At the end of Stephen Herek’s 1989 magnum opus Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Rufus explains why keeping Wyld Stallyns together is so important: “You see, eventually your music will help put an end to war and poverty. It will align the planets and bring them into universal harmony, allowing meaningful contact with all forms of life. From extraterrestrials to common household pets. And, it's excellent for dancing.”
In 1989, the Flaming Lips had just released Telepathic Surgery, their last record with Richard English and arguably their last record as a truly amateurish, noisy, gimmicky punk band. It would be four years until drummer Steven Drozd and guitar virtuoso Ronald Jones joined the group and, on the strength of Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, the Flaming Lips, now a sonic assault of a pop group, were somehow thrust into the top 40 and onto Beverly Hills 90210. Even as the gifted Jones left the group in 1996, the Lips continued to develop musically and conceptually, beginning with the Parking Lot Experiments, where Wayne Coyne effectively conducted an orchestra of 40 car cassette decks, and continuing with 1997's Zaireeka, the four-CD album where all of the CDs are meant to be played at once.
With 1999's The Soft Bulletin, however, the Lips reached a whole new level of lush musical brilliance, coupled with a heartfelt sincerity and emotional and conceptual depth rarely even grazed in popular music. One obvious reason for the band’s growth is the continual development of Drozd as a composer and a multi-instrumentalist, a development that has continued through 2002's Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and the Lips’ latest record, At War With The Mystics.
Mystics, in some of its best moments, oddly enough, marks a return to the Flaming Lips’ roots in classic rock. “Free Radicals” and “The W.A.N.D.” hearken back, with some restraint, to the band’s days of thick Led Zeppelin worship on Restless, and “The Wizard Turns On...” sounds, wonderfully, like something lifted off of Dark Side of the Moon. Other standouts include “Mr. Ambulance Driver” and “The Sound of Failure,” which are mature, nuanced pop songs where Coyne, Drozd and Michael Ivins sound like men walking away from the empty glitz that seems to come with iconic celebrity.
Pop Culture Press caught up with Drozd on the road in Florida.
Pop Culture Press: When was the last time you guys were in Florida?
Steven Drozd: The last time we toured here [in Florida] we were opening for Candlebox, and it was just such a brutal misadventure. We played like eight shows in Florida, everywhere—Pensacola, Gainsville, Jacksonville, Miami, Tampa, Orlando. I think that our response throughout the whole tour was pretty tepid from the audience, since we were the opening band, but in Florida I think they seemed especially brutally uninterested. So we just said “let’s just skip Florida if we can,” and only recently we got this offer for this festival and it just seemed too cool to pass up. They offered a good amount of money and they put you up somewhere nice, and it’s nice down here anyway, so I think we’re trying to rekindle our relationship with Florida.
PCP: Speaking of touring, what was it like touring with Beck?
SD: We were opening for him, and we were his band. What we felt was a brilliant career opportunity at the time just turned out to be where Beck was being really wily and thrifty, because he got an opening band and his band for the price of one, basically. No doubt, it definitely worked out great for us—it certainly heightened our profile. That tour really shot us up to a new level of notoriety and everything, and maybe respect even on some terms. But it was brutally long days and hard work. Our daily routine was we’d show up, get off the bus about noon, go in, set the stage, set up our gear to do a sound check with Beck for his show. He would show up whatever time, we would run through whatever songs we were gonna do, we’d strike that, break that down. Then we’d set up the Flaming Lips gear for the Flaming Lips show. By the time we did that the doors were usually opening, we’d try to squeeze in a quick sound check, maybe get a quick bite to eat, and then we were on. We’d play 45 minutes, we’d be done with the Lips set, we’d move all the Lips crap, put all the Beck stuff on stage, get about 20 to 30 minutes to take a little breather, and then we were back out there with Beck doing a whole two-hour set with him. It was pretty brutal, you know, and I think it kind of turned us even more into road warrior kind of guys. We don’t want to do that again. We don’t want to do two-month tours that are a brutal schedule like that.
PCP: On the new record, At War With the Mystics, you are given a lead vocal credit.
