Watch a rare performance of The Flaming Lips from 1987
Like most bands, The Flaming Lips went through a good amount of upheaval before most of the general public knew who they were. Unlike most bands, however, that process was roughly a decade long. Originally formed in the relatively sleepy confines of Oklahoma City in 1983, The Flaming Lips came together thanks to the combined efforts of brothers Mark and Wayne Coyne. Their initial sound was dark, largely influenced by the English post-punk scene and experimental noise rock of New York in the late 1970s.
After Mark departed following the band’s 1984 self-titled debut EP, Wayne took over lead vocal duties and began pushing the band in a more psychedelic direction. The trio of Coyne, bassist Michael Ivins, and drummer Richard English released the band’s first three full-length albums before the 1990s came around. With little in the way of commercial or even underground success, The Flaming Lips toured constantly throughout the American midwest, bringing their unique freak-rock identity to tiny clubs sprinkled throughout the smaller cities and towns of the US.
As a trio, the band’s sound was heavier and more driving than the goofy orchestral psych-folk that would become their signature. Coyne’s guitar work leaned heavily on distortion and feedback, while Ivins preferred an overdriven sound that helped fill in the space that naturally came out of a power trio format. English fused punk and progressive rock drumming styles, with hard-hitting fills being his most frequent flourish.
Coyne acknowledged that The Flaming Lips weren’t the only band fusing hippie ideals with aggressive approaches to music. “There was a guy who had a radio station that I would listen to real late on Friday nights and Saturday nights… And [he] would say things like that, like, ‘Dude, when more of these kids start to take acid, man, the music is gonna be really intense, and really interesting,’” Coyne told Nathan Pensky in 2012.
“And he was talking about people like Hüsker Dü and, you know … it wasn’t just thrash punk rock. They were starting to infuse more psychic ideas into their lyrics and more emotional things into their songs, and a bigger, more freakier dimension to the sounds that they were using,” he added. “I don’t know if it held true for everybody who was around then. But to me, that was a great explosion. In a sense that was where groups like the Butthole Surfers and even Sonic Youth came from. It’s based in punk rock, but it’s still expanding.”
The Flaming Lips themselves were trying to expand in 1987. That year, the band released their second album, Oh My Gawd!!! Leading off with a sample of The Beatles’ ‘Revolution 9’ and closing out with a loop of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, the band were more inclined to follow their hallucinogenic muse than ever before. The rawness of a three-piece punk outfit was still there, but the intensity of the music came equally from aggressive DIY as it did from trippy acid-soaked exploration.
While the band’s music was constantly evolving, the live Flaming Lips experience still left something to be desired. English attached a mirror ball to his drum kit during shows around the time, and toward the end of performances, a bubble machine would go off. Otherwise, feral energy and flashing light shows were largely responsible for the visual stimulus of the band’s late-1980s performances. One of the best-preserved time capsules from this time comes from the band’s appearance at the Mississippi Nights Club in St. Louis, Missouri, on August 28th, 1987.
The pithy devil-may-care approach to punk could be seen in their song choices. Initially kicking off with heady originals like ‘One Million Billionth of a Millisecond on a Sunday Morning’ and ‘Charlie Manson Blues’, The Flaming Lips settle into a groove that sees them weave in and out of songs at will. The band’s finale kicks off with ‘Staring at Sound’, followed by an interlude of the Midnight Cowboy theme song ‘Everybody’s Talkin’ before slamming back into ‘Staring at Sound’. Without missing a beat, ‘Scratchin’ The Door’ comes barrelling in, and while feedback fills the room, Coyne spits out some of Bo Diddley’s ‘Who Do You Love’ and the Paul McCartney-written bridge to The Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’ before ‘Scratchin’ the Door’ returns for a climactic conclusion.
Check out The Flaming Lips playing at Mississippi Nights in 1987 down below.
