Kraftwerk at the Museum of Modern Art on 10 April 2012

Originally published by PopMatters on April 20, 2012


In recent years, as Hollywood has been bitten once again by the gimmick of 3-D, legendary critic Roger Ebert has routinely taken to Facebook and other corners of the internet to lambast the film industry for its craven efforts to wring more money out of cinema-goers. I tend to side with Ebert on the topic though. As the parent of a 4th grader, I’ve certainly given in and donned silly glasses for 90 minutes in the pursuit of entertainment. I wonder what Ebert might think of Kraftwerk using a vast 3-D screen as part of their eight-night audio-visual series at the Museum of Modern Art.

The conceit with Kraftwerk is that while they’re undeniably futuristic, there’s a certain level of classic kitsch in the mix. It must have blown people’s minds when they first heard “The Robots” or “The Man-Machine”, for example, though much of the imagery of that time period was based on a Modernist movement which was already 40 years old. It’s within this dichotomy of retro-futurism that Kraftwerk initially found its relevance, and it’s there where they remain relevant today.

As a fad, 3-D film made its biggest initial splash in the early 1950’s, giving audiences “Astounding! Astonishing! Amazing!” experiences with schlocky flicks like The Mad Magician and It Came from Outer Space, in an age of cinema gimmickry where theatergoers found their seats vibrating and 30 different syncopated smells sprayed in their faces. The experience, we’re told, is different today than it was even in recent years past, and I suppose there’s some truth to that because we no longer have to wear glasses with one red lens and one blue (though as another throwback, those old timey glasses are on the cover of a fancy Kraftwerk book sold in the MoMA gift shop).

Perhaps it’s because I’m jaded, but 3-D in the modern age isn’t packing much more of a punch than it ever has. Which brings us back to Kraftwerk.

The MoMA retrospective is billed as a complete run-through of Kraftwerk’s entire back catalogue, providing one ignores their first few albums and begins with 1974’s digital travelogue, Autobahn. Over eight consecutive nights, Kraftwerk is performing an album in its entirety, though each show also contains highlights from other releases. The residency’s opening night (Tuesday, April 10) kicked with “The Robots,” a single from 1978’s The Man-Machine, before Autobahn was tackled in full. It was a shrewd opening salvo, introducing the longstanding half-gimmick of the members of Kraftwerk being robots themselves (a point actually first made in the lobby where robot versions of the four current members of the group slowly moved…well…robotically in glass cases. It was as though Disneyland’s Hall of Presidents had been overrun by the aliens in This Island Earth.

To the credit of Kraftwerk and MoMA, the Marron Atrium could have probably held twice as many people as they let in, but in the spirit of the immersive experience they allowed attendees to have a bit of breathing room. And honestly, if you’re speeding down the vast expanse of the Autobahn wearing cardboard 3-D glasses, the last thing you want upsetting the fantasy is being packed like sardines on the L train during the morning commute. The 3-D was great about half the time, and the other half it wasn’t particularly necessary. Whether 3-D added anything to the experience of seeing the sleek lines of the “Trans-Europe Express” come reasonably to life on the large screen behind the group is hardly the point. The evening included 3-D because 3-D is very Kraftwerk.

There they stood, nearly perfectly still, for just shy of two hours, resplendent in black bodysuits that were equal parts Tron (the original, ‘natch) and Spider-Man’s symbiotic Venom costume. Ralf Hütter is the sole remaining founding member of Kraftwerk, with his longtime co-conspirator Florian Schneider having left the fold in 2008. If it’s possible for a group largely modeled after barely animate robots that hasn’t released new music in nearly a decade to have an essential member, Hütter certainly fills the bill. Most of the lead vocals—often monotone, but with a vulnerable humanity—on the group’s classic tracks came from Hütter, and it remains so on stage in New York; he wears the only headset microphone, and any other voice heard comes via loops or outer space or wherever.

The future-past theme only holds water until the music comes into the conversation; nearly 40 years ago, Kraftwerk must have seemed as though they’d beamed in from another dimension, a window into a clean, emotionless yet oddly sexy future. And they still sound like that today, because for all the shit they influenced, and all the iPad apps that can create music on the fly, we still haven’t caught up to what Kraftwerk were doing as far back as Autobahn in 1974. I thought perhaps it was a trick of the eight-channel video and sound installation developed solely for this series of performances, but listening to the music now on my tiny laptop speakers it still brings me back to the future.

Tickets for the retrospective quickly sold out, adding to the exclusivity of the event, though the entire affair was as civilized as one might expect given the venue. Besides a guy in a wizard hat and sandals playing a harmonica, no one prowled the line outside hoping for a spare ticket. Inside, personal space was respected, and no one rushed the stage or craned their necks in vain to see over the group’s lecterns to find out how they made all those wonderful sounds. The crowd looked like something out of a Kraftwerk song, sharply dressed, all with the same goofy white cardboard 3-D glasses. A few danced, but most were struck with awe at a legendary group bringing their aesthetic to life in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. 

