Upwards to the Vanguard

A couple of weekends ago I went to a Flaming Lips concert out in Council Bluffs, thus defeating by counterexample the long-held theory that there is no conceivable reason for me to ever visit Council Bluffs. The show was absolutely amazing. I have been to a few Lips shows now and they still amaze me with their uncanny powers of crowd appeal. I’ve posted the photos I took in case you want to follow along with my rundown. I would have taken more, but I actually thought the concert was the next night until just a few hours before show time, and I had to save my battery for the videos I was also trying to get.

The venue was the Stir Cove at Harrah’s Casino. Basically it was a large green space nestled between their hotel and their boat. The stage could have been no more than 30 feet from the hotel actually; I felt a little sorry for any gambling old-timers wishing to turn in early only to be met with an audible barrage from the window.

The opening act was Magic Numbers (from Seattle, I think?), but we missed them entirely. We did catch Sonic Youth, who put on what I would call a good show. I’m not a big enough fan of their stuff to know any of the songs or anything, but it was plenty entertaining just to watch them spend 10-plus minutes literally rubbing their guitars against all the stage equipment available, in some sort of attempt at creating as much distortion as possible, then waving them in the air—as if to try and find the mystical position in space from which that potent wave interference they craved was emanating, in an ethereal fashion. It’s like they were dowsing for distortion.

After the Lips’ usual lengthy inter-band setup time for their crowd-blinders, confetti-blasters, giant-balloon-inflaters, mic-twirlers, and all sorts of other Dr. Seuss-esquely named devices, they started the show with a flashy introductory video on the rear projection screen set to a lively instrumental set. Oh, and while that was happening Wayne Coyne crowd-surfed in a huge plastic bubble. So that got everyone pretty excited. (Small digression: the use of Bubble Transportation strongly implicates that Wayne is a joiner.)

That led into the opening performance of Race for the Prize, during which the audience was showered with confetti and some 40-odd giant balloons. During the entire concert, a small army of volunteers dressed as Santa Clauses (the men) and Martians (the ladies) were dancing frantically on both sides of the stage. I tried to take some video to capture the spectacle, but it was really too much commotion to capture satisfactorily. Also, I was trying to enjoy it for myself without looking at an LCD the entire time.

For the rest of the concert, they played some lesser songs off of the newest album At War with the Mystics, but mostly stuck to their bigger hits (Yoshimi, Do You Realize??, and of course, She Don’t Use Jelly). Each tune had its own special video prepared for the rear screen—some, like Race and Do You Realize, seemed to just be their standard respective music videos. But others were definitely live-only clips. I was especially pleased with their choice for Free Radicals: a nicely timed edit of that video with the Morning Musume girls going up against a lizard with raw meat attached to their foreheads. Do yourself a favor and watch it now if you haven’t seen it already. After Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Part 1, they threw in Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Part 2 for good measure, so bonus points for that move as well. For the Yeah Yeah Yeah Song, Wayne encouraged the audience to sing along, and the first verse was basically done as an enormous a cappella rendition. We did similar slow “acoustic” sing-alongs following both Yoshimi and Jelly.

For the encore, we were treated to A Spoonful Weighs a Ton, complete with giant prop hands. Overall it was another great show by the Flaming Lips. The only downside was the T-shirt. I bought this cool tour shirt, and when I got home I discovered they had given me a small rather than my requested medium. A small! I was pretty pissed off, but I guess it’s good news for my little sister, onto whom I will most likely pawn it off.

As I mentioned before, I did take some videos, but they’re not online yet. I’m having some encoding issues. So, I’ll make another post when I get that stuff together.