![]() Priest opens with the rollicking stomp of “Shine On Sweet Jesus”, rendered in a comically-simple chord progression beating the listener’s brains into submission, while “Unconsciously Screamin’” is a bluesy mid-tempo scorcher teased along by Roberts’ intuitive drum-work. Although Priest doesn’t hold up as a concept album down the line, it’s oddly peppered with religious arcana and references to faith, a perennial favorite subject of Coyne’s that he’d continue elaborating on well into the band’s subdued, synthesizer-soaked years. Coyne’s higher singing and ambitious lyrics both represent a turn towards introspection and sentimentality here, as if he’s already feeling nostalgic for the hardscrabble era the young band was leaving behind. It would prove to be their final album released on an independent label the band signed on with Warner Brothers in time for 1992’s shoegaze-heavy Hit To Death In The Future Head. In a way, much of Priest signifies passage and transition, much befitting an album title concerned with death, spirituality, and transportation. In the minds of fans both casual and evangelical, this is how and when they truly became this band. Recorded at the SUNY campus in Fredonia, New York (Fridmann’s personal Xanadu in those days), the Lips fed off the encouragement and support of their newest friends, experimenting with strange sounds and tape loops and hypnotic noise just for the pure fun of it. Accordingly, everyone seems to have risen to the challenge, from Michael Ivins’ sturdy bass runs and Nathan Roberts’ titanically-huge drums to the positively glowing cacophony of guitar noise Lips leader Wayne Coyne and Donahue were merrily conjuring in the studio. In Fridmann, the Lips found another mad tinkerer and experimenter with as crazed an obsession with the unorthodox as they had. Immediately upon listening to Priest, the production registers as fuller, more intricate and more considered. Disappointed with the previous year’s Telepathic Surgery and ready to shake up their formula, the Lips enlisted sympathetic pals Donahue and Fridmann just when they were needed most. The Flaming Lips In A Priest Driven Ambulance, Restless 1990Īll of this began to come to fruition, more or less, with 1990’s In A Priest Driven Ambulance. Meet a devout Lips fan and you’ll find they usually embrace one of the band’s distinctive ‘eras’ over the others, but perhaps none is as rightfully acclaimed as their indelible 90’s discography, when they collaborated with Jonathan Donahue of Mercury Rev, began working with Dave Fridmann and Steven Drozd for the first time, and briefly became a luminous sonic canvas for enigmatic, rainbow-blazing guitar wizard Ronald Jones. Yet a fourth band exists only in their messianic, delirious live performances, piled to the brim with confetti, fake blood, giant prop hands, Christmas lights, megaphones, a transparent human-sized hamster ball, and dancers in animal costumes gyrating hypnotically at the stage’s shadowy corners. There was the acid-damaged noise-punk of the band’s earliest works, the 90s indie-rock era that resulted in a first exposure to a significantly-wider audience, and the synth-drenched inspirational balladeers they’ve more or less remained since their 1999 high watermark, The Soft Bulletin. Throughout an odd and storied career, the Lips have taken the forms of many sorts of band, reconfiguring and re-evaluating as needed as they drift along. The one exception to this rule, of course, is The Flaming Lips, the eccentric and not-quite-mainstream psychedelic noise project that originated there in 1983 and soldiers on to this day. Off-kilter energy, indeed, but you don’t often consider it in musical terms when someone says ‘Oklahoma City’ (other than country music, anyway). Regardless, we played a fantastic RSD set that afternoon and left town with mostly positive impressions, despite a bit of annoying car trouble upon journeying home to Memphis. That and the frog-themed greasy spoon diner where we breakfasted the next morning neatly sum up this city’s off-kilter energy to me. After arriving late due to severe weather, my wife/bandmate and I wearily checked in at our bleak freeway Super 8, where we were more than a little amused to discover that our room featured a massive painting of an oil drill hung above the bed. It was a few years back, for a Record Store Day performance. ![]() I remember vividly the first, and so far only, time I’ve visited Oklahoma City. ![]()
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