4X XPERIMENT IN SOUND
This morning on good ol’ social media I was made aware that the Flaming Lips crazy 4 CD release Zaireeka is twenty-five years old today. I think it is safe to say that never before or after in major label history was such a release green-lit, a release where all four CDs needed to be played simultaneously in order for the tracklist of songs to be heard properly. It was a crazy ride to get to the release of Zaireeka and I was lucky to be the Flaming Lips’ A&R guy at the time.
To set the stage: The Flaming Lips were in a major evolution moment. With guitarist Ronald Jones leaving the group while touring behind Clouds Taste Metallic, Wayne Coyne decided to take the band in a new direction. He told me that he did not want to make music for the now…he wanted to make music for the future. And so with longtime engineer/collaborator Dave Fridman, as well as bandmates Steven Drozd and Michael Ivans, Coyne headed to Fridman’s Tarbox studio in Fredonia, New York to start experimenting and writing…seeing what the next phase of the Flaming Lips would sound like.
The Lips entered a long period of recording, and I would occasionally hear bits and pieces of what was coming out of the sessions. The new sounds was more orchestrated, more arranged than past recordings….distancing the band from their past rock and roll driven bombasticity. And along with the music, there were also crazy, ingenious ideas brewing. Lips manager Scott Booker called me one morning to tell me that Wayne had created what he called The Parking Lot Experiment, gathering 30+ cars in a parking lot, and providing each with a cassette tape that contained an aspect of a bigger, orchestrated piece (to everyone younger than 30…in the recent past, cars had devices that could play cassettes).
This was the Lollapalooza era, a nationwide tour at that time that the band spent the Summer of 1994 performing in. Wayne had mentioned wanting to create a performance specifically for the parking lots next to the big music events. The Experiment was debuting in the bands’ town of Oklahoma City, and so I jumped a plane, rented a car and hit the specified parking lot. With cars gathered in a circle, a yellow-raincoated Wayne Coyne, talking through a loud speaker, passed out the cassettes to the drivers, and gave some comments and instructions about the experience about to happen. He gave the signal for the cassettes to be put in their players, for the windows to be rolled down and the stereos to be turned up LOUD. I stood outside the car surrounded by the symphony created from the resultant sounds echoing off of the cement walls of the lot, creating a reverberated noise of beauty that framed the new melodies and ideas Coyne had been concocting.
Coyne not only continued performing these parking lot experiments, but he started doing boom box experiments in clubs, featuring dozens of boom boxes each with a CD that contained a part of an arrangement of a bigger, grander piece. This time Wayne and Steven would be in the center of the mess of boom box users, using hand gestures to conduct the make shift orchestra as to when to turn the sound wayyyyy up, or go quieter.
All this was happening as the Flaming Lips were recording their new record.
It was around the time of the beat box experiments that I got a call from Scott Booker. Wayne had his next idea: he wanted to release a record that could be used similarly to the beat box experiments, where each CD had to be played simultaneously in order for the full song arrangement to be heard. His idea—a release containing 100 CDs…each needing to be synched to the other. Great idea (Waynes ideas were always completely inspired)….HOW TO PULL IT OFF? As the conversations went on, the band landed on the idea of instead of 100 CDs they would opt for four.
The current president of Warner Bros. Records was Steven Baker, the person who got me my internship at Warner Bros. many years before. He understood art…and artists…and was immediately supportive of the concept as long as we could figure out how to pull something like this off (which was complex). I flew to New York and visited the band at Tarbox Studio. The control room was a mess of cables and chords. Seats had been placed in the middle of the room and there were four pairs of speakers facing into the center of the room, each placed relatively in the middle of each of the four walls of the studio. That is how I first got the hear the songs that would make up Zaireeka, and probably the only time I heard the four arranged parts of each song perfectly synched.
Zaireeka is not a mere stunt-release, with songs like the Big Ol’ Bug Is The New Baby Now and (my favorite) A Machine In India, Coyne, Drozd, Fridman and Ivans were aliens armed with wonderful songs creating symphonies conjuring the minimalists of New York City 1957 and the krautrock visionaries of the early 70s. But those are mere references to a future sound that the band was creating, a sound I had not heard before.
And so it goes: twenty-five years ago today one of the strangest, most imaginative releases in major label history came out: Zaireeka was born. The release immediately caught the imagination of the rock journalists and the Flaming Lips fans, with Zaireeka listening parties being set up all over the country: people were buying the record, and then figuring out how to play it…with friends…and their friends…and drinks…and…. It was giving people permission to put on their own Flaming Lips show. Pure genius. No one ever questioned Warner Bros. Records decision to release something so unconventional (maybe there was a dissenter somewhere…it has been so long, I forget!).
Zaireeka also gave a peak to the future of the Flaming Lips’ sound, and when The Soft Bulletin followed it up (which was the last record I was to work on as their A&R person), it became the most talked about, revered record of the year. I really believe that it was Zaireeka, and the excitement it generated, that helped make that happen.
The Flaming Lips were on of my favorite bands wayyyyy before I began my initial internship at Warner Bros. They got signed the same day I got my official full-time A&R gig, after my boss Roberta Peterson listened to the music I gave her and heard what I heard in the band. Working with them was one of the joys of my life…and getting to be a part of the Zaireeka moment…I mean…what could be better.
Some ephemera from the time
