By: live intown
Hit Me Like You Did The First Time: The Okies Orbit The Gopher in The 21st Century
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Wayne Coyne being interviewed by Mary Lucia for the Current - Photo by Kyle Matteson
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Hardly another typical opening day at the Minnesota State Fair. We came. We saw. And we were conquered.
During the afternoon, Flaming Lips leader Wayne Coyne spoke live from the fairgrounds with Mary Lucia on 89.3 The Current and was abruptly cut after exclaiming that the eminent rain was now coming down hard. Signs pointed to a very uncomfortable evening under the dark clouds. Later reports by the Current booth audience members revealed that Wayne used the F-word during the interview and therefore was cut short.
With a slow building tornado-class storm that struck just an hour before show time, the fairgrounds appeared wiped clean of all non concertgoers. The local news were reporting softball size hail, tornado touchdowns, flash flooding – Minnesota summer type stuff. The sopping wet goth teens, the three generational family groups, the gawkers and the hipsters all met under available shelter with one prayer: the show must go on.
A few warm-up beers later, a line of dark clouds were cut by brilliant sun, visible on the Midway horizon. Is this really happening? The Grandstand floor was filling up nicely by 7:30 p.m., the scheduled start time for England's Magic Numbers who had soundchecked before the storm. Being the practically unheard-of opener opener for two long established bands is never easy. You couldn't help but feel some sadness or empathy for the group when it was announced that their equipment was damaged by the rain and they would not be performing.
The huddled crowd around the Flaming Lips merchandise booth was 10 people thick, while the Sonic Youth side offered plenty of room and no waiting. It was quickly apparent who had the allegiance of the young t-shirt buying public today. Well-healed elders were already wiping their seats dry, beers in hand, ready to rock to the 50-something former-youths of Sonic Youth. To arena rock fans and even First Avenue fans there was a noticeable lack of uniformed security or staff in the venue. This allowed for easy mingling between the large general admission floor and the seating in the stands; no one I spoke with was watching from their ticket-designated seating. For one evening, it really felt like the fans owned the event.
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Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth - Photo by Kyle Matteson
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Sonic Youth weathered the storm and hit the stage at 8:30 p.m. Opening with their 1988 anthem, "Teenage Riot," Thurston Moore summed up the day with his opening line, “Everybody's talking 'bout the stormy weather / And what's a man do to but work out whether it's true.” The droning coda featured Moore and Lee Ranaldo holding their guitars from the base of the bodies while slowly bowing guitar neck to guitar neck, a somber dance from these usually jumpy city boys – er, men.
This time out, Mark Ibold of Pavement played most of the bass duties, freeing Kim Gordon up to add rhythm guitar and then sing and dance like a bouncing spinning-top on three of her new songs from 2006's Rather Ripped. About halfway through the set, strangers were asking each other "How old is that woman?" Kim is now 53 – Mr. and Mrs. Punker – but with the same sleek body, intense head spins with shoulder-length blonde hair whipping this way and that, and gravely come-on come-on vocals, she is just as inspiring now as she was in each of the previous two decades. As though in an MTV flashback, we were able to watch the band duel with each other on video screens on both sides of the stage.
Older numbers like Lee's "Eric's Trip" from Goo, with Thurston's drumstick on guitar assault, and the 1986 chestnut "Tom Violence" off of EVOL, stood out as being grittier than the Rather Ripped material. The new songs have a catchy quality with far less dissonance, while still including hypnotic, higher scale guitar leads and familiar lyrical subject matter. Certainly not pop music though. Allowing for some damage control (literally) between songs, Sonic Youth still put out 100 percent and never felt like an opening act.
After about an hour of watching Wayne frantically help set up all of the musical and non-musical equipment, The Flaming Lips took the stage and played intro music while the now infamous “hamster ball” was quickly inflated. Moments later Wayne was crawling, falling and rolling over the audience.
After a few minutes, Wayne was returned to the stage with the pumping sounds of “Race For The Prize” from the band’s last turning point, The Soft Bulletin. A pair of short stubby cannons flanked the stage shooting smoke, streamers and confetti high over the crowd, punctuating the opening blasts during each chorus and looking like the frontal view of a battle ship. Stage dancers featured men dressed as tummy-less Santas on the right, and women in sexy alien costumes on the left. And Captain America and Superman were – what else? – stage crew.