Whether you made any of the performances or not, it’s worth heading across the East River to Queens for a presentation of Kraftwerk’s historical audio and visual material at the MoMA PS1 Performance Dome through May 14. For more information, visit www.moma.org.

Our Favorite Record Stores: PopMatters Picks

Originally published by PopMatters on April 20, 2012 as part of their coverage of Record Store Day

Permanent Records - Brooklyn, NY


Even in New York City, there’s no longer any guarantee that you can simply walk out your front door and find yourself within spitting distance of a record store, rad or otherwise. Fortunately for urban denizens in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood, there’s Permanent Records. Warm and inviting, Permanent Records combines the rare with the recent, and the staff is knowledgeable without ever coming off as elitist snobs. In other words, this is where you want to be whether you’re a music neophyte dipping his toe in the water or a sophisticate looking for the perfect fix. 

Van Halen: 1 March 2012 - Live at Madison Square Garden, New York

Originally published by PopMatters on March 9, 2012 with photographs by Sachyn Mital

If you want to be annoyed by David Lee Roth, there’s plenty to work with. The mincing, preening, gurning original and most recent frontman for Van Halen is one of rock’s most mercurial figures, a court jester in a fallen kingdom. But for all the hits of the Sammy Hagar era – a period Van Halen circa 2012 would rather pretend never happened, thank you – there is no one more perfectly suited to serve as a foil to Eddie Van Halen’s legendary guitar pyrotechnics than Diamond Dave.

At a sold out Madison Square Garden on Thursday, March 1 – the band’s second such show on their tour in support of A Different Kind of Truth – Van Halen blasted through many of the touchpoints of their golden era, weaving in seamlessly four songs from the new album, their first with Roth back in the fold.

The tension between Roth and the Van Halen brothers, Eddie and drummer Alex, has become a long, cautionary folktale, an awkward and terrible period stretching over two decades that’s only worth bringing up again for the umpteenth time because of its total absence on the stage at Madison Square Garden. Eddie always smiled on stage anyway, but he’s positively beaming these days. It can’t hurt that the band’s new album – its first since 1998’s grim Van Halen III, with vocals by Extreme’s Gary Cherone – has been heralded as a genuine return to form. And, sure, it’s hard to imagine anyone not grinning like a loon playing a second sold out show at “the world’s most famous arena” in the early stages of what promises to be a very profitable tour. But there’s also genuine warmth on the stage, so much so that it even manages to break through old stone face Alex.

Another awkward truth which can’t be overlooked is that for all the esprit de corps in the Van Halen camp these days, they’re still trolling through the past without the mystical mullet of Michael Anthony, the band’s original bass guitarist whose vocal harmonies were an integral part of their signature sound for all those years. As with almost anything involving the history of Van Halen, the relationship was fraught with acrimony, and Anthony is nowhere to be seen or heard. Filling in on bass and backing vocals for the past few years is Eddie’s son Wolfgang, an official member of the band. Wolfgang clearly has the chops to perform with Van Halen, and he appeared comfortable in front of nearly 20,000 fans in New York City. Weeks shy of his 21st birthday, Wolfgang has been an official member of Van Halen since his mid-teens, a time when most fledgling rock musicians are fumbling in the garage through a haze of low grade weed and acne medication. To Wolfgang’s credit, he’s not only in his element on stage, but does nothing to deserve any criticism from Anthony purists longing for a “true” reunion.

Being a support act at Madison Square Garden is no picnic, as the vast arena looks empty until it’s close to full. Kool & the Gang, performing without singer James “J.T.” Taylor, might seem a curious choice as a tour opener, but aside from a few ardent rock fans who sit, arms crossed, in protest, they do their job by getting the crowd in a celebratory mood.

Then came Van Halen, with a performance that mostly sounded like it might have back in 1978 or 1984. But let’s get the bad news out of the way first. After a night where proficiency matched energy, they closed with “Jump”, which topped the charts in 1984. It’s hard to imagine a more ideal choice for a finale, and after mostly killing all night it was a total mess, with none of the musicians able to secure a toehold with the song’s signature keyboards, played here as a backing track. It was a disappointing end to a terrific show, and all the confetti and grand prix flag waving couldn’t obscure it.

There were also three solo moments for the band’s old timers. It was inevitable, of course, but also unnecessary. Midway through the set, the rest of Van Halen left the stage so Alex could prove he’s still got it. There is no greater primal thrill in rock & roll than his tribal drums in “Hot For Teacher”, and as he demonstrated later, he’s still more than capable of pulling its complexities off on stage.

Eddie’s solo, incorporating elements of “Eruption” and “Cathedral”, was also undeniably skilled, and probably even more appreciated by the crowd. But at the risk of committing heresy, it would have been perfectly fine being passed over, especially with his incendiary work on songs like “Runnin’ With the Devil” and “Everybody Wants Some” still hanging in the air.

Diamond Dave’s solo bit was predictably more puzzling, an acoustic run through of “Ice Cream Man” with pauses to narrate home movies about his dogs playing on the massive HD movie screen at the back of the stage.

