I don’t know why youtube abstained from webcasting the Flaming lips’ performance this year at www.youtube/bonnaroo, but that was a shame because the Lips had announced they would play the entire ‘Dark Side of The Moon’ album after midnight. They had already played it at their New Year’s Eve show in Oklahoma City, but Wayne Coyne said in an interview it would exclusively be done for Bonnaroo and may never be done again.
Fortunately NPR did a live stream of the show they archived afterward. They also ran an interview of Wayne Coyne who explained that very few records are as popular as ‘Dark side of The Moon’ and arouse such curiosity among people.
‘It’s a nerve-wracking thing to do when you don’t get to play it over and over in front of an audience. Usually you have the luxury of getting to play a regular set and honing it as weeks go by, but when you only get to play this piece of music twice a year or something in front of people, it’s nerve-wracking. But it keeps us on our toes, and we like that.’ he exclaimed.
Last year, they did a recording of a track-for-track remake of the Pink Floyd album with Stardeath and White Dwarfs (the band of Dennis Coyne, Wayne’s nephew, which was also performing at Bonnaroo) and with the help of Henry Rollins who had never heard the album before according to Wayne! Come on, how this Black Flag-music-lover guy managed to escape such a universal brand?
Wayne, with his natural excitation about music, was eager to talk about how both bands (his and his nephew’s) had a big Pink Floyd influence, but also how weird the whole experience of covering such a sacrosanct band can be:
‘There are some very hardcore Pink Floyd fans out there that no matter what anybody does, if you touch this sacred ground your name goes on a list and they’ll kill you in the future. That was true when we did ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ […] it’s not a note-for-note reinterpretation. We’re not trying to say ‘Look we can produce records like Pink Floyd. A lot of the things that they did back in 1973 you can do in two seconds on a computer these days. Technically it’s not that hard. We weren’t trying to do that. We were trying to take the songs and make them our own trip.’
After a first set of their own songs, with that usual crazy intro consisting of a triumphant Wayne in his giant plastic bubble crawling over the crowd, an orgy of lights and giant laser beams, and a debauchery of balloons, confetti and smoke, the encore after midnight was the performance of ‘Dark Side of The Moon’.
The Lips managed to keep the long intro with that same heartbeat and the voices, but their version of ‘Speak to me/Breathe’ was heavily grounded whereas the Pink Floyd’s version was psychedelic and slowly floating in the air. The Lips speeded it up with a bouncing dark guitar noise and more deranged voices. It was absolutely not conform to the original, a quite stirring interpretation, with a heartfelt delivery of ‘And all you touch and all you see/Is all your life will ever be.’
‘On the Run’ lost his fluidity, the liquid Pink Floyd tune, with its menacing blasting helicopter-sounding noises was almost gone and the Lips added a devilish dancing beat that did not exist in the original version. A synthetic heavy disco beat made it almost unrecognizable compared to the original.
On stage, a giant clock was running at speed laser light during the loud and spectacular intro of ‘Time’ that Wayne Coyne sang with a silly falsetto voice. The whole song was quite minimalist instrumentally speaking, except the end which exploded with distorted guitars.
They kept the quiet keyboard intro of ‘The great gig in the sky’ but of course, the ethereal female voices of the Pink Floyd’s version were gone and replaced by screaming and agonizing ones. They seemed to have a lot of fun.
While throwing out balloons with real money inside them, they did a fun rendition of ‘Money’, the song that no band wishes ever to cover as Wayne noticed. Using the loud speaker all the time, with a heavy use of synthesizers, the song turned into a slow and funky tune as if Stevie Wonder was on the keyboard.
They continued with a shoegazing version of ‘Us and them’, a light rendition, floating like the original for almost 9 minutes, and engaging right away in the instrumental ‘Any color you like’ with their signature drumbeats and distorted balancing guitar riffs.
Their performance of the two last songs of the album were maybe less imaginative than the first ones, quite close to the original songs, distinctively and delightfully singing ‘the lunatic is on the grass’ during a spatial ‘Brain damage’, before the blasting loud percussions of the ending. They ended up with a rendition of ‘Eclipse’ ending with a long and fading heartbeat sound effect.
In an interview Wayne said it would feel very good to sing the great mantra of ‘Eclipse’ just past midnight. ‘I did not find it to be cynical, I find it to be just a realistic sort of grown-up approach to,… here is a real way to enjoy life’, he said, ‘When,… the line, and especially the line when he says ‘All that you touch/All that you see/All that you taste/All you feel’… To me that’s good news’.
Good news that your life is right now, that your life is your present experience, he explained. And the Flaming Lips are always there to remind us about this very special experience through music.