Band Names Are A Con: The Flaming Lips

By Adam McIntyre

Grunge wasn’t weird enough for us. I mean, the awesome rock power of those hairy flannel people was a little hard to deny but really, they were making music for someone else. My friends and I had backwoods families, didn’t use drugs, and had absolutely nothing to do. We were fifteen. It was more likely that we’d break into someone’s house to use the phone than steal something.

My friend Steven and I were tolerated at school, but nobody even pretended to quite understand what we were about. We had a four-track machine we used for recording our very strange songs (which we avoided letting anyone listen to) and even gave ourselves a strange name.

I thought we were original and fearless with our special music that had no audience. I thought we were the only ones making music that didn’t sound like the stuff on the radio.

Soon after school let out for the summer, Steven and I went to the beach for a week with my mom. This included a lot of shopping, and just around the corner from Destin, Florida was the only non-outlet mall for miles: Santa Rosa. They had the largest selection of tapes and CDs we’d yet seen in our young lives.

Scattered amongst all the Jackson Browne, Duran Duran, and Spin Doctors albums, we browsed past and stopped upon reading. . .

THE FLAMING LIPS

I don’t know who grabbed the tape first, but I’ll bet it was Steven. But I think my reaction was the same as his: “Holy Shit!” Just the name declared something rather unusual and dangerous in our sheltered world. It seemed like a threat or a dare, like, “if you listen to this, we’ll set your lips on fire!” Hell, it was funny. The cover art was a distorted photograph, making a boom box seem warped and ominous; there was a guitar that seemed to have 20 tuners on the headstock and a girl sat on the floor with headphones covering her eyes. In retrospect, that cover was a mean thing to show to us. It was painful and maddening not to immediately know what she was listening to in that room of distorted reality. The colors and the font (or lack thereof—Wayne Coyne’s handwriting) and brutal comedy of the whole thing stung like medicine on a scrape.

All our lives, we’d felt like something was missing, except we didn’t know what that thing was. Now we knew. We even knew what it looked like. We knew what its name was. There was enough money between us. It was like winning the lottery, and nothing is ever as good as being 15 and being right.

They’d recorded it all wrong. The weird people in this band had gone into a studio and done everything you’re not supposed to do—and someone had allowed it to happen. The Flaming Lips had turned every knob—rejoicing at all the broken ones they could find—and it sounded like they’d used only those broken knobs and controls to record this album. It was a terrible, frightening, and yet joyous noise. No parent in the world would have allowed us to listen to this grating mess. So we sat down and paid extra attention, just because of that. It didn’t seem like they’d made this record for just anyone; it seemed like they’d made it for themselves and we’d just found this message in a bottle adrift in the ocean. In a way, we felt like they were our pen pals, and the record was a secret transmission from an island where they kept other people like us. We heaped extra love upon it for being so different, buried our dreams under its pillow, and emotionally invested in it as if we’d made it ourselves.

I’m not 15 anymore (as this event was nearly 15years ago) and my musical tastes have changed a lot since then. Of course, The Flaming Lips are now quite famous adults and have lost a lot of that danger, that noise, that wrongness, but they make me feel the same as they did that day at Santa Rosa Mall: like I found some part of my life that was missing. What’s more, they’re good people who spend a lot of time talking to their fans after every show. “As long as it takes for someone to walk away feeling like they got something special” is how singer Wayne Coyne put it during one of our conversations. It’s all very calculated; their name was designed to grab my attention, their music was exactly what I’d hoped, and they treat their fans like royalty. If the Flaming Lips are con artists, I’m the perfect mark. I’ll admit it; the name worked.