You’d never know it just by listening, but for The Flaming Lips’ latest release, the psychedelic rock band dialed down its usual theatrics and focused on the music.
“It was actually pretty nerve-wracking,” said Wayne Coyne, singer for the 36-year-old Oklahoma City group. “At a live concert, you can withstand confetti and balloons and laser beams hitting you in the face because you’re in an altered state and your adrenaline’s going, as if you were in a car accident.”
That wouldn’t fly, however, at the Lips’ 2016 Red Rocks Amphitheatre show. The band had played the venue before — as a part of touring festival (2002’s Unlimited Sunshine), a double-headlining bill (with Ween in 2006), and its own tours (in 2009 and 2011). But Coyne had more experience traversing the crowd in a giant hamster ball and dodging dancers in animal costumes than calibrating his performances there for home audio.
That would change on May 26, 2016, when the Lips recorded a live album at the world-famous Morrison amphitheater. The performance of the band’s 1999 breakthrough album, “The Soft Bulletin,” was also the Lips’ first-ever recording with a full orchestra, making “The Soft Bulletin: Live at Red Rocks feat. The Colorado Symphony & André de Riddler” (out Nov. 29 on Warner Bros.) a riskier-than-usual proposition for a group already known for bizarre, attention-getting stunts (example: putting human blood in its vinyl records).
“Playing with an orchestra on that stage, it’s difficult to see them around what the Flaming Lips are doing,” Coyne said of the 68-piece orchestra and 57-person chorus. “And that was the challenge. While we had played there before, we didn’t want to dismiss them and act like they weren’t there. So the very beginning of the show was just, ‘Blammo!’ We wanted to immediately wake everybody up and get them into the spirit of things.”
As with most live recordings — music, comedy or otherwise — crowd reaction would be part of the deal. Coyne wanted to make sure the “muscle memory” of hearing an excited crowd complemented the rearranged “Bulletin” songs to give listeners the flavor of the event. He cited Peter Frampton’s top-selling “Frampton Comes Alive” album as an example of how crowd and performer energy can feed one another, with exponentially positive results.
“Or think about Beatlemania,” he said, referencing the high-pitched, teenage din associated with live performances of British Invasion music. “That screaming is like an instrument, and that sound has an effect on you.””
The weather, however, was not cooperating. Ponchos, raincoats and umbrellas dotted the crowd in anticipation of continuing hail that night at Red Rocks.
“We had a difficult day, dealing with the weather … but we’re excited about this,” conductor de Ridder said at the time.
The Colorado Symphony then performed “a rousing tribute to the majesty of Red Rocks Amphitheatre with the 4th Movement of Symphony No. 9, ‘From the New World,’ by Antonín Dvořák,” Marc Hobelman wrote in his 2016 Denver Post review. “From that point forward, the clouds parted. Referencing a successfully inflated special effect, but obviously alluding to the will of nature, Wayne Coyne later exclaimed, ‘We’ve learned now, never doubt the rainbow.’ ”
The album edits out that optimistic intro, as well as encore tracks such as “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt. 1,” “Do You Realize??,” “Space Oddity (a David Bowie cover)” and “The W.A.N.D.,” to focus on the proper, 12-track “Bulletin” sequence. It’s appropriate that David Fridmann, who produced the 20-year-old album, also joined the Lips for the Red Rocks project.
But so did Tom Hagerman, multi-instrumentalist for Denver band DeVotchKa. He helped write charts of the band’s music for the Colorado Symphony players. That meant translating individual synthesizer notes into full string and horn sections, the way Leopold Stokowski transcribed Bach’s immortal Baroque organ piece, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, for an orchestra.
It works. The string and horn notes that herald opening track “Race for the Price” — with the aforementioned and crucial crowd response — communicate the aching grandeur, bombast and melancholy of “The Soft Bulletin” in a wholly different way than the studio recording. Coyne’s sometimes-blown voice is in fine shape, and the angelic backing choir adds a hair-raising heft to the already lush arrangements.
Of course, none of that stopped Coyne from dabbling in some tried-and-true theatrics.
“Coyne then ventured up behind the soundboard and began inflating his crowd-traversing hamster bubble,” reviewer Hobelman wrote at the time. “There were many wide eyes calculating survival rates if he actually tried to roll on the hands of the Red Rocks crowd. It’s a steeper angle than it looks, as anyone who has lightly jogged back up to their seat from the bathrooms can attest.”
Fortunately, the show went so well that the band decided to reprise it earlier this year at a sold-out Boettcher Concert Hall.
“Frankly, I think that show was better than Red Rocks because it was on a bigger stage, in the round, and you could see and hear everybody better,” he said. “But both of those shows are phenomenal and I could see where, in the fog of time, you could have been at Red Rocks and not even know that we did the same thing in Denver, or vice versa.”