But in the end, these are minor gripes, and what the night was really about was those fantastic songs and the performance. Van Halen was always about blending style and substance, and even as they’re older now than they were then, they’ve still got it. Eddie still shreds, Alex still destroys and Dave…Dave is still Dave. His voice is terrific and he’s in unbelievable shape, not only wearing his ass-hugging fancy pants with his version of dignity and grace, but also capably, acrobatically performing every strut, spin, split and kick we all remember from the “Jump” video.

The crowd ate it up with a spoon. Women with overly frosted hair and the dudes evenly split between old rockers, guys who want to be low-level mob enforcers and guys who consider Jason Statham a fashion and lifestyle template. Everybody wants some, indeed. And even 40 years after they first got together in Pasadena, California, Van Halen can still give it to them.

The tour winds across the U.S. and Canada through the end of June.

Kaiser Chiefs: Start the Revolution Without Me

Originally published by PopMatters on March 7, 2012

The path that led to the new Kaiser Chiefs album, Start the Revolution Without Me might not have been fraught with the same corporate tension as Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or the threats of legal action and long periods of lethargy as the Stone Roses’ Second Coming, but it’s still every bit as winding.

Kaiser Chiefs have lived inside a Britpop bubble since their debut album, Employment, arrived on the scene in 2005. It wasn’t the first go-round for the Kaiser Chiefs, of course. They began life as Parva, a short-lived incarnation given a quick burial after their record label folded. The band regrouped with a host of impossibly catchy terrace anthems and found themselves the heroes of those who either missed or lamented the loss of the mid-‘90s English aesthetic.

The band has stuck with the formula ever since, tweaking it here and there but ultimately relying on the strengths and weaknesses of their wry pop-craft. In the UK, the plan has seen relatively diminishing commercial returns come the Kaiser Chiefs’ way: 2007’s Yours Truly, Angry Mob was the high water mark on the charts, with both the album and its lead single (“Ruby”) hitting the toppermost of the poppermost. But it sold fewer than a third the amount of Employment. Off With Their Heads, the band’s 2008 album was produced by Mark Ronson, but did little to stop the precipitous slide.

And so the Kaiser Chiefs responded with a hiatus of sorts; as with many young bands who settle into a record-tour-record-tour rhythm, they found themselves in need of a breather. It lasted more than two years, but was over before anyone realized it might be. Which brings us to mid-2011 and the beginning of the Start the Revolution Without Mesaga.

With little advance fanfare, the Kaiser Chiefs returned with a grand scheme, uploading 20 new songs to their website in early June of that year and allowing fans to create their own albums comprising 10. Other fans would be allowed to peruse those creations, and if purchased, the initial compiler would receive a royalty of one British Pound Note. Members of the band contributed their own compilations, with their royalty going to charity. A few weeks later, an official 13-track release was issued as The Future Is Medieval.

The Kaiser Chiefs had attempted to make inroads in the U.S. before their break, hoping a tour supporting Green Day would bring them legions of new fans. But then they disappeared and the momentum failed.

The Future Is Medieval wasn’t released on this side of the Atlantic, and so with a North American tour looming – including high profile appearances at SXSW and Coachella – the Kaiser Chiefs reassembled some of the 20 songs from 2011 again, added one new one and called the albumStart the Revolution Without Me.

If your album is going to share its name with a film, you could do worse than the 1970 historical parody starring Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland. Loosely based on events surrounding the French Revolution, Start the Revolution Without Me predated the ‘80s rash of switched-at-birth flicks by over a decade and in addition to giving a boost to the powdered wig industry also gave Orson Welles a chance to flex his narration muscles. Whether we’re meant to draw a connection between the film and the album is unclear; it’s tricky enough to consider the songs here without comparing them to prior releases, so contemplating where Charles and Claude Coupé fit into the picture is unlikely to yield rewards.

Listening to Start the Revolution Without Me and forgetting The Future Is Medieval is easy enough because it has the feel of an album proper. The Kaiser Chiefs have sometimes been dismissed as lightweight pop wusses, to which I’d reply, “So what?” Though the radio often tries to convince us otherwise, pop songs don’t necessarily have to feature vocal histrionics or lazy guest appearances from Busta Rhymes. And that’s where the value in a band like the Kaiser Chiefs really lies. Their songs, for the most part, are difficult to not sing along to, no matter how unpopular that might make you during the morning commute.

Start the Revolution Without Me draws its title from a lyric to “Cousin in the Bronx”, a song which opens like the Charlatans’ Clash-lite ode to the city before it, “N.Y.C. (There’s No Need to Stop)”, with the sounds of the streets and police sirens. The song arrives midway through Start the Revolution Without Me, often the refuge to space fillers on other albums. Here, it’s one of the album’s strongest tracks, with the sort of chorus one can imagine a stadium full of faithful fans singing along with, and with a slinky guitar possibly turned up to entice the U.S. market.

