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Shortly after releasing its long-rumored Christmas on Mars film and completing the expansive, two-disc Embryonic, The Flaming Lips returned to the studio to cut yet another album. But instead of focusing on its own songs or even a mix of covers, the Oklahoma-bred band decided to record a new version of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. A collaboration with Lips leader Wayne Coyne’s nephew Dennis and his band Stardeath and White Dwarfs, the album uses Dark Side as a reference point and quickly moves into the unknown (including guests spots from Henry Rollins and the singer Peaches). The two bands will revisit the album during its performance at Oklahoma City’s Cox Business Services Convention Center and possibly while on tour next year.
Below, Wayne Coyne discusses his remake of Dark Side, the ideas behind Embryonic and why The Flaming Lips are not the world’s greatest protest band.
The Flaming Lips are not only recording a new version of Dark Side of the Moon as an iTunes release, but are also planning to play the entire album on New Year’s Eve. When did you first decide to revisit this classic album?
Well, I think The Flaming Lips have probably been associated with Pink Floyd even since the beginning of The Flaming Lips. When we started in 1983 there were elements of early Pink Floyd in our sound—Syd Barrett and all that. We always thought, “Man, this music is kind of punk rock and they take acid.” It suited our lack of being able to play real well, but it also suited the fact that we wanted to make freaky noises and make pop songs or whatever. So we listened to a lot of early Pink Floyd earlier in our career.
So when we were getting ready to put out [2009’s] Embryonic, we were in New York. I think we were doing something like The Colbert Report, and I was talking with iTunes on the phone about having these extra tracks. Whenever a group puts out records now there’s always this demand for exclusive tracks, and we just simply didn’t have that many. We already relegated our few extra tracks and Embryonic has a lot of tracks anyway since it is a double album.
The few tracks that we had were kind of B-sides, so I said, almost jokingly, “Well, why don’t we do a version of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon?” as just a way of pushing the conversation to other possibilities. I didn’t mean it literally—I just suggested that idea not giving it any serious thought. And then about a week later we talked with iTunes and our manager, and they said, “You know, I think that’d be a great idea, do you want to do that?”
And suddenly you find yourself recording yet another album…
In the meantime I had given it some consideration. [Flaming Lips drummer Steven Drozd] had come up with a weird version of “Money” and, of all the songs on Dark Side of the Moon, if there’s one song where you’re like, “I don’t know what the fuck we would do with this song,” it was always going to be the song “Money.” You know, it is bluesy, and it is such an iconic song. Of all the tracks that are on the album, I don’t want to say I don’t like it, but I guess it’s the one that if I never heard it again in my life I wouldn’t really care. But he came up with this kind of funny, very pleasing other rendition of that song, so we thought, “Well, that one’s out of the way.” My nephew’s group the White Dwarfs also offered to take up some of the slack and, knowing that they’re weird and have some wacky ideas, it made me more comfortable moving forward.
At what point did Henry Rollins become involved in the project?
I think his manager put us in touch. We just emailed him and said, “Hey, do you think Henry would be into this?” and he said, “This sounds like something Henry will love.” And then we emailed Peaches about doing some singing on it, and she got back to us immediately and was like, “I’ll do this! Count me in!”
I think if any one of those phases had been too difficult we probably would have said, “Ah, fuck it—we’ll do something else.” But, as we moved forward, each one of these ideas seemed to work out and so, a month later, we had three or four days in between doing others things, and my nephew’s group had these three or four days, and so we all just said, “Let’s get together and do this.” Our friend Trent Bell has a studio about 20 miles south of here, and his studio has just been reconfigured to where it is actually two studios in one. So while they were doing “Brain Damage” in one room, we were doing “Eclipse” in another. So all the things where you might think, “That’s gonna be a struggle,” just seemed to work. It’s a great album and a short album. The songs are so resilient—they’re open for a lot of interpretation. So it wasn’t because we were clever, it wasn’t because we knew what we were doing. It was really a lot of coincidences. The Pink Floyd stuff is already worth of listening to, just the strange arrangements and the little things happening. I think people are going to like it.
If I remember correctly, you also covered a few songs off Dark Side of the Moon at Bonnaroo in 2003.
We did that as an encore—that was the first time we played Bonnaroo. And again, I think that was part of this realization that we could do Dark Side of the Moon. We were already pretty familiar with the stuff. We had already done a version of “Us & Them,” which is one of the greatest songs ever, anyway. We had also done “Breathe,” so we knew these tracks before we started working on this album. But the way we played those songs at Bonnaroo in 2003 sounded more like Pink Floyd than our interpretation of Pink Floyd. I think you have a dilemma when play a song in front of people that they don’t recognize—it is hard for them to really get into it. The way we’re doing Dark Side of the Moon now is more us doing our own take on it. Back then we were playing it more like, “You’ll recognize this, it’s a Pink Floyd song.” But I think that was still part of why it didn’t feel like it was such an overwhelming of a task for us to cover this album. [We had the mentality that] we’ll figure out the bits that we don’t already know. They are just really great songs.
