From the New York Times…

From Simmer to Boil for Alternative Rock Survivors
By DAVID BERNSTEIN

CHICAGO, Jan. 13 — Two hours before the White Stripes and the Flaming Lips ushered in 2004 with their double-bill New Year’s Eve concert at the historic Aragon Ballroom here, the Flaming Lips were onstage blowing up oversize balloons, posing inflatable robots and setting up a giant video screen and confetti machine for their extravagant multimedia show.

By contrast, Jack and Meg White, who make up the White Stripes, were mostly backstage until performance time, their roadies, in black suits and bowler hats, guarding their dressing suite. The White Stripes are rock stars, and stars are not supposed to do stagehand work.

The same cannot be said of the members of the Flaming Lips: Wayne Coyne, Michael Ivins and Steven Drozd. A psychedelic pop band from Oklahoma City, the Flaming Lips have been toiling largely outside the notice of the mainstream for 20 years.

But while most rock bands flare and disappear like Roman candles, the Flaming Lips have survived, steadily building a following, winning the praise of critics and selling ever more discs with each release. Now they find themselves in elite company, nominated for a major Grammy Award along with some of the biggest names in rock: Radiohead, Sigur Ros, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and, yes, the White Stripes. The nomination is for “Fight Test,” an extended-play disc that Flaming Lips released in April on the Warner Brothers label. Even with just two new original songs (and five remixes and covers), it was nominated for best alternative album.

If the Flaming Lips upset their better-known competition and win the award during the ceremony in Los Angeles on Feb. 8, it would be that band’s second Grammy: last year it won in a little-noticed category, for best rock instrumental single, with “Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia),” from its 2002 album, “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,” its biggest seller and a release that made many critics’ best-of lists.

But even if Flaming Lips doesn’t win this year, the attention surrounding their nomination can only add to the momentum building for the band during the last year.

A collaboration with the electronica duo the Chemical Brothers produced the single “Golden Path,” a Top 20 hit in Britain, and the Flaming Lips shared a bill last summer with the Rolling Stones and Justin Timberlake, among others, at a Toronto concert intended to show support for that city during the SARS scare. This year the group plans to release a feature-length film, “Christmas on Mars,” a futuristic fairy tale that its members wrote and produced, with some financing from Warner Brothers.

The film, with a soundtrack of new music, will be pitched initially toward the film-festival circuit and is to be released on DVD. The band also plans a much-anticipated follow-up album to “Yoshimi.”

Mr. Coyne, the Flaming Lips’s 42-year-old singer and primary songwriter, is modest and tentative about the group’s recent fortunes. “If we can win a Grammy, anyone can,” he said, the twang in his voice revealing his Oklahoma roots. “You get lucky, and things happen. I don’t know, it really seems like it could all end tomorrow.”

Mr. Coyne has a slight beard and shaggy, graying hair. Onstage he usually dresses in a white suit and an open-collar shirt, looking something like a charismatic New Age guru. More than anything else, though, he and his bandmates come across as Dust Bowl Everymen with Bible Belt work ethics.

“Nobody works harder than the Lips,” said Jim DeRogatis, a pop music critic for The Chicago Sun-Times. “They don’t act like rock stars. They still carry this indie ideal of the 80’s.”

Mr. DeRogatis, who is writing a biography of the group, calls the Flaming Lips “one of the most influential bands of their generation” and compares Mr. Coyne and his bandmates to the counterculture writer Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters of the 60’s. The band’s Chicago performance was a spectacle, featuring 20 go-go dancers dressed in fuzzy animal costumes, surreal video vignettes and plenty of smoke, lights, confetti and balloons.

Rarely does a band reach success so late in its career. “Most bands, if they’re still together 20 years down the road, they’re going back out and doing oldie sets, or whatever,” said Mr. Drozd, 34, the band’s drummer and multi-instrumentalist, who joined in 1992.

Mr. Coyne formed the Flaming Lips in 1983, while working as a fish fryer at Long John Silver’s. He was influenced mainly by underground punk rock, which he said appealed to him for two reasons: “You didn’t have to be a skilled musician, and you didn’t have to sing very good.”

The band’s name, Mr. Coyne said, came to him “out of sheer panic.”

“We had a gig, and we didn’t have a name,” he said. “We always thought we’d change it later to something else, but people seemed not to despise us too much.”

Early on, the Flaming Lips were the opening act for hardcore punk groups like Black Flag and the Minutemen as they passed through Oklahoma City and nearby at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. Warner Brothers signed the group in 1990, and it scored a breakthrough about three years later with the single “She Don’t Use Jelly,” which climbed to No. 9 on Billboard’s modern-rock tracks chart in January 1995 and led to an MTV video. That song has been the Flaming Lips’ only Top 40 hit.

Playing supporting roles for more famous acts, like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Candlebox, and appearing in the 1994 Lollapalooza tour, the group seemed poised to break out; it even landed on an episode of “Beverly Hills 90210.” After “Jelly” came the album “Clouds Taste Metallic,” which failed to produce a hit, and the band appeared destined to join the crowded graveyard of one-hit wonders.

In the summer of 1996 its guitarist, Ronald Jones, left, freeing Mr. Coyne to lead Mr. Drozd and Mr. Ivins, 40, away from traditional guitar-based, alternative rock and toward more conceptual, experimental music, which he describes as “psychotic rock.”

Soon there were “parking-lot experiments”: Mr. Coyne directing automotive symphonies involving 40 cars, each playing a different tape of the band’s music. That same concept was used in clubs, with boomboxes scattered around the audiences. Then in 1997 the group embarked on its most ambitious, though commercially dubious, endeavor: “Zaireeka,” a set of four CD’s intended to be played simultaneously.

These experiments, Mr. Coyne said, “opened our minds up.”

The culmination of this unconventional direction came in 1999 with “The Soft Bulletin,” a critically celebrated orchestral pop album, which sold 280,000 copies worldwide, more than all the band’s previous albums combined. It also paved the way for the success of “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots”; about 700,000 copies of that album have been sold, according to Warner Brothers.

“We thought this would really be the end of us,” Mr. Coyne said of “Soft Bulletin.” “We thought anyone who did like us would go: `This is too weird. It’s a bunch of strings and horns and sad songs with pianos in them. Where are the loud guitars and the weird stuff?’ ”

But at its New Year’s Eve concert with the White Stripes, the Flaming Lips seemed closer to a beginning than an end. They drew an enthusiastic response from the 4,500 fans at the Aragon Ballroom, most in their 20’s and 30’s, and Chicago-area rock critics tended to agree that the band had rivaled the White Stripes if not stolen the show from them.

Whether the Flaming Lips will capitalize on their late-career success or drop back into obscurity remains an open question. For the moment the hard work and the stagehand duties go on. At the end of the band’s Chicago concert, Mr. Ivins, still in a zebra suit, was disassembling the video screen’s giant metal frame.