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♪"Segue Music Pre The Terror" by The Flaming Lips♪
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♪"Race For The Prize" (Live Version)♪
Seems like we're good to go.
I'm going to go ahead and take off my mask...
get this started.
♪"Space Bible" by The Flaming Lips♪
So let's go back to the year 2000 and we as the Flaming Lips,
we set the agenda.
The thing we're going to start to do is start to make this
absurd, surreal, sci-fi Christmas movie.
It ends up being called 'Christmas on Mars.'
I think we started to make the movie because Steven and I
wanted to make the soundtrack to a movie,
so we just made up a movie that it was going to be about.
At the very beginning of this conceptualizing about what
scenes we were going to shoot, in the very beginning,
I had this...
the character that I play in the movie,
I'm this alien superbeing...
and I'm arriving on-- it's not
really Mars, but I come onto the scene.
My spaceship is a shaped like a bubble.
♪"The Horrors of Isolation" by The Flaming Lips♪
We start to look for a big, round,
clear, probably inflatable bubble.
It was around 2003 or four--
you know, late 2003/early 2004--
when Wayne came to me and wanted
me to help him find a bubble to purchase, and
I kinda of was like, "Okay."
Back then, the Internet wasn't what it is today,
but you could still do a search and find lots of great stuff.
But as much as we looked and searched,
at the time, we couldn't find anything.
And I kept thinking about this scene that I wanted to shoot,
so we ended up just doing the scene using computer animation.
We didn't end up needing the space bubble to make the movie,
but lo and behold about a year and a half later...
Wayne calls me up and says, "I found the bubble."
It was this place in Italy, and I started talking to him.
It was this guy named Charles, and it turns out he actually
lived in Oklahoma at one point, and he was the guy who owned
this plastic company that made these "water balls,"
which is what they called them.
The idea was that you're supposed to get in the ball,
get in a swimming pool, and walk on water.
So the space bubble, just one space bubble,
shows up and it just happens to be a few days before we are
going out to play the big Coachella festival.
I don't remember the time exactly,
but I do remember showing up for work on a suburban Edmond Street
in a suburb of Oklahoma City.
I remember Wayne came over and we blew it up.
He brought a leaf blower and we blew it up in our front yard,
and he walked down the street with all the neighbors looking
out.
I think they always knew we were weird,
but after that they knew for sure.
We didn't know what was going to happen.
We didn't know if we were going to walk on one little rock and
the whole thing would pop.
We had no idea.
You have to keep in mind this is a giant American festival,
and they've got lots of stagehands and lots of
insurance, and they're very worried about everything going
according to plan.
And we as the Flaming Lips, we're pretty used to people
saying, "No, you can't do that."
So we collectively decided that we wouldn't tell anybody,
we wouldn't say anything about it.
And we're about to start to do our first song,
and there's a usual panic and a lot of calamity at these
festivals.
It's a lot of people setting up, and nobody really seems to
notice, and I just get in the space bubble and we blow it up,
and before you know it the band goes into the first song and I
just jump out on top of the crowd.
Sort of to our relief and surprise,
nobody stops me.
That is awesome!
No, no, no!
Hey Michael, we're going!
At the time, it was such an exhilarating,
embarrassing, adrenaline-filled moment because you just don't
know what's going to happen.
You don't know if the stagehands are going to stop you,
if they're going to be mad and stop the whole show,
or if the audience is going to grab it and tear it apart.
It's all just so nerve-wracking, so you just go.
I remember a big issue at Coachella was,
once he rolled into the crowd, would he be able to get back?
My biggest worry was Wayne was going to be out there in the
middle of the audience and someone was going to hit it with
a cigarette.
And in my head, it's like a balloon.
The air just goes, it collapses, and Wayne just sinks into the
audience.
And I was holding a Bowie knife, and I had this knife in my hand
thinking I was going to have to jump into the audience and cut
Wayne out of this deflated bubble.
Part of me thought, "It might just really work,
and it might be utterly fantastic," and
so you take that chance.
I get in it, and I do my best to walk on top of the audience,
but I can't really walk on top of them.
I take a step or two and fall over,
and I get back up as best I can.
But when I'm walking, I do try to look relaxed and elegant as
though I do this all the time, even though it was the very
first time.
It almost immediately became this iconic image.
They take these fantastical things that you make up when
you're just sitting around with your friends and saying,
"Wouldn't it be funny if we did this?"
And they're the only people who actually go and do it.
There was a cover story in Newsweek.
Donald Rumsfeld was on the cover,
but there was something about music festivals.
And inside of Newsweek there was a two-page spread,
and the photo was of Wayne on the audience at Coachella in his
bubble.
It has just started to be embraced and it started to
become a thing that we would do.
It started to become a thing that the audience expected us to
do.
If that's 2004 when we did that at Coachella,
you fast-forward, that's 16 years...
♪"When We Die When We're High" by The Flaming Lips♪
I would do it often enough, not every night,
but virtually every night.
Singing a different song, sometimes coming out in the
middle of the set.
But it's a long time to be doing this,
and doing it in a panic and figuring out how long it takes
for the space bubble to blow up, and how to work the zipper
mechanism, and how to get in and out of it,
and how much air would be in there,
and how long you could be in there,
and how it would sound if you're singing in there.
There's no way, or there'd be really no reason that you would
want to know or bother to know these things unless you had done
it as often as we had.
So, I think just by virtue of us having those this silly gag as
part of our show every night, we really became the world's
experts on these space bubbles.
♪Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1 by The Flaming Lips♪
♪"Powerless" by The Flaming Lips♪
On the very day that we went into lockdown,
I did this little drawing that was meant to be a little
commentary of our times.
It's not necessarily a political cartoon but something like that,
that I just posted on my Instagram.
And I think everybody thought it was funny and clever.
I'm not even sure if people realize that I drew it.
And really, for me that was all that the little drawing was
intended to be.
In my mind, when I first saw the sketch,
I thought, "That's a pretty neat thing."
And then the next thought was I wonder if he's actually thinking
"We're all at home, we're not touring,
nobody is going anywhere, I wondered what's going to happen
next."
And then a week later I got the call that we're going to try
to actually turn this into a thing.
When I saw the drawing, I thought it was cool,
and I thought that would be cool if we could do that,
but there's no way we could do that.
I would be crazy if I said we weren't all worried in our own
ways and wondering what was going on or how it was going to
be safe, but at the same time it's with a group of people that
you put your safety in their hands all the time.
We're used to this, we take care of each other on the road all
the time, so if anybody was going to do it or if I was going
to trust anybody to do it, it would be us.
And that was pretty early, getting together.
I missed being able to be around our gang and our friends
and get to do stuff and play.
So even though it was difficult, I was excited that we were going
to get to do something.
I thought "Oh shit, he's really going to do that."
I was more scared of how much work this was going to be and
what are other people going to think of it?
Are they going to think we're being reckless,
or not care about the serious situation?
But I knew that we did care, and we were just as worried if not
more worried than everybody else.
He would find a way to do it safely,
but it sounded pretty hard.
At the beginning of the first couple of weeks of the lockdown,
all the late-night talk shows were scrambling a little bit to
figure out what they were going to do about having musical
guests.
And the Stephen Colbert show talent buyer,
he was hinting around about maybe we could do one of these
at home concerts with these space bubbles like he'd seen in
my Instagram.
I was hinting around at that too,
wondering, "Hey do you think that we could do this?"
We start to set out to do this very first,
this very limited, this very cautious,
this very stripped down at home concert song.
So, we asked everybody in our family and all of our friends
that we think would be up to this to come down and help us.
We even asked the mayor of Oklahoma City.
My first thought is: nobody is doing anything at this point.
Nobody is gathering.
People aren't even having meals with their parents.
♪Turning Violent by The Flaming Lips♪
It did feel good that we were going to be doing something,
anything, and we were going to be on TV,
and we were getting together again because we hadn't gotten
together as a band.
When the idea for the Colbert thing first came up,
I was certainly nervous.
Not against the idea, just nervous.
My wife has got some pretty severe asthma,
and that was pretty early on into the pandemic.
It was probably only two months in and there was so much we
didn't know.
Again, I knew it was going to be cool.
And we took it seriously and I didn't feel like it was unsafe.
