![]() ![]() ![]() So what if he admits to wondering if Drozd, his Lips bandmate and lead actor in Mars, will die from heroin abuse before filming ends? The puppets and the humor help. He’s got zany ideas about what to do for Halloween or his never-ending Christmas on Mars flick. We see him as one of the few guys in his depressed Oklahoma City neighborhood who’s not forever bringing home bad luck in the bed of his truck. We see him mowing his lawn and talking about his deceased workaholic father. In Fearless Freaks we see Coyne doing a lot of things that have nothing to do with writing big exploding pop. On 2002’s messy follow-up Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, the Lips got more explicitly weepy with their perfect single “Do You Realize?” where Coyne’s death fixation pierced his band’s trademark kitschy gospel-pop bubble.Īnd here’s what a lot of us realized with Yoshimi: Beneath all that studio trickery, Wayne Coyne is a great guy. His voice cracked a little on the high notes and grounded the album’s buzzy symphonies in melancholia, marrying the cosmic with real life. That’s a skill Haynes couldn’t master, which is why his obit will surely end with the Buttholes’ Beck-lite 1996 novelty hit “Pepper” while the Flaming Lips survived a similar moment that found them playing “She Don’t Use Jelly” at 90210’s Peach Pit.Įventually, Coyne’s cherry-red hair turned gray, and with 1999’s The Soft Bulletin, he suddenly started sounding like an adult. But what Haynes fails to appreciate is Coyne’s ability to sell it and mean it. ![]() Haynes is right, sort of-Drozd and bassist Michael Ivins hold things down musically while Coyne plays Arena Messiah, a role at which he’s become adept in the past few years. “Well, I’d first ask them if they’d ever seen a Butthole Surfers show.” Later, Haynes jokes that Lips frontman Wayne Coyne’s biggest asset is multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd. When the Butthole Surfers singer viewed the Lips through his rearview mirror back in the late ’80s, he probably saw a bunch of Philistines: a band whose inept pyrotechnics got its bass player’s hair torched, whose psych wasn’t really all that demented, who merely sang about LSD.Īnd now the Flaming Lips are as obligatory at summer festivals as henna tattoos and bottled water, and Haynes is left grumbling about his inferiors in the great, even moving, Lips documentary Fearless Freaks: “Uh, how would I describe a Flaming Lips show to someone who’d never seen it?” he says. Gibby Haynes may be the only person in America who begrudges the Flaming Lips’ late-career success. ![]()
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