SD: Even though we made mention of that, “Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung” that I sing lead vocals on, the thing about it is really we’ve done this sort of thing before, where I’ll go and I’ll do a big group vocal, I’ll like voice-by-voice build a four-part harmony, and then we put Wayne’s vocal on top of that, and that’s a vocal thing we’ve done many times, and it’s worked very well for us. We did it on “The Gash” on The Soft Bulletin, just a bunch of stuff we’ve done it on. And on this one we were gonna do that same thing, but when we tried to put Wayne’s vocal on top of it it just didn’t have the same creepy mood about it. I am glad it’s mentioned that, “Hey, Steven sang lead on this,” but it’s not like I’m singing a lead vocal, belting it out from the top of a mountain or something. I think we’re gonna try to do more things like that. We just did a couple of B-sides for a radio show on KCRW, and we did a medley of Sonic Youth’s “Unmade Bed” and “No Quarter” by Led Zeppelin. We do that same sort of thing where I just did a cluster of three harmony vocals, and hopefully people that love the Lips won’t hear it and go, “Man, where’s Wayne singing?” Hopefully they can appreciate that as well, hearing another kind of vocal style that we can possibly do.
PCP: How do you feel about this latest record?
SD: I don’t want to sound like the typical rock ‘n’ roll guy—“I think it’s our best work to date”—I think there’s a couple of things I wish we would have done a little bit different, but overall I think I like it more than Yoshimi, to tell you the truth. I just think it’s more—to me, it sounds more of an exploration of stuff that Yoshimi did. To me, even though we were doing this electronic sort of stuff, and there are some classic tracks on there, I feel like with this record we were trying to open up a new thing of possibilities for us. The Soft Bulletin came out and—I know I thought the record would come out and maybe 25 or 30 thousand people would buy it, and then we’d be quietly dropped from the label. Clouds Taste Metallic, the proper record before that, had done pretty abysmally, after Transmissions had done so well on the fluke of “She Don’t Use Jelly.” So when The Soft Bulletin came out, we didn’t think anything would happen, and in the course of a couple of years became this critically acclaimed album, and did all these things we didn’t expect it to do. So when Yoshimi came out, we thought this will be our Clouds Taste Metallic part 2, you know? And then it didn’t, it sold more than The Soft Bulletin. So to be honest with you, I felt, personally, a lot of pressure doing this new record. I think people get the notion that we took four years to make it but we really only spent a year making it, because Yoshimi came out and we toured and toured like crazy for a good solid two-and-a-half years or whatever, and really only hunkered down January of last year to work on the record. But all told, I love it. I think it’s got a lot of energy to it. It’s got some good guitar rock moments and just some more prog rock stuff we like to do, and—it just feels to me, it’s sort of like new music. And not to compare it to Yoshimi or Soft Bulletin, but that’s one struggle I know we have. Here we are, these old guys: Michael and Wayne have been together for 23 years, I’ve been in the band for 15 years this year, and that’s longer than most bands have been together. To try to make music that appeals to young people now, that sounds like new music coming out now that is valid and sounds like it’s moving forward, and I think we did it with this new record.
PCP: One of the problems that I have when I have seen you play live is that, while I like the new records, I would really like to hear some songs from the older records.
SD: That’s really a valid point, actually Wayne and I argue about this all the time. He’s like, “People don’t care about that.” I’m like, “You’d be surprised at how many people do care about that.” So the other day we were rehearsing and I started playing “Love Your Brain” on the piano, off Oh My Gawd, and he’s like “Yeah that’s cool” so we’re gonna play that in Austin, we’ll see how it goes. We are actually talking about bringing out more older stuff. I think we’ll just have to see how it goes. I don’t ever want to be a band that plays three hour sets, but I think if we continue on and start playing these bigger shows , which is certainly a possibility, cause it seems like interest is really picking up here, our shows are selling out pretty quick, if we start doing bigger shows I could see us pulling a couple of older things in. Now I know we’ll never do anything before Oh My Gawd, I just can’t imagine that. The last time we played anything before Oh My Gawd was in 1992 when Ronald was still in the band. We used to do “She is Death” for a little while, but that was a long time ago. I definitely would like to do “When You Smile” again, I would like to pull that out. We played “Slow Nerve Action” not too long ago, and that was cool. It’s cool to have it with actually a live drummer playing along with us, so that’s fun. But it depends on how long our shows go, because we have this new record, and we feel like we should play at least three or four songs off the new record. And we’ll always play “Race for the Prize.” That’s like our “Substitute,” or is it “I Can’t Explain,” that the Who opened up with for like 30 years. I think that will always be our opener. I hope that doesn’t bum you out too much. We’ve talked about doing “Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus with Needles,” we’ve talked about “[Talkin’ ‘Bout the Smiling Deathporn Immortality Blues] Everyone Wants to Live Forever” off Hit to Death in the Future Head, we’ve talked about “Unconsciously Screamin’” again, there’re on the list of possibles.
