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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Wayne Coyne in Christmas on Mars. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

Ten seasons ago, the weirdest holiday movie you’ve likely never heard of, Christmas on Mars, by Oklahoma indie-rock eccentrics the Flaming Lips, was released to both bafflement and acclaim (OK, mostly bafflement), and it became an instant cult classic.

The wacky production — delayed multiple times due to the unexpected success and ensuing promotion of the band’s albums The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots — took about $200,000 of the Lips’ own money and seven years to make. (“I’m not sure if I’m embarrassed about it or if I’m proud of it,” the band’s mastermind/frontman, Wayne Coyne, says of that long wait.) So, by the time Christmas on Mars finally made its official premiere at the 2008 Sasquatch! music festival, the film had already become the stuff of legend.

However, despite all the mythology and speculation surrounding Christmas on Mars, the finished product is actually way more bonkers than even the most diehard Lips fan could have imagined.

Starring Flaming Lips multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd as Major Syrtis, an astronaut on the verge of a nervous breakdown; Coyne as an antenna-headed, Santa-suited green alien; Fred Armisen, Adam Goldberg, and, in a longer and even-lesser-seen DVD director’s cut, Elijah Wood and Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock; and a fleet of giant marching vulvas, the lo-fi sci-fi flick focuses on a Christmas pageant celebrating the birth of the first baby born on the newly colonized planet Mars.

Got all that? OK, so none of it makes very much sense. Maybe that’s because it all started as an excuse for the band to record an album of “bizarre classical-music-meets-space-age-music-meets-music-from-the-future” with the Christmas on Mars title. “This idea of making a movie was kind of a way for us to make a soundtrack to a movie, but the movie didn’t exist,” Coyne tells Yahoo Entertainment. However, like many of the Lips’ fantastical ideas — Zaireeka, an experimental release requiring four CDs to be played simultaneously for four different stereo systems; those limited-edition songs the Lips issued on a USB drive buried inside a life-sized, edible gummy skull; the Dead Petz side project with Miley Cyrus — Christmas on Mars is, a decade later, a fascinating example of Coyne’s rampant, unchecked creativity at work.

“I think [making Christmas on Mars] showed me a lot about the way that I could start to do any of my ideas, any of my art, and all that, from then on,” says Coyne. “No one was demanding that we finish it. It was only my own desire to sort of say, ‘No, we must do this.’”

Speaking of “movies that don’t exist,” when Coyne decided to make Christmas on Mars, he was inspired by some very un-sugarplum-like visions that danced in his mother’s head many Christmases ago. When Coyne and his older brother came home late from a night out, his mother attempted to tell them about a strange space movie she’d just seen on television, and her wildly disjointed recap remained in his brain throughout the years.

“It goes back to a ‘movie’ my mother had seen, which now I know wasn’t a movie. It was a combination of some movies that she saw, because she would fall asleep on the couch watching movies late at night,” Coyne laughs. “I remember one night she thought she saw this movie, but it wasn’t until much later, after she died, that we figured out she didn’t really see one movie — she saw three movies, and she was falling asleep off and on and connecting them in between. We searched forever to find this movie that she thought she saw.”

Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd in Christmas on Mars. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

Between 2001 and 2007, the Lips labored to bring Mama Coyne’s fake dream-state movie to the screen, sporadically shooting Christmas on Mars (at first on 16mm film, and then later, as home moviemaking technology rapidly advanced, on digital formats) at various locales around their native OKC — including dilapidated industrial facilities and homemade sets in Coyne’s compound of connected houses and backyard.

“Some of it we would shoot literally just in my house. I have a huge, crazy house in Oklahoma City,” Coyne says. “At the time, the back part of the house was still being renovated, so there would be rooms that were kind of just tore up, and I made them look like they were rooms inside a space station or whatever on Mars. … At the time, there was a crack house that was an abandoned little shack that was in the back of one of these houses that I had recently bought, and instead of tearing it down, I just turned it into another scene. So I’m literally shooting in my house, and literally shooting in my own backyard, and the scene that’s got Fred Armisen in it is shot in that crack house.”