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Wayne's Hamster Ball - Photo by Kyle Matteson
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As usual, Wayne made an effort during every song break to wax poetic about the meaning of the songs, his own fandom of the other bands, and to generally prove his love of us and of sharing this night. While Thurston Moore must have considered this a "family" crowd when he apologized for his slippage of the F-word, Wayne couldn't complete a sentence without it. Wayne expressed how hard it is to put on a large scale show such as this and how a few hours ago the weather appeared to have put an end to it. Since we braved all odds and stuck it out, Wayne promised us a show to remember. There were shout-outs to bands whom The Lips have shared the stage with over the past 20 years: The Replacements, Soul Asylum, and Sonic Youth, whom The Lips met when they opened for them on their home turf in Oklahoma in 1986.
In a moving gesture, just two songs into The Lips performance, Wayne asked the formerly rained-out Magic Numbers to come out and play a few songs. The band had come in from London and this was their first show on the tour. They played as a three-piece with acoustic guitar, bass and tambourine. It's tough under any circumstances to win over a virgin State Fair crowd with just a few songs, but their second number, "Love Me Like You," was delivered confidently and was everything a catchy radio-ready hit single should be.
And now back to you, Wayne. Sing-a-longs were plentiful and playful with extended versions of "Yoshimi" and "She Don't Use Jelly" – the latter with just piano accompaniment – and the sarcastic "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song." A moving highlight was the new song "My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion," which included the lyrics on a screen behind the band. It felt like this year's "Do You Realize??"
So don't you believe them
Yes, it's true, some day everything dies
We won't let that defeat us
We can't hear him sing but we can hear it as it flies
It was easy to forget that there were other members in the band, since the group relied heavily on backing tapes and even Wayne only occasionally played guitar, mostly acoustic. The other founding member, Michael Ivins, was seated and appeared to be playing bass guitar, but could have been working a laptop as well. For those who haven’t seen The Lips in a decade or so, Steven Drozd has been replaced on drums by former Lips roadie Kliph Scurlock. Since leaving the kit behind, Steven has been getting more recognition for his work as multi-instrumentalist and arranger of the band’s songs. Live, he plays electric guitar and keyboards, and a fuzzy, heavy lead on the instrumental “Yoshimi pt. 2.” His falsetto “thank you”s after several of the songs had the crowd in stitches.
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The Flaming Lips - Photo by Kyle Matteson
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Seeing The Lips in concert now is like getting a Vegas version of the best of their songs and stage show from the last decade. In place of explosive guitars you will see: the confetti and smoke cannons (formerly leaf blowers from their 1994/1995 tours); audience participation in the form of dancers in costumes (1998’s Boombox Experiments had audience members controlling boomboxes on stage, 2000 rolled in dancers in cute animal outfits); Wayne’s singing nun hand-puppet, viewable on screen from his mic-cam (first appeared on the 1999 International Music Against Brain Degeneration Revue); balloons of all sizes; streamer “rifles” fired over the crowd by Wayne, and on and on. Even if you had witnessed the group’s spectacle before, you couldn’t possibly be prepared for this level of constant aural assault. It was glorious. Probably the least interesting use of video media was the band’s recycling of their own music videos, shown on the screen behind them as they played the exact same song.
Several times Wayne thanked the staff and crew for sticking it out, and even thanked the State Fair officials for taking a chance on such a musical freak show and for allowing them a longer set time instead of canceling the entire concert. During the Current interview, Wayne invited the official Minnesota State Fair mascot “weasel,” actually a gopher, to come up and dance during their set. True to his word, the person in the gopher suit looked right at home on stage, dancing with the alien hotties. The show closed with a faithful cover of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” complete with current wartime visuals and our current “war pigs” on screen. While The Lips have found an entirely different musical and theatrical landscape, their attitude and lust for life has remained intact.
This show was one for the time capsule.
liveintown is an anonymous music lover from the Twin Cities area
See also a discussion of this show in the forums.
Set Lists:
SONIC YOUTH:
Teenage Riot [Thurston vox]
Reena [Kim vox]
Incinerate [Thurston vox]
Eric's Trip [Lee vox]
Do You Believe In Rapture? [1st attempt - aborted]
What A Waste [Kim vox]
Tom Violence [Thurston vox]
Jams Run Free [Kim vox]
Sleepin Around [Thurston vox]
Pink Steam [Thurston vox]
encore:
Do You Believe In Rapture? [Thurston vox]
FLAMING LIPS:
Race For The Prize
Free Radicals
MAGIC NUMBERS:
Long Legs
Love Me Like You
FLAMING LIPS:
Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots pt.1
Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots pt.2
Vein Of Stars
The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song
The W.A.N.D.
My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion
She Don't Use Jelly
Do You Realize??
encore:
War Pigs [BLACK SABBATH]
Location Info:
State Fair Grandstand
Artist Info: Sonic Youth, The Flaming Lips
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