The Flaming Lips / Spoon

The Flaming Lips took a swing through Canada recently, and since several here at the Glow managed to catch their live act it sparked a bit of a debate. The cynics accuse Wayne Coyne and co. of being tired, cloying, and even a bit racist, while those favourable see more merit in the spectacle. The contrast with opener Spoon gave me a particular insight into what makes the Lips one of the most successful and necessary arena acts of our time.

Spoon’s set was revelatory because their live show is so different from the headliner’s. First off, none of Spoon’s sounds are pre-recorded. I guess I can’t know this for sure, but it’s pretty clear that what’s coming out of the speakers is what’s being made on the guitars, bass, drums, mics, and keyboards on stage. Spoon opened with “Don’t You Evah” and “Small Stakes,” the incredible lead-off track from Kill The Moonlight (2002). They made several inspired set list choices, with the focus on all the best stuff from Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (2007). With each highlight from their catalogue, however, it became clearer that Spoon is the kind of band better listened to at home.

I’ve only seen them once, and it may have been a rough night, but starting right from “Small Stakes” the live versions had less pop, less impact than on record. Given Spoon’s intricate and detailed production this makes sense, but perhaps the gulf doesn’t have to be as big as it is. “The Ghost of You Lingers” can’t maintain, in a huge outdoor space, the claustrophobic tautness of the studio version. “The Underdog” and “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb”—with horns provided by local, disinterested hired guns—were a bit limp, as was the tense funk of “I Turn My Camera On.” On this night at least, Spoon had yet to make the transition to true arena band, and so the experience of seeing them in this environment was of hearing inferior covers of all their best songs. That, and they’re not much to look at either.

Not that the boys in Spoon aren’t lookers. It’s that Spoon’s stage setup is spare, with Britt Daniel dressed in all white that matches the colour of the white cloth rectangles set up around the stage. Coloured lights are projected onto these rectangles. In a small or midsized club I could see the attraction, but in a dusk-lit outdoor arena as big as the Molson Amphitheatre the whole thing looked pretty unimpressive. Perhaps openers are not allowed a full-bodied stage setup, but either way Spoon was dwarfed by the giant setting.

Their live show doesn’t include a powerful visual or a massive aural element, so the concert experience is predicated the “Real Life Principle,” whereby the main thing is seeing the real bodies from the real recordings play real instruments. It’s not all that abnormal for bands to sound better in the studio, and supposedly the shortfall is made up for by an increase in authenticity from seeing bona fide band members people do real things. Perhaps in sweaty little clubs this is true, as you’re up close and personal with the drum sticks, the amplifiers, and all that hard work. As performance spaces get bigger, however, it doesn’t necessarily hold. Some bands can just put three or four bodies and a massive sound on an otherwise empty stage and make it work; some bands put on an Andrew Lloyd Weber sized circus. Either way there’s some adjustment involved, and with Spoon making only a nominal effort to adapt their look and sound for big arenas what we see now is some serious growing pains.

Not so for the Flaming Lips, who have been a stadium-sized band for years now. On this particular night their gigantic circular video screen showed a neon silhouette of a naked woman dancing. Eventually she lies down and reveals a glowing vagina. The image and the light grow bigger and bigger until a door opens in the projection screen and the band emerges from the womb to be born. Accompanied by their usual gaggle of animal-suited dancers and orangey-pink instruments, the band starts playing, the big balloons start coming out, and the confetti canons fire. At some point Coyne gets into that giant bubble and walks on top of the crowd.

These are all things I’d been hearing about for years but had never seen. And even if I had, I think I’d pay to see them again. The show is totally mesmerizing, a spectacular barrage of sight and sound. It’s an overstimulating visual sugar rush, and it blisses you out to a point where the Lips’ hippy peace vibes seem kind of relevant, and kind of sweet. This aesthetic is perfectly in line with all the glitter of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (2002) and At War With The Mystics (2006), and so meshes seamlessly with singles like “Do You Realize?” and “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song.” Darker material from last year’s Embryonic provides a nice contrast, and finds the band churning out proggy passages with multicoloured projections that seem to “jam along” to the music.

At some point Wayne Coyne picks up those giant hands which project multiple green lasers at two giant disco-balls, which in turn disseminate beams throughout the amphitheatre. This is an unfuckwithable climax, coming towards the end of the song (that I forget which song is perhaps fodder for those who call bullshit on these shenanigans). Just as you think the visual stimuli can’t get any more intense, the final chord of the song hits and the projection screen shows an onslaught of tooth-and-fang-bearing animal mouths, one inside another, incessantly flying toward us. These moments, hard to capture in words, provide a big pay-off and reward patience with the down-tempo or puerile sing-a-long moments of the show. I grant that once the initial glee of the explosions of colour, glitter, confetti, and balloons wears off, there is some down time. The Lips’ frequent chanting and invocations of the power of love can be cheesy, especially to those hard of heart. The worst charge I’d heard was that the next night, in Ottawa, they played “I Can Be a Frog” and had the whole crowd chant “whoop whoop whoop” after the line “I can be a warrior Indian.” I don’t remember this from the Toronto show (perhaps I was blocking it out), and so I was spared from a real watershed moment.

That much of the audio is prerecorded makes little difference to me. It’s difficult, at times, to tell which sounds are coming from the track and which from the instruments on stage, but I don’t care. “Authentic” or not, the Lips have a gigantic stage sound, quite capable of filling up the Molson Amphitheatre and any other venue I’ve seen. The extra choruses, breakdowns, and jam-outs leave comparatively little in common with the studio versions, and without the sense of a band trying to mimic an effect they could only really achieve in the studio, you find yourself embracing the live version as a different iteration and wondering what’s going to happen next. Besides, the visual element of the show is so dominant it makes fine aural distinctions a bit superfluous.

This emphasis on the spectacle over the music is, I would wager, at the heart of the cynics’ distaste for the Lips in concert. Apart from their uncritical invocation of a First Nations stereotype in a song about animals, the key sin of the Flaming Lips appears to be their move away from the subtle musicianship of the club band—pitched to discerning ears—to the broad populism of the festival band. They’ve been doing some of the same things for years now, but rewarding expectations and giving their fans visual “hits” along with the musical ones is part and parcel. There’s nothing to “get” about bright pink balloons, holding up the peace sign, or 15,000 people singing along to the chorus of “Do You Realize?”; it’s all right there on the surface, its meaning as simple and stupid and gleeful as it seems. Fan or newcomer, sober, drunk, or high, the Lips take all comers. I made owl noises with a kid two seats over, and I accidentally hit a guy in the head with a balloon. He smiled at me. The Flaming Lips have exploded their records to an arena scale and now when they play they don’t just fill up physical and aural space, but social space as well.