I felt like it went as well as it could have.
♪Race for the Prize by the Flaming Lips♪
If you look closely in the video,
I'm right front and center bouncing up and down.
I felt that was my obligation.
It's kind of hard to show energy at a concert,
through a bubble.
But I took that role seriously.
That was the first night of performing with people in the
bubbles. That was really weird.
I felt a disconnect there. You know?
I usually don't seek out the validation on Instagram or
whatever, but I kind of needed it.
Everybody sees it on TV, and we got the feeling whether you
loved it or whether you hated it,
everybody sort of reacted like, well,
this is already a concert.
And I can understand where they would think that because most of
the at home concerts would literally be one or two people
sitting on the couch in their living room where this was a
whole group and we're on a stage.
And we have people though, everybody's in the space bubble,
we have an audience and all that.
So, I think it went out into the world as the Flaming Lips are
putting on concerts inside these bubbles.
And even though we knew it was really just one song.
It was very quick and haphazard or whatever,
we started to get maybe an idea that as people were getting more
weary of the pandemic and there seemed to be more and more of a
desire for someone to figure out how can we do concerts?
And everybody was thinking, we'd already figured out this way to
do concerts, even though we hadn't really figured it out.
It appeared that we did from the video that played on the Stephen
Colbert Show.
The bubbles were a gimmick, but they are actually a protection
from transmission.
♪"Flowers of Neptune 6" (Live Version) by The Flaming Lips♪
♪"Segue Music Pre the Terror" by The Flaming Lips♪
So, we're in a circle of friends and we're in this sort
of community that's in the spirit of well we want to do
something and we want to help.
I guess it was about June when we realized this is going to be
long-term, for a while.
And it took a while to kind of wrap your head around that.
The healthcare system in the United States,
the way it is, hospitals can't just have all that gear,
all that equipment, just in stock and storage because of the
cost.
So all of a sudden, we're used to having maybe a few patients a
month on the vent and then the demand goes up just like it did
with every other product.
The toilet paper, Clorox, whatever,
masks, we didn't have.
Everybody was trying to scramble to get equipment.
Some good friends of ours have a tech company and they were
making ventilators from sourced parts that you could get here
the US when the ventilators from China,
no one could get them and there was a big shortage up in New
York.
They also made, I don't know if it ever got into being
manufactured, but they made a great digital soap dispenser
that counted down the 20 seconds.
Remember everybody washing their hands for 20 seconds.
You couldn't even buy masks.
My wife was hand sewing our masks,
her company, Wicked Hippie was making handmade,
homemade hand sanitizer.
Of course, they put some glitter in it.
You have to remember Trump is in office and part of you feels
like he is incapable of doing something.
You don't believe that he's going to do anything to help you
anyway, so you sort of feel like you're in this on your own.
And yet our mayor in Oklahoma City was very active.
He was out, involved in everything.
For all those reasons here in Oklahoma City,
we acted really fast.
I mean, we closed bars, restaurants,
music venues, hair salons, two days after our first case of
local spread.
That was that probably wasn't done in New York for a month
after their first case of local spread.
Our drummer was in the unemployment line,
these giant unemployment lines that were on the news every day.
Yeah.
I mean, it was weeks of dealing with it and getting out there
early and trying to get in line and it was going to be too long,
or we weren't going to be able to get a voucher.
You know, when I first heard that these lines were forming,
it's just something that I had to see for myself because
honestly, I haven't seen anything like that outside of a
history book and seeing the lines during the great
depression of people waiting for food and relief.
I made a little video of me walking through this line and it
took a good five to 10 minutes for me just to walk from one end
of the line to the other.
We knew people that were at the ground zero of the violence and
the protests in the Black Lives Matter movement.
So we were very inspired by them.
I didn't feel like not doing anything for sure.
I felt motivated to do something.
When you are a creator of something in a community,
I feel like you become extra invested in that community,
right?
Because if you're successful in creating that thing or you
choose some kind of definition of success,
it's because the community has come behind you.
That's how I feel about this store.
That in November, 2019, we opened our doors and several
members of the community embraced us.
