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" The Flaming Lips Battle the Prevailing Dread  OH, SHIT. This is a story about the power of love. Oh shit. Oh SHIT! OH SHIT! This is a story about the power of rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll to express the power of love, even now, in the first wan and terrifying years of the twenty-first century. OH SHIIIIT! OH SHIIIIIIIIITTTT! This is a story about the power of a band called the Flaming Lips to use the power of rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll to express the power of love in the twenty-first century--to harness the power of love in their epic artistic battle against the inevitable forces of death, to posit the power of love as an answer to the prevailing dread, to use the power of love to stop . . . the screaming. . . . OH SHIIIIIIT! OH SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTT! Someone is screaming. On the Flaming Lips bus, someone is screaming. At four-thirty in the morning, in the absolute darkness, on the highway between Santa Barbara and Long Beach, on the second-to-last night of the band&amp;#039;s seven-week tour with Beck, with the motor humming and the bus driver navigating his lonesome transit, with the black curtains of the bus&amp;#039;s twelve individual sleeping pallets pulled tightly closed, with vibrant snores erupting from the mouths of the Lips and members of their crew, with death beaten back one more show, one more day, and the power of love ascendant--someone is screaming absolute bloody murder. OH SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT! OH SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTT! Oh, shit, is right. Because this is some serious-ass screaming. This is some blood-curdling, hair-raising shit. This is the kind of screaming that&amp;#039;s so scary, your skin hears it before you do, and when you do hear it . . . well, Michael Ivins, the band&amp;#039;s bassist, wakes up thinking that some deranged fan has jimmied his way into the bus and is going at someone with a knife, just hacking away. Miss Saigon, the young woman who sells the band&amp;#039;s T-shirts, wakes up thinking that someone is being burned alive. Someone else thinks: an animal. This is the sound a human being makes when his flesh is being torn by a wild beast . . . because, see, it&amp;#039;s that kind of screaming. It&amp;#039;s the screaming of primal human fear. It&amp;#039;s the voice of all human dread. It&amp;#039;s the terrible howling song of a man who has feared something all his life and who has now lived to see what he has feared transpire before his eyes, without any ability to stop it. But someone has to stop it--someone from the Flaming Lips has to stop . . . the screaming. . . . OH SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT! &amp;quot;Justin!&amp;quot; A light goes on in one of the pallets. Flanked along the center aisle of the bus, there are four banks of pallets, each of them three pallets high. The screaming is coming from one of the pallets on the bottom. It&amp;#039;s Justin&amp;#039;s pallet. Justin is a member of the crew. He&amp;#039;s just a kid, blond, dimpled, square-jawed, with earrings and a soul patch. The light goes on in the pallet above him, and a curtain slides back to reveal a middle-aged man who, until Justin started screaming, had been sleeping in a white suit of some kind, a white suit that just happens to be covered with dribs and drabs of what appears to be dried human blood. Wayne! Of course! Wayne Coyne, who has been singing with the Flaming Lips for twenty years. Wayne, who has transformed himself from a caterwauling purveyor of punk-rock freak-outs into a kind of Mister Rogers for a generation of kids who are now too old for the Neighborhood but who still need someone to tell them that everything&amp;#039;s all right. Wayne, who sings songs so earnest and full of childlike faith that when you first hear them, you think they must be some kind of joke, until they bring tears to your eyes. Wayne, who is no spring chicken! Wayne, who always says yes unless he says no! Wayne the seer, Wayne the sage, Wayne the celebrant, Wayne the prankster, Wayne the atheist, Wayne the believer, Wayne the scientist, Wayne the preacher, Wayne Coyne the most unlikely leader of this most unlikely example of that most unlikely and indeed nearly mythical thing: the rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll band that still matters. Wayne the hero. Wayne! OH SHHIIIIIIII-- &amp;quot;Justin! Shut the fuck up! We&amp;#039;re trying to sleep! You&amp;#039;re waking everybody up!&amp;quot; OH-- Yes, Wayne stops the screaming, all right. He stops it by curling his arm over the edge of his bed and slugging the howling figure below him. &amp;quot;Justin! Shut! The fuck! Up!&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Wayne?