On May 30, orange-tracksuited icon DJ Lance Rock did a DJ set at Studio City’s famous Licorice Pizza Records, warming up the all-ages crowd for an eggcellent instore concert by Radioactive Chicken Heads. Lance later joined the poultry punks (who he recently met at another L.A. institution, the Bob Baker Marionette Theater) for a surprise performance of Joe Jackson’s “Got the Time” and Wall of Voodoo’s “Mexican Radio.”

Lance fit right in with the Chicken Heads flock, because he is of course accustomed to sharing the stage with creatively costumed creatures. This past April, he and Yo Gabba Gabba! delivered the buzziest, bizarre-est, and bonkers-est set of both cameo-filled Coachella weekends — climaxing with a fever-dream xennial extravaganza of the Muppets’ classic “Rainbow Connection,” sung in unison by human heroes Paul Wiliams, “Weird Al” Yankovic, Thundercat, David Arquette, Portugal. The Man, and Flavor Flav, as well as by H.R. Pufnstuf, a Sleestak from Land of the Lost, Duo the Duolingo owl, Bozo the Clown, L.A. Kings mascot Bailey the Lion, NHK Japan mascot Domo, Cheer Bear from Care Bears, Billy Bob Bear from the Rocka-fire Explosion, and Yo Gabba Gabba!’s own Muno, Toodee, Plex, Foofa, and Brobee.

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While hanging with Licorice Pizza’s LPTV and the Chicken Heads in the parking lot next to the store’s powder-blue ‘70s Pizza van, Lance confessed that he initially wasn’t sure if he wanted to be involved with the new-but-not-necessarily-improved Yo Gabba Gabba!’s Coachella revue. “I guess [show creators Christian Jacobs and Scott Schultz] had been working on it for a while. There’s a reboot out now called Yo Gabba GabbaLand!, and they have a new host [13-year-old Kammy Kam]. She wasn’t even born the last time we were at Coachella,” he chuckled. “That’s OK. It was very funny, too, because they were promoting the new show, but they only played three songs from the new show, and it was mostly stuff from Yo Gabba Gabba! — so, at some point they’re like, ‘Do you want to come and do this?’”

When the Coachella request came in, Lance was visiting his mother in  in Missouri, where he was born and raised, but he eventually agreed to head to the desert, and “we kind of got the band back together.” And he was especially happy that Flav was involved, declaring the Public Enemy legend “the MVP” of the historic Coachella set because of Flav’s tribute to the late Biz Markie (who was a regular guest on the original children’s show with his “Biz’s Beat of the Day” segments).

“[Flavor Flav] and biz kind of grew up together — I think they’re both from Long Island – and I said, ‘Would you please?’ Because they were just going to do the Beat of the Day and just kind of have his come out and do that. But he did this nice tribute and he got everyone in the audience to sing ‘Just a Friend,’” Lance recalled with a fond smile. “And that’s what Biz deserves. So, there were a lot of moments like that that I appreciated — it was kind of an acknowledgement of what the show had meant to people.”

Yo Gabba Gabba’s set may have been the surprise highlight of Coachella 2025, but as Lance mentioned, this wasn’t his first time playing the fest. “What’s crazy to me is that the first time we were there was in 2010,” he said. “We played early on [in the Sahara Tent, at 2:15 p.m.], and we were like second. I think John Waters had done his thing already and they were just getting things warmed for the day, and they’re like, ‘You’ve got to do the kid show in the daytime.’ So, we did our thing, and then right after Perry Farrell was DJing. So, thousands of people still there with kids and everything, and it literally went from the visuals of Brobee jumping around to topless women in two minutes. That was a really funny thing. I don’t think they thought it through, but that was a good time.”

Lance has such impeccable musical taste that he should consider launching his own musical festival (during his hour-long Licorice Pizza Records DJ set, he spun awesome obscurities by Medium Medium, Electric Six, Klaus Nomi, Yello, and We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It). And he is intrigued by the idea of him curating his own supercool festival lineup, much like Simpsons creator Matt Groening did for All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2003 and 2010. But, of course, Lance’s triumphant return to Coachella with the Yo Gabba Gabba! gang went over so well this year, one has to wonder if that has created the demand for him to become an official part of Yo Gabba GabbaLand!. However, he seems content with just being a part of fans’ dearly held memories of the original series, which ran from 2007 to 2015.

