The band is finally really about to go on, I’ve just dashed over from the backstage bar into the photo pit and the pre-show mixtape that they’ve been playing segues into a song from the first Roxy Music album and I’m instantly transported to 1986’s mescalyn college daze and listening to that album constantly, and this reminds me that I have mushrooms with me, not a lot, cuz I shared some with a neighbor who helped me smoke off a hangover the night before with a mix of weed and opium that I’d never tried.
I casually reach into my pocket and pull out the dried bitter stems and crinkly caps and start chewing, chasing ‘em with some stout beer which sustains my jack-built buzz, and just feels right after the ‘shrooms. I gush down a ton of water and face the stage.
To find myself here, this mellow, still trippin’ and getting up with the experience, seems more than just the justification of a misspent youth, it feels dharmic, and I sentimentally pay a nod to my former, 20-year old self. It's really a lovely thing to hear that Roxy Music song from my past, just as I’m about to trip. Maybe later I’ll post up the short video of it playing while the backdrop morphs.
Clip 1 is their amazing high-powered intro where they make the mothership connection and they come out of a space ship and Wayne rolls into the audience inside a transparent egg sac.
Clip 2 is just the full-on disco assault replete with high cosmic wailing, dreamy ambient keybs, mad, stuttering-on-the-1-and-2 drumbeats, discos strings, confetti cannons, swinging light bulbs, and all gorgeous hell breaking loose.
Part three, which I‘ll post up later, is just odds and sods from the show after I left the photography pit and watched the show from the back of the stage. I was a so mellow and into the show – not really tripping too hard or anything, that I decided to just enjoy it. Sorry I didn’t tape anymore, but I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.
Around the seven-minute mark in Pt. 2, when they hit that funky, chunky beat and Wayne breaks out the bugle, he’s not really playing it. As he explained later in the show, this custom instrument is used by the US military for funerals. There’s a shortage of musicians available to play all our funerals and so this bugle has a chip with “Taps” stored on it – at funerals, another soldier simply pretends to play the tribute to the dead soldier.
I found something interesting in the girls doing the sexy dance during this tune – when I pan up her leg it’s all seduction at first and then when you get to the head it’s a thoroughly unfamiliar being. And while I have nothing against sexy aliens, at the time I was filming, this dirge seemed to convey the horrible lie that inevitably saw “shock and awe” media sell of this war, turn into a shortage of “Taps” players, and it’s all enabled by a people and a government to enfeebled to properly stand up, which is something that the band discuss quite a lot during the show, albeit like myself, in vague tho’ earnest terms.
Herewith, The Flaming Lips set intro and opener at Bonnaroo, in three ten minute parts. This is clip 1, clip 2 – which is even more dramatic than clip 1 – is also up and is truly amazing. Over the next few days we’ll be putting up WAY more videos, many of them exclusive. This is not spellchecked, man. Michael Vazquez
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