The Flaming Lips at Red Rocks

I've always had a soft spot for The Flaming Lips. They hail from Oklahoma City (my hometown), and I'm just a couple of years older than lead Lip Wayne Coyne. While I was growing up on the west side suburbs, Wayne and his family were living around the NW 10th and Pennslyvania area of OKC. And while I was learning to play guitar around the age of 13, just a couple of years later, Wayne and his brothers were doing the same thing.

But, unlike nearly all the wanna-be musicians I knew (including me), Wayne stuck to his dream of becoming a rock star. It took him a while - something like fifteen years of hard work, no money, keeping that assistant manager's job at Long John Silver's for a long time - but the release of "The Soft Bulletin" and "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots" turned The Flaming Lips into bona-fide international rock stars.

Their sound is a cool mashup of bubblegum, heavy metal, electro-pop, sixties outer space soundtracks and lounge-core crooning. But the songs are incisive, artful, painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny - usually all in the same tune. Lead singer Wayne Coyne's wavering relationship to the melodies anchors the band's futuristic, often pounding sound with a coy, frail humanity.

(Fight Test, All We Have Is Now, Race For The Prize, A Spoonful Weighs A Ton, Do You Realize? - all great songs that belong in some sort of songwriter's hall of fame!)

Sunday's show at the legendary Red Rocks Ampitheater was a tightly focused sensory onslaught that touched on all the Lips' musical strengths, from clanging pop metal to spacey instrumentals to unabashedly heartfelt sing-alongs. Accompanying the music was their trademark stage/light show, complete with tons of confetti, bullhorns spewing smoke, giant balloons, the human hamster ball and the usual brace of completely amateur, crazily costumed stage dancers.

You can check out multiple videos shot from the audience on You Tube. But better yet, take in a show - there is nothing out there like a Flaming Lips concert.

(I took some photos - a few of them are at the top - but gave up after a while and just enjoyed the circus! A more in depth review from yours truly is available here: http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll)