Steve and I went to see the Flaming Lips and Black Moth Super Rainbow last Friday night. A couple odd/interesting things happened outside the show though, so you can skip this paragraph if you want to get the show. We stopped at a Subway, thinking maybe we could eat fresh or something. But I guess it wasn’t the nicest part of town to stop in. Though no doubt the food was in fact very fresh, we did not feel the same, for customers were barricaded from the Subway workers with thick, bullet resistant Plexiglas, and even the holes you were supposed to talk through had additional circular Plexiglas reinforcement over them. To pay for and receive your food, you had to rotate an open cubic turnstile made of, you guessed it, reinforced Plexiglas. So it was like being in some sort of high security bank, only you were getting sandwiches. I don’t know how they clean the eating areas. After they close I guess. So we left as soon as we got our sandwiches, quickly. As we were leaving, some guy yelled through the door that the prices were too high and they should lower them. I can’t agree more, actually. The other strange thing, Steve recognized this crossword puzzle whiz from a documentary, who ended up next to us between sets. Seemed like a good guy, I’ll learn his name and post it later.
The show was at the Aragon, and we arrived thirty minutes before the start of the show. We had an okay location, as you can see from the photos. There were the occasional Flaming Lips fans in stuffed animal, alien, and robot costumes. One robot had some kind of antennae on his head, and it was humorous to see the exchange between him and the Aragon manager who wanted him to remove it.
Black Moth Super Rainbow sounded good with their psychedelic compositions and liquid synths, but I don’t have much positive to say otherwise. They had a large screen behind them that projected a wide array of very weird stuff. Now don’t get me wrong, I can enjoy neon beetles and waterfalls and rainbows, and to a lesser extent, Richard Simmons dancing (pretty funny actually), but there is only so much I can take of hapless people melting or turning to bone, as well as the inordinately creepy cartoons they displayed. Messed up stuff can be interesting, but much of this display was grotesque and rather tasteless. If I wasn’t in my right mind I might have been freaking out. It was quite distracting yet it was the only thing you could see on stage. There were no lights on the band members. So while I will say my auditory senses were satisfied, my optic ones were at war with what was going on. I recognized two of their songs, “Sun Lips,” and “Spiracle.” “Spiracle” they wrote with the Octopus Project, and, if you like BMSR, I would recommend their One Ten Hundred Thousand Million. I hear live they also have very weird displays too.
The Flaming Lips put on quite a show. They gave everyone laser pointers, Santa Clauses were dancing stage left, space aliens stage right, Wayne Coyne entered and left on a huge spaceship and rolled around the crowd in a plastic air-filled balloon at the beginning, huge balloons bounded around along with confetti and streamers, and so on and so on. The screen behind them complemented the stage performance this time around, and the Flaming Lips did much to involve the fans. In addition to several anecdotes between songs, we sang along to “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Part One” with small piano accompaniment, and at one point all the lights went off and we shot Wayne with our lasers, so that it seemed a swarm of red particles formed into Wayne running around the stage. Some of the many songs they played were “Race for the Prize,” “Fight Test,” “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song,” “Waitin’ for Superman,” “The W.A.N.D,” “She Don’t Use Jelly,” and “Riding to Work in the year 2025 (You’re Invisible Now)” from Zaireeka. I never even considered buying Zaireeka because of its hassle, until they performed this song. I still probably won’t bother, but I was impressed nonetheless. Wayne complemented the fans often, which they deserved, I must say. They sang along with many of the songs, allowing me better freedom to practice my native okie accent along with the show. No concert buttons here either, but I did buy a Flaming Lips Alley street sign, which in truth exists in downtown Oklahoma City. I have been long remiss to see the Flaming Lips live. Given their showmanship and display, I wish I had seen them perform a while ago, and I will say it is worth it for anybody to see once, just to see how outlandishly fun a concert can be performed.
we got to vote on which covers the band got to play (Why does the Damned get no love?), and at one point Damian got us to do the wave simply for his amusement. Anyone hoping that the band would reenact the treadmill video was seriously kidding themselves, because the budget necessary to transport four treadmills to every location they play would be insane, but they did perform the dance from the equally hysterical video for “A Million Ways,” which I have posted below even though cameras supposedly “weren’t allowed” in the concert. I admit nothing.