I know in the past The Flaming Lips’ covers have influenced your writing. For instance, you said in a 2006 Relix interview that some of the political themes and punk-rock sounds on At War With the Mystics were a direct result of covering Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs.” Have any elements of Dark Side of the Moon crept into your psyche yet?
When we did “War Pigs” I sort of discovered that unless you are faithful to Black Sabbath’s version of the song it really doesn’t work. I’m sure people have taken it and done cabaret versions of it or whatever, but to me the way Black Sabbath is doing that song makes it that you can’t veer very far from it. But I didn’t find that to be true with the Pink Floyd stuff. It’s not that the Black Sabbath song is any lesser of a song—actually, I think that is a great compliment to Black Sabbath that the song doesn’t fucking work unless you sing like Ozzy. With Pink Floyd, I didn’t think that was true. Those songs are so—they’re open to having other meaning to them. For instance, we when they did “Money” on their version of Dark Side of the Moon, I think they were meaning it very cynical. Money is truly the root of all evil, yet I still want it, you know? And I think we’re doing it in almost a hip-hop way [with the mentality that] if you don’t have money you’re a fucking chump. So, in a way, I felt that the way were interpreted these songs almost gave them a new meaning. And that’s kind of a bonus you get out of all that ‘cause I don’t think anybody is really ever satisfied singing someone else’s songs—you usually want to be able to color them and shape them, and I think we got lucky with some of that.
I’ve always felt that cover choices were great incites into a band’s psyche.
The covers are exposing some desire or some sound that you’re curious about, and I know for sure that when we did “War Pigs” there was a dynamic that me and Steven had considered. We thought about this dynamic and how are they were getting away with it. There’s this sound that Black Sabbath does that’s hard to capture. It is powerful but real simple, in the way that they play there’s this strange dynamic. The same way when we did our version of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”—it wasn’t until we actually played it and had to sit there and really get inside these musicians’ heads and think: “What are these fucking musicians and producers and songwriters doing?”
You go along listening to these things and its really not apparent what the recipe is that’s inside of this stuff, and when you have to make the music and break it apart and see what the DNA is, its fucking cool. We’re lucky we’re given such freedom and such encouragement by our audience to do that. I don’t know if a lot of people would see some of the comparisons between that cover and what we did on At War with the Mystics, but it is very related to “War Pigs”—even the fact that it is kind of a protest song. A lot of the things on At War with the Mystics were these drug-addled protest songs in the same way that—I mean how seriously could anybody have ever taken Ozzy Osbourne singing out against the Vietnam War? I don’t know if it’s really anti-war or if makes you want to start a war [laugher]. It is kind of hard to say what function the song actually has. But I think that’s what we liked about it. We didn’t ever want anyone to think that we’re actually protesting the war.
If we were really protesting the war, we weren’t just gonna fucking make a record—we were going to do something else. But we took the ideas or the identity of being a protest band that takes 20 hits of acid before they go up there and say anything. I think that is a powerful thing that rock and roll can do, but I think in some ways it really overplayed that. I think sometimes when we play festivals people think that this is some kind of anti-war statement. But let’s be serious here: We are having as much fun as you can have, and we’re making absolutely no sacrifices. We’re feeling no pain and this is about as far away from war as you can get. And I say that as much as I’m given a chance to say, but sometimes it’s not a very obvious message.
Exactly. People are always going to inject their own ideologies on a decision—even when it ends up just being a coincidence.
Even now people say, “Are you going to play ‘War Pigs?,’” and we always use it as an excuse like, “Well, now we’re not against Obama the same way were against George Bush.” It’s a lame excuse—it is really just a wicked song to play. I’m sure any of the songs on Dark Side of the Moon could easily become one of those tracks we play here and there. And yeah, I think that would be a great thing. I’m more than glad that we’re associated with that aspect of the way that groups take on these other identities. I know that people will mention that Phish does that a lot. Every time we mention that we did Dark Side of the Moon, the people standing in front of us are like, “I saw Phish do that…” so I know that it evokes comparisons to that kind of trip, so it’s cool.
The Flaming Lips has been a staple on the jamband and festival circuits for a number of years now. Though the entertainment value of your show is what has turned the band into a hit on this circuit, I was curious if your time in this scene influenced the creation of Embryonic in any way.
Yeah, I think improvisation—it’s a great word but I think it’s used to sloppily. To be able to be entertaining—musicians love playing music, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be entertaining—but they can really also play music all day long, As long as there is an audience out there to please, they’re very happy. But I’m not really a musician in that sense. I don’t play that well, so a lot of times when I’m improvising, I’m really just grooving, and I think that’s what happens a lot on Embryonic. I mean, you really have to be a substantial musician to have the confidence to think that you can improvise a lot and I’m not, but the things that I like to do and really feel comfortable with are these strange sort of hypnotic grooves. But that allows the other guys in this band who do love to improvise and create just right there on the spot—it allows them the utter freedom to say, “Well, I can sprinkle this little nuance thing in here” and the shape of the thing is being pushed along, yet the nuances of the thing can shift underneath. I think that’s where people are hearing that and I think it’s real. I just don’t want people to think that I’m doing much of the improvising. They allow me to do the groove and there is a sophistication that Steven is playing with that is really limitless. There’s a sophistication to that I think we just stumbled upon by accident—this great combination of my primitive style and his very elegant sophisticated style and you don’t know where one starts and one ends. It is just a very nice kind of blend. I don’t know how we did it or why we did it or if we even knew we were doing it. I think we just kept hearing it, thinking, “Oh, I thought this was gonna suck and I think I like it.” I think that’s all any group does, they kind of move on and think, “Hey, what we’re doing is pleasing me.”