Well, when COVID happened and then the protests following the
George Floyd murder and Trump coming here and all of those
things, I mean, we couldn't just say,
"Well, I'm not going to do anything now,
because this is too much."
The protest happened outside of our shop,
right here on Archer and Greenwood.
There were a lot of sneaker stores that were getting broken
into all over the country.
And when word came out that Trump was going to come here,
I remember that was one of my biggest fears was,
"Oh my gosh, if there's violence, if there's chaos,
something is going to happen to this store.
We're right here on Greenwood.
We are a target, because of what we represent in terms of Black
success, Black wealth."
I made the decision though that I wasn't going to run away.
I wasn't going to board my windows like some businesses
were, I was going to stand here.
I was going to open my doors and I was going to operate.
I don't think we ever thought we were the only ones doing
something like this.
I think we thought any minute, there would be 10,
20 other bands doing something in their own way.
To me, the real panic is when Wayne came over and was talking
to me about it and said, "Let's do this."
And then I agree.
That's when the panic kicks in.
Well, we end up making the decision to order the space
bubbles.
We're looking ahead a bit in time thinking about promoters
and thinking about these concerts,
these venues, and even the people that work at the venues
and our own Flaming Lips road crew and thinking,
well, what can we do?
Is there a way that we can make some kind of concerts happen and
they can get back to work, and they can make some money?
And we can all contribute to helping this.
We had to make kind of a leap of faith in ourselves to make
that purchase of a hundred bubbles.
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess when I found out that Wayne was actually buying a
hundred space bubbles, it made it all real, you know?
It seemed like an idea for a long time.
It's cool to talk about doing a concert that way,
but there's a lot of things that you don't think about or that
you don't want to think about.
Like, are people going to die that now you have to think about
because the bubbles are in the mail.
♪"Are You a Hypnotist?" by The Flaming Lips♪
Stop!
We are still promoting a record that's yet to come out.
So, the American Head album isn't going to come out 'til
September 11th, but there's a lot of things that you start to
get ready for when albums come out.
So, we started to get asked if we can do shows and so we do
this great NPR show, the Tiny Desk show and we're actually in
the space bubbles, but we're just in our studio and this is
starting to show us how we can really play instruments and how
we can really set up things, because we're doing multiple
songs now.
It's not just one song and it's a panic.
I have to do a little, a little speech here real quick.
You've got to get out of the frame, sorry.
Now we're starting to do multiple songs.
And I think in a way, all that is coming as a little bit of
relief, because it is so difficult to do just a normal
concert without being in space bubbles and the audience not
being in space bubbles.
So this is starting to give us a little bit of hint of like,
could we actually do, when we say a concert,
could we actually do 90 to 100 minute sets?
Is any of that possible?
So being able to set up in our studio and to play and sing and
have all those mechanisms kind of go where if you mess up,
you can try it again, you can try it again.
I think all that helped us.
Then I think not too many days after that,
we were doing the same thing for The Jimmy Fallon Show.
All right, D, it's going to be a little awkward.
Be careful when you're crawling in.
♪drumming♪
We're playing, but the stakes aren't as high because it's just
us in our studio.
There's a lot of questions to everybody that would see this in
the news or see a picture of it.
I think your immediate reaction is,
"Well, how long can you stay in one of these before it runs out
of breathable oxygen?" And I think all those are
great questions.
And I only know because I've done it a lot.
We decided that we would see just how long.
We were thinking it could be up to three people.
And just how long could three people be in one of these space
bubbles and not feel like it's going to run out of air.
We kept them in there and I think we stopped after about...
It's just short of two hours.
So it's something like what would be a 90 minute set,
but there's some time to get in the space bubbles and some time
to get out.
♪"Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" by The Flaming Lips♪
♪"Segue Music Pre the Terror" by The Flaming Lips♪
So, we take a very guarded family trip out to Los Angeles,
and it's mostly just to see the sights along the way,
but also to take Baby Bloom to the ocean for the first time.
And while I'm in Los Angeles, I bum rush Marc Maron to
be a guest on his show.
Now Marc and I, we've been texting back and forth for
really years.
And in the months leading up to this,
I probably texted him 100 times, but I still got the feeling when
I was there, he wasn't quite sure,
like, "Why are you here?"
But he pulled it together and he had me on his show.
I have 100 hundred of these space bubbles that I go in over
the crowd.
Yeah. 100 of them?
100 of them on the way to my house.
Where do you store them?
Well, they're on the way to my house now.
Okay.
They just got manufactured in China.
Okay.
And they're on the way to my house,
hopefully in the next couple of days.
I saw the sketch. Is this the concert idea?
The space bubbles arrive like we thought they would.
They arrive at my house on, I think it's a big UPS truck.
It's the entire truck.
And Michael and I unload the 100 space bubbles right there into
my yard.
And then within the next couple of hours,
we just take them down to the Criterion and start to set up
what we now know is this giant grid that worked for all of the
shows.
♪Flowers of Neptune 6 by The Flaming Lips♪
♪Segue Music Pre the Terror by The Flaming Lips♪
All right, everybody.
Now I want you to know that this is a music video shoot.
This is a music video shoot.
So we decide to do another music video for the song,
this time for the song "Assassins of Youth."
♪"Assassins of Youth" by The Flaming Lips♪
But it's also a practice run for us to see just how quickly
can we blow up these 100 space bubbles.
Because you can see where, if it takes you an hour to do them
all, people are just not going to tolerate that.
So we see how quickly we can blow them up.
It's also an opportunity for us to see how it's going to sound
inside the space bubble. We don't really know.
It's one thing to stand in there.
It's another thing to be 10 rows back inside a space bubble.
It's an opportunity for us to see how long the audience will
want to be in the space bubble, if they'll actually enjoy it,
or by the end of this 20 minutes that they're going to be in
there, are they all hating it and not even wanting to tolerate
it for 20 minutes.
♪Assassins of Youth by The Flaming Lips♪
So it's an opportunity for us to learn a lot about it.
Everybody is...
We've figured out a way to make everybody absolutely safe,
and now we're starting to figure out a way to see if they can
actually enjoy the concert.
We want to know if it gets too hot in the space bubbles,
we want to know what do we do if people have to use the bathroom?
Now for this particular shoot, no one had to use the bathroom.
So we didn't learn that much.
It all goes great, and we put it out into the world,
and the video looks and sounds spectacular.
I think there's a part of everybody knows it's a video,
but then it goes out into the world,
and people, once again, think it's an actual concert.
♪"There Should Be Unicorns" by The Flaming Lips♪
♪"Segue Music Pre the Terror" by The Flaming Lips♪
Once inside the space bubble,
you can remove your mask.
But please remember--
We've got all this momentum and we're feeling confident about
it, but we quickly approach this moment of truth.
We'll announce a show, and we'll have to put tickets on sale.
And though up until then, it would feel like there's a lot of
excitement about what we're doing,
and there's literally no other shows happening.
And so part of you feels like, "Well,
everybody will want to come to this,"
but you really don't know.
And it really was a stressful moment.
We put the first show on sale, and it seems to sell out in
about 30 seconds.
It sells out so quickly that we think there's something has gone
wrong with the system.
And so, we're panicking like, oh,
something is messed up.
Part of us is relieved, we think it's sold out.
But part of us is confused because we don't know it's if
right or not.
But after 10 or 20 minutes, we realize,
"Oh, this concert is sold out."
So, we regroup about midday and we decide that we'll add a
second show. So bam, second show is added.
And that one sells out in about 45 seconds.
And so the whole thing seems like this is...
It's spectacular.
It seems like there's a big demand for this.
But then as the following weeks go,
I think for the first time since the pandemic started,
the numbers start to get pretty alarming.
Yeah.
We had more people die in Oklahoma City in the two weeks
after Thanksgiving than died in March,
April, May, June combined.
And actually, I believe that was right leading into the original
dates for the space bubble concert.
I think in our minds it was always a little bit like,
well, we're going to announce them.
And of course, in these times I think the audience and everybody
would understand if we needed to change the dates or postpone it.
So a couple of weeks goes by, and we decide then that we'll
postpone those shows.
And we didn't really know when would be a good time,
but we hinted around let's wait till later in the new year.
So we decide those are postponed,
and we look into the future and somehow try to predict that
whatever the COVID numbers are after Thanksgiving and after
Christmas, maybe two weeks or so after the new year,
maybe would be a safe time to do these first two space bubble
shows.
So we announced that they're going to be in 2021,
and we'll do them on January...
I think it's January 10th and 11th.
The 22nd.
Oh, there you go.
So we announced that the shows are going to be in the new year,
in 2021.
And we announced that it's going to be January 21st and 22nd.
22nd and 23rd.
We do this all the time.
So no, so it's January 22nd and 23rd.
There you go.
And I think Scott was smart for picking the days of January 22nd
and the 23rd of 2021.
bubble inflating]
Every year we bring Santa into the hospital for kids to visit.
We try to normalize the hospital experience as much as we can.
And so I contacted Wayne and I said,
"I have this crazy idea.
How about we put Santa in a space bubble?"
And he was all over it quickly.
The space bubble allowed us to be able to bring Santa to our
patients, to our families, and to our staff.
That made it just such a memorable experience.
Yeah.
So I got my positive COVID test back on Christmas Day.
And then we had a quarantine from Christmas Day until New
Year's Day. And it sucked, it was horrible.
I was as sick as I'd been since I was a little kid.
I had a terrible fever and was waking up in the middle of the
night, sweating.
We got COVID because we were around one person for a day that
had it, and yeah. And it was no fun, for sure.
Well, the phone call was the scariest part.
It was I'm sorry to inform you that you've tested positive.
You're like...
It was freaky.
Anyway, after the phone call, then it's just,
I got to keep Wayne safe.
I've got to keep Bloom safe.
I've got to keep my mom safe.
So we figured out all the ways to run a household with the mom
being separated from the family.
And it was around Christmas.
That wasn't fun.
♪"She Don't Use Jelly" by The Flaming Lips♪
Oh, my God!
Hold on!
I made it!
At the end of the concert everyone will,
while still inside the space bubble,
roll their space bubble to the exit door.
Once outside the venue, you can unzip your space bubble and get
out.
So we are still very concerned about what the audience will do
in this immediate, these immediate moments after we're
done playing the show.
Because we don't really want them to just unzip the bubble,
letting out all of this potentially COVID contaminated
air into a room, and everybody just jump out in it.
So we decide that they will exit the venue while they're still
inside their space bubble.
And we think at first that they're just going to go out the
front door like they came in, but the front doors are too
small.
So we end up using the doors in the back of The Criterion,
the big equipment, loading and equipment in and out doors.
And these doors just happen, by a strange coincidence which I
didn't even remember, these doors just happened to open up
onto Flaming Lips Alley.
So in 2007, this became Flaming Lips Alley.
But 13 years ago, we actually started a school,
the Academy of Contemporary Music with The University of
Central Oklahoma, just down a block this way.
Can't wait to see if some big guys would come help us
straighten it out.
But right now, 400 yards away from here on Flaming Lips Alley
is the venue where we did all the space bubble shows,
The Criterion.
All the way down as far as you can,
you already got your mask on for me, okay?
You're going to get out, and you're going to put your blue
speaker in that box.
There should be a trash down there for you okay?
Okay.
All right.
I'm going to take my mask off for this.
All right.
I'm mixing the sanitizing juice, fog juice every night that we
clean it out, making sure that we're at the right pH.
♪"Turning Violent" by The Flaming Lips♪
Sanitizing each and every bubble as we go every night,
making sure that we reload everything the proper way.
Let's see, we've done seven of these now,
and I've tested negative seven times in a row.
So if anybody was going to get, it it'd probably be me who was
in contact with every single one of these bubbles and every
single person, but in testament to how safe this actually is,
I'm good. Yeah.
So right now, what we're sitting in here,
each bubble weighs 23 pounds.
So with over 100 bubbles, we have a metric ton of bubble-age
here, if you will.
Every night after the show's over,
we have to clean these and sanitize them,
getting ready, nice and safe, for everybody the next day.
So after we sanitize and we come back to clean just the outside
of them, we came up with this. Did some quick math here.
I'll let you see what me and my friend Pete Winslow came up with
here.
The area of a sphere is equal to four times pie times radius
squared.
