No vaseline required

"We were on the Jenny Jones show last Friday," claims Wayne Coyne, vocalist and guitarist for Oklahoma's favorite psychedelic cowboys, The Flaming Lips. But he wasn't there as a teen seeking a makeover or even, as some older fans might suspect, to serve as one of the show's hired drug "experts." He was simply an observer.

"(Jenny Jones) came out before the show began to say hi to all the tour groups and colleges there, and she said, 'I don't know who they are but our producers really like these guys, The Flaming Lips,'" says Coyne. "And no one really knew who we were."

Don't feel bad for Coyne and the remaining members of the 16-year-old band though. What many perceived to be the group's 15 minutes of fame occurred about six years ago when the "She Don't Use Jelly" single was beginning to grind on modern rock radio listeners' nerves, and the Lips made appearances on MTV, The Late Show with David Letterman, and even Beverly Hills 90210. "That's something that impresses your friends and family back home," says Coyne. "It's not something that gets you a better table in a restaurant or anything."

Maybe not. Since then the group has toiled in the relative obscurity most true artists crave, allowing Coyne to pursue creative endeavors such as 1996's "Parking Lot Experiment." On this particular Halloween, auto owners and fans from around the Oklahoma City area (a place the Lips still call home) gathered in a parking lot to perform a Coyne-synchronized rock symphony, with each car stereo playing a distinct part.

But displays of inspired insanity like this have led to more than just headaches for the OKC meter maids. Zaireeka (a 1997 four-CD set meant to be played simultaneously) and 1999's The Soft Bulletin (a single CD fans play repeatedly) are arguably two of the most aurally engaging albums to come out in the last five years, and a far cry from the Lips' earlier efforts.

"We stumbled on all this stuff," says Coyne. "We've always tried to bite off more than we can chew, but never enough for it to bite back. We've tried to master each stage, and by the time we went in to do Zaireeka and even some of The Soft Bulletin stuff, the reach of what we wanted to do seemed like a lot, and seemed to border on the impossible. But it seemed doable, knowing the amount of time and ambition and the amount of work we were willing to do based on what we had done in the past.

"Even if it truly is a great record, a lot of it is as accidental as any of our other records. We didn't set up shop three years ago with some design that went into being The Soft Bulletin, we just started doing junk and hoped it worked out."

Here, one man's junk proved to be another's treasure. The record was voted one of the year's top 10 by critics across the country, and, surprisingly, it was even cherished enough to land in the same spots at Rolling Stone and Spin.

"The circumstances that you put a record out in have to do as much with it being accepted as the sound on it," Coyne says. "I'm sure there are people that think we're shit, they just don't come up and talk to me about it."

This self-effacing attitude makes it hard to remember that in the past this sort of critical support is almost unprecedented for a group written off by some as an antigrunge novelty. As it turns out, throwing off critical shackles to receive these accolades was only made possible by the group shedding the protective layers of guitars it had built around itself.

"Unlimited freedom paralyzes people as much as big restrictions do because they don't have any guide. I think we always held ourselves back a little bit by saying we don't really know what we're doing. So it's best to follow people that do," confesses Coyne. "We usually followed things that we thought were great, whether it was Sonic Youth in 1986, or Dinosaur Jr. in 1989, or My Bloody Valentine in '91. We would look and say, 'What they're doing seems to be accepted and we like that. Why don't we do something in that vein?' I don't know if that's how our records sounded, but I know we didn't look at it as being on a path by ourselves.

"But there came a point when we weren't necessarily bored, we had just reached the point where the stuff that we were talking about had never been done before, or at least no one was talking about it now. So as we feared less that we would be on our own path, we accidentally found that we liked that.... It freed us up to say, 'Fuck, let's just do all this other stuff we've never done before.'"

Eventually, the parking lot experiment turned into Zaireeka, which became the boombox experiment (just like the parking lot, only indoors) when taken on the road. To that end, The Soft Bulletin itself, with its use of everything from refrigerators and tubas to insects and harps, is like some acid-induced Beatles free-for-all through the natural sound closets of Native America. "I don't know why we didn't do that before," explains Coyne. "We had just restricted ourselves in this palette of guitar-driven/effect-driven, slightly symphonic stuff, but based in a sound collage that came almost specifically from guitars."