“Here’s the thing: Doing that show was great, being out there at Coachella. It was something for the fans, and that’s what I really felt and really appreciated. That meant a lot. A lot of people would say, ‘You don’t understand, I was 6 years old [when I watched the original show]!’ Like, I ran into Dave Grohl’s wife and daughter when they were walking, and she’s like, ‘Hey, I have a picture of you on my phone.’ And [in the photo] I was holding her [as a baby], and now she’s like this tall and looks like Liv Tyler but even more beautiful,” Lance laughed. “I don’t feel old yet; maybe it’s the orange. I don’t feel so old! But a lot of people grew up with it. So, it was nice having this kind of full-circle moment. A lot of people seemed to really genuinely appreciate it.”

Watch DJ Lance Rock’s full LPTV interview at Licorice Pizza Records in the Instagram video above.

DJ Lance Rock in the Licorice Pizza Records parking lot on May 30, 2025.

When people rank the greatest moments in Coachella history, many epic festival moments spring to mind. Peter Murphy descending from the rafters in a bat-suit, dangling in an inverted Christ pose, during Bauhaus’s 2005 reunion. Daft Punk’s Pyramid Stage triumph in 2006. The Tupac hologram of 2012. Beyoncé’s “Beychella” tour de force in 2018. No Doubt’s spectacular reunion this year.

But another moment that’s surely high on the list took place exactly 20 years ago, when Oklahoma eccentrics the Flaming Lips earned the title of Coolest Band at Coachella 2004/In the World. That was the year that frontman Wayne Coyne reinvented the long-standing festival tradition of beachball-tossing, when he stepped into his giant plastic space-bubble for the first time and became a human beachball of sorts, gleefully rolling and bouncing atop the Coachella crowd.

“I had a dream that I would arrive at Coachella in a bubble descended from outer space,” was Coyne’s matter-of-fact explanation of this bizarre stunt at the time, which he would go on recreate at many other festivals for the next two decades.

“I knew that we were going to be playing on the last night of the festival,” Coyne told Music Times’ Lyndsey Parker during a January 2021 interview for SiriusXM, when the Lips were promoting a series of COVID-safe “Space Bubble” concerts in Oklahoma City. “And, I thought by then, if you’d been at Coachella for two or three days, that you would want something, like, absurd to happen. Like, ‘Oh, so another band comes on and they play guitars and lights flash — ugh, who cares?’”

So, Coyne began to mastermind a secret, surprisingly last-minute plan to shake things up at Coachella 2004.

“I couldn’t really tell anybody, because back then, people wouldn’t let you do stuff,” Coyne explained. “I mean, now promoters and everybody wants us to do it, and begs us to do it, but back then, no one would have let us do it. This is something where I said, ‘ I’m just going to do it.’”

The bubble was inspired by the Flaming Lips’ bonkers, cult-classic, D.I.Y. holiday movie, Christmas on Mars, in which Coyne starred as an antenna-headed, Santa-suited green alien. He’d wanted to ride a spherical spaceship in the film, similar to Glinda the Good Witch’s entrance in The Wizard of Oz, but he didn’t fully realize his original bizarre vision until the Lips took the Coachella stage.

“I thought I would be able to find a bubble in the world back in 2002, 2003, but I just couldn’t find them. I ended up making the movie, but [the bubble] was all just done in the computer. It looks real, but it’s not real,” Coyne explained. “But as soon as I did this CGI version of it in the movie, an Italian plastic weirdo guy, who was a Flaming Lips fan, [got in touch] and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got one of these for you!’ And so, I got it literally a day or two before Coachella. We blew it up in my front yard and I thought, ‘I think this could work.’”

READ ALSO: CoacHella Good: No Doubt Triumph with One of the Festival’s All-Time Greatest Reunions

Things ended up working much better than Coyne had anticipated. “We knew so little about it that when I went out on top of the crowd at Coachella, our manager gave me a sharp pocketknife and said, ‘OK, if you get stuck out there and you run out of air, you can cut your way out of it,’” Coyne laughingly remembered. “Since then, we now know that I could stay in that [bubble] for hours and hours and not run out of air. But at the time, we didn’t really know that.”

