It’s easy to lean back on some clichés when describing the stage persona of Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne: there’s a combination of Midwestern decency and Southern hospitality that one might expect from a native of Oklahoma. Here’s a man who, without being hokey, can thank his audience for allowing him the chance to sing for a living. His perhaps overly earnest, but utterly charming, desire for his fans to have a good time makes him the perfect host, and his band a wonder to experience in concert, as evinced last night at Hollywood’s Knitting Factory.

Over their career, the Lips’ sound has moved from twisted, frenzied distorto-rock to a pop style more palatable but arguably no less skewed, creating somewhat of a dilemma for them. After the intricate layering of Zaireeka and The Soft Bulletin, how would three guys recreate such an orchestrated sound live? They settled on playing along to backing tracks, but amping up the entertainment value of their art.

So on a cool summer night, lucky Angelenos packed the Knitting Factory as the Lips split the difference between stripped-down and full-on spectacle. By ‘02, most would say that we should be so post-everything that the idea of (what was) a rock band integrating prerecorded rhythm, guitar and keyboard parts into their show shouldn’t draw much comment. There is, on the other hand, the risk of an underwhelming karaoke debacle — the “why didn’t we stay home and listen to the record” factor.

But the Lips overcame that hurdle on the merits of the music alone, spinning Technicolor beauty from a set focusing primarily on Soft Bulletin tracks, with nods further into the back catalog and forward to new release Yoshimi… The live playing and backing tracks worked together almost seamlessly, albeit with enough separation that the performances breathed and flowed.

Steve Drozd (clad in a bunny costume) inhabited the tinkerer role, busily and distractedly switching from guitar to keyboards to drums. His versatility obviously is a catalyst for the Lips’ haywire pop classicism, but the two Bulletin tracks that sent Drozd behind the kit, “A Spoonful Weighs a Ton” and “The Spark That Bled,” were the treats of the evening. He is such a hard hitter that even given zero leeway for rhythmic variation, he still shook the room. Mike Ivins, with his beautiful Afro long departed, sat unobtrusively in his own bunny costume while holding down the bass parts, looking for all the world with his bald pate and sunglasses-at-night like a cross between a minivan-piloting suburban dad and a hep jazz cat.

Which brings us back to Coyne. Pumping his fists, raising his hands in triumph, bombarding the crowd with confetti and dry ice fog, he was the ringleader, clearly working hard to engage his audience and give them a show to remember. This joy and generosity lent the show the air of an event, a party — easily compensating for the singer’s tired voice, scratchier and thinner even than on record.

Against a backdrop of clips from Cool Hand Luke, an ultraviolent Japanese film, the Teletubbies and amateur softcore, as well as the Lips’ own videos, sunrises and starbursts, Coyne spent the majority of the set unhindered by a guitar. All the better to wield lip-synching hand puppets, dramatize the impact of that soft bullet(in) with fake blood on his face or toss giant balloons filled with yet more confetti into the crowd. Shtick? Maybe yes, but in combination with the general philosophical-inspirational bent of Lips lyrics, and in contrast to the lush complexity of the group’s sound, his act made for something refreshingly down-home and lo-fi. This is an example of an artist catering to his audience, in the best sense of the phrase.

To close the band’s set, Coyne asked the audience to make noise and keep the energy going throughout the entire last song. A performer who asks for applause is begging for cynical sneers, but this move makes more sense in the context of the Lips’ between-album projects like the boombox orchestra and the parking lot experiment. Here Coyne was at once drawing the audience into the performance and using the hand claps, roars and hoots as elements in a song. And the subjective experience worked perfectly, the climax of the pure joy that the Lips had been channeling all night.

We can safely say that the Flaming Lips are the only band going who make it feel like New Year’s Eve in mid-July.

Links:
http://www.flaminglips.com
http://www.hellfireltd.com/management-flaminglips.htm
http://www.knittingfactory.com/kfla/