On previous efforts, the music of Kaiser Chiefs has seen the message delivered with the smirking vocals of Ricky Wilson and the quirky keyboards of Nick “Peanut” Baines. Start the Revolution Without Me doesn’t get rid of those features, though the guitars of Andrew “Whitey” White and the drums of Nick Hodgson are generally higher in the mix than before. It’s not an unpleasing result, as on “Problem Solved” or “Little Shocks”, which served as the first official taste of theFuture Is Medieval material last year.

Hodgson also emerges here as a lead vocalist, singing the anthemic “Man on Mars” and the heartachy “If You Will Have Me” with enough weedy Lennonesque pathos that the notion of a solo album by a drummer wouldn’t be the worst idea ever. The newest track, “On the Run,” was worth waiting around for, a Frankenstein’s monster created from all the strengths of the Kaiser Chiefs.

If they can’t make a dent in the U.S. market in 2012, the Kaiser Chiefs can’t blame the quality ofStart the Revolution Without Me, a collection that manages to overcome the cobbled-together history of the material to become one of the band’s most complete-sounding collections sinceEmployment. It’s very British with enough American influence in the grooves that it’s worthy of comparisons to other bands who wore that mantle in the past like the Kinks and Blur.

8 out of 10

Paul McCartney: Kisses on the Bottom

Originally published by PopMatters on February 7, 2012


Let’s get the good news out of the way first: Paul McCartney’s new album of old standards isn’t quite as disappointing as Rod Stewart’s “Songbook” series.


Kisses on the Bottom, a… well… cheeky title taken from the lyric of the collection’s opening number, “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter”, originally popularized by Fats Waller and possibly a song which made the young McCartney giggle like a loon when he was a wee lad in Liverpool.


To his credit and sometimes also to his detriment, McCartney has been unafraid in the past of publicly flogging his personal playlists. Never mind that the Beatles often covered rock ‘n’ roll, soul and show tunes alike, but Macca’s solo canon includes two albums of raucous versions of tunes that supposedly made him put grease in his hair and pick up a guitar as a teenager. Here, McCartney is in crooner mode, backed by Diana Krall and her capable band and sticking almost exclusively to the microphone, pictured in the album’s artwork as one of those old-timey models that hangs upside-down and is encircled by a fancy bit of metal wire and was probably caked with Dean Martin’s booze breath.


McCartney has often been tagged as a purveyor of schmaltz, a reputation that he’s at least partly responsible for earning with numbers like “My Love” and “Ebony and Ivory”, the latter a duet with Stevie Wonder so corny it makes Macca’s “Pipes of Peace” seem like a work of great insight and importance by comparison. Wonder is here as well on “Only Our Hearts”, one of just two McCartney originals on the album; the Motown legend doesn’t sing, but instead plays a harmonica solo so uncharacteristically abrasive, I almost used it to file my nails.


Elsewhere, the music is so inoffensive and gently wrought that it’s difficult to generate any enthusiasm in either direction. It proved challenging to accentuate the positive in the cover of “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive”, because it sounds as though it was hastily performed to test the mics and was accidentally included in the final mix. “My Friend the Milkman” has McCartney doing a probably-unintentional Carol Channing impersonation and is possibly even weirder than that looks in print.


It’s hard to completely knock Kisses on the Bottom because McCartney is in love and as history will tell us, McCartney in love makes for a flowery broth. Indeed, some of the songs themselves are quite good. “My Valentine”, a McCartney original featuring tasteful guitar from Eric Clapton, is one of the album’s genuinely captivating tunes. “We Three (My Echo, My Shadow and Me)” is also quite good, a lush orchestral number arranged by Johnny Mandel with a breathy McCartney vocal that’s just about as perfect as it’s likely to get here.


McCartney is clearly enthusiastic for the project, wearing the velvet lapels and smoky ambience with a natural comfort. And maybe he saw what Stewart’s done over the past decade-plus and thought he might as well take a crack at it and move a few units in the process. If there’s even a whisper of commercial ambition here, it’s at least a toned-down version. The guest stars are few—Wonder and Clapton, but most importantly Krall—and their contributions seem less a sales gimmick than they could. Yes, the intentions seem mostly pure, and if buoyed by love of the music and of how it expresses McCartney’s own fondness for romance, and if that all sounds way too saccharine sweet for your tastes, it probably is.


As musical interpretations of romance go, Kisses on the Bottom may only get you about halfway there, flowers in hand wondering whether a second date is on the cards, unsure if that’s even what you want at all.


6 out of 10

Different Flavored Skulls: An Intimate Conversation with the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne

Originally published by PopMatters on January 27, 2012

Talking to Wayne Coyne is exhausting.

It’s not that the enigmatic frontman of the Flaming Lips doesn’t have anything interesting to say, but rather the opposite. Ideas come quickly, like an enthusiastic machine gun. There are many reasons why so many people love the Flaming Lips—their unhinged pop aesthetic; the sheer massiveness of their sound; their theatrical live performances; their weirdness—but if not for Coyne, none of that would even exist. He’s an otherworldly motivational speaker, a psychedelic soothsayer, a court jester who felled the king and took the throne for himself.