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re dreaming again, man. The bed&amp;#039;s caving in on you again.&amp;quot; Apparently, this has happened before. Apparently, he has told Wayne that he has suffered sleep disturbances his entire life and that when he was a little kid, his parents found him sleeping under a neighbor&amp;#039;s car, in his underwear. &amp;quot;Wayne?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yes, Justin?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Why do I do this, Wayne?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Because you&amp;#039;re a freak, man. Don&amp;#039;t worry about it.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;But Wayne? I had a dream, Wayne. I had a dream that the beds were caving in on me.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;And Justin?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What, Wayne?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Aren&amp;#039;t you glad it wasn&amp;#039;t real?&amp;quot; The Flaming Lips Battle the Condition of Arbitrary Adulthood I AM ABSOLUTELY SERIOUS about the Flaming Lips and the power of love, by the way--absolutely serious, although the Flaming Lips try their best to be ridiculous. They tried to be ridiculous when they first started out as kind of a punk band for &amp;quot;heads&amp;quot; in Oklahoma City--the recent reissue of their early material is titled Finally the Punk Rockers Are Taking Acid--and they try to be ridiculous now that they have made it into the same Hewlett-Packard TV commercial as fellow cultural curiosities Penn &amp;amp;amp; Teller and Abe Vigoda. Indeed, to attend a Flaming Lips concert--oh, hell, to listen to a Flaming Lips album--is to be forced to decide whether you believe that a band as incessantly jokey as the Flaming Lips can be more than a joke, or, put another way, if you believe that a band that seems to be staging a lysergically leaning television show for children can possibly be for adults. Wayne Coyne, who sings and plays what appears to be a guitar, is forty-two; Michael Ivins, who plays bass and assorted electronic gadgets, is thirty-nine; and Steven Drozd, who plays everything else and, as an eleven-year veteran of the Lips, considers himself the newcomer, is thirty-three. Their fans, however, are not just, well, children--by which I mean college students--but children who have sought music that is relentlessly childlike in its orientation if not its concerns and who are as likely as not to have attended the concert wearing homemade animal costumes, ranging from zebra to giraffe to aardvark.  This does not prove nearly as distracting as it sounds, since the band members not only walk onstage dressed in animal costumes of their own but also are accompanied by a bobbing horde of similarly garbed youths (panda, goldfish, lion, giraffe, purple baboon) shining high-beam flashlights in the faces of people in the audience. Michael was dressed as a zebra the first time I saw the Flaming Lips perform; balding and bearded, with the put-upon disposition of a nontenured academic, he never cracked a smile and seemed to view the suit as nothing more than a mild imposition on his stoic dignity. Steven was dressed as a pink bunny rabbit, as was Kliph Scurlock, who plays drums when the band is on the road. Steven, in particular, is not the pink-bunny-rabbit type; thick-bodied, dark-eyed, and haunted-looking, he comes off, by his own description, as &amp;quot;a cigarette-smoking bitter drunk wearing a pink rabbit suit.&amp;quot;  The only member of the Flaming Lips not wearing an animal costume is the one who should be wearing an animal costume, for Wayne Coyne manages to look more absurd in a dapper linen-colored suit than Steven and Michael do in costumes that are essentially footed pajamas. Is there anything this guy won&amp;#039;t do to get the crowd on his side? He comes out smiling with hammy sincerity and pumping his fists over his head in apparent triumph; he stretches out his arms, palms opened in supplication; he sweeps his arm imploringly during one of the ballads; he throws clouds of confetti; he swings a red light over his head; he produces a bullhorn and employs it to turn a voice that is, at its best, a humble instrument--a strained tenor that might be described as the world&amp;#039;s friendliest whine--into a distorted croak, like some postmodern Rudy Vallee or, more to the point, like a benign Andy Kaufmann.  Because it&amp;#039;s gotta be a put-on, right? It&amp;#039;s gotta be a joke. Even the songs are at the very least odd, in that they&amp;#039;re not usually about love, the experience, but Love, the universal precept, and even then are often about the Love necessary for, say, scientists to risk their lives in the race to find a cure for &amp;quot;all mankind&amp;quot; or, in the title track of 2002&amp;#039;s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, for a young Japanese woman to risk her life battling the evil robots &amp;quot;programmed to destroy us.