Fifteen years later, Coyne is the guitarist and vocalist of the Flaming Lips. As with so many things in the unique universe of the Lips, this simple observation became an idea. Then the idea became the so-called "Parking Lot Experiment," a series of makeshift performances involving dozens of cars simultaneously blasting cassettes recorded and produced by Coyne. And now, against most any odds, everyone's favorite cult band from Oklahoma City is making recording industry history (certainly in the marketing sense, and arguably even in the artistic one) by releasing a set of four CDs intended to be played simultaneously on four separate CD players.
With a title that combines "Zaire" and "eureka" (it's all explained in the vastly entertaining liner notes), Zaireeka (Warner Bros.) arrived in stores a month or two back in a limited-edition set priced at 24 bucks. If you're thinking it's some sort of superserious John Cage- or Metal Machine Music-style avant-garde experiment, think again. The thing costs slightly more than Milton Bradley's Twister, and that's exactly how Coyne hopes that it will be viewed.
"Hopefully, it's entertaining even if you don't like the music," he says in his friendly Okie drawl. "The idea that you got your friends over there all pressing CD players all at the same time -- that in itself has an element of entertainment about it. To say, 'OK, we're doing this, and I don't know why.' If people perceive this as something that you participate in, and it's different and unique and it does take a bit of a hassle -- well, instead of looking at that as being bad, if people think that's cool, then maybe they'll like it."
At the tail end of the alternative-rock era, one might argue the futility of expecting that kind of effort from an audience used to being spoon-fed such carefully contrived pabulum as Third Eye Blind; does Coyne really expect his slacker listeners to do that much work?
"Well, it's not that much work," he says, laughing. "I'm not asking them to mow the lawn.
"I guess what I'm hoping for is that playing the CD becomes a little bit of an event. Because things do become too convenient. I can't remember the last time we got a record and actually sat and listened to it in our house. There's cable TV, there's computers, there's all this stuff that makes you say, 'I don't wanna sit here and just listen.' I think the idea that it becomes an event, each song as it comes up, that's what will appeal to people. Or maybe not."
Not that the music itself isn't worth the effort; if nothing else, Zaireeka stands as conclusive evidence that the Flaming Lips remain one of the most ambitious, imaginative, twisted, and for the most part sadly unheralded bands in rock 'n' roll today. They've trodden that path since the middle of the indie-rock '80s, when the group came together in the college town of Norman, Okla. Coyne and bassist Michael Ivins would meet up at punk shows by the likes of the Meat Puppets, and the pair soon figured it would be easy enough to make a similar noise themselves. On such early recordings as Hear It Is (1986) and Oh My Gawd!!! (1987), the band sounded a lot like an acid-damaged Replacements. But by the time they signed to Warners in 1992 (the label thinking that maybe, just maybe, the quartet could be another Jane's Addiction), the Lips had forged a thoroughly distinctive sound that merged the psychedelic shenanigans of bands like My Bloody Valentine and the Butthole Surfers with the twisted pop sensibilities of Syd Barrett and Brian Eno.
The latter element of their sound paid off most noticeably in late '94, when modern-rock radio started playing "She Don't Use Jelly," an irresistibly catchy ditty about tangerines, Cher, and Vaseline from the Lips' sixth album, 1993's Transmissions From the Satellite Heart. The group had been touring relentlessly for months with its strongest lineup to date: Ivins, Coyne, Ronald Jones (an expert at crafting freaky orchestral guitar sounds, since departed from the group), and drummer Steven Drozd (the master of thCR>e Bonham-esque backbeat). Suddenly, years of hard work were rewarded with a slot on MTV's Buzz Bin, an appearance on Letterman, a contribution to the soundtrack of Batman Forever, a flurry of requisite name-checking by the likes of Billy Corgan, and, most hilariously, a guest slot on Beverly Hills 90210 as a band playing at the Peach Pit.
Unfortunately but perhaps predictably, this elusive altrock buzz slipped away just as quickly as it had come. When the band released the symphonic, Pet Sounds-styled Clouds Taste Metallic in 1995, Warner Bros. gave it the usual two weeks of marketing push. The commercial powers that be barely noticed, and the Lips went right back to selling albums to the devoted 50,000 or so hard-core fans who had cared about them from the beginning. In stark contrast to most rock musicians in the business, Coyne refuses to blame his record label for the Lips' fleeting success; mostly, he just blames himself.
"I think 'Jelly' was a total fluke," he says. "Not that that's bad; a lot of songs that are hits are flukes. But with us, a different standard applies: We're not trying very hard to make a commercial record. The fact that there are people who think that what we're doing should be popular, well, that's just icing on the cake.
"A lot of people wouldn't want to be in our position," Coyne continues. "You can say, 'Look, you guys get to make whatever records you want!' But a lot of people today would say, 'I want to be famous and make a lot of money! What kind of record do you want me to make here?' That's more of what goes on. People are more concerned about being famous and getting their picture in the paper and wearing the cool new clothes than they are about making music, but that's been the rule since day one."
What Coyne is implying here is that the Lips are different, that they have remained steadfast in the general pursuit of artistry over commerce. You can even see it in the way they live: Coyne, photographer Michelle Martin (his significant other), Ivins, and LCR>ips manager Scott Booker all inhabit a rambling ranch house that the band alternately calls "The Compound" and "Stately Wayne Manor." The group members rehearse there, do their own album art there, and build freaky sculptures out on the lawn. As unlikely as it sounds, they have forged a sort of ideal creative community in an otherwise sleepy neighborhood about a mile away from where the now-infamous Murrah Federal Building once stood.