I could say that it’s an interesting time to be a fan of the Flaming Lips, but that’s always the case. Their history includes explorations in sound (the four-disc Zaireeka and its associated parking lot and boom box experiments), B-movies (Christmas on Mars), and the exhilarating day-glo expansion of the tent revival approach to building a collective experience (pretty much every live show they’ve ever played).

But in the age of the digital download, when artists and record labels are scrambling to figure out how to get music fans to actually pay for music, the Flaming Lips just did what they always do: they got weirder.

Early this year, the Flaming Lips released “Two Blobs Fucking”, a descendant of the Zaireeka days that was a single song divided into 12 separate YouTube videos meant to be played simultaneously. It signified, at least in part, the coming year of odd releases. And when you’re as odd as the Flaming Lips, that’s really saying something.

They’ve released an EP with Neon Indian, performed shows paying tribute to their own classic albums and put four songs on a USB inside a novelty item called the Gummy Song Skull. They’ve rarely let a wild idea go unchecked, unrecorded or unreleased. And they did it all on a major label.

If Warner Brothers isn’t always an active conspirator in the bizarre shenanigans undertaken by Coyne and his fellow Lips, they’re certainly willing cosigners. In fact, Coyne says, his experience with Warner Brothers is considerably different than the stuffed shirt shitstorm indie hopefuls are always scornful of.

“I think a lot of major labels get a bad rap from unknowing portion of bands who have, I guess, had a bad experience with them,” says Coyne. “But most of the people that we’ve dealt with at Warner Brothers, even previous to being signed there, were all about being creative and being unpredictable and doing new things and being, you know, absurd and being unique. All these myths about major labels wanting to take you and normalize you and put you in a mold, I mean we’ve never experienced that, otherwise we would not want to be at Warner Brothers. The people that signed us ... the woman that signed us signed Van Halen, signed Dire Straits, signed KD Lang, signed Devo. You know, the people that we signed the deal with, there was a guy that signed Jimi Hendrix and the Sex Pistols. I mean, that’s pretty extraordinary. These are not conservative money-oriented people. These are people that loved music, and when they brought the Flaming Lips to the label, they were like, ‘We found another part of our story. We have another Frank Zappa. We have another Captain Beefheart. We have another Jimi Hendrix here,’ and I was like, ‘Wow, amazing!’”

Coyne added that the relationship between the Flaming Lips and Warner Brothers has reached the point where the label will often allow the band to follow their own path outside of the artistic realm.

“Warner Brothers is arguably one of the biggest corporations on the planet, you know, and they deal with in-depth, to my liking, sometimes bullshit entertainment strategies,” Coyne says. “They’re a big bureaucracy, and something I can do in ten minutes, sometimes when they get involved—and they know this—will sometimes take ten months, simply because there’s a lot of people who have to sign off on something. Back in the day, if we wanted to do something that had a budget of half-a-million dollars, well you’d have to get 200 people to say, ‘This is cool,’ and that takes a long time. That’s a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of desks things have to go through. Lucky for me, they have a lot of money, and if I’m patient enough, I can make that work for me.”

That goes beyond the decision-making process, as well. According to Coyne, many of the Flaming Lips’ projects are completed with almost no label involvement at all.

“Nowadays we don’t really need them to give us money,” Coyne says. “We just can say, ‘We know how this shit works, and we are going to move ahead on this.’ When we made that Neon Indian record that, I believe it was March when that came out, we recorded it and in six days actually had a record in our hands. When I asked (Warner Brothers) how long it would take, they were like, ‘Well, if you can get the music to us, we can get you maybe a demo, a master that you can listen to in six weeks,’ and I can’t take six weeks. I just started to say, ‘Well, I’m going to find somebody who can help me do it quicker and better and not so much bureaucracy.’ And I didn’t know if it would be three weeks or if it would be four weeks. I tried to get it overnight. And so I found places that can do what we want them to do quicker. And they wanted that.

“We’ve been doing this for almost 30 years now. We made our very first record ourselves back in 1983/1984. It would be difficult for someone young who was just getting into it to do what I’m doing. I have a lot of people that want to help me do cool shit that have been doing cool shit for a long time. That being said, some of it is that we can just move a lot faster without the giant machine of Warner Brothers being dragged along with us, you know? So they want to find ways to be more immediate and to be more current and to be more spontaneous. But it’s difficult for them, because they’ve got thousands of people that have to sign off on shit, for better or worse.”

The Gummy Song Skull was devised in a similarly independent way.

“We knew that we were going to do these objects, and I’ll give you the quick, you know, fast-forward version,” Coyne explains. “Our very first record that we made had these versions of these skulls on them, and when we knew that we were going to get into this self-imposed indie version of ourselves here ... we never have any fucking ideas, and so we fucking panic and say, ‘We’ll use the skull again! That’s what we did in 1984!’ So I bought some skulls, some plastic skulls at Urban Outfitters, and we just started to play with them in my shop.

