NU Community Concert Blog

[Ramona_A_Stone]

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The Big Old Bug is the New Baby Now
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Something has always vaguely bothered me about The Flaming Lips. I lived in Norman (college burb of OKC, their hometown) for years and worked with a number of "rival" local bands. Of course all local bands are rivals, but I have to say The Lips were particularly elevated to nemesis status, and I never really knew why. Everyone said they were retards, and thinking that epitaph was hardly warranted by the story of an ambulance being called to one of their gigs because the bass player had OD'd on cappuccino, I'd ask what their music was like and everyone would say "they suck." I was finally motivated by community loathing to go and see them in their prehistoric form, and they did kind of suck, but I had to admit they sucked with a kind of raw brilliance.

Wayne (lead singer) Coyne reminded me of everyone I knew that was trying to make art out of ordinariness; you know those coffee house poets that seemed to think that by steeping their audience in the Bland Midwestern Obvious they might brew some ultrahip concoction and become all the rage, a sort of approach that might work for Japanese exchange students, but never for natives. But he was such an incredibly nice and unpretentious guy that you just had to like him and feel sorry for him at the same: he obviously couldn't help being a brilliant retard.

Then they started to do some things that really pissed me off: The Boombox Experience, The Parking Lot Experiment, Zaireeka, (the four CD set which each have various tracks from songs and are meant to be played together from four separate CD players/stereos), and the Headphone Concerts, (in which certain tracks from the live performance and/or other sources were in certain sets of headphones, and not in others, distributed amongst, traded and often listened to with one ear by the quasi-mystified audience). These were not only brilliant and retarded concepts, concepts which had been lying around in the most eclectic corners of the minds of many who were simply underwhelmed at the feasibility and demographic prospects of such difficult listening experiences, but they were concepts The Lips were getting away with favorably, quietly and subtly changing the texture of pop music forever. The brilliant retarded bastards.

I finally became a confirmed fan even though, basically, just about everyone I know is a musician who grew up at the same time and in the same region as The Lips, exposed to the same weather, convenience stores, drug availability, and late night cable TV channels, and so most discussions about them can be condensed to "yeah, they are brilliant retards." I usually pretend not to like them half as much as I really do.

It was a steamy Dallas night. We parked and were immediately informed by scalpers that the show was sold out, which sucked because there were four of us and two tickets. We haggled.

The old theater was packed elbow to elbow and about the temperature required to bake pastries. We opted for many shots of tequila, which, added to the sweat, was all the lubrication required to slide up to the front. The Starlight Mints (another OKC band) opened the show and halfway into the 1st song I hated them and wanted them to die slowly and painfully. This is an attitude I reserve for opening acts which are less than absolutely breathtaking, and is based on the practical fact that the human ears can only take so many decibels for so long before they begin to shut down. Thankfully they didn't play long, and we met some really cool people in the crowd. It's hard not to be really friendly when you're dripping sweat into each other's drinks.

Then Liz Phair did a set. In panties and fishnet stockings. (Wayne would later comment on her nervousness about her wardrobe, but everyone agreed it was the right thing to do, except for the hat.) By the time she launched into Hot White Cum, I was thinking we should all just get naked, a sentiment echoed by others in the crowd, although almost everyone didn't. Liz's set was short too, and sparse, two guitars and a bass, no drums. She didn't suck, but I spent most of her set watching my new friend Karl blush bright red as I clarified various lyrics for him.

There had been a few enormous balloons being bounced around for some time, and now I noticed there were about 50 of them, some as big as cars, bouncing everywhere and filled with little devices that made a sound like a turkey gobbling. It's hard not to be in a good mood when you're shooting tequila and there are car-sized balloons that sound like turkeys bouncing everywhere.

Most of The Lips shows I've seen seem to have the general theme of a child's birthday party. This would be impossibly trite and retarded if it didn't work so brilliantly. It works because you can't help becoming a maximum of nine years old, even if you try, and since I didn't, I became about five. An host of animal-suited groupies waved strangely phallic balloons and spotlights continuously from the wings. Everyone was dressed in animal suit bottoms, except for Wayne, who wore the typical white three-piece suit which, by the end of the show, looked as if he'd taken a swim in it. He relentlessly fogged, confetti'd and strobed us with a stage presence somewhere between Rip Taylor, Moses, and Alex Trebek, and constantly exchanged silly props apropos to a child's birthday party magician. He kept apologizing for the heat and asking if everyone was OK. You just wanted to leap onstage and hug him, and a few people did.


Wayne does his impersonation of Mighty Mouse during Fight Test.

The encore was an exceptionally beautiful rendition of Pink Floyd's Breathe from Dark Side of the Moon, complete with projected video of the Teletubbies. (I understand that they plan to cover the entire album on their second set in the upcoming Bonaroo Festival, with a synched projection of The Wizard of Oz... and with that, I rest my case about them being brilliant retards.)

At the end of the show, Wayne informed us it was raining outside, and since we couldn't get any wetter, everyone rushed outside to celebrate, dancing like Fred Astaire in every available puddle. It took some of us hours to grow back up.

I become a bigger fan every time I see them. For me, they now occupy the niche REM once inhabited: the brilliant, retarded, compassionate, living spokesband of the American zeitgeist. My advice is that if you ever get a chance to see the Lips live, you'd be a complete retard to miss it.


