Wayne Coyne dedicated the song ‘Waiting for Superman’, during the Flaming Lips’ set at Sasquatch a few days ago. He introduced the song, which he sang only accompanied on piano, with the following long monologue, as he is used to:
‘This next song is a song that we normally would not play at a festival because it reminds us too much of sadness. But sometimes my singing about it, hum… we get to where we understand a different dimension of our unbearable sadness. Ok? Err…We were on tour, I forget, it has been a few years now, we were on tour when we heard the news that our friend Elliott Smith had died.
And I don’t think we will ever really know if he took his own life or whatever the actual circumstances were. But there were plenty of time when we were around him when we felt as though he was waiting for an answer, and he was waiting for something that was gonna come along and may be make everything bearable for him.
And we can’t wait, we have to try to make right now, bearable enough, that’s all we can do, we don’t know what the fuck we’re gonna do, so this song is about everybody who has ever felt like this moment is too much, and hope that you can get to the next one.’
It is interesting the Lips are still dedicating a song to Elliott, almost 8 years after he died. But what strikes me in Wayne’s monologue, is when he says that we may never know if Elliott took his own life. When Wayne reacted to his death, he was condemning Elliott’s heavy drug use and was kind of insinuating that Elliott was destined to commit suicide.
This is what he declared to Billboard magazine in 2003:
‘Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne wasn't so optimistic about Smith's state of mind. He recalled the Lips' show in Los Angeles with Beck last year, where a bloated and clearly frustrated Smith was involved in a scuffle with police and seemed to be clearly losing his fight with addiction. ‘It really was nothing but sad,’ Coyne says. ‘You just sort of saw a guy who had lost control of himself. He was needy, he was grumpy, he was everything you wouldn't want in a person. It's not like when you think of Keith Richards being pleasantly blissed out in the corner.’
‘I think it points out how unglamorous the whole drug thing really is,’ Coyne continues. ‘For the people who knew him, the people who were around him, it was horrible. It's not this glamorous, jetsetting, beautiful lifestyle that everybody dreams of rock 'n' roll heaven being. It wasn't like that at all. It was ugly. It was sad.’
First of all, I saw Elliott at that Flaming Lips/Beck show, and he was not bloated!! What is he talking about? But his recent declaration is a change of tone, Wayne was not expressing that kind of doubt in 2003 or even later in 2008 when he said in an interview:
‘ I remember it was a couple of years ago now we were on tour and Elliot Smith died. Elliot Smith wasn't a great friend of ours but we knew him enough to know of his plight. He struggled with drugs; he struggled with depression. He struggled with what you'd think from the outside was a great life. As an artist and a songwriter, he got to do exactly what he wanted to do- but he struggled with it and could never just be satisfied by what his life was. He seemed to hint that he kept waiting for happiness to finally come along.’
So Wayne Coyne, what made you suddenly suspicious about Elliott’s death last month? All you have done before was make a connection between his drug use, depression and his sad ending, but all a sudden, we may never really know if he took his own life or whatever the actual circumstances were?