Are You A Hypnotist?? And Other People Shootin' Heroin

The Flaming Lips LIVE!!!

I promised a full review of this concert last week, but you people have to realize that sometimes the laziness, it overtakes me. But fuck it, I'll bang out a quick recap of this amazing experience despite the obvious handicap of having only 11 hours of sleep.


I drove up to Port Land Wednesday night on little more than a wing and a prayer--the wing being an aging Dodge Grand Caravan (which totally looks badass when the bumper is missing), and the prayer being, well, a prayer of getting a ticket to the sold-out show. (Note: Jokes about praying to a specific deity, whether it be Allah, Jebus, or L. Ron Hubbard are not funny any more. We understand irony, folks. And a moratorium on Scientology jokes. It's retarded. WE GET IT. Moving on...) Arriving at the Roseland two hours in advance, I was hoping the scalpers would bless me with the fruits of their labor. Alas, it seemed we had the half-assed scalpers working the beat that night, buying extra tickets off of people in line instead of the pros who buy their tickets in advance. After an hour of walking around and realizing that the bar across the street was in fact a gay bar (it took a while to notice the softly purple lit upside down triangle/martini glass logo), I was finally able to procure a ticket for myself, at great expense. But fuckit, it's the Flaming Lips. I'll eat next week.


I'll mention a few things about the pre-main event happenings. One, people enjoy looking at a screen that displays messages that they themselves send. A liquid crystal mirror of our stupidity indeed. Along those same lines, I would like to mention one audience member's complaint about the musical selection of Prince in the between-set lull, crying "Sellout! He sold music to Pepsi!". Apparently she didn't realize that since this occurrence that Prince continues to make music however he damn well pleases, so in fact didn't really "sell out", and that the band that she presumably paid to see had licensed their songs to be used by VH1 and most recently Dell Computers. Whatev. Two, I could not get into the opening act, Black Moth Super Rainbow, because I decided that 45 minutes of keyboard arpeggios, vocoder nonsense, and trip-hop beats was not particularly interesting--think Salem's Nodding Tree Remedies meets We Are Wolves, but worse. And three, the Flaming Lips only employ roadies backstage--when it comes to their instruments, they tune everything up for themselves, which is really kind of cool--it really keeps the energy of the crowd up as we wait around for the show to start.


The Flaming Lips entered to a stage sent for crazy 70s Technicolor spacetravel, greeted with blasts of confetti given by dancing Santas and Martian ladies, with Wayne Coyne greeting the audience with giant foam rubber hands. The crowd was whipped into a delirious frenzy, as the band opened with "Race For the Prize". The enthusiasm level would rarely dip below this fevered pace, as the band ripped through standards and random jams alike. The crowd was especially loud tonight, with Wayne comparing it to an arena-sized audience, and made its presence felt on numerous singalongs. We needed little prodding to participate in "Free Radicals", shouting with vigor "Fanatical Fuck!" with each chorus. They also proved surprisingly mature, as they refrained from playing with the beach balls as Wayne requested as they played the rarity "Riding To Work In The Year 2025" from Zaireeka.


The band made sure to play all the recent favorites, from a moving "Waiting For A Superman" to a vibrant "Fight Test". "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Part 1" was morphed into a piano ballad, with the audience singing along through its entirety. We also enjoyed Wayne's rambling commentary, from his explanation of the Zaireeka album to his assurances that the band held no vendetta for Portland--in fact, it was a favorite destination of their's including a trip to the Satyricon way back in the day where they found some one there shooting up heroin in their dressing room, and none of the bandmates were involved. Steven Drozd also would chime in, even taking the lead vocals for his song "Pompeii am Götterdämmerung", while Michael Ivins sat there calmly plucking his bass in his Entwistle-inspired skeleton outfit. Our love for the Lips did not discriminate. The main set ended with a euphoric version of "Do You Realize??", the happiest song about death you've ever heard, and would be the ultimate peak of the show. The band would quickly return for two encores, one the standard rendition of "She Don't Use Jelly", and the other, an intriguing cover of the Stones' "Moonlight Mile", but neither could match the emotion of the main set closer.

Normally I would be disappointed with the absence of the giant plastic ball that Wayne uses to walk over the crowd, but I understand the logistics of the Roseland prevented this. Hopefully, when the Flaming Lips soon return (as they promised at the show), we'll be able to see it in person. And I'll make sure to get tickets in advance this time. And maybe the overflowing euphoria from the show will bleed into these next few crappy weeks.