Back in 2013, I wrote this piece
It was hard being a Flaming Lips fan in Toronto during the 1990s. Sure, Wayne Coyne and crew would make fairly frequent visits for a van-hauling band schlepping all the way from Oklahoma, however, the circumstances were always less than ideal. I first encountered them in the spring of 1993 as a support act for Porno for Pyros. But even as the band’s subsequent release, Transmissions From the Satellite Heart, turned them into MTV darlings, their headlining tours never seemed to come our way. Instead, I had to make do with a short mid-afternoon Lollapalooza side-stage set (3 p.m. = not the best time for strobe lights) or, even worse, an opening slot for Tool before a hockey arena full of hostile heshers. (Best way to kill a mosh pit? Open with a cover of A Flock of Seagulls’ “Space Age Love Song.”) Alas, Canadian radio’s surprising resistance to Candlebox meant the most mismatched alt-rock tour of 1994 didn’t extend north of the border, but I totally would’ve forked out for that one, too.
The Lips’ first Toronto date to promote the release of 1995’s Clouds Taste Metallic promised even more dispiriting conditions—they were scheduled to open for the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the SkyDome. But, finally, the gods smiled upon me: a day before the show, Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith broke his elbow, forcing a cancellation of the SkyDome show, and since the Lips had already crossed into Canada, they booked a last-minute local headlining gig, for a walk-up cover of $5.
The venue was the Opera House, a historic 800-capacity room with a glorious archway looming 35-feet above the stage. The Lips started their set in near-darkness with “The Abandoned Hospital Ship,” the melancholic ballad that opens Clouds: Steven Drozd tapped out the melody on a little piano set up adjacent to his drum kit, Coyne crooned the song’s first and only verse, and guitarist Ronald Jones squeezed his strings until they shed teardrops. Two minutes in, the singing stopped, Coyne and Jones churned out a gnarlier version of the main riff, and Drozd hopped onto his kit to get his Bonham on. And then this happened:
Alas, after that magical evening in November ‘95, it would be another seven years before the Lips made it back to Toronto. Even after The Soft Bulletin dropped in ‘99 and thrust them to a new level of popularity, their revamped gong-smashing stage spectacle never made it over the border, so I had to travel to Detroit and St. Louis (my brother lived there at the time) to get my bloody-face fix. Finally, in the autumn of 2002, the Lips returned to town, but once again, there was an asterisk attached: They were opening for Beck on the Sea Change tour, and also serving as his backing band for his headlining set. I connected with Coyne a week before the tour was set to begin—although the Lips still hadn’t begun to practice for it:
So what are you going to be playing with Beck?
A lot of the new record, we all love it. Beck gave us the freedom and said, “whatever you guys like, let’s go, and do those things.” I think he was surprised when we said, “Do we have to play ‘Loser’?” I told him I want to play “MTV Makes Me Want to Smoke Crack,” off his first single. He’ll go with whatever it is we want to do, as long as it won’t offend him. I think it has the potential to be a great tour. That being said, it doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot of work. I want to make sure this tour is as awesome as it seems like it could be. It’d just be a shame to go out there and not make this something really memorable for people.
Is it a relief to be following someone else’s lead for once?
I wish. In a way, it hasn’t shaped up to be that. Even in the beginning, I knew Beck would want us to take the reins and say, “do your Flaming Lips thing to my music,” which sounds like it could be easy, but it’s a lot of work. And people truly do love him. It almost seems like even if we were horrible behind him, he could shine without us and it could still be a great show. So in that sense, it’s a little bit of a relief. But, on the other hand I do want it to be special, I do want it to be great, because the bands he’s had in the past have all been great, so he’s got a reputation. I don't want people to say, “I’ve seen Beck five times and the time he played with The Flaming Lips, it sucked.” So I want it to be special, I want it to be good, I want it to transcend and be a little bit above that, because it does have high expectations and tickets cost a lot of money.
You’re playing Massey Hall in Toronto—the house of Gordon Lightfoot. Which is fitting, since the new Beck record kind of sounds like Gordon Lightfoot…
Dude, I told him that the first time I heard it: “This sounds like Gordon Lightfoot”’ He said, “I don’t know who he is.” I said, “You need to stop listening to Outkast and listen to more ’70s songwriters,” but obviously he has heard plenty of ’70s songwriters, perhaps not Gordon Lightfoot. But I think you’re exactly right, it’s very Gordon Lightfoot.
Do you feel a sense of kinship with Beck?