&amp;quot; And yet, if the Flaming Lips are ridiculous, they are not merely ridiculous. Everything works. Everyone grins and sings along. The concert is not just a concert, it&amp;#039;s a bliss party, and when Wayne begins singing a song from Yoshimi called &amp;quot;Do You Realize?&amp;quot; the kid next to me begins . . . hugging me. He doesn&amp;#039;t give me a hug, for that would imply that he briskly squeezes and then stops; no, he begins hugging me and doesn&amp;#039;t let go, at least until all the animals dancing in the wings onstage descend into the audience and begin hugging everyone they can touch, and everyone they hug begins hugging everyone else. Do I hug the kid back? It&amp;#039;s the decision the Flaming Lips force you to make: Do I resist what is clearly ridiculous, or do I follow it as a road to what&amp;#039;s somehow real? And so of course I hug him back, and as I do, what I hear is him singing along with Wayne the lyrics to a song that somehow made it to the Hewlett-Packard commercial, the lyrics that function, in this universe of children, as some kind of ecstatic secret: &amp;quot;Do you realize . . . that everyone you know . . . someday . . . will die?&amp;quot; The Flaming Lips Battle the Self-Importance of Rock Stars in General, and of Beck Hansen in Particular THE FLAMING LIPS are not rock stars. They have never been rock stars. Although they have made ten albums and record for Warner Bros., they have had one radio hit in their entire twenty years of existence, and that was ten years ago. It has been their fate--either their claim to fame or their compensation for obscurity--to be known as the favorite band of certain celebrities. Right now they are, according to their publicist, the favorite band of both David Letterman and Conan O&amp;#039;Brien. They are also the favorite band of Juliette Lewis, who, on the night the Flaming Lips were playing in Santa Barbara, California, called the road manager and asked if she could go onstage with her sister and dance around in the anonymity of animal costumes. The band discusses this prospect before the show. The band also discusses the news that Alyssa Milano might dance as an animal at tomorrow night&amp;#039;s show in Long Beach and that Adam Goldberg, the actor, had phoned in and asked for tickets. Wayne, Steven, Michael, and Kliph talk about the celebrities, interested in them not so much because they are gratified by celebrity interest--even though to some degree they are: &amp;quot;Hey, Adam Goldberg&amp;#039;s my friend,&amp;quot; Steven says--or even because celebrity interest indicates that they are probably closer to being rock stars than they have ever been in their lives. No, they talk about celebrities because they have a lot of downtime in which to do it, and on this tour they have a lot of downtime because of Beck. Beck is a rock star. They didn&amp;#039;t think he would be when he called them and asked if they would open for him on his Sea Change tour and then back him during his own set. They thought that Beck would be kind of cool. They thought, specifically, that he would be, well, like them. It is one of Beck&amp;#039;s talents to make people think that he is just like them. One day, Wayne saw a funky old beat-up Chevy pulling up to the arena and heard the security guards all crow, &amp;quot;Here comes Beck!&amp;quot; because they thought Beck was the kind of guy who goes tooling around L. A. in a funky old beat-up Chevy. But Beck is not that kind of guy. According to the Flaming Lips, Beck is the kind of guy who takes a limo and then worries about people knowing that he takes a limo. Beck is the kind of guy who worries that he is losing his hair. Beck is the kind of guy who worries about his hotel room and walks out if he doesn&amp;#039;t like the color of the walls. Beck is the kind of guy who worries about his food and makes his crew wait around in a restaurant while he sends back his meal two or three times. Beck is the kind of guy who eventually hires his own chef or has someone in his retinue hire his own chef, because Beck is the kind of guy who leaves a lot to his retinue and winds up being a rather passive participant in his own life. More to the point, Beck is the kind of guy who makes people wait, and now, as the Flaming Lips stand onstage in Santa Barbara and wait for Beck to show up for sound check, Wayne wonders aloud if Beck is late because Beck is waiting for someone to &amp;quot;put on his pants for him,&amp;quot; and then cries, to the darkened theater, &amp;quot;Put on your own pants, Beck!&amp;quot; &amp;quot;A lot of people ask me what song I wish I had written,&amp;quot; Wayne says as the Lips wait for Beck. &amp;quot;C&amp;#039;mon, that&amp;#039;s easy--&amp;#039;Happy Birthday.