Flaming Lips, Shaking Hips: Live @ Ottawa Bluesfest

Okay so straight up, up front, front and centre: I did not get on stage with the Flaming Lips. A handful of lucky fans and dancers (=fancers) did, but I didn't get there early enough to find and charm the Animal Wrangler. I almost didn't even make it to the show. But hear me out. I'm disappointed in myself, but the experience was far from disappointing.

I raced down to the Lebreton flats and Bluesfest venue on a borrowed bike on Saturday July 10 at about 9:40 when the show had started at 9:30. I was by myself. Adrenaline pumping, I screeched to a stop on a ridge overlooking the flats where I could see the flashing lights and video graphics of the Lips' show. Big exhale. The performance dazzled me from over a KM away. They were tearing through 'The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song' as I tore through the crowd on the wobbly unfamiliar bicycle, down to the bottle neck of bodies, searching a little aimlessly for the entrance.

All that day I was manning my table at the Centretown used and vintage clothing sale Hand Down Your Pants. All day in the sun and afternoon beers really took the energy and bodily fluids right out of me. The following morning I was getting on a plane at 7:15 am to Halifax, and planned to stay up all night to not risk sleeping in and missing it. But by 5 pm I was already feeling exhausted after packing up the sale.

If I had had the gusto, I should have gone down to the flats then, even a few hours before then, to get to the stage front and try to find the Animal Wrangler. I wanted to stand out so I planned to wear something crazy, but I had nothing planned for that either. My lack of coordination and hydration sent me on a tailspin that found me eventually eating dinner at Oz Café, happy, sedated and a little drunk on tequila ceasars at 9:20 pm. I still didn't have a plan for how to get down there nor any active company awake enough to go to a rock show after our long day.

The time came to make a decision, and as I weighed my exhaustion against my expectations for that evening it became more and more hopeless. But then something snapped. I had been anticipating this show for months. I'd told everyone my plans for the night and I'd already exhausted them. I had to at least get down there and see the damn performance.

So there I was jogging through the crowds towards the stage. I found a scalper selling tickets for $5. "Is it fake?" I asked him stupidly.
"Nope."
"I'll come find you in five minutes."

I locked my friend's bike to a tree and ran through the crowd, jumping up to see the stage over the fences. I found an exit and hung back a bit, sitting on my haunches waiting to pounce. I saw a friend on her way in. She had already been in and had a stamp on her arm. I got her attention and told her I was going to try to sneak in through the gate. Without hesitating she grabbed my hand and pulled me in the gate. No one looked twice, including myself.

I was in, I was at the show! I lost my friend almost immediately in the crowd but began sifting through the audience toward the stage anyway. I got as close as I could without stepping on toes and started moving around almost immediately. I didn't stop moving the whole time, waving my arms in the air, singing every word I knew, and even the ones I didn't at the top of my lungs. Wading through dirty looks from the people around me like only a solo concert-goer can do shamelessly. The spirit was downright Dionysian.

I took some recordings of the show but they're a bit garbled under my hooting, clapping and off-key sing-alonging. There's a time and a place and a sound for taking good live recordings, and usually I'll try to hush up so I can take some decent ones, but I had no intention of doing that from the beginning of the show. A Flaming Lips show is about the experience, the community of live music, and interacting with the band, the art, the music and the people around you. I wanted to be able to scream and shout and make animal noises like the rest of the people around me. I wanted to experience the Flaming Lips experience. And boy did I.

Anyway, a Flaming Lips live performance is about 50% music and 50% spectacle, and even that ratio is contestable. The frontman Wayne Coyne is a showboat. He isn't the principal songwriter nor even a principal musician. He's an able vocalist, but his real talent lies in riling up an audience to great new heights. Heights that not even the amassed narcotics of all present audience members could induce. Even when you watch the Flaming Lips 2003 performance at the Coachella music festival, one of my favourite concert recordings ever, Coyne isn't even playing the guitar. He's making strumming gestures, but doesn't even bother to put his fingers on the fretboard. But it hardly matters. It's all about the spectacle, baby.

My recorder crapped out just before the last three songs, which was pretty unlucky. At that point, The Lips parted from their usual repertoire to play Taps, the trumpet solo that plays at the funerals of American soldiers. Naturally they dressed it up a bit with a Lipsian bassline and some lowfi distortion. "We made a vow to play this melody at every show until this stupid fucking war ends," Wayne announced. "What you guys can do for this one is make your two fingers into a peace sign. The most intense peace sign you can muster, and hold it up." This, he told us, would hopefully send some sort of collective energy up into the cosmos that would rain down onto this sad sorry planet and make people stop fighting. It was a bit corny, but a beautiful gesture. I can't speak for the whole audience but I gobbled it down and let the thought of a rock show changing the world swell in my empty cavity. We're all rock revolutionaries tonight, my friends.

They then tore into face-melter 'The W.A.N.D.' It's the loudest, most sticky, syrupy, dirty, low fi, gnarly Flaming Lips song there is. I knew that it would soar on a live stage, and I love it when I'm right. The buzzing synth and bass tore through my tendons. I shook like the wind in the willows.

They then closed with 'Do You Realize??' which was again beautiful and all-encompassing. My arms extended towards the stage, toward Wayne and the lights and confetti storming in front of me, palms facing out. I focused on making a connection, from a hundred feet back, with the band and the experience and my fellow audience members. No, I didn't get on stage that night, but my experience was still incredible. I felt myself a part of the show even where I was, and that's what it's all about. That's the community of live music. We're all in it together, the entertainers and the entertained, we're all part of the spectacle.

I walked away from the flats, wheeling my borrowed bike, by myself and giggling like an idiot. I had another 6 hours or so before I had to be on the flight to Halifax. I realized that my exhaustion was just chemicals in my brain that I could resist. The show and the spectacle was over but the night never ends.

Let them know you realize that the sun doesn't go down. It's just an illusion caused the by world spinnin' round.

Bon nuit, mes amis
V. Rocky Racoon

Photos by World of Good and momaraman