Fred Armisen in Christmas on Mars. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

Coyne also shot in Austin during the 2004 South by Southwest festival to accommodate Goldberg’s schedule, and it turned out to be well worth it. “I said, ‘Well, if you’re gonna be there for four days, I’ll build a set in Austin. All you gotta do is come over there.’ He said, ‘If you can do that, dude, I’ll be yours for a whole day and a whole night. Whatever it takes, from the beginning of the morning to the end of the night.’ He had, like, four pages of dialogue, and I saw him literally go off to a room 20 minutes before we shot, read through it, and then he came in and did probably 50 takes. Every one of the takes was stunning. I remember we would forget that we were even shooting a movie. We’d be like, ‘Oh, f***. Sorry. Cut!’ He was so amazing.”

Coyne admits with a self-deprecating chuckle and a shrug that he and his bandmates and cast of assembled local pals weren’t as skilled at acting as Goldberg, but he believes that is part of the film’s DIY charm. “There’s bits of it where the acting is weird, or it’s awkward, or bad, or ridiculous, but that was our way of saying, ‘I know, but this is us making a movie. We’re not really trying to win the Cannes Film Festival this year. We’re just making this with our friends and our family. It really is a vehicle by which we can put our music and other abstract ideas into.’ … And you know, I’m not trying to be a movie director. I wasn’t waiting on someone to call me and say, ‘Hey, we saw Christmas on Mars. Would you wanna make our movie?’ I’m just making my own movie, my own way. This isn’t me auditioning for other director’s parts!”

The result wasn’t exactly a feel-good family film: Ten years later, Christmas on Mars is still best remembered for the above-mentioned vulva-army scene, set to an experimental instrumental titled “The Gleaming Armament of Marching Genitalia.” (Side note/fun fact: A year after Christmas on Mars’s brief theatrical release, the Flaming Lips expounded upon their weird version of this “nativity scene” of sorts, by releasing a limited-edition Christmas tree ornament shaped like a fetus.)

Coyne breathlessly attempts to explain this vaginal symbolism to Yahoo Entertainment. “It went along the concept that this baby was being born outside of its real mother [in a manmade plastic space-womb], and that this is the way babies will be born 100 years from now. They’ll be in an incubated thing looked over by the parents, but it won’t actually be inside the woman or man. That was the concept there,” he begins. “So, the one main character [Drozd’s Major Syrtis], he’s haunted. He sees this baby in there, and he’s living on Mars, and the oxygen’s weird, and the oxygen generator breaks. All these things sort of cause him to have this breakdown, which leads to hallucinations. And so this dream that he thinks he’s having is really a hallucination the entire space station is having. Somehow on some deep humanistic level, this way of a baby being born, without being inside of its mother, is causing some humanistic break. And that’s what they were trying to come to grips with. That’s what that parade is. He’s telling people about this horrible dream of the baby being crushed by a marching band whose heads are … yeah, they’re giant, flopping women’s vaginas.

“Yeah. I mean, it’s a scene that only we would make.”

Obviously the dystopian Christmas on Mars has more in common with Eraserhead than with popular holiday fare like, say, It’s a Wonderful Life or Love, Actually. But Coyne insists that, despite all of its disturbing imagery and soundtrack song titles like “The Horrors of Isolation: The Celestial Dissolve, Triumphant Hallucination, Light Being Absorbed,” “The Secret of Immortality: This Strange Feeling, This Impossible World,” “Space Bible with Volume Lumps,” and “In Excelsior Vaginalistic,” the movie does offer a Christmas-appropriate, if vague, message of hope.

“To me, Christmas on Mars is like a situation,” Coyne explains. “Mars is the situation that this is completely brutal, and this is completely unknown. And we don’t know what to do. And you know, we invented Christmas on the darkest day in the northern part of the world. On the darkest days of the year, we put lights in our trees. And that’s what I would tell everybody: On the darkest days of your life, you have to put lights in your trees, whatever your ‘trees’ may be. It’s like you saying, ‘I know I’m playing along with this ridiculous fantasy, but it actually works.’ That’s what we mean when we say ‘Christmas on Mars.’ Christmas is the made-up fantasy scenario that will bring you happiness in the face of this utter unknown, bleak void.”

