How Wayne Coyne Changed My Life

          I mentioned before that in the late 90's I pretty much stopped listening to rock music and was into jazz and New Age. I'll talk more about that sometime when I get to my Miles Davis collection. Anyhow, in 2002, I had just gone through a divorce and I was in a really bad place in my life. I had a weekend off from work and decided to take a drive up to Mackinac Island to clear my head and just get away. The trip was alright, but I didn't feel much better about my life. On the way back to Detroit, I was driving past Lansing and was channel surfing on the radio. I stopped on a college station that was playing an interesting song. It was about telling people who are close to you that you love them before they die and it's too late. The DJ came on and said it was a new song by the Flaming Lips called "Do You Realize?". I had a vague memory of seeing them on HBO's Reverb and thinking they were kind of cool in an unusual sort of way. I didn't really think about them again nor did I recall "She Don't Use Jelly", which had been a minor hit for them in the mid-90's. Shortly after I heard "Do You Realize?", I was in a CD store with listening stations and one of the choices was Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by Flaming Lips. The opening track "Fight Test" grabbed me right away with the distorted spoken words "The test begins nowwwww"! Then it goes into a song about how a guy loses the girl he loves because he wouldn't fight for her. I stopped listening and bought the CD and that started me on a road of musical rediscovery. I bought all the Flaming Lips CD's I could find and ordered the rest at work. I was done with jazz, except Miles, and New Age and back into rock music.
     I went back through their catalog and was thrilled by the quality and variety and off-kilter insanity of their albums. My favorites were In A Priest Driven Ambulance and Transmissions From the Satellite Heart. Priest had many great tracks, but I especially loved "Five Stop Mother Superior Rain". One line that encapsulates how I feel quite often is "somebody please tell this machine I'm not a machine". There's another great line in the song "There You Are", You stand in the rain/ and the rain fills your brain/ and it makes you think that God/ was fucked up/ when he made this town.
     At work, we had Red Dot machines which allowed you to listen to 30 seconds of a song on thousands of CD's. It also suggested similar artists when you selected a CD. This lead to hours of listening to bands similar to the Flaming Lips and then bands similar to those bands. This is how I discovered GbV, Mercury Rev, Modest Mouse, Pavement and many other bands that I had either missed when they were first out or new bands. This type of music spoke to me in a way that music never had spoken to me before. I felt better about myself and my life and it all came from a random song on the radio by a weird band from Oklahoma City.
      Obviously, their best album is The Soft Bulletin which was released in 1999. My favorite song is "Waitin' For a Superman" which is the only song that makes me cry every time I hear it. The chorus is:
     Tell everybody waitin' for Superman/ that they should try to hold on best they can/ he hasn't dropped them, forgot them, or anything/ it's just too heavy for Superman to lift.
     The way Wayne sings it kills me every time. It also has one of my future funeral songs on it, "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate". The other two on my list so far are "Do You Realize?" and "All Things Must Pass" by George Harrison. I hope my kids will give all of the Flaming Lips music a chance, but definitely the three albums I have mentioned here.
     One last thought about Wayne Coyne. I hope he finds his way again, because he has touched a lot of people with his music. I've gotten to the point with his gummy vaginas and 24 hour long songs and disturbing videos that I can't support his art anymore. I really hate to say that, because he helped get me through a very rough time in my life, but that's how I feel.