Yesterday, we shared with you the first part of our exclusive Q&A with Wayne Coyne, in which the Flaming Lips frontman discussed the future of the music industry, the importance of timely releases and how he came to discover Dallas' A&R Records.
Today, we bring you the second half of our exclusive interview, wherein Coyne discusses the importance (or lack thereof) in music regionalism, how he came up with the idea to put music inside of a skull made of gummy candy, the awkward nature of finding his band's limited releases pop up for high prices on eBay and his collaboration with Neon Indian.
He also discusses, again, his ongoing relationship with A&R Records, the rather nondescript mom-and-pop vinyl record manufacturer located on Riverfront Boulevard in Dallas. Be sure to read up on A&R Records, its history and its recent resurgence here, and, feel free to check out a slideshow of the behind-the-scenes goings-on at the shop, too -- all after finishing the Q&A, of course, which continues after the jump.
That these releases have largely been made available first in the
Austin-Dallas-Oklahoma corridor: Is that intentional? Or just because
that's where you are?
I think it's both. Obviously, it's convenient
for me. It would be harder for me to drive to Chicago than it would be
to get to Dallas, to get to Austin. As much as the Internet gets the
music out there to the world almost immediately--you press a button and,
bam, everywhere in the world, it's available--I still like this idea
that, well, if you want one of these, you might have to come here, or
you might have to know somebody here.
I'm not trying to make our
region more exclusive or more important. But I would imagine that if you
were able to go to the North Pole and Santa Claus was making some toys,
you might find some out in his backyard. Being close to cool shit may
have its advantages.
I love Frank Zappa. I don't love all of his
music, but I love his way of doing things. Frank Zappa would always say,
"I do everything on the records--everything except deliver them to the
store." And I thought, "Well, I'll deliver them to the store."
How have those appearances been for you? These are some obsessive fans.
I
want that. I'm glad when I show up to Good Records, or Waterloo in
Austin, y'know? The people that are there, they love me, they love our
music, and they love what it has done with their lives and they love
what it means. And I want that. That's exactly why I do it. And I think
they want that idea that we get to have this moment together. I like
this idea. I'm standing there, and we're exchanging ideas and stories,
and they're giving me paintings, and giving me their own music, and
giving me their own experiences with our music.
The gummy skulls -- that's a fun idea, but there has to be that thought in your head that says, "Man, this is crazy."
It's
like a lot of ideas. When you initially think of it, you do not think
that you're some super genius. You've thought of this thing. You think
everybody is probably thinking the same shit at the same time, and so
you have this push to say, "This isn't my idea. This is a good idea that
I have stumbled upon." And you get the feeling that there must be a
hundred people out there doing the exact same thing, and so you're
trying to make yours as unique and as good, and frankly as fast, as you
can, because of that inertia from these kinds of ideas. It isn't because
you think it's the greatest thing ever. You think, "Well, of course
it's great," and that pushes you along. And you don't even question it.
But
as it starts getting closer and closer--meaning you start getting these
prototypes--and you're actually digging into it, and people can actually
touch it, and look at it, and taste it if they want to, that's when you
start to settle in and go, "Oh, this is insane. What have we done here?"
It's kind of like waking up in the morning with blood on your hands,
and you go "Oh my God, who did we kill last night?" I was so involved in
what we were doing, that I didn't remember. And that's exhilarating.
You do have to get caught up in your ideas before you second guess them,
or before someone talks you out of it, or if someone says, "You know
what, this isn't making any money. Why are you doing this?"
There
are a lot of practical reasons why you should never do something like
this. But you can't listen to those. You have to have a very practical
part of your mind always working, or you can't get anything done.
The way that we started on this is I bought some plastic skulls down at Urban Outfitters.
In Dallas, right?
Yeah.
We go down there all the time to shop and buy clothes, eat, visit
family and stuff. So we bought these plastic skulls, and I brought them
home and we filled them full of this expandable rubber shit that we
bought and we thought, maybe we'd put our music into expandable rubber,
and you'd have to break these skulls to get them open. And my wife has a
lot of weird perfumes around here, and one of them is a weird bubble
gum-scented perfume. We had made one of these plastic skulls, coated it
in this weird rubber, and sprayed it with some of this bubble gum
perfume, so people didn't know what the fuck we were doing.
