The Flaming Lips

They're just humans, with wives and children! A fount of triumphant humanism, The Flaming Lips rolled into town, awash in celebration. Balloons, confetti, lasers, strobe lights, smoke cannons, pink bunnies. The exploding accoutrements of the band's universe looked like mystic spheres, cosmic dust, and starbursts. You had to be there, for once, is the only fair way to describe the experience. And The D Man, Rip, Rizzo, and Stark the Vinyl Shark were there for every glorious second.

Years ago, The D Man wrote a poem for Wayne Coyne, the indie-titan and lead singer of Oklahoma City's greatest rock band, essentially providing a response to some of the universal questions that he posed on 1999's masterwork The Soft Bulletin. Fittingly, it is titled "For Wayne."

An untested hypothesis?

It is far more than that (and you know it)--

the accelerating universe

only expands on those same

chemical principles

that have fired in your brain

from the beginning

Love?

Hate?

Love?

Love.

The small explosions of neurons,

the electrical waves that travel

along a bundle of fibers,

the impulses and chemicals,

and the flaming lips that are never consumed--

they are more than a theory.

The feelings and dreams that orbit your brain

are descendants of the cosmos,

the children of the big bang.

What else can The D Man say, other than pointing out the obvious question: how many artists can evoke such a personal reaction? A poetic dialogue from a gushing fan? Really? To the concert!

• Worm Mountain. Wayne crawled across the crowd in his cosmic bubble. He came to rest right above us. He stood up inside the sphere as we held him aloft. We were a collective Atlas, carrying the fate of the entire planet on our shoulders. I should add that many Lip fans have died without ever holding the bubble. We felt so honored.
• She Don't Use Jelly. Totally ridiculous song. Totally works everytime. One of the most entertaining songs that you could ever hope to hear live, it is a bizarre treasure from the Lips always-interesting catalog. The alterna-hit thrust the Lips into the national consciousness, or at least the consciousness of weirdos everywhere.
• The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song. My kids love this song. What's not to like? So easy to sing.
• Vein of Stars. A pensive strummer, contemplating space and time itself. Stephen Drozd's guitar wailed with existential sadness.
• See the Leaves. A scary track from Embryonic. There were lots of cymbals crashing and drum fills banging.
• Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1. Wayne turned this favorite into an intimate sing-along. There was no doubt that she could save us all. She's a black-belt in karate!
• Death Rays of the Sun.
• Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung.
• What is the Light? / The Observer. A cool track from The Soft Bulletin. The spacey bass-line kept it groovy.
• Race for the Prize. One of the most euphoric moments of The D Man's concert-going history. Don't believe me? Even the Japanese (see the video) understand the splendor of the woozy, off-kilter guitars and keyboards, the penultimate race for the cure. Rip and The D Man jumped in jubilation as the swell hit one of my favorite lyrical hooks in all of pop music: They're just humans, with wives and children!
• Do You Realize???. A massive celebratory send-off. Wayne talked about how some individuals in the audience were likely burdened by sadness, and how he was happy that they could come to the show and escape for a little while. It was touching and sincere. It was a call to reach out, to lift, to realize: The sun doesn't go down. It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round.