A decade after the Flaming Lips released Christmas on Mars into the void, Coyne is still celebrating Christmas as only he can — the Lips just released their own psychedelic version of the beloved Bing Crosby/David Bowie duet, “Peace on Earth”/“Little Drummer Boy” — and he’s looking forward to new holiday traditions in 2019, when he and his girlfriend, Katy Weaver, will welcome their first child, a son. “For me, every day when you’re a little boy is like Christmas already. … I mean, for me, I get to live like a whole ’nother life now. This is the beginning of my second life. I’m like, ‘Let’s go, motherf***er!’” he says. “Our house is already made for little kids, and we don’t always get that much sleep already, so it’s not gonna be that much different for us.”

As for whether Christmas on Mars will ever become a more widely viewed or loved holiday classic in decades to come, Coyne knows that, like fruitcake, the film is an acquired taste. “We do make weird f***ing music. Not everybody in the world’s gonna understand it,” he admits. “But I feel like the people that do understand it are people that understand it the way I do. It’s emotional. We’re not just having a party. It’s hitting something very down to the core. I think Christmas on Mars has that reach, too. It’s not trying to really entertain you on your conscious level.”

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Nowadays, indie and alternative rock bands think nothing of promoting their music via TV, commercial, and film placements. But back in the ’90s, when Oklahoma eccentrics the Flaming Lips (who just released their 14th album, Oczy Mlody) hit the stage at the Peach Pit After Dark — aka the hottest fictional nightclub on Beverly Hills, 90210 — to rock out in front of David Silver, Valerie Malone, and Dylan McKay, it was a real eyebrow-raiser and head-scratcher.

“Popularity is a funny thing,” chuckles the Lips’ charismatic frontman, Wayne Coyne, reflecting on “She Don’t Use Jelly,” which took more than a year after its 1993 release to become the band’s only major radio hit. “Once something is kind of popular, it has the potential to grow and grow and grow. When Beverly Hills, 90210 called us, if this would have been a year earlier, or six months earlier, we probably would have thought, ‘No, we’re too cool; we don’t do those sorts of things.’ But we had done a lot of stuff by then” — the song had already received a promotional boost from its mocking on Beavis & Butt-head, which Coyne had found “endearing and clever” — “and it occurred to us that [going on 90210] would be ridiculous and absurd and funny. It didn’t really matter if it was artistically good or bad or whatever.”

Wayne Coyne (Photo: Mario Framingheddu)

Coyne remembers thinking the 90210 shoot went so badly that the 1995 episode, titled “Love Hurts,” would never see the light of day. “We did kind of talk amongst ourselves [on the set that day], like, ‘It seems weird that the one episode that we’re on is such a disaster that there’s no way it will air.’ It just didn’t seem possible it could work! We saw them saying lines, and they would do them five or six times, and everybody at the end of the badly done — from our perception, anyway — takes, everybody’d kinda be like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ Yay. No big celebration. It just kind of felt like yet another grueling day on the set. And we thought, ‘That probably won’t air, and nobody will see us.’ And three weeks later, it’s on TV and it looks wonderful! All the things we thought seemed like a disaster were just business as usual.”

Remembering the band’s time on the set, Coyne says one unnamed female cast member made it obvious that she liked the Flaming Lips even less than Beavis or Butt-head did. (“It was at the end of a long week, and she probably didn’t like the episode anyway,” he says of her bad attitude.) But he recalls that another 90210 actor was a bit friendlier. “For good reason, they had a lot of restrictions about what could be backstage [at the Peach Pit] — there could be no pot, no drugs, no alcohol, or any of that. But some of the people involved in the Flaming Lips are pretty determined and imaginative in how they want to spend their day, so there was some ruckus about that. Some of the cast members were really fans, and really fun, and some could kind of care less and just wanted the day to be over with. … There was a blond dude who talked to us all day. But I think mostly he wanted to get wasted with [band member] Steven [Drozd]. I think he was like, ‘Where’d you get the booze?’ I think that bonded their friendship even more.”

That “blond guy” just may have been Ian Ziering, whose Steve Sanders character uttered arguably the most infamous and immortal line in the “Love Hurts” episode: “You know, I’ve never been a big fan of alternative music, but these guys rocked the house!” Coyne laughs, still incredulous that the episode actually made it onto Fox. “These were really lines! Even when you say it now, it feels like this is not a finished phrase for a real actor in a real show to put into the world,” Wayne exclaims. “And yet, when he says it, I kind of believe him.”