&amp;#039; That&amp;#039;s a useful little song, isn&amp;#039;t it? You start singing &amp;#039;Happy Birthday&amp;#039; and things start happening. People start smiling, they start singing along. Well, that&amp;#039;s what rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll is, if it&amp;#039;s done right. It&amp;#039;s useful. You do it right, and people generally have a pretty good time. They go to the concert, they talk to their friends, they drink beer, and hopefully they go home and have sex. That&amp;#039;s what rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll is about; that&amp;#039;s what it&amp;#039;s always been about--that&amp;#039;s the deal. But a guy like Beck, he doesn&amp;#039;t know that because, you know, he&amp;#039;s Beck. He thinks it&amp;#039;s about him. He thinks that when he&amp;#039;s walking down the hallway before the show, the people out there are thinking about him walking down the hallway, because he&amp;#039;s the artist. And I&amp;#039;m like, &amp;#039;Beck, I hate to break this to you, but for most of those people, you&amp;#039;re the entertainment. They&amp;#039;re not thinking of you. They&amp;#039;re thinking of whether they&amp;#039;re going to have sex tonight. So entertain them and help them have sex.&amp;#039; And so, at the beginning of this tour, Beck wanted the shows to be very serious. He&amp;#039;s a serious artist, he&amp;#039;s come out with a serious album, he wants to do a serious show. And I&amp;#039;m like, &amp;#039;Beck, what are you, Elvis Costello? People like Elvis, but secretly they think he&amp;#039;s boring. You&amp;#039;re Beck. You do that funny little hipster dance. People love the hipster dance. If you don&amp;#039;t do the hipster dance, people are going to be disappointed. So do the hipster dance.&amp;#039; And Beck&amp;#039;s like, &amp;#039;But I want these shows to be serious.&amp;#039; And I&amp;#039;m like, &amp;#039;Beck, I go out there and pour fake blood all over myself while singing &amp;quot;Happy Birthday.&amp;quot; The least you can do is dance.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; In a few minutes, Beck shows up for sound check. He is very small and very pink. He looks not childlike, like fans at a Flaming Lips show, but nearly childish, and the disjunction between his appearance and his status as rock star gives him the appearance of a tiny boy-prince of medieval times now occupying the throne of the slain king. With the Flaming Lips, he sings the lovely, somber, and serious &amp;quot;The Golden Age,&amp;quot; from his lovely, somber, and serious album Sea Change. Then Wayne suggests they rehearse &amp;quot;Imagine&amp;quot; for the KROQ Christmas concert that, in three nights, will be the last performance the Flaming Lips and Beck do together.  &amp;quot; &amp;#039;Imagine&amp;#039;?&amp;quot; Beck says. &amp;quot;Well, the concert&amp;#039;s on December 8,&amp;quot; Wayne says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s the anniversary of John Lennon&amp;#039;s murder.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Oh, okay,&amp;quot; Beck says. &amp;quot;But do we have to do &amp;#039;Imagine&amp;#039;?&amp;quot; Later, Wayne will say, &amp;quot;Beck doesn&amp;#039;t like doing the obvious, so he doesn&amp;#039;t want to do &amp;#039;Imagine.&amp;#039; He wants to do some John Lennon song nobody&amp;#039;s ever heard of. But it&amp;#039;s the day John Lennon died. If you&amp;#039;re going to sing a John Lennon song, you have to sing &amp;#039;Imagine.&amp;#039; Sure, it&amp;#039;s obvious--but so is rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll.&amp;quot; Right now, however, what he says is simply: &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s give it a try.&amp;quot; So Beck sings &amp;quot;Imagine&amp;quot; to an empty house, and it sounds lovely--as serious as any serious artist could want. And that night, Wayne sings &amp;quot;Happy Birthday&amp;quot; while pouring fake blood over his head, and Juliette Lewis dances around dressed as a wombat or something. And Beck does his funny little hipster dance while Wayne lies on the floor in his bloody off-white suit and shines a spotlight on him. And somebody in the crowd goes home and has sex. And everybody is happy.  The Flaming Lips Battle the Fans Who Misunderstand Their Mission THERE ARE ADVANTAGES to not being rock stars. One is that what Wayne Coyne calls the &amp;quot;freedom of not being successful&amp;quot; has allowed the Flaming Lips to do what rock stars never do. It has allowed them not only to survive but to get better. It has allowed them, late in their careers, to produce eccentric music of such curious power that they have found a new audience, a young audience, and to stand as close to genuine rock-stardom as they have ever stood. Indeed, in all of rock history there is no precedent for what the Flaming Lips have done, because in all of rock history there is no precedent for what the Flaming Lips did in 1999, with their album The Soft Bulletin--there is no precedent for a band producing eight albums and then, with their ninth, a masterpiece. On first listen, The Soft Bulletin sounded like a typical Flaming Lips album, in that it sounded sort of ridiculous--a concept album about scientists or about injury or maybe about injured scientists. Far from sounding like a punk album, it was lush and grandiose, with big, booming, Led Zeppelin--style drumming and fragile melodies that might make Brian Wilson blush. In fact, it was exactly the kind of album that people used to laugh at in the seventies when perpetrated by the likes of Yes and King Crimson, except that these guys clearly meant it. Scientists or no scientists, The Soft Bulletin was emotionally massive: celebratory of human possibility, forgiving of human frailty, and, in virtually every song, as death-haunted as any lamentation by Son House or Robert Johnson. And by the time the song &amp;quot;Waitin&amp;#039; for a Superman&amp;quot; came on, with its lyrics &amp;quot;Tell everybody / waitin&amp;#039; for a superman / that they should try to / hold on best they can--He hasn&amp;#039;t dropped them / forgot them / or anything--it [the world, the sun, death itself]&amp;#039;s just too heavy / for a superman to lift,&amp;quot; it was clear that the Flaming Lips had arrived at a conciliatory and even healing vision and were ready to enter their second careers as the wise uncles of rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll.  You can see it after the Santa Barbara show. You can see the need that the Flaming Lips have managed both to inspire and to answer. You can see that kids are looking to the Flaming Lips--and, specifically, to Wayne--not just for music anymore but rather to tell them what no one else in the culture is telling them, which is simply that life is worth living. And because the Flaming Lips are not rock stars--because he&amp;#039;s not a rock star but rather something else--Wayne is happy to oblige. He&amp;#039;s happy to stand with fans after the show; happy to shake their hands while saying, &amp;quot;Hi, I&amp;#039;m Wayne&amp;quot;; happy to autograph their tour posters and to draw a Hitler mustache on the picture of Beck (&amp;quot;Now, I&amp;#039;m not saying that Beck is like Hitler . . .&amp;quot;); happy to listen; happy even to give advice to the lovelorn: &amp;quot;C&amp;#039;mon, man. If you love her, why don&amp;#039;t you go ahead and tell her? Call her when you get home. Do you have a cell phone? Call her now. Sure, you might be humiliated. But you might have the best night of your life. . . .&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s happy to do these things, because if the songs on The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots are all about the necessity of saying yes until you face the necessity of saying no, the advantage of not being a rock star is that you can do what rock stars can&amp;#039;t, and say yes to your fans. . . .  Until you have to say no. The no, of course, is the tour bus. The tour bus has always been the great thundering No of rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll, the terrible monolith dividing fans from their gods. Hell, the Lips never had a tour bus of their own until they started touring with Beck . . . but now they do. And there&amp;#039;s a kid standing outside of it whose need is not merely for affirmation or even for advice. It&amp;#039;s a need that even a band as accessible as the Flaming Lips can&amp;#039;t satisfy--the need for validation, the need for identification, the need to be recognized. All during the show, the kid was screaming for Wayne. He was screaming his terrible stricken WAAAAAAYNE! during the Lips&amp;#039; set, and he was even screaming his terrible stricken WAAAAAYNE! during Beck&amp;#039;s set. Now he&amp;#039;s waiting by the door of the bus, even though Wayne is back inside the theater, signing autographs for other fans. He manages to catch Steven on the way in, and Steven talks to him for a while, but eventually Steven has to shake his hand and go inside . . . the bus. The door closes, and Steven goes to the back of the bus, where he can smoke and drink and listen to music. Steven: the great dark musical heart of the Flaming Lips. Steven, who came to the Lips as a drummer and who now makes virtually all the music on the albums except the bass. Steven, who remembers his boyhood in terms of music: &amp;quot;My father working in the garage and playing Hank Williams. My mother in the kitchen singing soul music. My brother smoking pot in his room and listening to Wish You Were Here. My sister in her bedroom listening to Donna Summer.&amp;quot; Steven, who a year and a half ago kicked a six-year heroin addiction. Steven, who now plugs his iPod in to the stereo and, while pulling off a bottle of Jim Beam, sinks so deeply into every song he listens to--from Heart to Yes to Sabbath to Roxy Music to the Smiths to the Eagles to Mazzy Star to Super Furry Animals to Linda Ronstadt to Fleetwood Mac to Al Green to Donna Summer--that he not only knows every part of every song, he enacts every part of every song, in absolutely perfect time, and never sees . . .  