He really is one of those guys… from about 1993 onwards, between the Beastie Boys and Beck and Bjork, and even Radiohead and Aphex Twin, we really have been living in the age of what I feel is some awesome new music that hasn’t necessarily been a reference to the past—people are creating something that could not have been heard unless you were living in these times. And when I think of people who just have a unique thing that wasn’t retro at all, Beck was certainly one of them, like with Odelay. If you like country music or songwriter-type music, and hated hip-hop, it was like, “What are we going to do with Beck?”,’ because he really did take the bizarreness of what hip-hop could do and made people who really weren’t listening to that say, “Fuck, I like this stuff.” It’s a great moment, and he should always be applauded for that, even though a lot of people make fun of him for being a fake rapper.
For me, he should always be applauded for making that step up and making it popular enough, so now when you hear hip-hop and all that other stuff joined together, it doesn’t even feel like anything is happening. It feels very normal, but back in 1995-’96, when he started doing that, it was like, “Whoa, what the fuck was that?” And “Loser” was still inventive even in its day, and when you talk to him, you realize “Loser” was actually recorded in 1991, which really makes you go, “Fuck!” He’s no slacker, it’s just that he’s got a lot on his plate, so when we get in there to practice [for this tour], there’s a lot of indecision because he’s not there to decide what to do. So in that sense, he’s relieved that we’re a band that’s been together a long time and we can decide what to do without him, as opposed to other ensembles that are dictated piece by piece by him.
Do you think that ingrained indie/elitist attitude is fading away and people are just accepting music as music now?
Well, I wish that would be the case. And I think it happens, and it happens only when artists are brave enough to attempt it. That’s why when John McCrae from Cake told me he had this idea to include us and The Hackensaw Boys and De La Soul [on the Unlimited Sunshine Tour], I thought, “this is a ballsy move.” Unlike Ozzfest and some of these things, which I think are fine, but they really do cater to a very small corner—”if you like this kind of music, here’s 18 hours of it!” Whereas the thing that John was putting together wasn’t really like that. He’d say, “If you like Cake, I’m not sure if you’re going to like any of this other junk, but I’m going to present it to you anyway.” But he knew his audience would just come and drink some beers and have a good time.
I know that sounds hokey, and it sounds like this is just generic fun-lovin’ times, but gosh, if people would not worry about being cool all the time, they really would hear how big a range of music and range of ideas there is, and the world just have a little less tension in it. I mean, the tension in the Middle East should be what we worry about, instead of whether the guy who goes to the Puddle of Mudd concert wearing a Smiths t-shirt is going to get the shit kicked out of him. How ridiculous is this? It’s like sports: you define who you are by who your enemies are, and when your team wins, something in you is affirmed, like, “We are the superiors—being this way is superior to being another way.” Music has that power as well, but only if you’re very young, and hopefully people get over it by the time they’re about 30 and they can just listen to music.
Did you get the same sense playing Lollapalooza?
There were elements of that. It started off trying to be diverse, but what seems diverse two years ago—even in the way we were talking about Beck—now seems very normal, so by the time we were on Lollapalooza, it was already starting to feel like it was a club of cool people again. Because when you think about who was on there—Nick Cave, The Boredoms, The Breeders, Guided by Voices, Palace Brothers, Flaming Lips, Stereolab—it’s essentially another clique. It’s a great bill, don’t get me wrong, but it’s another clique of musicians all playing to the same converted crowd. Beastie Boys, Smashing Pumpkins… it was a mega show, but again it didn’t touch all corners as much as it could have.
The first time I saw you was when you opened for Porno for Pyros in ‘93. And then I saw you open for Tool, and you’ve also done tours with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Candlebox. Do you still get a kick out of doing weird opening slots?
I think that’s why we do tours like that—in a sense, we do like the confrontation that happens when the audience is like, “What the fuck is this bullshit? What is this band called?” That’s kinda fun. One part of us is always trying to convert people who don’t know what we’re about. If we play to the same people all the time, we won’t gain a new audience, and I do like the idea that sometimes we play to people who don’t know who we are, and just through the course of playing a 45-minute set, you have people who now love us. I see it all the time. We played with Tool back in ’’94, and when we were playing with them, we were not literally getting the shit beaten out of us, but it was pretty confrontational. But we knew that going into it, and I still run into people across the country who are like, “I saw you guys play with Tool and now you’re my favourite band.” We like the idea of bands saying, “We love this music, and perhaps the audience would like it as well,” but it never works out that way.
It reminds of that line in “Five Stop Mother Superior Rain”: “All my smiles / get in that hate generation’s way.” Does that line still ring as true for you in the nu-metal era as the grunge era?
