“You’re 17, it’s a normal dumb night, then someone’s screaming, ‘Get on the floor!’ I’m gonna die. This is the end of my life”: The armed hold-up that set the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne on the road to music

In 2020 the Flaming Lips were on a roll – literally. They’d come up with a plan to observe Covid regulations by performing in bubbles to support the launch of American Head, their second album in 18 months. Band leader Wayne Coyne told Prog its autobiographical nature included memories of an armed hold-up and dreams of living in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“I don’t know if this album is prog rock, but it’s certainly in a classic rock style that could easily be considered prog, you know?” Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne is on the phone from a car outside his Oklahoma City home, discussing where his group’s current album, American Head, fits into the musical landscape.

If ever there was a band that made up their own rules, genres and stylistic templates, it’s the shape-shifting, psychedelically charged mavericks he’s fronted through countless experiments, detours, collaborations and reinventions since 1983.

One thing that American Head does have that Prog readers will instinctively understand is an over-arching concept, or at the very least a strong thematic basis knitting its 13 tracks together. And happily, it comes wrapped in some of the strongest, most evocative songs the band have written in years.

The seeds were planted when heartland rock icon Tom Petty passed away in 2017. “It affected us a lot,” says Coyne, “just like when Bowie died. But the thing that got my imagination going was that before the Heartbreakers they were called Mudcrutch, and they recorded sessions in Tulsa in the early 70s, just up the road from where we grew up in Oklahoma City.

The Flaming Lips - Flowers of Neptune 6 [Official Music Video] - YouTube

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I would have been 12, 13 or so then, and my older brothers would go back and forth to Tulsa all the time – they knew drug dealers, bikers, all kinds of colourful people. So it’s kind of a fantasy of mine that my older brothers could have run into Mudcrutch. What if they’d stayed in Tulsa, got waylaid by the seedier side of the scene, and never become the Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers that we know. What would that album be like? Then we thought: what if we make it?

“The band already had “a couple of tracks that were like an Eagles record – the kind of gentle classic rock we always liked,” but at the same time they opted not to go fully down the method-acting route, and put some of their own identity in there too. “We wanted to veer away from the macho lyrics of that era,” says Coyne, “and maybe sing sad songs about our fucked-up families, about what might have happened in our own lives if fate had taken different turns, y’know?”

The “we” he speaks of encompasses his long-time lieutenant and co-songwriter Steven Drozd, who has a not dissimilar background to Coyne, with several wayward older siblings involved in countercultural shenanigans as far back as the late 60s. “We asked, ‘Is this really gonna work?’” says Coyne. “But then we said to ourselves, ‘We can do what we want – we’re The Flaming Lips!’”

There certainly seems to have been no limits to this band’s sense of adventure in the past. They’ve collaborated with everyone from Miley Cyrus to Yoko Ono, issued experiments such as Two Blobs Fucking – 12 YouTube videos designed to be played simultaneously – and presented The 24 Hour Song Skull, a day-long song on a memory stick presented inside, yes indeed, a skull.

The Flaming Lips - Mother Please Don't Be Sad [Official Music Video] - YouTube

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Last year’s album King’s Mouth was built around the tale, narrated by The Clash’s Mick Jones, of a giant monarch who saved his subjects from an avalanche, and whose head was then cut off and cast in steel. Obviously. American Head’s themes are less cerebral and surreal, even if there’s a distinct dreamlike quality to them.

That’s because their lyrics are partly rooted in real events and people from Coyne and Drozd’s lives. Mother Please Don’t Be Sad, for instance, puts us in the place of a teenage Wayne as he apologises to his mum for not dropping by her house... because he’s about to die in an armed robbery. For several years, Coyne worked as a cook in Long John Silver’s fast food takeaway in Oklahoma City, and they were held up several times. The most terrifying incident is recalled on this song.

“So you’re 17, just thinking it’s a normal dumb summer night. Then within a second, adrenaline is flying through you, your heart’s beating out of your chest and someone’s screaming, ‘Get on the floor, motherfuckers, get on the fuckin’ floor!’ And I really did lie on the floor thinking, ‘I’m gonna die. This is the end of my life.’ I thought about my mother – I would stop by on my way to or from work and drop off my uniform there, and she’ll worry where I’m at. And I thought, ‘Oh no, the police are going to show up and say, ‘I’m sorry, he was killed in a robbery.’

“So the song is me letting her know nothing can be done, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time... but of course, then I got to live! Which is the greatest gift you could ever have. And actually I thought anything was possible after that. It exposed me to how fucked up the world could be – but also how wonderful it can be. I think it kind of erased the insecure pettiness of being a teenager and I was able to think, ‘Fuck it! I’m gonna try to be a musician, an artist, and if people don’t like it who gives a fuck!’ Which is a very powerful way to be.”

The Flaming Lips - You n Me Sellin’ Weed [Official Video] - YouTube

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Other scenarios presented on the album include semi-autobiographical visions such as At The Movies On Quaaludes, Watching The Lightbugs Glow and You N Me Sellin’ Weed, reflecting roads not fully taken by the young Coyne and Drozd, as they grew up viewing early 70s counterculture through very young eyes.

“I clearly remember when 2001: A Space Odyssey was out,” Coyne says. “A couple of years after, it was still playing in movie theatres. I remember my older brothers talking with one of their supposedly wiser druggy friends, and they all dismissed even having a job because in the future we’re just going to live in outer space and listen to The Beatles; and being eight or nine years old, I bought into that utopia!

“But while I got more into the music, my brothers got more immersed in the drug culture side of things. The song You N Me Sellin’ Weed is about when I was 16, and everyone was smoking and doing drugs. We knew some of the more organised pot dealers, and it just seemed like this is the way we’re all gonna make money – this isn’t wrong.

“But there’s a whole other side of violence and greed and it’s horrible and destructive. Seeing the effects on some of our brothers and their friends – people dying in motorcycle accidents, put in jail, drug deals gone bad... I would say to myself, ‘I’m just not that tough; I’m not going to be some street thug and have a fist fight every day. I just wanna play music.’”

The Flaming Lips - At The Movies On Quaaludes [Official Video] - YouTube

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It’s fair to say that criminality’s loss has been music’s gain, but these visions of an alternate history lend American Head a vivid nostalgic colour, and their roots in real life add emotional weight to some powerful tunes.

Coyne turns 60 in January, but shows no signs of slowing down his and The Lips’ creative output. His latest project is a plan to circumvent the current Covid restrictions on live shows in a style glimpsed in the video to this album’s lead single, Flowers Of Neptune 6, where he walked around in a giant bubble.

“We’ve been thinking about doing shows in space bubbles – Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, where the Sex Pistols once played, is a big venue we were thinking of trying. If we can’t do normal shows for the foreseeable future, could we do them with everyone in sealed bubbles?”

Inspired by their bubbled performance on The Late Show, the band trialled the idea at the Criterion in Oklahoma City in October and, at time of press, had two full concerts scheduled for December at the same venue. If anyone can pull it off, they surely can. For now, though, there seem like few better places to be than inside his uniquely inventive American head.

The Flaming Lips - Brother Eye [Live Video] - YouTube

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