Many writers have described Embryonic as a return to an earlier Flaming Lips sound. Do you agree with that assessment?
You make your first record when you’re 22 and by the time you’re 24 you feel like a completely different person—at that age two years is a long time. But for me, I’m 48 years old, so I remember back even ten years ago and that feels like yesterday to me. I’m reminded all the time that the Soft Bulletin came out ten years ago in 1999, but all that seems very fresh to me. So to say that we haven’t made music that’s this kind of, I don’t know, sloppy, intense and sort of driven by sound instead of by studio effects is correct. I would say we hadn’t really done that since even [1995’s] Clouds Taste Metallic. But to me that wasn’t another world ago. Between me and Steven, and Dave Fridmann, we’re always kind of fucking with our sound anyway. It was just a matter of saying, “Well, we’ve done this. Do you wanna change it? Do you wanna refine it?” And there are things we are able to do on Embryonic that there’s no way we could have done in say the early-‘90s when we were doing [1993’s] Transmissions From the Satellite Heart or even Clouds Taste Metallic .
So yeah, I think it sounds like something that we’re—and I wouldn’t say return to it—I think it sounds like music that we’re comfortable doing, being. And to me I guess that was a great relief ‘cause I was always worried that if we really just relaxed and didn’t worry about the music that we played we’d just sound like a bunch of sloppy, drug-damaged, non-musicians. And I think in a way some of Embryonic does sound like that but in the best ways possible. I was so worried about all these things when we were a younger group—that we didn’t play that well. And now with Stephen and Dave Fridmann and even some of the things that Michael does, they play so well, but I forget that they’re such great musicians. So sometimes we’d be playing and I would think, “We don’t have to arrange that.” It’s just mostly me trying to get over this dumb “we still suck what are we going to do” mentality.”
It is interesting how The Flaming Lips’ evolution from psyche-punks to more expansive art-rockers really mirrors Pink Floyd’s evolution.
I don’t think that The Flaming Lips have ever been very far from the satellite heart of Pink Floyd anyway, but that would be true of a million bands like Radiohead or Wilco. We all say, “Oh yeah, I like Pink Floyd.” But in our defense—and I’m not saying that we need one—but in our defense I would say I have two pairs of green jeans that I wear all the time and, on St. Patrick’s Day, you could have walked up to me and said, “Hey, you’re wearing green pants today” and I would say, “Mike, that’s true, I am wearing green pants today and it’s St. Patrick’s Day, but I wear them all the time anyway.” People might say, “Well, is this a coincidence that you guys were kind of sounding more like freaky early Pink Floyd and then you do this?” and I would say, “That may be true but not really.”
We’re so immersed in this shit anyway. Like I said, the coincidence of why we’re doing Dark Side of the Moon really was not any thread of conceptual thought. It was really just an off-the-cuff thing that I said. I could have said why don’t we just cover The Clash’s London Calling, and it would have meant the same thing, meaning let’s have another way we do exclusive tracks. It looks like something we could have meticulously, well we couldn’t have thought of something better, but really it’s just a dumb coincidence and I’m not denying that. I’m not denying that we have Pink Floyd things about us anyways. That being said, on Dark Side of the Moon hey do very timeless, universal things. Their melodies and their chord changes and the structures of their arrangements are just these things that have been handed down from humanity to each other. You hear that type of arranging all the time and it is great. I think the Syd Barrett-era of Pink Floyd is more uniquely that type of music whereas Dark Side of the Moon just speaks to you if you’re a human.
Finally,you touched upon this a bit earlier, but after New Year’s do you plan to take your Dark Side of the Moon show on the road when you tour in support of Embryonic?
That’s a motherfucker of a question. I could see us—and this wasn’t our intention—but now that I kind of have to consider the possibility, I could see us, if we had rehearsed enough since we’re building a show around it for New Years Eve, playing one night a Dark Side of the Moon show and second night as a Flaming Lips show. I could see the possibilities it giving us—I don’t know if necessarily in a good way, giving us more, a bigger range of shows that we could do. I know when we said we were doing it on New Year’s immediately promotes were talking about bringing our Dark Side show to Europe. And I said, “Well, I don’t know, I hadn’t really thought about it.” And obviously it’s because Pink Floyd is just such a mega-group. I think even for musicians and stuff it’s just a curiosity of like, “Oh well.” It would be easy for us to say hey, “Here’s ‘Brain Damage’ at the end of one of our sets,” and people would be fine with that. But I can also see us embracing Dark Side because it is a very embraceable album