It’s always lurking under the surface regardless of what the style of the current trend is, there’s always going to be that idea of: “Look at us, we’re miserable, and we have to contain our hatred and the only way out is through our music” and all that, and I just look at that and go, “Whatever.” Any true expression is fine by me, but after a while I just get beaten down by it.
What inspired you to reissue your Restless Records catalogue?
Ryko and Restless made some sort of deal, and then Ryko approached me a while back and we started talking, like, “How will we do this?” Because I didn’t want it to be a box set. I don’t like the idea of box sets—I just don’t think they’re very practical. No one carries them around in their cars, and they’re sort of put on the shelf and you never listen to them, and I didn’t want that. I wanted it to be, like, disposable: Listen to it, read it, and if it gets messy, buy another one off the internet. I don’t like the idea of the Velvet Underground box set sitting on the mantle over there. I didn’t want this to be something people get charged $70 for. They pretty much left it up to me to design it and what songs we were going to pick and all that.
In a Priest-Driven Ambulance was made in a real uncertain time for the band, but it turned out to be a real turning point…
Yeah. When we were embracing that sort of “going into oblivion” mentality—back then everything was unknown. We never had any money, there was never any sense of stability, so every time we began a new record, it always felt like, “let’s do as much as we can because someone might pull the rug out from under us, and not give us the money—the whole thing was barely holding together.” But we saw how much freedom that gave us, and we sort of felt like, “if this whole thing is all going to fuckin’ blow up by the afternoon, let’s just do whatever the fuck we want and not think that there’s any expectation, or anything holding us back from going as far out as we want to go. I think, in a sense, we still work from that mold, like, “who knows what the future holds. so let’s do the music that we truly want to make and find a way to make it.”
I was going to ask if The Soft Bulletin came from that same mindset…
It totally was, and even to a more extreme extent: There was more to lose and there was more to be said in the songs, with the things that were happening to me and the things that were happening to Steven and stuff. We had these powerful songs, and we wanted to do this grand production. We hadn’t scaled that height yet, and we knew we needed time, we knew we needed money, we knew we needed to do a lot of work before we could get these songs up to this grandeur and we said, “Fuck it, let’s just start doing it, we’ll find a way.” It does seem that some of the best art does go side by side with a kind of metaphysical desperation, which is a good thing. Everybody’s life, whether you’re an artist or a plumber, runs those same gamuts. Luckily, I am an artist: People give me money and I get to do something with it. But I think everybody’s life has those same dimensions to it, where you don’t know what you’re going to do, and you just go, “Fuck it—let’s go ahead as opposed to retreating or standing still, and let’s move into the unknown.”
Unfortunately, some people in that situation might pick up a rifle and start playing human target practice…
It’s true. The human mind is always going to be unpredictable. And because it has the capacity to be so evil, people should remember that when you have people around you who do care about you, that’s a great achievement. They only pay attention to it when it’s in reverse, and they say, “look how evil people can be,” so you try to remind them to look around at society and see how much love there is and how much good is happening, and encourage them to think, “oh gosh, we really are evil power-hungry beasts, but we can also sit here and listen to music and make all this beauty around us—that really is a big deal.”
I’m reminded of an old Frank Zappa quote where he said something like: There’s more love songs than any other kind of song in this world, but they don’t make us all love one another…
Well, songs are just songs. And I think Frank probably wished they had more power to motivate and change people than they do. Music really just offers you a moment. But for me, music gives you that comfort that no other form of art really can do. When you’re at your deepest, darkest hour of despair, there are some moments in your mind where music speaks to you and lets you know you’re not alone. Because someone else has made music that you can relate to in such a way, you go, “Gosh, maybe someone else has felt the same way I did.” And it says, “You’re not alone.” When I’ve been at my darkest, worst days and I’ve put on music, and while it didn’t change me utterly, it changed me enough to think, “This is the way life is, and everybody’s going to go through this—it’s not just my own dementia.”
And that’s how music can be comforting. In a sense, it really is the most powerful of the arts, and when you compare it with movies or things like that, it can transcend even more. You might feel like you’re going to kill yourself, but then you go into a movie and you escape into a movie, and forget about your life almost completely. But when the movie’s over, you’re thrust back into the reality of your life with such velocity, it can be a shock. I’ll forget I’m in Minneapolis, but then I walk outside and it’s a cold wintry day and I’m on tour not having that good a time, but as long as I was watching a movie, I was in someone else’s life. But what music does is, it takes your life, and instead of escaping into a world of someone else’s life, it takes your own life and elevates it into the heights of what a movie can be. When the music stops, it doesn’t thrust you right back into your life, it says, “That was my life with music,” and you go, “Wow, if I could live my life with music, maybe it wouldn’t be so intolerable.” That’s why music is so transcendent, because it lifts you up with it, unlike movies, which obliterate your life so that you can watch someone else’s.
