A relevant irreverence

THESE days, Wayne Coyne can usually spot them from a distance. They tug on his sleeve in airport terminals with a grim smile or approach him backstage at concerts with tears in their eyes. They tell him wrenching stories, like the one he heard from a San Francisco family: It was Christmastime and their son, so healthy and only 21, took a bad fall. Then he died, just like that. When they went through his things they happened on the CD in his stereo. When they pushed play they heard Coyne and his dreamy, bittersweet song:

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Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die

And instead of saying all of your goodbyes

Let them know you realize that life goes fast

It’s hard to make the good things last

You realize the sun doesn’t go down

It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round

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The song from 2002 is called “Do You Realize?” and musically it’s a layered, shimmering work, but the lyrics are as simple and soothing as a child’s bedtime prayer. That family played it over and over, and made it the theme at the son’s memorial service.

Coyne, the lead singer of an irreverent, head-trippy band called the Flaming Lips, was hushed by the sentiment. “To have something I wrote be there for them in that moment of despair and isolation? If it weren’t my song, it would have been another. People started telling me it was the song they used at their mother’s funeral or they played it when their child was born. Do you know what that feels like for me? To carry that around the rest of my life is something very, very special. No matter what happens, I have that.”

The weird thing is that as Coyne told this heart-rending tale, he was sitting in an old slaughterhouse on the scabby edges of downtown Los Angeles and reeked of raw meat. “Is it bad? Can you smell it? I hate to say it but I haven’t had a shower, so I’ve had it on me yesterday and today.”

Coyne, who dresses like a Jules Verne character and acts like the host of a psychedelic children’s show, and his band spun their way out of dusty Oklahoma in the 1980s the way Dorothy and Toto once flew beyond the Kansas horizon. And although they have flirted with the mainstream (their new album, “At War With the Mystics,” just came thisclose to debuting in the Top 10 of the nation’s pop album chart), they are too old, too weird and too heartfelt to fit comfortably with the core of MTV’s predictable young franchises.

That explains the slaughterhouse: When it came time to film a video for the catchy first single from “Mystics,” “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song ... (With All Your Power),” the Lips decided the best showcase would in a video with Krispy Kreme doughnuts, lots of raw meat, a doomed Paris Hilton look-alike, marauding L.A. cops and a werewolf in Baghdad. The theme of the video is modern American excess and the plot is ... well, uh, never mind.

“Sometimes it’s not so much about meaning or meaningfulness, it’s just something to look at,” Coyne said. “If you get something out of it, that’s great.”

And that sums up the lovely puzzle of the Flaming Lips. Their music is like a sermon delivered between gulps of helium: It’s hard to know exactly when you should take it seriously, but you would also hate to miss something special hidden in all the funny squeaking. The Lips have loopy songs of wizards and pink robots and prog-rock dementia that generally demands giggles, but (as “Do You Realize?” proved) they also can bring people to tears.

Their concerts, meanwhile, look like Fellini invested in a Chuck E. Cheese’s franchise -- all confetti, giant furry animals, huge balloons and ditzy fan sing-alongs under waves of fluorescent reverb. It’s also becoming a coveted goof among celebs to play mascot during a Lips gigs -- Justin Timberlake, Drew Barrymore and Beck have worn the suits.

As with any respectable acid trip, you can’t exactly tell people what the Flaming Lips are, you can only try to say what they are like. Like the Grateful Dead or Phish, they have intensely loyal fans who walk through concert turnstiles like tribe members climbing into the sweat lodge (and often do so with, ahem, peace pipe in hand). Like the Wu-Tang Clan, the Lips have created a crazy quilt of pop-culture references and band mythology that cannot be taken seriously. But, like Tool and Pink Floyd, they have some fans that insist on taking them way too seriously. And, as with the Beastie Boys, no one would have predicted in the goofball early days that musical ambition and personal pilgrimage would carry them past their second decade in the spotlight. Like Radiohead, they are one of the few bands today that make albums, not CDs full of singles and filler.