STTEEEEEVEN! ...the fan from outside the bus leap into his lap. &amp;quot;Steeeeven! You&amp;#039;re the greatest fucking rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll drummer in the world!&amp;quot; Steven is much bigger than the fan, and so for a second he cradles him as he would a baby, until Kliph, the drummer, pulls the fan off and sends him sprawling in the aisle between the pallet beds. The poor kid&amp;#039;s so fucked up, he falls over in one piece, like an upended pole, and he&amp;#039;s just lying there, moaning, refusing to get off the bus until a member of the Lips crew drags him off. And now he&amp;#039;s outside the bus again. The door is closed, and, together with a friend, he stands screaming imprecations at the terrible blind god of rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll. &amp;quot;You guys suck! You guys are a bunch of fucking dicks!&amp;quot; And then the both of them begin kicking the bus. Rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll rule number one: Never kick the bus, especially if the bus driver is named Spider. &amp;quot;You kick the bus one more time,&amp;quot; Spider says, opening the door, &amp;quot;you&amp;#039;re gonna have to deal with me.&amp;quot; They kick the bus again. They kick it harder. &amp;quot;Fuck you! You want a piece of me? C&amp;#039;mon--&amp;quot; Spider&amp;#039;s first punch spreads the fan&amp;#039;s nose across his face. His second punch lifts the friend off the ground. These guys, the Flaming Lips&amp;#039; biggest fans, are now bent over, bleeding, hiding in the parking lot, sobbing, consoling each other, and they never see Wayne Coyne get on the bus, nor can they imagine, as the bus pulls away, that later, in the middle of the night, on the way from Santa Barbara to Long Beach, that&amp;#039;s when the screaming begins. The Flaming Lips Battle Death Itself When the Flaming Lips were first writing the songs for The Soft Bulletin, Steven Drozd kept a tune in his head for a month before he played it for anyone. He thought it was &amp;quot;too classic&amp;quot; and figured that one day he would remember who had written it before he did. Then one day, he played it in the studio, and Wayne said, &amp;quot;What is that?&amp;quot; Wayne wound up writing lyrics based not on his typical flights of fancy but rather on a conversation he&amp;#039;d had with his brother when their father was dying of cancer the year before. The song was &amp;quot;Waitin&amp;#039; for a Superman,&amp;quot; and it became the centerpiece of The Soft Bulletin. Wayne had not set out to write a song about enduring death; he had simply attempted to write songs that meant something to him--&amp;quot;I was old enough that I didn&amp;#039;t have to be weird anymore&amp;quot;--and death had found him. &amp;quot;You don&amp;#039;t have to decide to write about death,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;You write about life, and you wind up writing about death, because death is what happens. You don&amp;#039;t have to look for it, and you don&amp;#039;t have to make it up. It&amp;#039;s coming.&amp;quot; Indeed, when Wayne asks, on Yoshimi, &amp;quot;Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?&amp;quot; the question is not an occasion for sentiment; it is what happened to Steven. The mother who sang soul music so sweetly died of an overdose. The brother who played Wish You Were Here while smoking pot in his room became paralyzed in an accident and killed himself. The sister who danced to Donna Summer committed suicide right before the Lips started the tour with Beck. Steven attended his sister&amp;#039;s funeral in Oklahoma and then, because the tour was so important to him, flew to Los Angeles the next day so he wouldn&amp;#039;t be late to begin rehearsals. Beck showed up five hours late and thereby violated the belief espoused in virtually every Flaming Lips song since The Soft Bulletin, which is that human rituals must be celebrated and respected, since they are all we have in the face of certain annihilation.  No matter how na\u00EFve they sound, the songs of the Flaming Lips concern not peace but battle, and not acceptance but resistance. &amp;quot;Look,&amp;quot; Wayne had said, &amp;quot;life is pretty fucking good. But that&amp;#039;s something we, as humans, have to agree on. Life over death. That&amp;#039;s what civilization is--an agreement. Listen, nothing good is natural. Love and mercy do not exist in nature. They&amp;#039;re human inventions. Which is why, when they happen, they&amp;#039;re such a triumph. Which is why they have to be celebrated. Which is why we celebrate them.