Reflecting on why the space-bubble became such an iconic moment for both Coachella and for the Flaming Lips themselves, Coyne shrugged, “Sometimes you just know that it’s going to be an absurd moment, and you just hope it goes good and people like it. I mean, I didn’t even know if people would like it. Maybe people would say, ‘Oh, this is stupid! Why would anybody do that?’ And I think that’s part of it too. It’s like, why did Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire? I dunno, just because it’s just crazy to do that, you know? I think [the bubble trick] was in the spirit of that. I didn’t even think back then that I would do it every night or whatever. But that’s what all artists do. There’s no rhyme or reason for it. There’s no deep meaning, and there’s nothing else to it other than ‘I like it.’

“And no one stopped me.”

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Every year music history is made at The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Watch the top five most memorable moments from past festivals.

13. It’s the Freakin’ Weekend With Phoenix and R. Kelly (2013)

Saturday at Coachella ‘13 was a day of surprise collaborations, including Solange Knowles lending guest vocals to British indie band the xx’s cover of Aaliyah’s “Hot Like Fire” and an unbilled John Legend joining Italian DJ Benny Benassi in the dance tent for a performance of “Dance the Pain Away.” But there was no Saturday surprise collaboration as truly surprising as the one that took place on the main stage during French alt-pop band Phoenix’s headlining set, when they were joined by a very unexpected guest, when R&B lothario R. Kelly sauntered out singing the familiar refrain of his 2003 partystarting smash, “Ignition.” Then Phoenix joined in to mash it up with their breakthrough single, “1901.” It was utterly, head-scratchingly random, and it shouldn’t have worked… but it did work, quite brilliantly, creating what shall henceforth be known as “Ignition (1901 Remix).”

12. Pharrell Williams and Gwen Stefani Put on a Hella Good Performance (2014)

Coachella 2014 was more like Cameo-chella, with surprise appearances by Billie Joe Armstrong, Debbie Harry, Justin Bieber, Slash, Jay Z, Mary J. Blige, and even Beyoncé. But the Greated Hatted One’s all-star set was still the standout of the weekend. Nelly, Busta Rhymes, Puff Daddy, Diplo, and Snoop Dogg all joined in on the fun, but the crowd really got “happy” when Pharrell’s bestie and future Voice co-star Gwen Stefani emerged — looking amazing less than two months after giving birth to her third child — to sing “Hollaback Girl” (which Pharrell produced in 2004 as one half of the hit-making Neptunes team). “My album’s called GIRL,” Pharrell announced, “and I can tell you right now, there’s only one incredible, historical, most important, incredibly talented, f—-ing awesome, rad girl in world.” (Video below contains profanity.)

11. Prince “Creep”s Everyone Out (2008)

His Purple Majesty’s Radiohead cover is such the stuff of legend, video of it resurfaces every few years. Quick, watch it now – before it gets taken down again. Even if you were there back in 2008, it’s even better than you remember.

10. Kanye West Literally Touches the Sky (2011)

Coachella has always been a massive affair, but leave it to 2011’s Sunday headliner to elevate the fest to an entire new level — literally, by arriving to the main stage via a glowing crane, rotating 30 feet above thousands of amazed spectators, and asking the musical question, “Can we get much higher?” Let’s see if ‘Ye can top this stunt when he goes on tour again this year. (Video below contains profanity.)

9. Madonna Gets Into the Dance Tent Groove (2006)

The hype surrounding Madonna’s first-ever festival performance (in the dance tent, not on the main stage) was huge. But in retrospect, this was a worse idea than that time when she posed nude with Vanilla Ice. Practically all 60,000 Coachella attendees tried to shoehorn themselves into the 10,000-capacity space, and especially desperate fans even climbed atop nearby porta-potties to get a clearer glimpse of the leotarded diva — refusing to budge when the beefed-up security staff tried to yank them down, or even when the Andy Gumps’ flimsy plastic roofs started to buckle under their weight. When the woman of the hour was still nowhere to be seen 20 minutes after her advertised set time, and the crowd began to get restless, ominous visions of the Who in Cincinnati and other concert disasters raced through worried spectators’ minds. Those who eventually managed to see Madge were treated to a mere six songs. Other just counted their lucky stars that they’d made it out unscathed. (Madonna made Coachella news again last year, when she showed up for an awkward makeout session during Drake’s set.)