Coyne is the charismatic dynamo at the center of all of this, and it isn't much of a stretch to think that he'd have made a heck of a cult leader in another life; as proof, consider the success he's had so far with the Parking Lot Experiments. Last year, inspired by those cars at the Kiss show, he convinced 40 friends, neighbors, and relatives to drive to a concrete parking ramp in downtown Oklahoma City on a Sunday afternoon; park in a designated order; roll down their windows; turn up their stereos; and press "play" on his cue to blast the numbered cassettes he'd given them. Throughout the performance, Coyne scampered around in a yellow raincoat, directing the proceedings through a bullhorn.
After several false starts, what finally came together was the sound of 80 speakers playing 40 tapes each containing a different instrumental part or sound effect. The experiment was repeated, fine-tuned, and taken on the road; this writer participated in the third or fourth attempt at the South by Southwest music conference last March, and my rental car contributed the sound of an elephant snoring to a piece called "The March of the Rotting Vegetables." Listeners were encouraged to walk around between the cars, and the effect of hearing different parts sliding in and out of sync and jumping out of unexpected places was wonderfully disorienting and extremely powerful.
The experiment has grown since then, with Coyne taking it inside and recruiting upward of 100 boomboxes. (It wowed 'em at the CMJ Festival in New York this September.) Zaireeka is, of course, the do-it-yourself,CR> take-home, album representation of all this. To some degree, anyway; a full-on re-creation would require dozens more CDs. David Katznelson, the band's Warners A&R rep, sounds nervous and wary when asked why Coyne limited the recorded version to four discs.
"Please don't ask Wayne that," he says. "They're doing this with 30 cars, 300 boomboxes. ... I guess we got off easy with four CDs."
As one might expect, Warners execs weren't exactly thrilled when the modest-selling Lips presented the idea to them. Here was something different (and therefore difficult) that also sounded expensive. But the group has always had a few employees at the company who are solidly in its corner, and the idea started to grow on them after Coyne came to Burbank and conducted an experiment in the Warners parking lot earlier this year. To assuage some of the label's potential financial concerns, the Lips struck a deal whereby they would record Zaireeka at the same time as a more conventional rock album that will follow in April or May; since the band treated the former as four separate albums with four 24-track master tapes, this means they effectively made five albums at once, all for the relatively humble sum of about $200,000.
"Honestly, when the idea was presented to the label, there was some resistance, because nobody had ever heard of such a thing before," Katznelson says. "But I have to believe, and Warners believes, that in the long haul, if you stick with a guy like Wayne Coyne, you're going to be rewarded both artistically and commercially."
Just how rewarding is Zaireeka? Not surprisingly, it works best if you go through the trouble of rounding up four friends and four CD players; under those circumstances, it's even better than Laserium Pink Floyd in quadraphonic sound -- partly because it's your friends in your living room. (And partly because it's the Flaming Lips instead of Pink Floyd.) Voices come out of nowhere, melodies slither around your head, and your grip on reality slides away as the CD playeCR>rs subtly slip out of sync. This disorienting effect was part of what Coyne was after.
"We've tried it out on a lot of different CD players around here, just to see what the variables would be," he says. "And they start to develop a mind of their own. Part of that is built into the music and the rhythms, so that what appears to be wrong could be just different."
The discs work just as well when they're played individually. Sometimes, you hear an entire Lips pop song: "Riding to Work in the Year 2025 (Your Invisible Now)" or "Thirty-Five Thousand Feet of Despair." At others, you get washes of noise or ambient music that seems to illustrate just how easy it is to make Aphex Twin or Tortoise records. ("Make sure you note that I said that wasn't part of anybody's intention," Coyne says, laughing. "The idea was, you can be ambient if you want, but you can also go the other way and put it into a song.")
If you're still not totally convinced that there's a method to this madness, well, join the club: Neither am I, neither is Warners, and, in a certain sense, neither is Coyne. While it's hard to deny that Zaireeka in particular and the Lips in general are entertaining as hell, there is that old cliche about the fine line between charlatan and genius -- and Coyne is the first to admit as much.
"I totally agree," he says. "I think the people who know me know that it's not a prank; I'm not trying to trick them. But even then, everything we do is kind of avant-garde, kind of tongue-in-cheek. It's a joke but not a joke at the same time."
Just like, say, Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters or Tim Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery. Hmmm ... Parking Lot Experiments, artistic communes, the pursuit of art over commerce, Syd Barrett, Brian Wilson, acid gurus Kesey and Leary ... is all of this Flaming Lips strangeness just a retro hippie trip at heart? The answer is a resounding "no," and that's one more hugely compelling reason to love this band.
"Our generation -- me and you -- we really do have tCR>o be responsible somewhere along the way to have done something on our own," Coyne says. "This accumulation of the past. ... I'll be the first to say that I've partaken to the point where I've probably done damage to myself, because we're so enraptured of the myths of the past. But I think it's time we said, 'OK, we know the Velvets were cool. We know Syd Barrett was cool. We know the Beatles had good songs. What have you done for me?'
"Somewhere along the way, we're the ones who have to say, 'Here's what we have to offer. It's new, it's different, it's unique to us.' Instead of saying, 'Well, if you like David Bowie, you may like these guys,' or Oasis talking about how much they like the Beatles. Show us your soul, don't show us your record collection! And if I am made a fool of because I tried to do that, well, I'll be a fool. That's OK with me.