PCP: Going back over the band’s catalog of music to now, it’s almost as though it was a different band before.
SD: It would have to be. Ronald Jones was such a part of our whole aura of intensity and sound back in the early ‘90s. His guitar playing just put it on a different plane. When he walked away, it was like, “Well, we’re definitely not going to find anyone of his caliber.” Honestly, I couldn’t imagine who could fill his shoes, in the specific things he does. And that’s when we said we’re not gonna play that game. I was really interested in trying to bring the sort of symphonic orchestral pop elements to hard rock, trying to fuse those things together. Wayne was interested in that as well, and for some reason, we got lucky and we both—all of us—we wanted to do this thing at the same time, so this energy and intensity was focused on that, and we were able to move forward with that creative thought process. Of course it makes perfect sense that it’s a totally different band. Sometimes the thing that makes it the Lips is Wayne singing, and his personality, which is absolutely the strongest part of the band, but underneath that it’s changed quite a bit.
PCP: At what point do you think you went from being the drummer to musical genius?
SD: Luckily I was encouraged pretty early on. I always poked around the piano and tried—I always had little chord progressions and melodies, but in the back of my limited thinking I just thought, ”I'll just always have these little things I can play on my own.” I never thought “I'm gonna bring this to the table and see if we can do something with it.” You always think, What's the last thing the drummer said before they fired him? Hey guys I got a new song, or whatever. So that was always in the back of my mind. But early on, even before we started recording Transmissions I had written that song, “Chewing the Apple of Your Eye.” I had the chords and melodies, even like the first verse and stuff. When I played it for Wayne—you never know what's going to happen. I figured, ‘cause as soon as I joined the band they let me start having a hand in helping people figure out guitar parts or whatever we were doing, and that was great. But I played him “Chewing the Apple of Your Eye.” and he loved it. It felt like, well this isn't just some little bullshit you're doing, this can be Flaming Lips music and we can work on this together. The ideas you have will become Flaming Lips pieces of music and of course that was a great jolt for me. It just energized me to start thinking in that realm and not just playing drums and trying to come up with interesting drum parts, but chord structures and all that stuff. It just seemed to go more and more in that direction the further we went. And by The Soft Bulletin it definitely seemed like Wayne and I were equally co-creating these songs together. Musically I was doing most of the thinking on that and piecing other things and lyrically he was putting all that together. It's just over time, but it was a lot of encouragement from everybody, Michael, Wayne, Dave Fridmann, and whoever, were always like, “This isn't some fluke, this guy can definitely help us with some valid, cool ideas,” So it's worked out great.
PCP: Does it feel strange when people refer to you as a “musical genius”?
SD: I don't know who really does that. I don't really take it that seriously. I take it as a high complement, that's very great, but when I'm thinking of musical geniuses I'm thinking of people like Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder and Brian Wilson, Gil Evans, something like that. I don't think I belong in the room with those people. But who knows, maybe if I keep working at it... It's a great complement but I feel a little bit weird about it. Wayne's called me that in interviews, and you couldn't get a higher complement than that cause he's such a hell of a tester, he's not so easily impressed.
PCP: Is it odd doing interviews, I mean, with Wayne entrenched as the public face of the Flaming Lips?
SD: I got this weird rap as a guy who doesn't like to do interviews over the last couple of years, which isn'ttrue. It's just a lot of times people want to talk to Wayne. I'm not bitter about it, but if they don't wanna talk to me I don't wanna talk to them as a second-stringer, like "Okay, I can't get Wayne I guess I'll talk to Steven." I told Rick [Gershon, of Warner Bros Records] that, I said, “Look I want to help as much as I can. Any interviews I can do I will happily and gladly do them if people want to talk to me. But if they want to talk to Wayne they should just talk to Wayne, be patient and sooner or later, I guess, they'll get to talk to him.” But it seems lately I've been doing a ton of these, and people seem genuinely interested so that makes me glad too.
