‘There is supposed to be a lunar eclipse, tonight, and we have a team of scientists working on it! We will stop the set when it happens, fuck! Isn’t it cool?’
I paraphrase a little but this is how Wayne Coyne introduced the show on Wednesday night at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. The Flaming Lips were about to play ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’, so a lunar eclipse sounded too perfect to be true. In fact, we never got the chance to see it, since the eclipse turned out not being visible in the US, but it does not really matter.
The Flaming Lips had only played their version of the Pink Floyd’s classic only a couple of times, and they wanted to do it their own way, with more flamboyance and some Wizard of Oz here and there.
It was my second night in a row seeing the Lips, and it is amazing how fast you got used to these kinds of things, I even got the same spot, close to some other people who were already there the day before!
Wayne Coyne repeated he wanted to do this each year, so I have all the good reasons to get use to it. Their arrival on stage was as grandiose as the previous day, but this time a Dorothy-Judy Garland was projected in the background, repeating obsessively the same sentence below the rainbow-like set. Soon, we were projected in their magic psychedelic multicolor world, and I suppose that Wayne Coyne’s plastic bubble hasn’t got old yet, seeing people’s crazy reaction about it. But I was right to bring up Sisyphus, because he fucking has to do it every day!
‘The Dark Side of the Rainbow’ or the pairing of the 1973 Pink Floyd’s album ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ with the visual portion of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz is a relatively old idea of the mid 90s, and although Pink Floyd’s members have denied that the album was intentionally written to be synchronized with Oz, the idea has persisted because of people’s love for weird coincidences, and the Lips had just more fun with it.
They effectively took some liberty with the original tracks (and the Wizard of Oz was not the only one), but it is impossible to ignore the obvious connection between the current Lips’ music and the ahead-of-their-time and inventiveness of Pink Floyd’s.
Wayne Coyne, singing in a loud speaker that was spiting loads of smog, was mixing ‘Over a Rainbow’ with ‘Speak to me/Breathe’ while tons of confetti were one more time released, then green-faced Steven Drozd took care of ‘On the Run’ with a lot of interesting liberties, scary noises and screaming voices. After some Pink Floyd drama, we were back in Oz land with a slow ‘We're off to see the wizard’. Of course, the Dorothy dancers were back, with a few scarecrows, lions and Tin Men.
There was one more episode about Wayne Coyne wearing his giant hands to fight the green laser beams and making everything explode in a cloud of smog. Peaches, ‘a friend who can really fucking sing’, came on stage to sing ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’, just like she did on their 2009 album, and they released giant balloons enclosing real dollar bills during ‘Money’. ‘My generosity exploded’, said Wayne while singing the song again with the use of a loud speaker.
From green bills to green witches, there was another Oz interlude, a sort of psychedelic military march, before a completely indescribable ‘Us and Them’ played in the dark with a forest of multicolor laser beams ending into an explosive rainbow.
Wayne wanted us to sing along on ‘If I Only Had A Brain’, ‘You fuck up, I don’t care, I’ll throw more money at you’, he said with his usual humor.
They ended up with ‘Brain Damage/Eclipse’, with Peaches back on stage, leaving us with a giant image of a bloody real heart beating on the large screen.
Of course, they came back for an encore, and since the Pink Floyd album is shorter than ‘The Soft Bulletin’, they had time for 4 songs, “She don’t use Jelly’, a stripped down version of ‘ Yoshimi’ requested by the crowd, an unexpected ‘Is David Bowie dying’ performed with the use of Steven’s phone, and finishing up with the song of the night ‘Do you realize?’, again lightened up things with balloons and confetti despite the terrible line they must have sung so many times by now: ‘Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?’
Wayne Coyne could not leave us without a few deep speech of his:
‘Death, it can be devastating news, or it can be a way to remember you are alive,… I don’t really believe there is something after this,… may be we’ll know, may be we will never know, that’s why we sing this song,’ he said just before singing it all smile, visibly happy and moved by the reaction of the crowd.
It was pretty incredible to hear the large crowd cheering up just after Wayne’s atheistic declaration. It was happening in the middle of a cemetery, people celebrating their life, the only sure thing we have.