Do the meaning of your songs change for you over time? Both Yoshimi and The Soft Bulletin came out of dark personal experiences, but could easily apply to a nation on the verge of war.
Well, yeah. My lot in life is, in some ways, to point out what death truly is. When you know and understand and experience what death is all about, it really just illuminates other aspects of what life is all about. I really think in the end, The Flaming Lips are the spokespeople for death. We don’t mean death metal, we don’t mean Slayer—when we say death, we mean what dying really means. With The Flaming Lips’ music, I try to look at what I think is the meaninglessness, the utter randomness of what true reality is, and look at that long enough and hard enough and say, “Even if it is meaningless, it’s still worth doing, it’s still worth being happy about and finding your light, finding what is good about your life.” Music that’s done in that way is always going to be valuable, because everyone’s going to come to that crossroad eventually.
Is that the message of the movie you’re making [Christmas on Mars] as well?
I don’t think intentionally, but they all go that way – every twist and turn that I take comes down to some sort of universal mechanism that says these things matter.
You started working on The Soft Bulletin the same time as Zaireeka, and you did Yoshimi along with the movie—do you always try to have a lot going on?
Not intentionally. Opportunities come up and you say, “I can do this,” but I never look at what I’m doing as that big a deal. If I thought, “Oh, making a record, that’s a big deal,” maybe I would, but to me, it’s like we do music, just like everyone else who has a job that they do. None of it is that impossible. Most of the stuff I do is with my friends, and I would be doing stuff with them anyway. It isn’t as though I’m seeking out things that are interesting; most of the great things that have happened to me are presented to me, and they say, “Wayne, can you do this?” And I say, “When?” And they say, “Now!” And I go. “Fuck, alright let’s go!” The best thing that’s happened to us is that we don’t look at our music as being that precious. None of these ideas are all that big of a deal; we don’t feel like the world needs more music. If no more music was made, there’d be plenty of great music that could last the rest of a lifetime. I don’t ever look at it like, “Oh, the world needs to hear Flaming Lips music or we’re saving the world.” To me, the world doesn’t need saving. It’s great. The world is great the way it is. What would be the purpose of saving something that isn’t asking to be saved? Sure there’s evil, and there’s death and all these horrible things—it’s always going to be that way. Even if you saved it, the next day there’d be deaths and destruction—that’s just the way it is.
ENCORES
As dedicated readers of this newsletter will note, this was my second time interviewing Coyne, but only my first time actually speaking to him. Here’s how the first one went.
So I actually missed the Lips/Beck show at Massey Hall in October 2002, but I had a good excuse—I was in Reykjavik for the Iceland Airwaves festival. My FOMO was mitigated by the fact I had just seen the Lips on the New York and Chicago stops of the aforementioned Unlimited Sunshine Tour, and also by the fact the Lips’ set at Massey was disrupted by a mid-set power outage, which Coyne jokingly blamed on a fan in a fish costume onstage kicking out the plug—you can hear it go down at the 23:35 mark here:
Alas, that Massey mishap ranks as just the second-most disastrous Flaming Lips show to ever take place in Toronto. In 2006, the band’s highly anticipated headlining set at V-Fest was cut off after just half an hour because the festival—which was running behind schedule all day—had gone past its 11 p.m. curfew. Click on the YouTube video below to hear 10,000 people suddenly slip into a very bad mood:
But I wasn’t too bummed about the V-Fest fiasco, because the night before, I and maybe 50 other people got to see the Lips play a secret show at a Toronto International Film Festival after-party for their friend Bradley Beasely’s documentary Summercamp! And while that might sound like a exclusive hoity-toity affair, let it be known that the Lips performed their three-song set in the public parking lot behind the Bloor Street location of local chicken-wing chain Gabby’s, and any rando passersby walking down the back alley to fetch their car would’ve been treated to a rare airing of “Plastic Jesus” and other deep cuts.
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That midday Lollapalooza set was my first big concert experience (beyond local bands in Polish Hall basements). But I loved it. Can’t remember what mainstage set I had to drag my friends away from to catch it. Still have the Lips shirt I bought at that show.