For its new CD, this band that makes music that usually seems untethered from the real world has gone political. “At War With the Mystics,” the group’s 11th full-length album, takes shots at President Bush, religious zealots of all stripes and the crisis of conscience among liberals in contemporary America. It is also, Coyne pointed out earnestly, “about all the pretty colors.”

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The band’s moving parts

WITH a halo of curly salt-and-pepper hair and a smile both benevolent and sly, Coyne is the star of the Lips, especially during their elaborate concerts when he is the engaging tour guide to the kooky Lips universe. To the public, Coyne may be both Willy Wonka and Ken Kesey for the band, but internally he is only one-third of the act’s vital moving parts. Coyne is the concept guy and key lyricist, but Steven Drozd (whom Coyne describes as “a real and true musical genius”) plays guitar, keyboards and drums at their recording sessions and is the guiding force behind the band’s musical compositions. Drozd is also the one behind the high, four- and five-part harmonies that at times create a sort of “Pet Sounds” flavor.

The third principal is Michael Ivins, the bass player and, more notably, the studio-tech maven who comes in to shape the wash of strange and psychedelic sound that set the Lips apart.

Drozd and Ivins are now well accustomed to Coyne getting the publicity. They mock his habit of granting long, windy interviews but they do so with a wink and a smile; this is a band that earned late-career success, by rock ‘n’ roll standards, so there seems to be a muted sense of ego within their ranks.

“It’s like a family now, which is just dumb luck,” Coyne said. “At the beginning, I don’t know if we would have thought of that as having any value. At that stage, it’s not about family and love, it’s about rock ‘n’ roll, it’s about drugs and mayhem. But as it goes on you see things without those parts that are just for show. But, yes, we do have that thing now, the family thing, and it’s good.”

This family came from a broken home. The Lips were a psychedelic band from the get-go but their sound and membership were in constant flux. From 1983 to 1990, the year the band signed with Warner Bros., there were six changes in the lineup. Coyne and Ivins date to the beginning, but little else does.

“People say we are like an old married couple,” Ivins sniffed on the set of the video shoot. Lanky, thin-lipped and a bit severe, Ivins is far less magnetic, but in the band’s circle of loyalists is hailed as a steadying force and an engine for an act that, improbably, is chugging toward its 25th anniversary.

“We’ve never been about the hard-sell,” Ivins said. “Wayne is the guy in the front and he’s very good at that. He’s a cool guy but he’s also very deferential to the whole proceedings. In the band, it’s like we have our archetypal roles. This guy is Luke Skywalker, this guy is Chewbacca....”

As he said that, Ivins was dressed as an LAPD cop, as were Drozd and Kliph Scurlock, the fourth member of the Lips (although he is clearly a junior partner; Scurlock is a former roadie who now plays drums during concerts to free Drozd up to hop between guitar and keyboards). In the music video, the faux L.A. cops were assigned to betray their king, portrayed, of course, by Coyne. In the narrative, Coyne is also covered with raw meat by a trio of scantily clad young Asian women and, eventually, served up as a meal to a supernatural beast roaming a marketplace in Iraq. The video is about avarice but it’s also pretty darn funny.

“I’ve got nothing against cops,” Ivins said sharply, “they are like doctors, they want to save the world but end up dealing with the dregs of society.”

He was sunnier on the topic of the Lips and their longevity. “I don’t think the band has ever been better, actually, as far its health and success.” He recounted an awkward lunch with Warner Bros. executives some 16 years ago when, over some celebratory sushi, an executive from the label’s legal department told the newly signed youngster that, in truth, “there’s a five-year span for bands,” so get what you can and don’t waste your time. That label has gone through tremendous upheaval and, really, the only way the Lips survived the roster thinning was by hiding out -- they were too far down the food chain to be worth cutting.

Then came “The Soft Bulletin.” The 1999 album was both bizarre and instantly adored by music-heads as that rarest of album accomplishments, something truly inventive but also accessible. The songs were about science and philosophy and the human heart, and the sounds were some strange cosmic pulse. As Coyne says: “Everything changed after that.”

Both “Bulletin” and the follow-up, “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,” were voted among the top three albums released in their year by the prestigious Village Voice poll that collects the ballots of more than 500 music critics in North America.

Since “Bulletin,” the music of the Lips has been primarily about life and death and the goofy dancing in between. It’s all been heavy but it’s also been floating in a comfortably distant space. Not so with “At War With the Mystics.”

“We pretty much hate Bush, can you hear that?” Coyne says without a trace of a smile.

To Ivins, the mystics are not one group, but three: “Seriously, we are at war with the mystics. They are the ones who tell us there is no room for ideas other than their own. They are the people who are killing each other over cartoons in other countries. In this country, they are the ones who say we should govern and rule based on ideas of what happens to all of us after we die, that that life is more important. There’s also the New Age [political] left ... that tells us everything will be fine, life is beautiful, there’s nothing in the world that should shake your precious views....”

Ivins speaks at length about “The End of Faith,” the book by Sam Harris that argues against organized religion, but he says he has deep respect for the spirituality of others and their intrinsic human right to worship. Still: “Substitute the word ‘Zeus’ every time someone says ‘God,’ and pretty soon you start getting the feeling that we should be moving forward.” Hefting his blue officer’s hat, he paused and watched a makeup person dab at Drozd’s face to prepare for the big chase sequence. He smiled. “Not that you should put on the new record and think about all that. You can think of that. But it’s a record that doesn’t require it.”

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A compelling connection

TWO weeks after the slaughterhouse video, the Lips were in Austin, Texas, to play a series of “surprise” shows for the South by Southwest Music Conference, but the only surprise was how surly the club management was toward the band. It was a hot and muggy afternoon and, with the scheduled soundcheck in doubt, Drozd popped down the street to a bar called the Mooseknuckle Pub. He sat at end of the bar closest to the front door, glanced at a videogame showing topless girls and then ordered a double shot of Jim Beam (no ice, thank you) and an Amstel Light.

It would be an awkward stretch to compare Drozd and Coyne to the team of Lennon and McCartney but, beyond the magical mystery touring, there is a compelling connection between the two partnerships. McCartney once sang the jaunty line “It’s getting better all the time,” and the acerbic Lennon came up with the perfect counterweight by muttering “It can’t get much worse.” Coyne is shiny happy people. Drozd is a bit more brooding. While Coyne loves the goofball pageantry of the Lips concerts, Drozd was initially reluctant to dress up like a pink elephant during a gig. Now, though, he understands the theatrics don’t undermine the music, they add a sense of ritual to the fever dream.

Drozd himself came a bit late to the Lips party. Ivins and Coyne are in their mid-40s, Drozd turns 37 this summer. The Houston native was a fan of the band when he was invited to play drums for them in 1991. His arrival eventually added new layers of complexity to their sound. But his battle against heroin addiction also gave the outfit some strange depths and a near-death experience. He was fighting to put the needle down in the months before the “Bulletin” recording sessions but the experiences of life on that awful edge were fresh in his blood and memory. The song “The Spiderbite Song” on the album was indicative of those strange days; Drozd had a nasty infection from shooting up but he lied to his bandmates, saying he had been bitten by a bug. The sweet lyrics written by Coyne seemed to unintentionally mock the addict fighting to get his life right:

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When you got that spider bite on your hand

I thought we would have to break up the band

To lose your arm would surely upset your brain

The poison then could reach your heart from a vein

I was glad that it didn’t destroy you

How sad that would be

Because if it destroyed you

It would destroy me

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Eventually, Drozd confessed that he had lied and went into rehab. Asked how he could reconcile shots of whiskey with a recovering addict’s lifestyle, he shrugged and talked about the nature of addicts to look for the one drug that will kill them. He knows what his is, he said, and he steers clear of it. “I don’t do any opiate drug, I don’t even look at them.”

It looked at one point as if Drozd’s drug abuse and other suffocating factors would snuff out the Flaming Lips. In late 1996, the band lost guitar player Ronald Jones, which sent a shiver through the group’s building cult audience, and one of the reasons cited for that defection was Drozd’s drug use.