8. The Cure Refuse to Let Their Set Come to a Grinding Halt (2009)

The Goth legends closed 2009 Sunday in their usual fabulously gloomy and doomy style, and it seemed like frontman Robert Smith just didn’t want to leave. Coming out for his second encore, already past the midnight cutoff, he announced: “They say we can only play one song. Are we f—!” The house lights came on after “Three Imaginary Boys” and “Fire in Cairo,” and then the actual sound was cut off and the Jumbotron screens went black. But the Cure kept on playing, and fans just ran closer to the stage so they could hear the band play semi-unplugged versions of “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Jumping Someone Else’s Train.” Whatever fine Robert and company had to pay for breaking the sound curfew that night, it was worth it.

7. When Pigs Fly… at Coachella (2008)

During Roger Waters’s Sunday set, an inflatable pig emblazoned with the word “Obama” sailed into the desert sky, as the Floyd man performed “Pigs” from Pink Floyd’s 1977 anti-capitalist opus “Animals.” Roger said nothing political, letting the heavenward hog do all the talking; he merely glanced up and chuckled, “That’s my pig!” Was Roger saying Barack Obama, who’d be running in his first presidential election later that year, would only be elected “when pigs flew”? Whatever statement Roger was trying to make, that soaring swine made news when it went missing. A $10,000 reward was offered for its safe return; the poor pig was later found in scattered tatters across two Indio residents’ yards miles away.

6. Scarlett Johansson Finds Jesus… and Mary Chain (2007)

Unlike most Coachella rumors, the one about Scottish post-punks the J&MC dueting with Scarlett turned out to be true. The indie It Girl’s appearance was anticlimactic, since she arrived onstage unannounced with her famous face obscured by a fedora, then just cooed almost inaudibly for the final 15 seconds of “Just Like Honey” before disappearing into the Indio sunset. But her cameo was nevertheless the talk of the fest for the remainder of the weekend, and it foreshadowed her actually-credible music career, which she launched the following year with the Tom Waits covers albumAnywhere I Lay My Head.

5. The Pixies Play the Most Gigantic Coachella Reunion Ever (2004)

Coachella has become the go-to festival for reunited bands and “heritage acts,” from Pulp to New Order, from Rage Against the Machine to this year’s Outkast. But no Coachella reunion was ever as hyped — or as deservedly hyped — as the Pixies’ appearance in 2004. When Kim Deal, Frank Black, David Lovering, and Joey Santiago tore into a furious, jaw-dropping main stage set of proto-grunge classics like “Monkey Gone to Heaven,” “Debaser,” “Here Comes Your Man,” “Where Is My Mind,” and “Gigantic,” it was the perfect Coachella moment. The Pixies were a last-minute lineup addition in 2014 — albeit without Kim, and this time playing the much smaller Mojave Tent — but ably recreated that old Coachella magic.

4. Wayne Coyne Becomes Coachella’s Bubble Boy (2004)

Oklahoma eccentrics the Flaming Lips earned the title of Coolest Band at Coachella/in the World, when frontman Wayne reinvented the long-standing festival tradition of beachball-tossing by stepping inside a giant clear plastic bubble, then having roadies send him out into the crowd, where he rolled around gleefully like a giddy hamster in a habitrail for much of the Lips’ set. “I had a dream that I would arrive at Coachella in a bubble descended from outer space,” was his matter-of-fact explanation of this stunt, which he recreated at other festivals for years to come.