Even before 90210 came along, the Lips had a hunch that “She Don’t Use Jelly” might be their breakthrough single, after playing it night after night to uninitiated audiences on an unlikely tour with third-tier grunge band Candlebox. “We’re out there playing our noisy little songs, and we would, most nights, start to play … and the audience there would absolutely hate us,” Coyne recalls. “There’s a certain energy you get from that kind of hatred, and it can be quite fun to play to people who want to kill you; it gives you a kind of a power. But we would play ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ even to that audience, and they would, even in the flow of their hatred, say, ‘Oh, we like that one!’ And then we’d play the next song, and they’d go back to being outwardly hateful.”

But despite their radio success — and success converting a few Candlebox fans here and there — the Flaming Lips were determined to keep experimenting, moving away from typical alt-rock. Just two years after appearing on 90210, they riskily released Zaireeka, a recording experiment that required the listener to play four CDs, on four separate stereo systems, at the same time. (The project sold about 12,000 copies.) The Lips then took another bold turn with the lush, orchestral, and not-at-all-guitar-oriented The Soft Bulletin in 1999, and while at the time they thought, “We’re going to make this record, and if it’s the last record we make, and the world doesn’t need any more Flaming Lips records, we would know that we did the thing that we wanted to do,” it turned out to be their true artistic breakthrough.

“Previous to us making The Soft Bulletin, we probably were wrongly overly concerned with seeming like we were a cool, weird rock group,” admits Coyne. But with The Soft Bulletin, the Lips were “working towards things that seemed more emotional,” and the result was song like “Waiting for a Superman,” inspired by Coyne’s father’s losing battle with cancer. “People will come up to me virtually every night that we play, and there’s this secret code that’s in the music — we don’t really have to speak about it,” muses Coyne. “People will point to that song, and that’s the song that, the person I’ll be talking to, him and his older brother talked about when their father was dying of cancer. That’s not in the music. You wouldn’t know that from looking at it. But if you’re in the right state of mind and you hear it, I think it communicates that.”

Later, on Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, the Lips created another sentimental fan favorite with “Do You Realize,” with its devastating line, “Everyone you know someday will die.” It is now considered one of the greatest funeral songs of all time. Says Coyne of the classic track: “How that comes from all these whimsical romantic little visions, and at the end of that is this sort of punch to the face, a horrible reality, it still feels acceptable in the flow of the music? We felt, ‘Ah, that’s going to work.’ And so we just moved on to record it. … There could have been no way we’d known it would have this other power where people use it at the deaths of their grandmothers and the births of their sons and daughters and it has such powerful meaning to people. I think all songwriters think, ‘It would be great if we had a song that could do that.’ And we really do have a song that does that. And when we play it, I know in the audience that there are people that this is their song. This is their mother in this song. This is their sons and daughters. We always play it absolutely like this is the greatest thing that we get to do. … We love, love, love that we get to play this song, because it’s like a piece of magic.”

Despite these songs’ deep connections to the Lips’ diehard followers, the group remained largely on the fringes, releasing limited-edition music on USB sticks submerged in gummy-candy fetuses, brains, and skulls; covering Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety with Peaches and Henry Rollins; filming an utterly bizarre sci-fi holiday movie, Christmas on Mars, whose cast included Fred Armisen and an army of giant marching vulvas; and recording their darkest and least accessible album to date, The Terror, in 2013. Shortly after that album’s release, it seemed that the Lips might return to the mainstream via the 56-year-old Coyne’s unlikely friendship with 24-year-old pop star Miley Cyrus. But that pairing instead led to some of the Lips’ most unexpected and out-there projects to date — like Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, which surprise-dropped as a free streaming release right after the Lips performed its pro-marijuana track “Dooo It!” with Cyrus and a troupe of RuPaul’s Drag Race alumni on the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards. Later the two acts toured the album together with stage show wilder and freakier than anything the Lips had done before. As Coyne puts it, “When Miley walked out onstage for the first time with that giant unicorn penis thing, I can tell you for sure that it wasn’t something that had been discussed!”

“Working with Miley on what would end up becoming the Miley Cyrus/Dead Petz record, this kind of secret Soundcloud record, it would seem like the idea that someone like a Miley Cyrus would not want or would not have anything to do with a group like the Flaming Lips,” admits Coyne. “On the surface, that would appear true. People would probably think she’s this music-industry, Disney-corporation, manufactured persona, and the Flaming Lips are these self-made weirdos that have nothing to do with the music industry. What would we have in common? But because I’ve been around a long, long time, making music and doing our own thing, and I’ve been lucky enough to have some success here and there that’s allowed us to keep building and growing and doing all that — she, I think at the time that we started knowing each other, had a desire to do that in her own way. I think she probably had a desire to be the ‘Wayne’ in her own world. So I think it was just all those coincidences coming together, where I’m old enough not to give a f*** about all that stuff, and she’s young enough and brave enough and experienced enough not to give a f***. It’s kind of about the same level.”

The Lips recently released Oczy Mlody, which they say was inspired by Syd Barrett and A$AP Rocky as well as by their bond with Cyrus, who appears on “We a Family,” the album’s feel-good final track. “I think doing a lot of stuff with Miley Cyrus and being subjected to listening to a lot of her favorite music, being around her producer Mike Will, you become immersed in it,” says Coyne. “For us, having a new approach, it’s exciting. Because we don’t want to do the same thing over and over again — or be conscious of it, anyway. You feel like you’re doing new things, it’s exciting and thrilling, and when it works, you’re like, ‘Look at that!’”

Surely even Steve Sanders would think that rocks the house.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

(Stefon-from-SNL voice) This party had everything… LED unicorns, unicorn-horned birthday cakes, indoor ice cream trucks, stuffed-animal walls, glow-in-the-dark womb chairs, a “bondage-latex room with positive discipline,” Elijah Wood on a furry Vespa, Moby hanging with Shepard Fairey, Miley Cyrus in a plushy onesie…

Yes, there ain’t no party like a Flaming Lips party — especially one jointly celebrating the Jan. 13 release of the Lips’ 14th album, the space-rock opus Oczy Mlody, and the 56th birthday of the Oklahoma eccentrics’ wild-eyed, ringlet-haired ringmaster, Mr. Wayne Coyne.
Coyne’s magical, mystical, (mis)guided tour along the rainbow path at Los Angeles’s Mack Sennett Studios included a pitstop at a grown-up version of a birthday-party spanking machine (manned by rainbow-bright dominatrices); a quickie joyride on that illuminated plush moped; and a dip at a body-painting station (where fans had their limbs decorated with Day-Glo, e-Lip-tical patterns). And it all ended with a cozy, cross-legged chat on the floor of the soiree’s shag-carpeted album-listening room, where Coyne discussed his pal and Dead Petz collaborator Cyrus’s appearance on Ozcy Mlody: the epic, feelgood, three-years-in-the-making closing track “We a Family” (originally titled “Jesus and the Spaceships”).

“The song is kind of heart-warming, it’s kind of dorky, and it’s kind of got this great singalong thing about it,” Coyne sweetly gushed. “Miley and I and our group of friends, when we’re together, we oftentimes will say that we’re family: ‘This is our family.’” Coyne also showed us photos on his phone of the literally Hefty-sized stash of marijuana Cyrus wanted to bring to the event on her party bus. ‘That is not Photoshopped… It’s her version of a ‘bag of pot,’” he joked.

Speaking of drugs, the “fantastical” and futuristic Oczy Mlody is a concept album of sorts about a magical cure-all pharmaceutical that allows partakers to sleep off their troubles for three months at a time. Coyne got a little serious when stressing that it’s not a political record influenced by the real-life troubles of today.

