The Flaming Lips Are in Complete Control

Photo by Francesco Carrozzini

During the spring of 1994, while the Flaming Lips were barnstorming across America, convincing radio programmers and their own label that a brain-fryingly weird pop tune, "She Don't Use Jelly," from their album Transmissions From the Satellite Heart, could be a hit, I was engaged in a middle-class rite of passage, backpacking across Europe. Drawn by equally healthy doses of American Jewish guilt and morbid curiosity, I spent a chilly afternoon touring Terezín, a former Nazi concentration camp 40 minutes outside Prague where more than 30,000 Jews died.

This was all obviously upsetting, but the one detail I recall most clearly is the sign that adorned the entrance: Arbeit macht frei. Translated literally, it means "Work makes free." It was, of course, just insidious propaganda -- hard work wasn't going to save anyone there -- but the phrase, disturbingly, stuck with me. After all, the idea that working your ass off could lead to freedom -- if not the physical kind, then financial, intellectual, or spiritual -- is an idea worth believing in and one that feels, in a way, quintessentially American.

Fifteen years later, I'm standing onstage at Atlanta's Chastain Park Amphitheater surrounded by work. Shaggy dudes in bright orange shirts and matching pants scurry, pushing monitors, carrying guitars, and scaling the massive orange video rig that dominates the stage. Flaming Lips bassist Michael Ivins, 46, guitarist-keyboardist Steven Drozd, 40, and drummer Kliph Scurlock, 36, are each intently setting up their gear. Behind the video rig, Lips frontman Wayne Coyne, 48, crouches alongside the band's stage manager, a red-haired guy named Shane, jiggling wires attached to a large cabinet of electronic equipment.

"This unit controls our video stuff," Coyne tells me. "We've got this huge LED screen, but we've been having problems with the brightness." He walks to the front of the stage, then looks back at the screen and shouts in Shane's direction: "Take the contrast all the way down, then up again." Coyne hops off the stage and backpedals a few paces. Orange and yellow hues pulsate from the screen. "If that's looking bad, that actually looks pretty awesome."

Coyne is wearing gray striped pants and a weathered polo-style shirt over his thin frame. His curly mane of dark gray hair and a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard give him the regal bearing of a Shakespearean king, but his tendency toward perpetual motion veers closer to Woody Allen. When I tell him the story about my trip to Terezín and the words over the camp gate, he laughs at the implicit comparison between the Lips and the Nazis, then warms to the idea.

"That is a great slogan," he concedes. "And it definitely does apply to my life. I don't know if work makes you free, but if you're willing to take chances, follow your convictions, or any of that bullshit, you can be happy."