PCP: Does Michael Ivins do many interviews?
SD: He does. All of us, it's been a press juggernaut getting ready for this record. Wayne by himself went to England and Europe for two weeks just to do a press junket, I mean just press. He'd set up shop in whatever city—London, Paris, I think he went Cologne, Hamburg—he would set up shop and they would bring in interviewers for like 12 hours a day, he was doing this, for two weeks, which is insanity—there's no way I could handle it, you know? We're all doing this. It seems like, when people wanna talk to Michael they want to talk to him about gear, recording techniques, his engineering skills, that's the bulk of the stuff he gets, and he loves that, that's what he excels at, and then Wayne gets to do Interview magazine and Spin, or whatever, and a lot of times I end up talking to Modern Drummer or something like that, which I'm fine with. When I was 14 if they would have had a cool drummer in Modern Drummer I would have freaked out and bought the magazine for sure, but they just never did, you know? It's really embarrassing—I can't remember the name of the drummer for Can, but if he'd been on the cover in 1986 I would have been like “Who's this guy?” At some point you would have said, “Oh it's just so bad to talk to Modern Drummer,” but I don't care. They guy I talked to is very cool, he knows cool stuff. He's not like, “Have you heard ‘The Trees’ by Rush?” He's nothing like that. He knows about all kinds of music, and not just drumming. One interview we did we didn't talk drums at all.
PCP: I read recently you were living in Fredonia, NY.
SD: I got married, and my wife and I moved back to Oklahoma City. We bought our first house, and she was pregnant, and we wanted to get out of western New York because winter there’s just so brutal, you know, and we moved back to Oklahoma City and bought a house, and that’s where we are now, about 10 minutes from where Wayne lives. I moved up there, actually—we can talk about it, I don’t care—to kick a heroin habit that I had, and I just wanted to get out of the area really bad. So I moved to Fredonia in October 2001, and I was there—about 3 ½ years, all told. I made a lot of friends there, it’s like anywhere you would move, you make what you want of it. I had many good friends, had some good times, but I just felt too disconnected from home, you know? Actually home for me is Houston, that’s where I grew up, and I just felt like I wanted to get back to that part of the country or whatever, and again the winters there are just horrible, you know, so as bad as the summers are in Texas they’re not as bad as the winters are in western New York.
PCP: I kind of hate to ask you this, but have you watched Fearless Freaks yet?
SD: I watched it, probably like six months ago. It's tough because, when I did it, and I told people this before because I had a couple of guys before who said, “That's so brave of you to do that in front of the camera,” and that wasn't being brave, I was just desperate. The whole thing is just desperate. There's nothing brave about it, it was pathetic and desperate and when I see it now I can't believe that it's really me. It's one of those things where the farther I get from it the weirder it seems, because when I did it, that was what I did. I think I tried to laugh it off at the time, and then I saw it about 6 months after I got off heroin, and I thought, “That was pretty bizarre,” and then I saw it a year and a half later and it was very uncomfortable to watch, and it's just weird that it's me. It'll be five years in October since I've been on heroin, and it just seems weirder and weirder. I went though a period for a while where I was really worried it would come back to haunt me or something, like they would try to take away my child or something, and I got really paranoid. Then I thought, “Well we can tell them that we faked the whole thing, staged the whole thing. What can they do about it?” Different periods of dealing with it. But I did tell Bradley he could use it. He asked me, “I can pull the stuff out if it's going to fuck with you too much,” and I said, “No, do it.” I still struggle with it. The fact that my wife is okay with it being in the movie kind of means a lot to me. She's okay with it. And my dad still hasn't seen that scene. Somehow my wily brother watched it with my dad and he was able to skip right past without my dad noticing, like he got him to use the bathroom or something, which is pathetic but I don't want my dad to see that. That's just something he doesn't need to see. And then when my son grows up he'll see it one day and he'll say “Dad, what's up with that?” and I guess I'll just be brutally honest with him and tell him exactly what was going on. I go back and forth on it.
PCP: I feel that there is a real sense of sunniness about the Flaming Lips’ catalog.
