The Flaming Lips were a bunch of dirty, druggy freaks from Oklahoma who were SO out there when they first stumbled out of the basement and into the glaring lights of the Rock Nation in the mid 1980’s that nobody even knew what the fuck they were. “Hear It Is” showed up on the shelves in 1986 without warning, and the dudes on the cover just looked like meth-addicted drifters from Planet Freakenstein. Frizzy monster hair, dirt, weird smirks – these fuckers were up to something nasty, no doubt. The back cover was just a big eye, so that didn’t help, but man, the song titles were AWESOME – “Charles Manson Blues”? “She is Death”? “Jesus Shooting Heroin”?!

This was perhaps the first time many of has had even considered Oklahoma as a real place, where real people came from. Apparently, Oklahoma was where they bred teenage monsters. So, we all bought it. Not just the record, the whole thing - frizzy-haired Satanic stoners from nowhere writing songs about Godzilla and Jesus’s drug problems. Keep in mind that by 1986 popular music had devolved completely and utterly into a sewer of overblown, soulless banality – it was either Motley Crue or Janet Jackson back then, and even they were starting to sound the same. We needed some wholesale, gutbucket scuzz n’ roll, and whatever the Flaming Lips actually sounded like – garbage metal, biker punk, acid-blues, whatever – they were just the breath of putrid puke-stench we needed.

And, as it turned out, their music sounded just like UFOs crashing into carwashes. So that was cool.

If the Flaming Lips had been more cynical, and if they were from some fire-belching Metropolis, then they would have probably been like White Zombie – psuedo-psychedelic art-metal propagandists selling snake oil to cosmic headbangers. But they came from an entirely different place in the universe, so they zagged instead of zigged, and ended up concocting a sound that refused to congeal into any one recognizable style – it was just a loud, dizzy mass of schizo-spacejunk that could be wistful, acoustic and rootsy at one end and like the devil himself releasing the bats at the other. Just who where these sinister ministers, and what kind of ugly joyride did they have planned for us?

Actually, they were just some dudes, you know, no big deal. Wayne Coyne bought his first guitar in the early 80’s after saving up the dough from his job at a low-rent fried fish joint called Long John Silvers. He met Mike Ivens one night when he crashed Mike’s party- the parents were out of town – and when Mike foolishly told Wayne that he was learning to play the bass, his fate was sealed. Wayne showed back up at the now-destroyed home with a drummer, and the Flaming Lips were born. The gave themselves the random-sounding name as a goof, figuring it was temporary, but they never bothered to come up with anything better, because they were already too busy learning the Batman theme and playing Oklahoma City’s finest all-black bars and transvestite dives. Lord knows how they survived 1984, but a mere year after they first started playing, they self-released a self-titled EP with five mind-frying drugpunk tracks, and nothing’s been normal ever since. The EP was big business with superhipster rock crits and freak hunters, and it eventually got them signed to upstart indie Restless, who released “Hear It Is” in early 1986.

I kinda wish there was something scary to report about them – it would surely add to the story if they were known to shoot coma victims in the feet with BB guns or kill cats to sell off to Chinese restaurants in their early years, but that shit just didn’t happen. The equilibrium destroying helter-skelter of their crazy-ass rock n’ roll mostly comes from spending their youth watching psychedelic Saturday morning cartoons, and wasting away their teenage years smoking pot and drinking cheap beer in Oklahoma City. And that’s just gonna have to do.
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Being Healthy's Just A Big Drag Anyway

But, you know, they were still recognizably human, even with the suitcases and lines like “Jesus is a rock star who destroys all he sees/Godzilla is a cowboy who is dressed up as a queen”. The burgeoning “alternative rock” movement dug them plenty, too. They had a lot of college radio airplay – aided by the crafty choice to put their most commercial tracks at the beginning of each side of their albums*, and enjoyed accolades in all the glossy hipster rags. Things were looking good for the Flaming Lips in 1987. All they had to do was not go completely mad, and they would have been well on their way to everybody’s second favorite indie rock band, right next to the Replacements.

And then, a year later, they went mad. Actually, the first side of 1988’s “Telepathic Surgery” is a relatively straightforward collection of altrock-baiting heavy-devy fuzz n’ roll, with some quirky pop twists thrown in to keep you guessing. Catchy dope rockers like the Alice Cooper-meets-the Ronettes epic “Chrome Plated Suicide” and the gleaming UFO metal of opener “Drug Machine in Heaven” was pretty much what you’d expect from the Flaming Lips at this point in their career- loud, fun, flashy, goofball space rock. But the flipside…holy fuckin’ rock n’ roll! “Hell’s Angel’s Cracker Factory” is random biker metal riffs and an operatic trill and bleating horns and a revving motorcycle, and it’s followed by three and half minutes of stoned rambling about a UFO (“UFO story”), made all the more teeth-gnashing by the

From there, it was all wavy gravy for our intrepid spacemen from Oklahoma. The Flaming Lips eventually snagged a major label deal, and they’ve been geeking and freaking freely, and with much encouragement, ever since. In 1993, they even snagged a hit song (“She Don’t Use Jelly”), which did nothing to deter them from mutating further.

Since their early daze as junkie-baiting death gospel freaks, the Flaming Lips have always stretched the boundaries of rock n’ roll, just to see how far it’ll go. Like in 1997, when they composed a sci-fi psyche-pop opera called “Zaireeka”, which required you to synch up four separate CD players perfectly to listen to. Or when they started incorporating giant plush animals in their live shows. Most recently, they’ve been composing bubbly, charming, Grammy-nominated cartoon bliss-pop songs about little Japanese girls fighting evil giant pink space robots, and have

So, where’s the Flash Metal Suicide? There isn’t one. There’s gotta be a happy ending once in awhile.

*CD’s used to have sides, back when they were still called records, and were made of vinyl.