 3. Bauhaus’s Peter Murphy Vamps It Up (2005)

As the bowel-rumbling strains of the Gothic granddaddies’ signature song “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” instantly transformed Coachella’s once-sunny festival grounds into a creepy “Blair Witch” field, white-haired, spooky-eyed frontman Peter Murphy made thegrandest entrance in Coachella history (yes, even grander than Wayne Coyne’s). Returning to the stage with Bauhaus for the first time since the group’s 1998 reunion tour, Peter descended from the rafters swaddled in a black batsuit, dangling mid-air in an inverted Christ pose. Unsurprisingly, this resurrection seemed to create an authentic religious experience for the thousands of Bauhaus fans who’d braved the heat all day in sticky PVC trousers, congealing pancake makeup, and layers of non-breathable velvet and lace. After an hour-long set that included such dark delights as “She’s in Parties,” “Passion of Lovers,” “Kick in the Eye,” “Stigmata Martyr,” and “Rose Garden Funeral of Sores,” Peter intoned, “You can say now that you were there.” Then he vanished back into the desert darkness like a vampire bat.

2. Daft Punk’s Random Awesome Memories

Speaking of being able to say “you were there,” those who were fortunate enough to witness Daft Punk’s jaw-dropping 2006 Saturday set are still bragging about it. Thankfully, the entire show exists on YouTube, for those who missed out. And Daft Punk mythology still surrounds Coachella. In 2011, it was rumored that the duo would join Kanye for “Stronger”; that didn’t happen. Then last year, when the Parisian popbots virtually debuted a snippet of their future hit “Get Lucky” on the festival’s Jumbotron screens, as a trailer for their album “Random Access Memories,” they practically upstaged all the actual performing bands that day. The rumors soon flew that they’d join their French friends, 2013 Saturday headliners Phoenix, but R. Kelly dueted with Phoenix instead. This year, with LCD Soundsystem set to headline Friday and likely perform “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House,” the speculation can begin anew!

1. Holla for the Tupac Hologram (2012)

The superstars came out on the final day of Coachella 2012 — really, only at this festival would a surprise dance tent performance by a superstar like Rihanna not be the most talked-about event of the day. Instead, everyone was buzzing about another, much more surprising superstar cameo, by Tupac. Yes, the late Tupac Shakur. In hologram form. Tupac may have died in 1996, three years before the first Coachella festival took place, but that didn’t stop him, or at least his bizarrely lifelike 3D image, from joining Dr. Dre onstage. Call it better gigging through technology: About halfway through Dre’s 70-minute set, what appeared to be an actual shirtless Tupac appeared like a desert mirage, then traded rhymes with Dre’s co-billed Coachella partner, the flesh-and-blood Snoop Dogg, on “Come With Me,” “Hail Mary,” and “Gangsta Party.” Concertgoers seemed confused at first, and that confusion only increased when Tupac vaporized and vanished as quickly as he had materialized. All eyez were on him, so to speak, and then, poof — ‘Pac was gone. Thankfully, the hologram Tupac lives on… via a semi-active Twitter account. (Video below contains profanity.)

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Well, I got it. As much as I appreciated the total 180 he did for his following album, the gut-wrenching, gorgeously sad Sea Change (one of the best breakup long-players of all time) and its new companion piece, Morning Phase, I always, always thought Midnite Vultures was completely underrated and undeserving of its bad rap.

I mean, it had song titles like “Nicotine & Gravy,” “Mixed Bizness,” “Hollywood Freaks,” and “Sexx Laws.” The latter song’s video even starred Jack Black and Jellyfish/Imperial Drag/Moog Cookbook synth wizard Roger Joseph Manning Jr. in a glam-rock superhero cape. What was there not to like?

I was reminded of Midnite Vultures‘ bawdy brilliance this past weekend at the Coachella festival, when Beck surprisingly played an awesome extendo-mix of “Debra,” that album’s freaky-deaky novelty slow-jam that he had disavowed in recent years.

Readopting his Prince-ly Midnite Vultures persona, he belted the geekiest musical seduction attempt ever, the song that probably inspired countless budget dream dates at Silver Lake’s Zankou Chicken. There were those old falsetto promises of cruises in a Hyundai lovemobile, of fresh packs of gum, of Glendale Galleria parking-lot romance, of group sex with a JC Penney employee’s prettier sister…and it was amazing.

So while every rock critic in America is currently salivating over Serious Beck’s Morning Phase (and rightfully so), I think it’s time to revisit Wacky Beck’s Midnite phase. Step inside his Hyundai and take a wild ride back to 1999 now: