Flaming Lip service
Musical wizard Steven Drozd talks about a new album, a spider bite, and life in the band.

By Sylvia W. Chan

CALL ME A fair-weather fan, but I didn't discover the Flaming Lips' Soft Bulletin until 2000, after it made practically every top 10 list in the universe, after even the grumpiest critics threw their hands in the air and let the album's humanity seep in, after listeners callused and bruised from limp rocks and kid bizkits breathed sighs of relief as the Lips delivered seraphim kisses on the napes of their necks. Since then, however, I haven't gone more than a week without a Bulletin fix, haven't been able to drive down any scenic stretch of highway without blaring "What Is the Light?" while singing at the top of my lungs, haven't stopped marveling at the sublime swell it sends through me with each and every play. And though one friend pointedly queried if I was becoming some sort of "rocker" when I began foaming at the mouth about the band the other day, I honestly believe the Lips transcend genre-itis, that if one sits down and really listens to their shit, it somehow starts to make sense that a bump-thwack backbeat goes perfectly well with thick synths, progressive guitar rock, Mantovani Orchestra-style strings, dollops of hopeless romanticism, and insect sounds.

Their latest album, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, gets to swelling real fast with "Fight Test," the opening track, on which head Lip Wayne Coyne declares, "I don't know where the sunbeams end / And the star lights begin / It's all a mystery." It's a song about choosing to fight, realizing that – as Coyne writes in the press kit – "to surrender to every conflict without a challenge ... is worse than getting beat up." While Bulletin is a cosmic affirmation, an invitation to stand up and say "yeah" (as Coyne sings on that album's "The Spark That Bled"), Yoshimi is about the consequences of that "yeah," what must be done after one figures out he or she is inextricably part of the grander scheme of things. And though the fable of Yoshimi, a badass Japanese woman with a black belt in karate who takes on (and eventually beats) the evil robots trying to destroy the world in the space of the first four songs, might be considered the record's "concept," by the album's close – after Coyne warns us that he "was waiting on a moment / But that moment never came" (on "Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell"), then poses questions like, "Do you realize that everyone you know / Someday will die?" (on "Do You Realize?") – it seems the Lips are suggesting that the concept might be to stop trying to figure out what the hell the concept might be, and to just be.

If Coyne is the Lips' grand philosophe, then multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd is the band's boy genius. Besides bassist Michael Ivins, Drozd has been part of Coyne's crew the longest. At 33, he's the youngest Lip and the one who crafted my favorite track off Yoshimi, "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1," an anime pop dream so creamy it begs listeners to sing harmony, as well as Bulletin's most luscious lushnesses – for example, the insistently upswept swirls of "Race for the Prize" and "Waiting for Superman," the two tracks that frame the album and the ones that most readily remind that like staccato or cantabile, love and faith can be musical dynamics. Drozd is also the star of the upcoming Flaming Lips movie, Christmas on Mars, directed by Coyne and which they describe as "a cross between 2001 and It's a Wonderful Life," tentatively set to be released on DVD in December 2003.

Speaking on the phone from Fredonia, N.Y., where he now lives (Ivins and Lips' producer Dave Fridmann also live there; Coyne is the only one who still resides in Oklahoma City, where the band began), Drozd is decidedly self-deprecating, droll, and sharper than a whole box of tacks. He patiently answers my initial standard-fare questions about how he joined the band back in 1991 (he was a huge Lips fan, then lived with a guy who knew Coyne), whether he likes life on the road (he says if he spent too much time at home, he'd "probably go a little crazy"), and how he and Coyne write together (he writes a tune and gives it to Coyne for lyrics, or Coyne does a demo and brings it to him to arrange and tweak). And as for Yoshimi's "concept," Drozd backs the don't-hurt-yourself-thinking-about-it approach, saying, "You know, like a few years ago, there was this big story about how if you put on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and the Wizard of Oz at the same time, the movie's actually sort of like a video for the songs? So my question is, OK, Dark Side's like what, 42 minutes long, and Wizard of Oz is like three hours long. So what do you do after the album's over? Loop it? Start all over again?... I mean what does 'Fight Test' have to do with 'Morning of the Magicians'? I guess that's the case with a lot of concept records though. People can read whatever they want into it."

Musically speaking, Yoshimi is much more technologically driven than Bulletin is, and though Yoshimi is trying to take them robot mofos out, it's clear the Lips aren't trying to make some statement about machines fucking up the modern musical landscape. Drozd says he, Ivins, and Coyne have all been listening to a lot of "Aphex Twin and contemporary hip-hop and R&B," and while the rapping gets a bit tired to him, "the stuff that's being done with drums and loops and bass is fantastic." Although Drozd is too modest to say it, one gets the feeling he probably brings a lot of these new sounds to the table. It's clear he's the musical method fueling Coyne's dreamy, existentialist madness, and as a recent Spin article states, "the baroque pop of Yoshimi and The Soft Bulletin is unimaginable without Drozd's contributions on guitar, drums, and keyboards." The Texas native continually defers to Coyne, however, telling me that "without something to focus on, like a theme or philosophy to attach [to the music], it's not nearly as powerful" and that "without Wayne to give it lyrical content, it just wouldn't be the same."

Humility aside, Drozd also has this genius slacker/kid-in-a-candy-store vibe going on, getting all excited when he notices that Mötley Crüe's "Driven" has just come on the TV (I ask if he heard about the time Ozzy Osbourne snorted a line of ants while kicking it with Tommy Lee; he answers by telling me about when Ozzy and Nikki Sixx somehow wound up licking Sixx's piss up off the ground) and charming the hell out of me when he says matter-of-factly, "I'm all set. I joined my favorite band, and we make pretty good money doing this" and that he'd like to be in the Lips "forever" because the music "seems to make people happy."

Not to say everything's been gee-whiz great for Drozd in Lipsville. He says he moved to Fredonia after living in Oklahoma City for 10 years to "get out of some bad habits and whatnot." And though far be it from me to pry into anyone's bad habits (god knows we all have them), I accidentally do when asking about the supposedly near-fatal spider bite Drozd got when working on Bulletin, the one that almost led to one of his arms being amputated and that Coyne so lovingly mused on in "The Spiderbite Song" ("When you got that spider bite on your hand / I thought we would have to break up the band). "Ah well," Drozd says wryly, "I've just been telling people the truth about that. It wasn't actually a spider bite. It was actually an abscess from a bad injection of drugs.... I remember I was in the hospital for like four days, and Wayne came to see me, and the whole time he's standing in front of me, and he's like, 'Spider bite, huh?' And I'm like, 'Yeah, spider bite.' And he goes, 'Are you sure it was a spider?' I guess he suspected I was trying to cover up this horrible truth of drug abuse gone bad. But then I felt really bad because he wrote that song.... I wanted to cry I felt so guilty." He stops and laughs. "Hell. At least we got a good song out of it."

It seems Drozd just might be the kind of guy to give up his arm for a good tune. At some point in our conversation, he begins talking about how music seeps into him, explaining, "We go through these phases of discovering some kind of music that we really didn't know before. And I guess the first step is that you're a big fan of that music. You end up listening to it more and more, and then I guess the next step, the big step, is to actually infuse those ideas into your own kind of music, you know?" I suppose that's what continues to be the most amazing thing about the Flaming Lips for me, that a decidedly nonrocker type like myself can hear Stevie Wonder and Sonic Youth pulsing through their decidedly rocking tunes alongside Debussy, the Doors, and Dr. Dre. And to paraphrase Coyne from Bulletin's "What Is the Light?," I'm not sure what the hell the light shining all around the Flaming Lips is, but it's definitely there, and I'm all aglow.

Flaming Lips play the Unlimited Sunshine Tour, with Cake, De La Soul, Modest Mouse, and Kinky, Sat/10, 5 p.m., Greek Theatre, Berk. $35. Call (415) 421-8497 or visit www.unlimitedsunshine.com for tickets. Go to www.flaminglips.com for more information on the band.