“You know, I wish that music could impact [on politics]. But I would say to anybody, as much music that’s been made and as much that is put out there every second of every day, and as expressive as artists can be and as powerful as music can be, if it really did [have that impact], I don’t think a Donald Trump would even exist,” he mused. “And I don’t think music needs to do that. I don’t think that’s its place. Music, when it’s at its most powerful, is like a friend of yours that sits with you in your times when you’re confused, in the times when you’re happy, in the times when you’re sad. And it’s there saying, ‘You’re trapped in the isolation of your own mind. But I’m here with you.’ And that’s an insane, insane thing… I think our music would gladly go past any petty things like a Donald Trump, and go right to your heart. That’s what I want my music to do.”

photo: Paul Rosales

Looking forward to the new year as the midnight countdown to his birthday approached, Coyne added: “A lot of people are kind of frightened and sort of — not cynical, but predicting, because of whatever political situation there is or whatever, that the world is going to turn more unfair, and more brutal, and more stupid. But I don’t really think that. For me, I never lived my life because of who was the governor, because of who was the president, because of who was supposed to be God. I was lucky that I always thought, ‘I’m going to live by my own laws and my own rules.’ And I think we’ll all continue to do that anyway. And if the person that happens to be president believes and helps us with our ways, then great. And if he doesn’t, f*** ‘em! I’ve never waited for the government or anything to be on our side — why would we think they have to be now? Fighting injustices and helping people less fortunate and caring about humanity in general is our job, regardless of who’s running this f***ing place. So more power to us.”

Enter Wayne’s world now, and watch Yahoo Music’s entire exclusive tour of Thursday’s party in the Facebook Live video below.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Some latecomers to the Flaming Lips probably primarily associate the Oklahoma eccentrics with the grand psychedelic orch-pop of The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, or with their crazy concert spectacles featuring dancing furries, puppets, fake blood, and frontman Wayne Coyne rolling around in a clear plastic Habitrail ball. Younger, more recent fans likely know them from their odd but awesome Dead Petz alliance with Miley Cyrus. However, many longtime Lips followers adamantly hail the more guitar-oriented 1995 album Clouds Taste Metallic as the band’s greatest work.

Those diehard fans are in for a treat – and new fans are in for a serious ‘90s rock history lesson – because that landmark release is getting a deluxe reissue treatment this month, as Heady Nuggs 20 Years After Clouds Taste Metallic 1994-1997. The collection comes out digitally and as a triple-CD set on Nov. 27, with a vinyl version slated for Dec. 18, but you can listen to the entire epic release – all 40 tracks, including rarities, B-sides, and various “ephemera”– exclusively on Yahoo Music now.

“I think we’d all agree that Clouds Taste Metallic was whatever we would call our heyday of being in one way this very punk-rock, very loud rock group, and in another way being very freaky, prog-rock, experimental,” Coyne tells Yahoo Music. “I think that was probably the peak of that. After that, I still think that we made rock music, but we didn’t overly embrace it so obviously anymore.”

(The Flaming Lips circa 1994: Wayne Coyne, Steven Drozd, and Ronald Jones. Photo by Brian Rasic

A major reason for the Lips’ post-Metallic, late-’90s artistic shift was the departure of a key member: elusive, reclusive guitarist Ronald Jones, who joined the group in the early ’90s, left in 1996, and has barely been heard or seen from since.

“I think a lot of [fans’ fondness for Clouds Taste Metallic] has to do with the legendary status and mystery of Ronald Jones. That’s the big masterwork/masterpiece that ended our time with him. And so I think that part of it just forever grows – you know, what happened to him? What is he doing now? What could’ve been? I think that colors it a little bit,” Coyne admits.

Even Coyne isn’t all that sure about what happened to Jones, who left the Lips either due to his severe agoraphobia, fatigue after four years of almost nonstop touring, or band member Steven Drozd’s drug use at the time, depending on which account you believe.

“He recorded with Richard Davies… but he didn’t do very much… I think he made an effort not to be known by anyone that would know him from the Flaming Lips,” says Coyne. “That helped it become secret. The Internet was beginning and it wasn’t like it is now, when f—ing anyone can find something [about someone] out there.

“We don’t really know that much about him or anybody that knows anything. I think he still lives in his house, but I’m not trying to go by there or anything. I think I might, though, as time goes by.”

As for fans that were hoping the Clouds reissue might inspire a reunion with Jones, even for just a one-off show, Coyne says, “If it was at all possible, we would do it for sure. I just don’t think he would want to.” (The Lips did play Clouds in its entirety for the first time ever – sans Jones, of course – at Minneapolis’s First Avenue club this past February.)

