It was a night of divine madness
By MATT ELLIOTT World Scene Writer
9/18/2006
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Where else but at a Flaming Lips concert can you sit next to a beer-drinking robot as the UFO arrives?
The Flaming Lips singer/high priest Wayne Coyne has said his band uses its spectacular live shows to mask its talentlessness.
The band proved those self-deprecating words to be false Friday as it has many times before in an energetic and absurdist psychedelic show at Oklahoma City's 9,000-seat Zoo Amphitheatre, performing for a standing room-only audience that packed the outdoor venue.
Coyne and the band led the crowd like Willy Wonka through their concert, playing much material from its most recent album, "At War with the Mystics," including "Free Radicals," "The W.A.N.D.," and "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song," while also including fan favorites such as "Do You Realize." They played with an energy, openness and spontaneity that can only come from the comfort a band gets playing to their hometown crowd. The music and the show were jaw-dropping, and Coyne told the audience it was being recorded for a live DVD.
Playing at the Zoo Amphitheatre "was the best night we could've asked for," Coyne told the audience.
Even before it started, I knew the show would be interesting. Driving home that point was a man standing next to me
dressed up like a robot resembling the unfortunate offspring of a drunken pairing of the Tin Man with the robot from "Lost In Space." Others in the crowd were dressed up as well.
He had foil arms and for his hands, clamps at the end of poles that were operated by levers held in his real hands. In his human hand, he clutched a 24 oz.-can of Bud Light. A silver mask covered his face. On the back of his box-shaped silver body were painted the words, "Feel Unit."
The robot spoke to me through the stench of gas station beer and marijuana smoke:
"What do you think they'll play first?" he said.
I don't know, I said.
He looked disappointed at my response and took an awkward step back, saying:
"I'm just messing with you, man. I've got my own set list in my head."
He then turned his metal gaze back to the stage, over which a flying saucer now hovered as roadies scurried about.
Finally, the moment we came for: the UFO descended, lights flashed and twinkled, aliens and Santa Claus people (audience members dressed in costumes) mobbed corners of the stage waving spotlights and joined by superheroes, and a ladder was placed at the UFO's base. From it emerged the Oklahoma indie rock gods known to their fans as "The Lips."
The crowd wailed as Coyne emerged from the top of the flying saucer, put himself inside his famous plastic bubble and awkwardly walked down the UFO's gangplank into the waiting arms of the superheroes, who placed the human gerbil ball into the audience.
Coyne crawled over the audience with the bubble's roll and bandmate Steven Drozd pounded away at his keyboard. The UFO's lights pulsed with the music. Streamers and confetti burst over the audience. The Feel Unit hit me in the head with a robot hand. He later fell on my wife.
Later on, Coyne, who spoke much with the audience, said that "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" has taken on a new life as a protest song.
Coyne sang, "if you could blow up the world with a flick of a switch, would you do it?" and the audience sang back, per his instructions, "yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."
They also played "She Don't Use Jelly," the 1993 hit and snapshot that familiarized pop radio, and unsophisticated dolts like me who wouldn't otherwise know anything about them, with a small part of their sound.
Just when I thought the Alice-In-Wonderland stuff was over, a red-headed woman grabbed my ink pen as I wrote notes in my notepad during "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Pt. 1."
She asked me what I was writing, and I told her I was writing what Coyne was saying.
She then took my pen and notepad. I threw up my hands, knowing my story was going to be terrible anyway. She then asked if there was something she could write down for me. She swayed on her feet and I shrugged my shoulders.
She scrawled "Yoshima," spelling the song wrong in my notepad and handed it back to me, with a drunken half-smile. It was that kind of crowd.
Coyne urged attendees to give a wide berth to aging cynics who say that being smart is just another curse.
He urged them to go crazy and alternately told the crowd to tell their loved ones and their fellow concert-goers that they love them.
Then, a woman kissed my wife several times on the cheek and hand. Another woman told my wife her hair smelled good.
After two encores, the spell was over and reality returned. As a now-calm but bleary-eyed mob, we made our way to the exit like we were leaving what could've been any other rock show, but we knew it was something much more.
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Matt Elliott 581-8366
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