The Flaming Lips at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery,… there is something so fitting with this band at this location, and before starting the show on Tuesday night, Wayne Coyne announced that it may well become an annual thing. I am completely for it, because I want to start all my summers like this one, till I die.
Death? It is all over The Lips’ songs, and Wayne Coyne is constantly battling or defying it with his forever-in-the-air right fist. But if death is tragic, the Lips have the answer, they celebrate life with an overload of sounds and colors, an orgy of confetti and balloons, a festival of explosions on stage, and what a better way to celebrate life than on the graves of thousands?
Front row at their show, I am like a kid in a playhouse who is repeatedly overdosing on dopamine. But, like any good amusement park ride, the show comes with some safety instructions announced by Wayne Coyne in person. Yes, they will use very strong lights, and explosions and Wayne is going to use his famous bubble to walk on the crowd, but no one will get hurt!
As promised, they played ‘The Soft Bulletin’ in its entirety, in the order of the songs, and came back for an encore with a few other songs. With an all-white set decorated of rainbow tape, a blinding rainbow screen where a myriad of films were projected during the songs, confetti guns and fog machines in non-stop action, giant balloons flying above our heads exploding into more confetti, the brain has a hard time to process everything happening on stage, and that is actually the point! With their organized chaos, they want to overwhelm you, they want to submerge your senses till you cannot bear it anymore
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They arrived on stage as if they were landing from out of space, or out of their rainbow, and after a long, psychedelic musical introduction, Wayne Coyne entered his famous bubble, walking on the crowd like a semi-God, and went back on stage to sing an explosive ‘Race for the Prize’, all confetti-smog machines firing up.
Their show is also populated by a phenomenal amount of characters: there were a bunch of Dorothies with their scarecrow and some wizard armed of a light saber doing their go-go girls part on each side of the stage, who were joined later by a few giant butterflies. On the screen, there were the Teletubbies during ‘A spoonful weighs a ton’, brain scans during ‘The Spark’, a song during which Wayne asked someone in the audience for some fake blood (he has forgotten his), since he could not decently sing ‘I accidentally touched my head/And noticed that I had been bleeding’ without bleeding. Of course there were insects during ‘Buggin’’, pulsing white light during ‘What is the Light?’ and other giant eyes firing lasers or animal mouths showing their teeth later on.
I know that California nights have been abnormally cold lately, but Wayne was strangely wearing this giant fur around his neck, which became naturally all bloody after the fake blood episode. As usual, he was talking a lot during the show, pouring his usual heartfelt discourse about giving love being the best reaction an human being can have, and explaining songs like ‘The Spiderbite song’, written for Steven Drozd when he almost lost his hand after a spider bite, although it is known it was just a metaphor for his addiction to heroin. ‘It would have been an horrible thing, we love our hands’, Wayne said, ‘we can use them to grab boobs and play music, I’m glad he has his hands’, continuing by saying that immortal Steven may well play a 1,000 more years!
If you are familiar with ‘The Soft Bulletin’ you know about the beauty of the symphonic arrangements, the psychedelic solemnity of the songs, and if you are not familiar, you will just have to buy it.
Before entering the cemetery, Wayne Coyne made an apparition in the crowd with Alex Ebert (from Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros) who was playing a show the next night at the very close Paramount studio, and he announced they would play a song together the next morning at sunrise in front of the bell tower of the cemetery, inviting everybody to stay up all night to attend their surprise acoustic show. Unfortunately, I didn’t!
Wayne dedicated again ‘Waiting for Superman’ to Elliott Smith, with a long introduction: ‘Some of these songs, for me, they kind of fucked me up. I can remember what was happening when we came up with these songs, I don’t know, your subconscious sometimes know so much more about what you are than the front part of your mind.[…] Some songs mean even more to us, they mean all this stuff and … we were on tour when we got the news that one of our friends had… Elliott Smith had ,… whatever the reason we don’t really know what happened, whether he has taken his own life or what happened,… but we had known him for a long time and he had always seemed to have trouble getting to the point where he was able to be happy for very long’,
He continued by explaining we cannot wait for something to come along to be happy, even if we are not sure if it is all worth doing, cheering up the crowd by saying that this song may remind us that life is sometimes too ‘fucking heavy’, but somewhat, singing it, even if does not change everything immensely, changes it enough that we can endure life, since this is all we have
And you have in a nutshell, a summary of the Flaming Lips’ philosophy!
The same idea run through the next song, ‘The Gash’, with these powerful lyrics ‘Will the fight for sanity be the fight of our lives?/Now that we've lost all the reasons/That we thought that we had’, just amplified by their over the top rendition, using a giant gong that Wayne has already broken in the past as Steven said.
Of course, Wayne could not stay mute before singing ‘Feeling yourself Disintegrate’, another song that ‘fucked him up’, especially when sung in a cemetery.
They came back for an encore with more explosions of confetti, balloons and fog, and a joyous celebration of life with ‘She don’t use Jelly’, ‘The Yeah Yeah Yeah song’, and the obvious ‘Do You realize (That everyone you know someday will die)’.
The Lips could lift the spirits of the dead, and they literally (editor's note: literally?) did just this on Tuesday night. The cemetery was a transformed place, full of colors, lasers and lights, with even a second moon, which may be used for their next night when they perform ‘The Dark side of the Moon’ in its entirety?
At one point, Wayne Coyne was defying the entire sky with his giant hands firing laser beams; with his fist in the air, he looked like a crazy wizard telling us to fully enjoy life, the only sure thing we have. It was as if Sisyphus had transformed his heavy rock into a giant bubble, and was rolling inside just to have fun.
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