Going through the Flaming Lips' back catalogue in preparation for my phone interview with Bradley Beesley, the director of the Lips documentary
The Fearless Freaks
which opens at CCA (1050 Old Pecos Trail, 982-1338) this week, I asked myself the question many people have asked: How did this group which began in the early '80s as psychedelic punks, half hippie art-rockers, half drug-dabbling quasi-metalheads, end up writing some of the most touching, beautiful, epic albums (
The Soft Bulletin
,
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
) of this young century? How did it all happen just kind of by accident, a mixture of people who bumped and collided in the same strange Midwestern place at the same time, an accident Beesley was there to chronicle?
Having hung around and constantly filmed the Lips for over 10 years, Beesley may be the best person (outside the band) to answer that question. "It's definitely a bunch of relationships built out of geographical convenience and not some sort of divine planning," Beesley says of the nexus of the Lips meeting each other, his meeting the Lips, and his unfolding role as the Lips documentarian. "I met Wayne [Coyne, Lips frontman] in 1991. I was going to the University of Oklahoma art school and he wanted to shoot a video for the song 'Frogs.' He just basically walked by
my house and knocked on my door and asked if I had a film camera, and that's how it all started."
A bit of history for those not familiar with the Flaming Lips: Their story is one of the most unlikely stories in rock 'n' roll. Lead singer/head Lip Coyne grew up in Oklahoma City, a land better known for producing football players, country music and crude oil
rather than artistic punk rock freakers. But somehow Oklahoma City and the neighboring university town Norman produced a band the has spewed out two decades worth of insane experimental pop, sometimes loud and grating, other times delicately melodic, but always enthralling, schizophrenically shifting from visceral, graphic imagery to a sweet, heartfelt worldview.
"It's been a very organic process," Beesley says, "not only for the Flaming Lips and the slow gradual process of going from very underground punk noise to this very orchestrated beautiful
music they make now, but my career has had the same sort of arc as well. I was doing experimental, insanely low budget stuff and thankfully now am doing feature documentaries, so I think there's similarities to my career and their music."
It would be expedient to say the Lips began when Coyne hooked up with like-minded people, but I wouldn't term the core group who comprised the early version of the band like-minded at all. They were actually vastly different: Coyne's older, jockish brother; Michael Ivins, a geeky bass player who seemed more like he'd be into Yes than The Dicks; and "some drummer guy" who reputedly left to join the Air Force.
Over the years, various band members have come and gone and the group has finally distilled into Coyne, Ivins and the quiet genius of the group, Steven Drozd. Though in recent press Coyne gets all the credit as the mad genius behind the band, it is actually Drozd who fuels the musical fire that inhabits the Lips' soul. Throughout most of the movie, he is a soft-spoken, gaunt, haunting figure. We get to know him a bit before we begin to understand that he's a junkie. And no wonder he is: Drozd's background is excruciating. He's lost three family members to suicide and one brother spent 10 years in a Texas prison for narcotics possession, yet the family that remains draws upon a deep reservoir of musical talent that bonds them. Beesley demonstrates this subtly, showing a long clip of Drozd, the brother recently released from prison and their father jamming on a country tune. Later, we watch as Drozd casually cooks up his heroin and speaks frankly about his addiction. "He had called me several times wanting to borrow money," Beesley told me. "At the time it was known he was a very strung-out, pitiful junkie around town and no one wanted to loan him money because they knew he'd just shoot up. So I said 'Yeah, I'll loan you money, but not only are we going to film this but we're going to talk about why you do this and what it's doing to your life."
Juxtaposed against the gritty, grainy black-and-white scene, Beesley documents Drozd's immense talent (as the Butthole Surfer's Gibby Haynes says to the camera, "What's Wayne's biggest asset? Steven!") and his friends' fears and frustrations. At one point, Coyne discusses how he struggled with casting Drozd as the lead in his film-in-the-works
Christmas on Mars
, because "What happens if Steven dies?" Yet Beesley steers quite clear of melodrama, not with detachment, but rather with a sad acceptance. He allows the situation to speak for itself.
Aided by an endless amount of unearthed super-8 footage of the Coyne family growing up, Beesley's treatment of the frontman also delves deeply into his family history. Beesley's footage captures the weird, dark world that many of Coyne's family members inhabit, one of bad teeth and white-trash addictions, and about halfway through the film you begin to realize that, instead of making him crazy, the Flaming Lips actually may have saved Coyne, giving him an outlet for violence and psychedlica, an outlet his brothers never accessed. Beesley makes the subtle but important point that Coyne is pretty much a quiet, neighborhood kinda guy, married, fond of mowing his lawn and scaring the local kids on Halloween. "I really wanted to exploit he fact that Wayne is very close to his family and lives in the same neighborhood he grew up in," Beesley says. "He could move off to New York or LA, but he chose to stay."
This focus on the Lips' family relationships, their connection to Oklahoma, really is what ties the film together, lifting it above even the best rockumentaries.
The Fearless Freaks
succeeds because Beesley went beyond being able to "infiltrate" the inner world of a rock band to the point where he became part of the family too. And, as with any family, the Lips' world swirls with good and bad. As Beesley puts it: "
The Fearless Freaks
mimics their music because in some ways the film is dire and dark, but also ends very happy, much like their songs do. They start off and you think, 'God, this is sad," and by the end you're cheering. I hope that's what people do with the film, too."
