ust to see pictures of The Flaming Lips in their early days as far back as 1983 is entertaining. By their own confession they were sufficiently unsure of their musical ability that they tried to fool their audience with a combination of extreme volume and crazy outfits. Bassist Michael Ivins (now balding and modestly shaven-headed) can be seen around the time he was recruited into the fledgling band with a huge bleached curly goth-punk Mohawk. In fact throughout this documentary it’s clear to see that he achieved more with his hair while he had it than most other people could manage given two lifetimes to try. It’s also very clear that - for this bunch of guys from a relatively poor, unsophisticated background in Oklahoma City - being a band was a deadly serious undertaking. The lengths they would go to to provide an entertaining show were spectacular, and anecdotes about a live show where one of Wayne’s brothers spent the whole set on stage revving a motocross bike with a microphone attached to the tailpipe are awesome and absurd while at the same time giving a great insight into how the band would wind up with a stage show filled with fake blood, hand puppets, high-powered flashlights, pyrotechnics and dozens of people in animal suits.
It’s not every band documentary that takes you so far back before the band’s success and really shows you the determination, experimentation and certain measure of luck that allowed them to reach the position they’re in now. In many ways this documentary is not just about the band itself but also an insight into a music industry that just doesn’t exist in the same form any more. The idea of a band struggling and starving in relative obscurity for seven years before being signed in today’s culture of instant gratification, online self-publication, and blogosphere exposure seems almost unbelievable. The fact that a major label allowed them four years after being signed before ‘Transmissions From The Satellite Heart’ brought them any kind of mainstream exposure, and that Coyne and company were then given the freedom to follow this up with two self-indulgently experimental albums (the second of which, ‘Zaireeka’, came as a boxset with all four CDs intended to be played simultaneously on four separate hi-fi systems) is the stuff of music industry mythical legend. It’s hard to imagine even an independent label allowing this sort of artistic freedom, and it’s a huge credit to the major label A&R at Warner Brothers that they had the faith and patience to let The Flaming Lips flourish into the wonderfully musical and still deeply experimental band they are to this day. Depressingly, it’s a story that’s hard to imagine happening any more.
The band had clearly become very comfortable with Beesley’s role as a documentarian, allowing for a depth of access that only a friend could fathom. There’s a substantial picture of how Coyne’s early life and family shaped him, and a touching glimpse of how supportive Steven Drozd’s highly musical family were of his career choice. The subject of drugs comes up frequently - unsurprising given the band’s trippy, escapist artwork. More surprising is Coyne’s dismissive attitude towards drugs, adamant that he no longer partakes and at best cagey about his youthful experimentation. All the same, it’s clear that drugs were a part of everyday life around him and that a different path could have led him where his older brother Tommy has ended up - in and out of prison, and probably on crack or meth. The member of the band most candid about drugs is drummer Drozd, who was responsible for the majority of instrumental input from Zaireeka onwards. Like many fans, it was the band’s druggy image that attracted him to them in the first place, and it’s almost too close for comfort watching him talk to the camera whilst cooking up a shot, openly relating getting into booze, then pot, then acid, then ecstasy, then heroin. As Drozd describes the opiate hit, the voyeurism is balanced out only by his frank acceptance that his life has been sorely damaged by heroin addiction. Even as a successful recording artist, it leaves him broke and more or less alone, and Coyne is worried that Drozd could literally die any day - leaving his band bereft of a songwriter, and his movie (now finished and released as ‘Christmas on Mars’) without a principal actor.
‘Fearless Freaks’ opens with a quote from Flaming Lips’ one time manager, Michelle Vlasimsky, making it clear that “these were not normal guys from normal families - you’re talking about freaks,” followed immediately by Coyne himself claiming “we’re just normal guys trying to make interesting music”. I can’t help but feel that this has something to do with the formula that has resulted in such an incredible band. From this documentary, it is clear to see that these are normal guys, and yet their background isn’t what everyone would see this way. There’s a distinct and heavy dose of humanity in everything The Flaming Lips make, and hearing Coyne talk about the realisation of his own mortality - being held up at gunpoint as a young man, accepting his own father’s death, and learning that Drozd had lost a frightening three members of his immediate family to suicide - betrays the band’s innate understanding of humanity. They are able to blend this with a level of absurdity and alien charm that affords them a rare and powerful artistic connection. Few bands have ever inspired as deep a level of fanaticism as The Flaming Lips, and footage of their audience makes it clear that these guys have true fans, in the truest sense of the word. It’s hard to say whether it’s their deeply interactive approach to performance, their humanity, their absurdity, years of hard work, or freedom of artistic experimentation that has allowed The Flaming Lips to develop into such a fascinating band, but ‘Fearless Freaks’ gives an up close and personal account of all this and more. The question doesn’t really need to be answered. It is genuinely fascinating to see into the lives and careers of such abnormal normal guys.