For almost four decades, The Flaming Lips have been on the cutting edge of the psych rock movement, and on June 1 they released their first volume of Greatest Hits, shepherding fans both old and new toward their favorite studio cuts.
As frontman Wayne Coyne sees it, Greatest Hits Vol. 1 as well as the newly remastered Scratching The Door: The First Recordings of the Flaming Lips and Seeing The Unseeable: The Complete Studio Recordings of the Flaming Lips 1986-1990 provide a window into the band’s earliest stages. “The stuff that’s really, really old now, I almost always just go, ‘Oh shit, this is insane. Why would they do this?’ It’s like I’m like listening and going ‘I don’t know these guys, they sound like they’re fucking cool, they’re crazy,’” he laughs. “So I always love it.”
In a recent conversation, Coyne opens up about the band’s legacy as well as their unique perspective as stalwarts of the summer festival scene and trailblazers of their ever-bizarre journey as a band. “None of it is something that we thought, ‘Oh, we want people to think of us this way or that way.’” he says. “It’s all just been a great surprise.”
You guys have this Flaming Lips Greatest Hits coming out on vinyl and a deluxe edition too with a bunch of B-sides and unreleased demos and other cool rarities. Can you talk to me a little bit about the curation process with this?
We’ve been talking about putting out something like a Greatest Hits probably for over 10 years now at least. There are already these Flaming Lips playlists out there, like on Spotify where it sort of feels like there’s already a Greatest Hits version of our stuff already out there, and I think more than ever we just felt, “Well, we should just make one ourselves.” Not that those other ones aren’t good and not that people don’t like them, we just thought, “Well, why don’t we just make one ourselves and then say this is our version that you can buy it on iTunes. It’s already there, and if you don’t know which record, say, this particular song is on, here’s all these songs that you possibly heard out there in the world, all collected for you and made the way I would want it to be, made easy for you.
We’ve always liked Greatest Hits. Some of my favorite records I’ve ever had were Greatest Hits: Tom Petty’s Greatest Hits, Elton John’s Greatest Hits, or even Donovan’s Greatest Hits, those are some of my favorite records. Not even the records that they would make, you know, I like Greatest Hits. So I think we’ve always tried to make one, we just have never quite been able to pull all the pieces together. The main piece to come together is our producer Dave Fridmann being the guy that’s in charge of all the remastering, and even though I’m there with him and all that, it’s a big long process, especially when it’s this many songs, you know, it’s a lot of listening and a lot of nuances, different levels, records made from the 90s versus records that were made just a couple years ago. So a lot of, you know, a lot of sonic challenges that you have to kinda get solved. And all that takes a little bit of time and listening and you know, fucking with it and all that.
Totally. And then it’s cool, kind of in tandem with the Greatest Hits thing, you have Rhino and Warner Brothers digging into the back catalogue and preserving all these early years of the band. When you’re listening back to all these earlier songs, kinda what emotions do they elicit?
Well, I mean luckily some of them, we’ve never gotten that far away from them, even a record like The Soft Bulletin which is, you know, one of our big, big records, that we played and talk about it all the time. That record’s gonna be 20 years old before too long so it’s already a long, long time ago that these records were conceived of and made. And then there’s the ones from the early 90s and even like the stuff that’s on the Rhino stuff, I mean some of that’s dating back to even the early 80s, and none of that stuff has ever been that far away from us revisiting it, we’ve revisited before, so it’s not an utter shock. But all of it is mostly a joyous occasion.
A lot of times I’m listening to it, and I’m absolutely loving it, absolutely loving how, like, just weird these dudes are and then I’ll say, “Who is this?” and then it’s like, “Dude, that’s you, that’s the same lick.” I’m like, “Oh shit, I don’t remember this song,” you know?
I know you said you revisit stuff often, but were there any songs in particular you kind of fell back in love with?
Even things from our very, very first album, this is the first time that they’ve really been re-mastered. Previous times it’s been re-mastered, it’s only been re-mastered as the way it was being put out, instead of getting out the tapes again and really EQing them differently, and that’s what Dave Fridmann did. I think when we listen to our very first EP that we put out in 1984, there’s a song “My Own Planet,” and hearing that I’m just like “Oh my god.”
Even just that we wrote such a great song, it’s got a great title, and it’s got a great, memorable semi-chorus, that you sing over and over. Then it’s got a great, you know, slightly sloppy, but very energetic and charming song to it, which none of us knew anything about at the time, you know, we were making it, we thought that this was gonna be some visceral, aggressive punk rock or something. Now it’s just very charming and nice.
And a lot of it is like that, where you’re just a little bit surprised at how…the word dorky comes up a lot, but I’m so glad that we were not too preoccupied with being great musicians or great, you know, great…you know, we didn’t get connected to great producers, we were doing it ourselves and learning and learning and figuring things out. And some of the figuring out is what makes the record so wonderful. I don’t think anybody would want to record the way we did and I’m glad we did because it makes the record just sound absolutely unique.
I think that kind of leads perfectly into my next question, because thinking about the band’s unique approach, and how you march to your own drummer, and how you guys have grown so much, the idea of “legacy” is naturally going to come up. When it’s all kind of said and done, decades from now, what would you want people to say is the legacy of The Flaming Lips?
Well, I think we’ve been really lucky that we’ve been able to sort of…You know, we’re already like an old, old group. We’ve already been around for 35 years. We’ve already been around a long, long time, and I think in that time, for better or for worse, whether you are intending it to happen or not, your legacy is being written for you. And you’re either helping it to happen, or you’re against it.
I think for us, this song, “Do You Realize?” has probably changed us more and probably made us more who we are than it is the other way around. There’s hardly a day goes by where I don’t talk to someone who’s said, “That’s the song that we played at our wedding,” “That’s the song that we played when my mother died,” “That’s the song that we played when my brother was, you know, dying of cancer.” Something like that, some big emotional, important, really wonderful thing that music can do. Our song being able to be used and part of people’s lives in that way, I think that changed us, knowing that we weren’t trying to do that with the song, but the song started to do that, and it just happened to us and brought up to a whole ‘nother world of what our music could mean, and even what it could mean to us.
It’s very profound that “Do You Realize” really changed people’s lives. I also really like how you kicked off the Greatest Hits with that song, because I think maybe sometimes bands aren’t as forward. A lot of times some bands like resent their most popular song for some reason.
Especially I think when they’re younger, and then they’re saying, “No, this doesn’t define me,” you know” And I totally understand that, I can totally see why groups, especially younger groups, would not want to be the definers of what they are. You know, they may say, “We haven’t done our greatest songs just yet.” But we don’t feel like any of that that. We kind of feel like we know there’s a certain audience out there that would like nothing more—I would be part of that audience—that would love nothing more than to say, “Put all your kinda popular songs on one record so I can just get it. Instead of having to jump around why don’t you put them all on something, make it easy for me.” And so part of it is that, and that we don’t necessarily feel either defined by it or that being defined by it is a bad thing. And so I think it’s all those things, in time, you either, like you said, you embrace this ride that you’re on or you try to go against it, or, I think in our case, we’re glad for all the good things that happen and we try not to worry about the bad things that happen and that we’re always making music anyway. I mean, I was in the studio just two hours ago, you know, working on a record that’s gonna come out before too long as well. We’re always just kind of immersed in absolutely right now, and you know, stuff that we’ve been doing for almost 40 years, so it’s insane really. It’s insane how much time of my life I get to spend just doing my thing. It’s great.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the festival scene. You guys were one of the first indie bands to become a huge festival act and enter that jammier sphere. And, you know, as opposed to when you guys first broke that barrier, now it’s not unusual to have an indie band and hip-hop music and all these different genres on the festival scene. What do you make of the festival scene now as opposed to when you first started kind of dipping toes into them, you know, decades ago?
Well, I think you’re exactly right. In the beginning, I think people would sort of think a festival is a certain genre of music and if you don’t understand that sort of genre of music, you don’t wanna go to a festival. And then I think people would sometimes go to, I don’t know, I can think of like, a Bonnaroo or something early on where they would say, “You know, I didn’t really know any of the bands but I fucking had the greatest time ever.”
My analogy is always like this: All great parties start with like-minded people liking the same thing and kind of celebrating themselves and the thing that they like. But any great party eventually just draws people who like to party. They don’t really need to be like you or like the same things you like, they just like to party, and since you’re partying, they just wanna join your party. And I think that’s more what we see now. You can go to almost any festival now and see, on the same bill, what at one point we could have called a jamband, at one point we would have called an electronic band, at one point we would have called it a DJ, at one point would have called it a hip-hop act, and a pop act, and that can all be on the same stage, on the same day.
We just wanna be together and party, and we don’t necessarily love every band and we don’t necessarily hate every band, we’re just here and we have the ability to sort of embrace the stuff we like about it and go get something to drink at the stuff we’re not interested in. And I think that’s probably the way it should be, ‘cause it’s all-inclusive.
I think there’s just a great desire in America now, there didn’t used to be, but I think Europe has been like this for a long, long time, there’s a great desire to spend your summer traveling around, going to festivals, seeing new music music that you may not have ever experienced before. I say that’s a fucking amazing, amazing thing to be happening in America.
I heard you saw Phish for the first time not too long ago, what’d you make of that experience?
Even when I went to see them, I didn’t really get to see them, because everybody dragged me backstage and everybody got caught up in talking and exchanging stories and meeting people afterwards. So I feel like I’ve kinda experienced them without necessarily having to be, you know, in the audience knowing every song.
I think what I like about them is what they’re about. I don’t know if I would know too many of their songs but I like the idea that what they’re about being there at their shows and being around them and being around their audience and all that. I think that’s really what a lot of groups are aspiring to in a way. It’s not necessarily that you have to like our music, it’s the idea that you like being in this room with these people and doing this thing, is really what it is. I think I’ve learned a lot about that as well, you know, just going to festivals and not knowing what these groups were. I’ve been turned onto so many cool things I would have never known what they were about, but standing there in it, having the experience with it, does sort of change you about that.
