“Hey man,” Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne asked me with a hippie-punk inflection, “are you a cop?”
Back in 2006, I was interviewing him backstage after a show in St. Louis with co-headliners Sonic Youth, where Coyne was winding down after an explosive performance filled with confetti, balloons and a psychedelic light show. One of the concert’s multimedia elements included a clip from the Flaming Lips’ 1995 appearance on the teen soap Beverly Hills, 90210, where they lip-synced to their unlikely Top 40 radio hit, “She Don’t Use Jelly.”
As Coyne eyed me suspiciously, I assured him that I was just a music writer and university professor who was interested in how copyright law impacts creativity. He was unnerved because I had asked him if his group felt the need to ask permission to use that Fox television clip, which consisted of little more than a five-second soundbite uttered by the show’s bad-girl character, Valerie Malone.
“Please help me welcome the cool, the crazy, the fabulous Flaming Lips!”
Their 90210 cameo was an incongruous sight for those of us who had watched this Oklahoma group develop into a slightly less menacing kid brother version of the Butthole Surfers, a demented Texas band that specialized in bad-trip light shows saturated with footage from autopsy films and other gruesome visual delights. Early Flaming Lips shows also were spectacles — a little less unhinged, but still laced with a potent dose of goofy weirdness.
“I first saw the Flaming Lips at Amelia Earhart’s Deli in Iowa City, maybe 1985,” said live music promoter and musician Doug Roberson. “When I started to book Gabe’s in 1986, I did book them a few times. They had strobe lights and were incredibly loud. I let them crash at my apartment. Wayne Coyne was always a nice guy. Easy to deal with and cool.”
Between 1986 and 1990, the group released four albums on Restless, an independent label that put out records by fellow pranksters the Dead Milkmen and other jewels in the American underground crown (the Feelies, the Cramps, Diamanda Galás, the Pandoras and many more). The Flaming Lips followed the lead of Midwesterners Hüsker Dü and the Replacements by joining the roster of Warner Brothers, and around that time indie stalwarts Sonic Youth signed to DCG, which inspired Nirvana to do the same.
These were the first ripples in what would become an “alternative rock” tidal wave that reshaped the pop cultural landscape in the early 1990s — prompting major labels to offer lucrative recording contracts to obscure, uncommercial artists like Shonen Knife, Daniel Johnston and Royal Trux. Why?
“One word: Nirvana,” Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo told me, referring to the fact that they made DCG a boatload of filthy lucre. “The record companies were throwing money at ‘quirky,’ ‘alternative’ bands of all sorts, like blind men on a dark night.”
“Nirvana’s Nevermind, it helped create a pop-culture version of this underground thing that had been bubbling up since the 1980s,” said Guided By Voices bassist Jim Greer. “The reason you loved it was because it was your own. And then, you know, it was just bizarre — around ’92, ’93, everything took off.”
Sonic Youth’s journey through the 1990s offered them, as Ranaldo put it, “a wild, privileged vantage point for four punk flies on the wall.” Not many punks guest star as themselves on The Simpsons, as Sonic Youth did in 1996, just one year after the Flaming Lips’ appearance on 90210.
“Whatever was special in the music or culture had kind of been ground up and digested,” Coyne recalled. “By around ’93, you basically got the feeling that things had jumped the shark. Our level of fame was such that we got to revel in the silliness of it all.”
Take, for instance, the following silly dialogue from that 90210 episode.
“Hey, is that the Flaming Lips?”
“Well, it’s not Michael Bolton.”
“You know, I’ve never been a big fan of alternative music, but these guys rocked the house!”
The 1990s were a time fraught with anxieties about “selling out” and “going corporate,” so I asked Coyne if the band was worried about damaging their credibility by appearing on the teen drama series. He took a breath, closed his eyes and sighed before cracking a smile.
“You’d like to think that you would say, ‘No, we’d never do a thing like that, man,’ but when the phone call came, we said, ‘Yeah!’ Because how could you refuse the absurdity of such an offer?”
The band kept embracing absurdism and experimentation during their major label tenure, a run that lasted much longer than others who were swept up in the alt rock gold rush (they are still signed to Warners more than three decades later). After the Flaming Lips released Clouds Taste Metallic in 1995, a transitional album that failed to produce another hit, they delivered 1997’s Zaireeka, one of the oddest albums ever released by a corporate conglomerate.
This box set consists of four CDs that each contain 45 minutes of stereo sound, which are designed to be played at the same time on four separate boomboxes, car radios, home stereos or other sound systems. No two listening sessions are quite the same because even split-second differences when pressing play can create subtle and sometimes wildly pronounced changes in the album’s soundscape. The Flaming Lips continued their sonic experiments while touring the 1999 album The Soft Bulletin by handing out wireless headphones to audience members.
“When the crowd entered the venue, you received a cheap pair of headphones,” recalled Roberson, who co-promoted the show. “They were playing through a PA system, but the headphones did make them sound good, so I am guessing you got the sound board feed instead of the ambient ‘live’ sound.”
The Flaming Lips followed the commercial success of “She Don’t Use Jelly” by trying really hard to not have another hit, and by the time they released 2004’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, they had developed into a respected album-oriented band with a formidable live act. Given that it helped establish them as alt-rock elder statesmen, this pivotal album is being celebrated with a 20th anniversary tour — one that will stop in Cedar Rapids at the McGrath Amphitheatre.
“If that cameo on 90210 was the height of silliness,” Coyne told me back in 2006, “then Yoshimi marked the moment when we were taken a little more seriously — or at least as serious as a band like ours will ever get.”
Kembrew McLeod still enjoys the Miley Cyrus/Flaming Lips collaboration Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, released in 2015. This article was originally published in Little Village’s June 2024 issue.