SD: I think there are some dark moments and there are some sunny moments. I think there's a gamete of emotions maybe a lot of bands don't get to. Not to say we're better than other bands but we actually try to—like the song “The Gash” on The Soft Bulletin, I mean who does that? Not many bands are trying to do that. I feel like there is a certain hokey element to our music that I love. There are certain hokey songs I don't love—I'm really sick of “This Here Giraffe” you know. I can go ten years without hearing that song and go, “Oh yeah, that one. I forgot.” But I think we have some darker elements. For me, I think one of our best songs is “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” off The Soft Bulletin, and that—there's nothing happy about that song I think. But that's the great thing about depressing music. I think when I'm depressed—I think it's probably true for you or anybody—I feel like when you're depressed the last thing you want to hear is happy music. When I'm depressed if I can hear a sad song I know will channel that sadness, whatever it is, it makes you feel better because you feel connected to something, and I think a lot of our sad-sounding music aspires to that. If you're feeling down you can hear this and you can connect to it and maybe that will make you feel better. But there's definitely some hokum and some over the top sunny elements to our music, and it's intentional.
PCP: But I think there’s a certain triumph in the sadness in your songs, a particular kind of acceptance that somehow brightens it.
SD: That's what I'm saying. Maybe I'm not saying exactly what you're saying, but it's when you tap into that sadness that it gives you that energy, that gives you a release that makes you feel better. “Music has the ability to make us feel connected to the rest of the human race in ways that other art can't do,” and I totally agree with that. More than reading text, more than still art or whatever, I feel that music has that extra emotional depth those other things can't get. And that's what that is. For me, hearing "Waiting for a Superman," even though we recorded it and it's our song, if I hadn't heard it in a while, and I remember Dave, Michael and Wayne were working on the Soft Bulletin 5.1 surround sound remixes and that song came up and it really hit me on some—not to brag about our music, I don't want to come across that way— but it really hit me on some weird, like it really hit me as a downer song, and it felt great. I sat down and I just listened to it go by. I listened to that like it was some band I had nothing to do with. Again there's that undercurrent of sadness. I think that's great to connect to that because it makes you feel better. I mean, "Do You Realize?" has an undercurrent of the message that everyone you know someday will die, but there's also, it's in a major key, it's real uplifting, the melody's very triumphant, and we try to do that. If we get it right, it's nice work if you can get it.
PCP: I think it’s just because I saw it on TV the other day, but at the end of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, the way George Carlin’s character Rufus describes their band—“Your music will help put an end to war and poverty. It will align the planets and bring them into universal harmony”—it really made me think of you guys.
SD: The only way I can take that is as a very nice complement. I remember when I was 20, 21, for many years growing up when I decided I wanted to be in a rock band, I wanted to be a rock star, from the age of 8 when I was a fan of Ace Frehley and then I became a fan of Peter Criss and then I started playing drums, but you're whole life you're growing up and you have a vision of what you aspire to be as a rock and roll star, Jimmy Page or whoever it is. This continues on into your early 20s, and then you're playing in bands and you still have this image of yourself in the back of your mind like this rock star you aspire to be like, this band you're gonna be in that's gonna change the world. I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago, it's like of all the possible routes I could have ended up taking, of all the possible things that could have happened, the situation I'm in—the situation we're in—is the best possible situation. Here's all these years later, more people are interested in our music than ever before, it seems to me, I get to be the musician I always wanted to be where I play all these different instruments, I get to do the songwriting and arranging and all that sort of stuff, and Wayne has really turned into this great rock star character. He's literally walking on the crowd in a space bubble, how David Bowie is that? It's really weird that I feel like we've gotten to a point where we can try to take on anything, you know. We might fail but we feel like we can try to take on anything. Maybe we can do some shows with Wyld Stallyns sometime in the future, align the planets and all that stuff. But I definitely feel that way. It's like I had this vision, “If things could go this way, or if this happens this way I could be this rock guy,” but it's actually kind of turned into that, it's actually where we're this band that people love. People are crazy about the Lips, and being around for so long there's a respect. But I know there's probably plenty of people that our music sickens them because it's just too hokey or whatever. I know there's some Lips haters out there, and I'm fine with it, but most people love us and have a respect and admiration for us, and we get to try these crazy things and get away with it, I mean we're making a movie for chrissakes, that's within the annals with Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. It's a pretty cool gig.
For more on the Flaming Lips, check out PCP's expansive cover story on the band in issue #57. We've still got some back issues--drop us an e-mail to order a copy!