Coyne recalls Jones’s time in the group – a time when the Lips were riding the momentum of their 1993 breakthrough single, the 90210-approved alt-rock radio staple “She Don’t Use Jelly” – as troubled. “He would be paranoid and he would be kind of more alone and more not wanting to be interrupted by all this touring, and it’d become more difficult to do stuff working as a group. At the time, I don’t know if we thought of it as being anything other than, ‘What the f—? We’re all struggling here!’ But I think we could see there was some mental break that was overcoming him.

“The dilemma he was having was the attention. You know, the more records we’d do, the more shows we’d play, and then people would want to come up and talk to him. You could see him not liking it. Not not liking it as in ‘F— you,’ but more like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t handle this.’

“Up until then, we were getting little by little, but I think that success sort of jumped it up a bit. We would just be playing and playing and traveling and traveling, and I think that you have to weigh in your mind to make these things enjoyable, otherwise it’s certain torture, you know? And I think Ronald was very much an intense introvert. We were all at the time introverts, really, but I think he was very much an introvert that was not ever wanting to be an extrovert, you know? I was still probably pretty introverted back then, but I would say, ‘Well, we gotta play in front of people, what the f—,’ and we’d start to embrace it. But I don’t think he was ever really able to make that crossover to be the entertainer and just go out there. I don’t think he was ever going to do that.”

The Lips have enjoyed an interesting, mostly underground, and definitely unique career ever since their brief brush with ’90s fame. While it’s questionable if Jones would have wanted to collaborate with Miley Cyrus, it seems his fears that the band was becoming too big and too mainstream were unfounded.

“I think that was probably the best thing that could’ve happened to us – that we went from being obscure weirdos to suddenly this big popular thing, and then back again,” says Coyne. “Hardly anybody gets out of that [unscathed], and I think [the Lips’ success] kind of caused Ronald to leave, or at least accelerated his understanding of what the future might be like.

“We’ve been around lots and lots of rock groups that are having some success, and it’s a very difficult thing to keep all of that together. I think we’ve been really lucky that for us it’s been little by little by little, and it’s not changed our values. We still love being around each other and love to make music and all this stuff, and we love the freedom of not thinking, ‘Oh my God, if we don’t sell 10 million records, what’s going to happen?’ And now we’re doing records with Miley Cyrus. Jesus Christ!”

The full track listing for Heady Nuggs 20 Years After Clouds Taste Metallic 1994-1997 is:

Disc 1: Clouds Taste Metallic

1. The Abandoned Hospital Ship

2. Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus With Needles

3. Placebo Headwound

4. This Here Giraffe

5. Brainville

6. Guy Who Got a Headache and Accidentally Saves the World

7. When You Smile

8. Kim’s Watermelon Gun

9. They Punctured My Yolk

10. Lightning Strikes the Postman

11. Christmas at the Zoo

12. Evil Will Prevail

13. Bad Days (aurally excited version)

Disc 2: Due to High Expectations the Flaming Lips Are Providing Needles for Your Balloons/ The King Bug Laughs (Oddities and Rarities)

1. Bad Days

2. Jets Part 2 (My Two Days as an Ambulance Driver)

3. Ice Drummer

4. Put the Waterbug in the Policeman’s Ear

5. Chewin’ the Apple of Yer Eye

6. Chosen One

7. Little Drummer Boy

8. Slow Nerve Action

9. It Was a Very Good Year

10. Sun Arise

11. Life on Mars

12. Ballrooms of Mars

13. Hot Day

14. Nobody Told Me

15. Magician Vs. the Headache

16. She Don’t Use Jelly (Live @KJ103)

Disc 3: Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus with Needles (Live in Seattle 1996)

1. The Abandoned Hospital Ship

2. Unconsciously Screamin’

3. Take Meta Mars

4. Moth in the Incubator

5. Put the Waterbug in the Policeman’s Ear

6. Lightning Strikes the Postman

7. Bad Days

8. She Don’t Use Jelly

9. Chewin’ the Apple of Yer Eye

10. When You Smile

11. Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus With Needles

12. Love Yer Brain

13. Placebo Headwound

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.