“We started to think of like objects that would represent whatever the Flaming Lips represent. And we were dipping them in rubber and plastic and doing shit with them. I ended up with this pink rubber skull, and my wife has some pretty exotic perfumes and has a perfume that smells like bubblegum. So I sprayed a pink rubber skull with some bubblegum perfume. I have parties at my house all the time, so people are over here doing drugs and shit, and they were fucking with this skull, and they said, ‘Wayne, this skull is made out of bubblegum, can we eat it?’ And I said, ‘No, you can’t. It’s made out of rubber even if it smells like bubblegum,’ but it gave me the idea to make them out of bubblegum. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have a fucking bubblegum skull?’ Well, we tried to get it made out of bubblegum, and no bubblegum company could figure out a way to do it. But in this process of trying to find a bubblegum place, we stumbled upon this gummy guy who’s out of North Carolina who makes giant gummies. We called him and said, ‘Would you like to make a skull out of gummy with this?’ He was a Flaming Lips fan, so bam! You can fast-forward to where we are now with these things that are so elaborate. But without him being a fan, and without him being a freak and without him being ambitious and without him wanting to try new things, this could take a year. We made the first skull ourselves; we believed it could be done. Having a lot of experience and just being lucky to find likeminded people with skill who have a great thing they’re doing that can sort of enhance what we’re doing, you’ve just got to get lucky.”

There’s also room in Coyne’s world for mistakes, especially as they often lead somewhere unintended with the end result something potentially more special than the original idea. It all stems from Coyne’s unabashed optimism.

“To me everything is an opportunity, from the size of the box that it’s going to be in to the way it’s going to smell,” Coyne said. “It’s not just, ‘What is the music going to be?’ All dimensions of things are an opportunity for you to say, ‘Here’s what it could be.’ So when we started to think about flavors, part of me was saying, ‘Can we make a brain that’s marijuana-flavored?’ and your imagination just goes wherever it goes. When I said that to (the North Carolina gummy guy), he said, ‘Yeah, let me try that.’ He sent me samples of his hemp-oil experiments and some of them failed miserably and were too oily. When people are willing to try, especially in the realm of art ... you’ve got to know that if you can’t do weird shit in the Flaming Lips, it’s going to be a bad world. We are willing to try and see what happens. Part of it, too, is aesthetic. When you see a skull that’s red, you’ve got to think, ‘Is that strawberry? Is that cherry? Is that blood-flavored?’ There’s a lot of things it could be. But you kind of want it to be, not an obvious experience, but to play along with it. So, I don’t know. All that stuff to me is another opportunity to insert your will of the world on it.”

The malleability of a Gummy Skull could well represent Coyne’s own flexibility when hurdles suddenly pop up.

“If I’d have been stuck on saying, ‘It must be bubblegum, godammit,’ we would really be in a pickle,” Coyne said. “Part of it is that you’re not rigid with your ideas anyway. Our movie that took seven years to make, Christmas on Mars, I think in the beginning you have a lot of ideas of what you want to do, and some of them work and some of them don’t. And I would say even the very first scene that I shot, I was using the cement factory that’s on the south side of town here, and I spent months getting this scene ready. It was in an abandoned cellar of the cement factory, and it was filled up with water, and I was going to have this space guy emerge from this water, and we were going to add computer effects to it and it was going to be a big hallucinogenic thing. And the day that I went down to film it, the motherfucker who owned the place didn’t tell me, he had it pumped out. I went down there and all the water was out of it, just kind of like out of nowhere. And I was like, ‘What are you doing?’ And he said, ‘Well, I knew you wanted to use this place so I’m getting it ready for you,’ and I said, ‘Dude, I’ve been getting ready for a month with this water.’ We just had to fix up whatever we could do now that the water wasn’t in there, and fill it up with smoke and lights. But I would say that it turned out a thousand times better than if the water had been in there. I think for me it’s just this idea that you cannot be set. You can say, ‘I always have ideas, and they’re good if they turn out good,’ and that’s all you can say. Your ideas are always failing and exploding and turning into another one all the time.”

But when your brain is firing full speed every minute of every day, the realities involved in making your dreams come true can sometimes be a bit of a bother, too.

“These devices that kind of take some manufacturing, you kind of have to get a little bit ahead of the game, which to me is just a mindfuck,” Coyne said. “You’re always living in the moment, but you have to project ahead and think, ‘Fuck, we’ve got to get that thing going.’ It’s kind of like planting grass. It’s like, ‘I want that hill to be green.’ Well, you have to plant the grass now so a year from now it’ll be green. It’s always those types of dilemmas.”

But for all the Technicolor imagery and sensationalism surrounding the Flaming Lips, it all stems from the music. For Coyne, that means tapping into a feeling he experienced nearly 35 years ago.

“It’s hard for people to relate to this now, but when I saw The Who in 1977, they were to a lot of people not at the peak of their power,” Coyne recalled. “But I think the night that they played in Oklahoma City, they were having an extraordinary night. And they had giant laser beams and they had their great energetic freak out show. Pete Townsend was probably at the peak of his peakness. Moon was playing, and they were loud. I mean, I was only 15, and it was like a religious experience where you feel like, ‘They’re speaking to me, and they’re speaking everybody, and we’re all feeling this love and this energy all at the same time.’ And it was extraordinary. Everybody that was there came away feeling like we got to peek at some other life. I’d seen plenty of bands before that, and I didn’t know that much about The Who—I was pretty young, and I was experiencing a lot of new music. But I was like, ‘Fuck, why doesn’t every band play like The Who?’ And my older brothers would say, ‘Dude, it’s ‘cos they’re The Who.’”

Coyne couldn’t be in The Who, but he didn’t have to be. Because for the Flaming Lips, a big part of their collective goal is to knock the crowd the fuck out, to have someone’s older brother tell him, “Dude, it’s ‘cos they’re the Flaming Lips.”

“Having experienced that sort of power, it was like, ‘Fuck, that’s what I want to do,’” Coyne said. “I didn’t want to do music. I mean, I know it’s about music. But I wanted to be in a band that got to do that, that did that sort of thing. Not in a band because we’d be popular, and not in a band because we’d be famous. I wanted to be in a band that did that thing. And I’m sure it’s connected to that, seeing and experiencing it from the other side. And I’m always putting myself in the audience, saying, ‘What are they getting out of this? Does it sound right? Does it look right? Is it powerful? Are we building this momentum? Does it work?’ I want the audience to have that thing. When they respond, we feel it too. And I think that’s exactly what The Who was feeling that night. They were feeling that energy and that love regenerating itself in the room. That’s why they played so fearlessly and so confidently, because they knew as they did it was going to work and make it better.”

But Coyne also recognizes that experience is a two way street, noting that much of the energy and excitement comes from even the furthest corners of wherever the band happens to be playing on any given night.

“I don’t always feel like we’re the ones responsible for it,” he said. “I feel like music has such an impact on people that they give it this epic meaning, because it’s a personal thing to them so it has no limits of what the meaning can be. You could see where it would be impossible for me to create exactly the meaning that it has. I kind of make the song and you kind of make it special to yourself. I think the more people think that about our shows, the more people are drawn to our shows. They think, ‘This will be a special experience.’ Our audiences get filled up with people who are willing to have this kind of over the top experience with us, and so when that happens ... if you’re kind of a casual person in our audience, if you think, ‘I’m just here to get high and listen to music,’ and if you’re standing next to ten people who are completely overwhelmed by this show, you’ll probably be overwhelmed as well because it’s just kind of this group thing, this kind of contagiousness that happens when you’re in a group. Not to put a negative twist on it, but that’s why people are always concerned about riots, because once they start it’s very difficult to resist. And that’s true in the other sense as well, that we all become one and love each other and can get taken away by something. That’s contagious as well. I’m not saying that I’m doing that. I just know that once that starts to happen in the audience, it’s easy with the way our music works and the live show and there are so many visuals and all that, that by the end of it, you could have walked in and, you know, ‘Fuck, I’m just here to listen to music and get laid,’ and then you’re like, ‘I love everybody, man!’”

And for all the laser beams and gigantic Hulk hands, the Flaming Lips make the greatest impact because of the music. The excitement of recording new music is as tangible for the band in 2011 as it was back in the ‘80s when they weren’t sure anyone was ever going to hear it.

“In the beginning, we always are in a panic and struggling with what we can just to make one song any good, you know?” Coyne said. “And we think, ‘Well, if we get one song that’s good, in that process it usually would turn into a fucklot of things just because you’re being immersed in ideas. I don’t know if it helps. If you’re working on something and everybody is excited in that time, that’s all you can ask. Sometimes we do something we love, and then six months later you hear it and go, ‘Oh, that’s just kind of ridiculous. Why did we do that?’ But you just kind of have to believe in the moment you are wanting to do it. But, yeah, it sometimes gives you a lot of freedom to think, ‘We’re doing four songs as opposed to one.’ And then you think, ‘Well, one can suck and it won’t matter.’ We really do think like that.”

That renegade swashbuckling vibe is part of the reason the Flaming Lips veer so effortlessly between pure pop confection and sonic exploration, often within the same song.

“When we made Embryonic, the record that came out a couple years ago, the fact that it was a double-record changed everything for us,” Coyne said. “You don’t realize how rigid you are. We were thinking in terms of songs, and then we thought since it was going to be a double record, we knew we were going to have this abstract, avant-garde side of it. We’d do a song, and then we would kind of relish the freedom of doing the freaky stuff, you know? After we did that three or four times, I said, ‘Why are we fucking with these songs? Why don’t we just do the freaky stuff, because that’s what we want to do anyway?’ And we ended up making a record that was all the other dimension of the record. You don’t know what tricks your mind is playing on you, because it’s all done in your subconscious. Occasionally you get this insight where you realize, ‘We’re retarded. Why can’t we just do things this way? Why can’t we do things like this all the time and not worry.’

“But it’s hard, because you’re always looking for a system to work on, and there is no system. But if you realize there’s no system, you’ll go insane. So you always build one no matter what. It’s the music as well. Sometimes we make this music, and we forget, ‘Dude, this is going to come out in three weeks. We’re not just sitting on this.’ And to me that’s where the real freaky joy is. We’re not mulling over 100 songs here and releasing four that we think are great. We’re literally making them and releasing them. And it’s a wonderful, spontaneous time to be creative. And it’s exhausting. Everybody around me is fucking sick of making music and candy and all this shit. But fuck, it’s cool.”

The Lemonheads Bring 'It's a Shame About Ray' to Brooklyn

Originally published by PopMatters on January 17, 2012

It’s 1992 all over again. The Lemonheads played a sold out show at Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory on Wednesday night, the conceit being a run through It’s a Shame About Ray – the breakout album which put Lemon-leader Evan Dando’s lustrous locks squarely in the hearts and minds of neophyte hipsters from sea to shining sea. The gig was the first of a lengthy tour which sees the band give its regards to the Deep South and Midwest, flirt with the West Coast and ultimately return to the NYC-metropolitan area for a pair of mid-March shows at Hoboken’s legendary venue, Maxwell’s.

I say “band” despite the common knowledge that the Lemonheads have effectively served as a Dando solo venture since even before It’s a Shame About Ray introduced Generation X to timeless pop songwriting, albeit viewed through a grimy slacker lens. Anyway, finding offense in Dando touring as the Lemonheads is an absurd notion, since even in the busiest of times he never had the same musicians around him for more than a couple of years at best. The Lemonheads, for better or worse, are all about Evan Dando.

The guys on stage with Dando at the Knitting Factory, and in all likelihood the entirety of the tour to follow, sound great. The drums are sometimes overly flashy for performances which otherwise stick close to the original arrangements, but that’s a minor quibble at best. What’s perhaps most apparent on the stage with the current incarnation of the Lemonheads is this: Everyone is clearly having a very good time. And as long as you’re taking a trip through the past, you might as well enjoy it.

Evan Dando’s past is nothing if not notorious, an often grim bacchanalia of drugs, excess and hanging out with the likes of Oasis and Courtney Love. That he survived at all would be worthy of note on its own, but the sobering truth is that he’s not only survived, but he still looks fantastic. This superhero has been through wringer after wringer and still looks as though he stepped off a surfboard and onto the stage. He’s in trim fighting shape, still has a full head of messy, sexy hair and is still the handsomest guy in any room he’ll ever enter. For those of us who awake looking like a pile of broken dreams after a night where, “Okay, but just one more beer” is the exception rather than the norm, this will either come as welcome news or as sure a sign as any that life just isn’t fair.

But we want the Evan Dando we remember from back when we first fell for the scamp, and if he’s had to arrange some sort of Picture of Dorian Gray deal with the devil to preserve that, well that’s cool with us. Whatever he’s done, its working. I didn’t have to squint my eyes and pretend or con myself or whatever, because the perfectly disheveled guy on stage looks like he stepped out of a time machine from one of those extremely ‘90s videos the band made, right down to the same guitar, the same t-shirt, the same knowing smirk. He’s also come armed with the same songs, which in case it’s been a while since you’ve heard them, are bona fide classics.

The first sign of trouble for the original Lemonheads, or so the legend goes, was partly ego-based, but perhaps more tellingly was down to the fact that Dando’s growth as a songwriter was pushing him into the spotlight. It’s why the Lemonheads can tour It’s a Shame About Ray and from stem to stern, there’s no waste, no moment where the concept falls flat. Okay, so the album clocks in at just shy of thirty minutes, but the songs are so perfectly written, so beautifully wrought that nothing is inessential.

But before the full-band run through the album, Dando hits the stage for a brisk run through a few songs on acoustic guitar, beginning with “Being Around” from Come on Feel the Lemonheads, as charming a song with the word “booger” in it as you’re ever likely to hear. Dando performed solo again after the sequential run through It’s a Shame About Ray, as well, playing songs of his own as well as the odd cover, such as “Streets of Baltimore”, a tune most closely associated with the late Gram Parsons.

Whether the night’s most effective sing-a-long strikes the same chord on the road remains to be seen. “Frank Mills”, the song from the musical Hair which closes It’s a Shame About Ray, is rife with local references: “He lives in Brooklyn somewhere” got a predictably huge cheer, as did Dando wryly observing mid-song that the Waverly was now called the IFC Center.

The crowd was largely comprised of fans who remember what the Lemonheads sounded like when “college rock” morphed into “alternative rock”, but that’s hardly a prerequisite for attending a Lemonheads show. The songs are truly timeless, and if Dando is going to keep delivering them with geniality, good humor and gusto, it’s worth putting away your CD’s for the night and enjoying them live.