&amp;quot; And so when I ask Wayne in the morning how a band that champions the power of love can countenance the pummeling of two of its fans the night before, he points out that without the power to defend the bus there is no power of love, except that the language he uses to express himself is more to the point: &amp;quot;Fucking guys got what they deserved.&amp;quot; The Flaming Lips Battle Lesser Improprieties &amp;quot;Has Wayne tried to change you?&amp;quot; Steven asks me on my last day with the Flaming Lips. &amp;quot;Because he does that. That&amp;#039;s what he does after he gets to know you. He finds one thing about you and tries to change it. He&amp;#039;s relentless. The only way you can stop him is if you tell him that whatever it is he&amp;#039;s trying to change is enabling you to have great sex. That&amp;#039;s the only way to stop him.&amp;quot; And so it is, on the morning of December 8, twenty-two years after the murder of John Lennon, that Wayne Coyne tries to change my cherished habit of sleeping without any clothes on. The tour with Beck is over, and instead of sleeping on the bus, the Flaming Lips are sleeping in a hotel near the Universal Amphitheatre, where that night they will perform with, among others, Beck, Coldplay, the Vines, and Creed for KROQ&amp;#039;s Christmas concert. Wayne is showered and clean and has changed, finally, out of his bloodstained suit. In rooming with Kliph, however, he has discovered that Kliph sleeps in the nude, and now, as he eats breakfast in the amphitheater basement with roadies from at least ten bands, he is trying to convince Kliph that no normal person sleeps naked, and indeed that sleeping naked constitutes an offense against not only common sense but civilization. &amp;quot;Well, I sleep naked,&amp;quot; I offer. &amp;quot;Really?&amp;quot; Wayne says. &amp;quot;Well, then, meet Kliph. You guys deserve each other.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What do you sleep in?&amp;quot; I ask. &amp;quot;Depends where I am. At home, I sleep in boxer shorts, like most sane Americans. On the road, I sleep in my suit. Sometimes I sleep in my shoes. You have to be ready to go, on the road. Look what happened with Justin the other night. With the screaming. How much worse would that have been if we were naked?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, that&amp;#039;s because you&amp;#039;re in a band. I don&amp;#039;t have to worry about that. I sleep naked because I like sleeping naked with my wife.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;But does she like it?&amp;quot; Wayne asks. &amp;quot;Look, you&amp;#039;re a guy. You got stuff oozing out of you at all times. You&amp;#039;re asking your wife to sleep in that?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well,&amp;quot; I offer lamely, &amp;quot;today is the day John Lennon was shot. And so we&amp;#039;re back to the old John--Paul question. I&amp;#039;ll bet you Paul is the guy who slept in his underwear and that John slept naked. Case closed.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Case closed? John Lennon was a fool, man! He thought he was God! At least four times in his life, he thought he was Jesus Christ! John Lennon!&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yeah,&amp;quot; Kliph says, &amp;quot;and after his first two solo albums, he sucked. At least Paul put one or two good songs on every Wings album.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Doesn&amp;#039;t everybody sleep naked?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, just you and Kliph. And you&amp;#039;re freaks. Listen. Let&amp;#039;s be scientific about this. Let&amp;#039;s take a poll of the room. But if I&amp;#039;m right, you have to promise me to go home and tell your wife that she doesn&amp;#039;t have to sleep naked with you anymore. Because she&amp;#039;s doing it for you, man. You have to know that.&amp;quot; And so the poll begins. Wayne asks the roadies at the next table, &amp;quot;Do you sleep in your underwear?&amp;quot; and one by one, they all answer &amp;quot;Yes.&amp;quot; The same thing happens at the next table. Finally, he gets to one guy, the oldest roadie, the ur-roadie, the most grizzled, the most leathery, the one with the longest and frizziest gray hair and the yellowest teeth. &amp;quot;No,&amp;quot; the guy says, with a happy, appalling grin. &amp;quot;There you go,&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;Look at him!&amp;quot; Wayne booms. &amp;quot;Look who&amp;#039;s on your side! Look who you&amp;#039;re with. Man, what were you thinking?&amp;quot; So I go home and tell my wife that she doesn&amp;#039;t have to sleep naked with me anymore. But when we go to bed for the night, naked is how we sleep, like children, for this is a story, as I said in the beginning, about the power of love. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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