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Growing Up
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Peter absorbed by the Zorb.

The opening act was twenty-five-year-old Uzbek singer and stunning beauty Sevara Nazarkhan, and I became an instant fan. The music was a mix of traditional instruments and clubby beats over which Sevara's voice arced, soared and trilled with almost absurd ease. She wandered aimlessly around the huge stage, reclining here and there as it suited her, and often seemed to be addressing unseen presences in the Texas sky. Toir Kuziyev, her lutist, played masterfully, producing a nasal electric tone somewhere between a bowed string and a Telecaster with a Ross Fuzz Box. She disappeared briefly to exchange her traditional dress for a cowboy hat and boots, which seemingly increased one's awareness that Twang is universal. It's a rare experience to be utterly transported by music you've never heard before, but every sentient being in the vicinity was.

Unfortunately not every being in the vicinity was sentient, and as Peter took the stage the semi-outdoor environment was liberally peppered with loud obnoxious rednecks engaged in beery, screaming cellphone conversations, or, as the guy next to me incessantly did, whistling with ear piercing shrillness in that particular manner of acute appreciation which ironically approaches heckling. Why people feel a need to get Peter's attention and shriek "Shock The Monkey!" every time he began to prattle in his characteristically soft rasp, telling fragile little stories between songs, completely escapes me. I kind of thought it was just me and that I was an asshole for letting myself be annoyed, in spite of an $80 ticket and a 300 mile drive, until I read the reviews of this show (by other fans) at Peter's web site and found the complaint to be prevalent. The consensus was that the venue itself (The Smirnoff, formerly the Starplex, where I've seen Bowie & NIN, Yes and a number of other great shows) was a bad choice with its rodeo arena ambiance which seems to encourage a... somewhat less than sophisticated listening/appreciation experience in some of the indigenous folk.

I hate to belabor this kind of bitching, but one example is too ironic not to mention. At one point Peter launched into a typical little sermonette, that went something like this, paraphrasing: "At one time Great Britain had the kind of wealth and power which allowed her to go anywhere on the planet and use anyone's resources as she saw fit, and now it seems, it's your turn..." This roused a huge, prolonged cheer, at which Peter tried not to appear too surprised and continued almost inaudibly, something along the lines of "this kind of power only has value as long as we remember to always respect the basic human rights of others," at which about 95% of the crowd fell into an awkward silence while the other 5% of us cheered. Oh well, c'est la vie.


While you were out, PG became an ancient Chinese philosopher.

There were also a lot of complaints about Melanie, Peter's daughter, who sang back up, especially based on the fact that she missed a couple of Kate Bush's cues on the song Don't Give Up, after which Peter quipped, "don't worry, we'll add that one to the list." On the whole I think she has a great voice for that particular niche in Peter's music and her performance, while certainly not polished to the extent of her formidable company which would make any sane person more than a little self-conscious, was quite more than adequate.

My only criticism of the show itself was based on the set list: I really didn't want to hear Sledgehammer, or Shock the Monkey, or Games Without Frontiers, if, as I felt, it was at the expense of hearing more new material. I had hoped to hear every song from UP and more of OVO, personally. It's also vaguely irritating that these past pop hits always receive the loudest ovations. I wish American audiences would grow up enough not to require artists to do all their most famous pony tricks, but such is life in the circus.

I certainly can't complain about the impeccable renditions of these songs they delivered, or about how much fun Peter had with them, racing to and fro in a bulky jacket covered with flashbulbs, weaving through delightfully silly minimalist band choreography, everyone leaping into the air in time with bursts of smoke, spinning in circles, or racing back and forth across the stage jerkily on battery powered two-wheeled "people movers" in a sort of lude and ridiculous dance.

The Zorb, pictured above, was lowered onto Peter during the intro to Growing Up, and he performed the whole song from inside the 15-foot high transparent double sphere, deftly maneuvering around the stage and bouncing in syncopation to the choruses. Afterwards he told the story of getting the idea from one of the "gerbil balls" he had purchased for Melanie's pet rodents, and offered the suggestion that it was a sort of living proof of the law of Karma that he should end up entertaining us in the same way.

It's always such a pleasure to see Tony Levin live that I was just a tad disappointed that he wasn't more animated on this tour. I had forewarned an uninitiated friend to expect the world's sexiest bass-playing freakazoid, and he opted for mere deftly understated ultrasuperbness. Shucky-dern. David Rhodes seemed a little more concentrated than usual as well, and I sensed they were a little tired from the tour, and were not quite up to their usual illusion of pure effortlessness, though they played flawlessly.


Melanie and Tone E. Levinnnn, suuuupergeeeniuuuuss...

In Your Eyes, while not my absolute favorite Peter Gabriel song, was, for me, one of the highlights, (second only perhaps to a near-demonic rendition of Darkness). Toir and Sevara returned to the stage and she absolutely nailed the Youssou N'dour niche in the song, and I was most properly utterly exalted.

Finally, so was everyone else. It became a little like the scene of the big party at Zion from the Matrix, and I even forgave the shrill whistler.

The show ended with Peter solo at the piano, doing Father, Son from OVO, and the wind came up rather fiercely and lightning began to strike, so seemingly on cue that I thought it was an effect. By the time the song ended, the Texas rain was torrential and Peter was gone.