They
walked in and I said, "What do you think of this?" "Oh, it's bubble gum.
Can I eat it?" And I said, "Well, no, you can't. But wouldn't that be a
great idea? Wouldn't it be great if we could make these out of bubble
gum?" Well, we tried to get them made out of bubble gum for a few
days--that proved difficult. But, in the process, we discovered this
gummy manufacturer out of North Carolina, called him up, and he said he
was a big Flaming Lips fan, that he'd love to help us do this thing, and
me and my crew around here, we immediately made a gummy skull--we made
it in a mold just in my shop--and showed him how we think it could be
made. And he took our crew's skull that we made, and used his expertise,
and within about two weeks, he sent us back prototypes.
So you
could see the process. I don't think we ever jumped out of bed one day
and said, "Gummy skulls!" It's a process. You just keep going, "Oh, can
we do this, can we do this?"
What's coming next?
I'm not able to
talk about the very next one, because it's a little controversial, so I
don't want to get him in trouble before I get my product, you know? It's
not controversial to me, but he has a factory that deals with a lot of
candy, so they deal with a lot of kids' stuff, and you can kind of
imagine the area that that's in.
But then, down the line, we're
making a skull that's going to be available--there's a show that we're
going to be doing in a cemetery in Hollywood, and there's going to be a
strawberry-flavored skull, and, inside, there's going to be a green
brain that's marijuana-flavored. He's sending us--I might even get it in
this afternoon--a prototype of this gummy skull that has the
marijuana-flavored brain. He assured me that he had some experts on hand
that were going to be tasting it.
So that's going to be available in
June, but it's only going to be available at this special show. I don't
like to announce it too much, though, because everyone likes to put
them on eBay and I don't want people thinking they have to buy them for a
thousand dollars. It's, like, they're rare, but they're for that
special show. And if you're at that special show, then you can get it.
Some of the releases here wound up on eBay. Is that a concern?
It
is, but at some point, if you have money and you want to spend it on
this shit, I can't really control that. I try to the best of our ability
to say, "Look, we're making these, and if you're really wanting one, I
can make one available, and here's how much they cost." You know, some
things aren't available to everybody in the world. That's just a
reality. So I care about it, yeah. But I don't care about it that much.
All
of this kind of started right with your collaboration with Neon Indian,
which came out in March. How did you meet [Neon Indian's] Alan Palomo,
and how did the whole collaboration come about?
Well, [Flaming Lips
multi-instrumentalist] Steven [Drozd] had been playing some of this Neon
Indian music, and I don't know if it was one of their singles or what,
but he played it in the back of the bus. And I said, "Who is that? It's
cool." And then we became interested in Neon Indian, but they were a new
group, so I don't think we thought about where they were from or any of
that junk. Then we were in Portland in October, and they were playing,
and we had a night off, so I just called them up and said, "Hey, I wanna
come see you guys." I went to see them, and they were great. And I went
to talk to them afterward, and in that conversation afterward I was
like, "Hey, we should play a show together. This seems cool."
And you played here Super Bowl weekend.
That
was right after I met him. All this was kind of serendipitous. We just
happened to be in the right place at the right time. Here we are, six
months later, and we've done some shows together and actually done some
music together, and, bam, the world is good.
And you guys got to geek out on some synths together, I assume.
[Laughs.] He's more geeky than me.
Are you going to continue working with A&R moving forward?
Yeah,
I think every other release we've got is from there. We'll do a vinyl,
then a skull, then a vinyl, then we'll do another weird thing. I think,
even beyond this time, this year, when we're doing stuff like this, I
think we'll always do stuff this way, with Stan down there.
So it's been rewarding?
Yeah,
it totally has. I could even see more limited releases, where we go
down there with 500 copies. And you see how easily it works. In the
past, if you wanted to release something for Christmas, you'd really
have to start working on it on the fucking Fourth of July. You'd have to
think in advance. Now I could say, "Maybe I could go down there right
after Halloween, make something and it could be available simply because
I can move at a quicker pace." And it could just be more current, more
"right now" in the way that we're thinking.
And, to me, that's
great. That's what we want out of this. If you listen to this music,
it's music that we did just three weeks ago. It's awesome.
