Wayne's World

A gigantic UFO descending to the stage that puts P-Funk's Mothership to shame. Huge inflatable aliens and Santa Clauses. Dancing bears and rabbits. Gyrating strippers. Balloons galore. Silly String shooting out of cannons. Giant foam fists. Roadies dressed as superheroes. Nearly as much confetti as Times Square on New Year's Eve. Thick, rolling fog. Frontman Wayne Coyne — the grinning guru-cum-ringmaster — in a fake, blood-drenched Armani suit, rolling over the crowd inside an enormous, clear "hamster ball." And the music, oh man, the music: soaring and euphoric and clamorous and trippy, lending itself to spontaneous sing-alongs and freakouts. Indeed, a Flaming Lips concert is the biggest spectacle in rock music today: a cross between the carnival of your dreams, the most demented Halloween party ever, and an experience that's probably the closest an adult can come to re-creating that feeling of being 5 years old and wandering wide-eyed through Disney's Magic Kingdom in full sensory overload.

It's a far cry from the homebrewed light show, mirror balls, and mostly functioning smoke machine that the band employed onstage in the mid-'80s. But every band starts modestly enough, and when reached by phone at home in Oklahoma City, bassist Michael Ivins — who co-founded the group in 1983 with Coyne brothers Wayne and Mark (the Lips' original singer, who quit in 1985) — laughs as he recalls those old days and a particular Michael Jacksonesque moment during one of the band's earliest national tours.

"We had the strobes and these halogen security lights that we got at Builders Square, but we thought, 'Well, we should really do something... I know, let's do flash pots!' So I rigged some up, and the problem was that sometimes the powder would clump up, and I think a clump fell on my head when I triggered it." He chuckles, noting that at the time, he was sporting an especially large Afro. "I started smelling this smell, like, 'What is that burning? Man, that sure stinks! You know, it smells like hair...' And by that time, someone had poured their beer on me and doused my head, and that was the last time that we experimented with flash pots."

Yet, Ivins says, the group was eager to continue building on the idea of making its concerts more of an event; it was a lesson learned from witnessing the legendary costume-and-pyro antics of the Butthole Surfers, possibly the Lips' closest musical peers in those days. "We took their show to heart, that you could do that sort of thing and not... I'm kind of a Rush fan, so I don't mean to be dissing Rush, but you didn't worry that you weren't going soooo totally overboard. That you could still do a punk rock show even with all the lights and smoke and stuff."

The affable Ivins seems to be in a rather reflective mood these days, which may have to do with several things: The Lips are in between albums (their 11th LP, the politically minded At War With the Mystics, came out more than a year ago, though they're still ostensibly touring behind it); they're in the midst of putting together some career-spanning concert DVDs; and early next year, the band will mark its 25th anniversary. An immensely colorful, weird, fairly well-documented roller coaster of a quarter-century it's been too. Some of the more infamous low points include Wayne Coyne spending 11 years as a fry cook at Long John Silver's, until the early '90s. And Lips drummer-turned-multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd — who joined the band in 1991 — nearly losing his left hand due to his heroin abuse (he'd initially told Coyne and company that he'd been bitten by a brown recluse spider). Then there was 1997's baffling, momentum-killing Zaireeka, an album that consisted of four separate CDs designed to be played simultaneously.

Thankfully, the high notes are of legendary status, including their out-of-left-field 1994 breakthrough with the alt-rock radio hit "She Don't Use Jelly," which they performed on Beverly Hills, 90210. ("You know, I've never been a big fan of alternative music, but these guys rocked the house," gushes Steve Sanders.)

And, of course, the massive comeback thanks to 1999's The Soft Bulletin — a transcendent, symphonic-pop masterpiece that was wholly unexpected after 15 years of chaotic noise-rock, loopy quasi-psychedelia, and rampant experimentalism — and 2002's platinum-selling Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, their tenth studio recording. As rock critic Jim DeRogatis put it in his 2006 bio Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma's Fabulous Flaming Lips, "A band that produces an artistic triumph as well as its most commercially successful effort on its tenth album is nearly unprecedented in rock 'n' roll."