“There was a real moment there where it looked like everything would come down after Ronnie quit,” Drozd said. “Me, I was plowing down this path, this whole lifestyle of being addicted to heroin, and there was also a very real possibility that we were going to be dropped because Warner Bros. was in such a state of flux. In 1997, it was definitely a possibility that it was the end. So we said, ‘Let’s put one more record out and 25 people will buy it and then we’ll quietly leave the label.’ We had no idea that we were going to make a record that would send us to a whole new stratosphere.”

That would be “The Soft Bulletin,” and Drozd was actually sober enough in the year after its release to appreciate it. “There was a weird moment of clarity a few months later where I listened to the whole album and I had one thought: ‘How did we do this?’ ”

The critical acclaim and new commercial success of “Bulletin” was a wave that carried through to the follow-up album, “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,” in 2002, which brought in even better reviews and the band’s widest audience.

“People look at us like we are these master wizards and we know what we’re doing,” Drozd said, “but it’s not like that.” That status is one reason that reviews of the new CD have been mixed. Rolling Stone, for instance, described the lead single, “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song,” as “a bouncy mishmash of acoustic guitars, studio high jinks and ya-ya-ya backing vocals that sounds like Neil Young inside a NASA rocket” but also damned the Lips for failing to meet their own cosmic standards. “ ‘At War With the Mystics’ might be one of the year’s best headphone records, but for the Lips, it’s a step sideways.”

Sometimes Drozd pretends not to care about reviews and sales, but then he will also admit that the group feels pressure to succeed and searches hard to keep the musical compass pointed to a new north instead of covering familiar ground. In the summer of 2004, the Lips were in the studio looking for the next new sound. They recorded “Mr. Ambulance Driver,” which popped up on the soundtrack to “Wedding Crashers,” but Drozd was glum about the track. “It’s a nice song, I like it, but it didn’t feel like a creative new thing.”

In early 2005, Drozd started feeling better. Coyne had come into the studio with a guitar riff that would eventually become a song called “The W.A.N.D. (The Will Always Negates Defeat),” a centerpiece for “Mystics.” The nutty thing is how it came together in the studio: Coyne played guitar, Ivins played bass and Drozd hopped behind the drum kit. “After all that time, the thing that felt like the freshest, newest thing was what we were as a band in the first place. It gave us a jolt, it gave us energy and a new direction. ‘The W.A.N.D.’ was the jumping off point for the album and it’s still my favorite song.”

Drozd checked his watch. He is a new father and he needed to get back to the hotel room. He chuckled at his new lifestyle -- he is on a diet and recently shed 25 pounds. “Oh, that’s very rock ‘n’ roll. Over here on one side is Keith Richards and here on the other side is me in Weight Watchers. What can I say? But I am happy. And the band is doing great, better than ever.”

Later that night, as thousands of people crowded Sixth Street in the Texas college town to attend music-industry showcases and big-name concerts, a strange commotion came down the boulevard. There were huge, bobbing insects and a giant bubble with a man in a white suit inside. It was Coyne, of course, rolling down the pavement like the lead hamster in a Lewis Carroll parade. Smiling and laughing, fans and curious passersby parted to make way for the surprise procession.

There was a moment of ugliness though: A heavy-handed security person got up against the bubble and shouted that the whole stunt had to be scrapped. In the noise and commotion, Coyne, trapped in his bubble, watched helplessly as his wife got rudely manhandled in the chaos. The singer was seething by the time he got to the venue and it was a trick for him to get himself back into the shiny, happy people mode expected of the grand wizard of the Flaming Lips.

It seems the real world is invading more and more into the fanciful ether of the Lips universe.

Back at the video shoot at the Los Angeles slaughterhouse, there was a surreal moment when an unexpected visitor wandered onto the set. It was Los Angeles Sheriff Lee Baca, the leader of the largest police force in the country, who looked a bit ashen when he happened upon a scenario that looked like some sort of fast-food snuff film. He had been touring the property for a completely unrelated purpose and, as he exited, he made a strained joke about wanting to go on a diet after seeing the surreal proceedings.

Coyne wore a smile of puerile mischief as he watched Baca leave. “If he saw the cops in the video he might have gotten mad,” Coyne said. “That could be fun.”