So these are six and a half foot bubbles,
which comes out to be 126 square feet per bubble.
Keep that in mind whenever you come to the bubble shows,
that you have 126 square feet inside of each bubble.
It's good size.
Times 100 is 12.600 square feet.
And if you think about it, when you're cleaning out the outside,
if you have a one foot swath, wax on wax off,
to clean the entire outside of every bubble is a two mile wipe
down.
So from your house to probably the closest McDonald's is the
distance it takes to wipe down all the bubbles for the show and
get them ready and nice and clean for you for the next night
when you come in.
It's deadly serious, but that doesn't mean we still can't have
fun while we're doing it.
My family, we lost a couple of people around the end of last
year because of COVID.
This was my dad's brother and his mother.
We lost both of them within two weeks of each other.
We're all getting tested.
We're all getting vaccinated at this point.
Yeah, we're doing the best we can to make it safe.
And I feel a lot safer as time went on.
So there's still these details that you can't quite...
When you're thinking in the abstract,
you can't quite figure out what they're going to be.
So we decide that the line for the...
we're going to have the audience line up outside in the socially
distant rows.
And once we know that everybody is in line,
Zach would go out, and he would escort each row into the venue,
into their space bubbles, get one row in and then go get the
next one.
And we've done some work with radio and headphones before,
so we've worked out that the sound inside the space bubbles
is this little speaker that you wear.
It enhances the sound that's on the outside and it makes it so
you can hear the high end on the inside.
We have a radio transmitter on the stage,
which is sending a stereo signal out to all these portable FM
speaker systems that you're carrying,
putting around your neck, inside the space bubble.
Once inside the space bubble, you will see and hear
your in bubble high frequency supplement speaker.
The blue dots should face out like this.
There is a battery operated fan that is yours to use and keep.
There is a bottle of water with the Flaming Lips space bubble
commemorative concert logo insignia on it.
There's a towel to wipe down the condensation buildup on the
inside of your space bubble.
There is a sign to show the attendance that you have to pee,
and they will assist you getting out and getting back in your
space bubble.
The other side of the sign says it's hot in here.
Show this to the attendant and they will refresh your space
bubble with new cool air.
♪"Original Score" by the Flaming Lips♪
♪drumming♪
So the shows, they go, they go better than we would've ever
hoped that they could go.
They just go utterly spectacular.
And there's even a slightly impromptu wedding proposal,
which is something that The Flaming Lips do.
We don't do it at every show, but we do wedding proposals
quite often. We're used to doing them.
We've never done one in the space bubble.
Erin and Jesse are in bubble number three
in the ninth row there.
He gets down on one knee, and from the way it looks on the
video screen, she is at first kind of confused,
and despite not being able to hear very well there's leaf
blowers and no one can really tell what's going on,
it seems to go pretty good.
And at the very end of it...
She says, "Yes."
And there's a great "Yeah, we did it."
He was more fascinated with the confetti that was out in the
crowd.
It was just get one piece of confetti,
he was good.
He'd just gather on the whole time.
Do people think Wayne's crazy?
I'm sure they do.
Yeah, but he is so not...
So safe. So cautious.
Doesn't take drugs.
Doesn't...
any mind-altering substance.
Just wants to be in control, wants everybody to be safe.
And everybody who knows him knows that.
So the concert goes good, but we're still very concerned as
the next weeks go.
Are we going to find out in two or three weeks that say 10
people that were at the shows now have tested positive.
And this has turned out to be a bad idea.
By the time January rolled around,
the numbers were actually starting to stabilize and come
down a little bit.
Half of you is very concerned that you've done this horrible
thing and that we should stop.
And half of you is moving forward at the same time.
So we're in this two mindsets overtaking you at the same time.
Maybe that was part of the stress was knowing a lot of
people have traveled a long ways for this.
A lot of people have paid a lot of money and that weighs heavily
on me too.
Well, I think that the very first show is definitely
frightening because you don't know how the crowd is going to
move and react to instruction.
And after nights would progress,
zippers on bubbles are breaking.
And so I'm talking to Zac about those kinds of things every
night.
And he trying to gauge how stressed or worried he is and
that'll inform how worried I should be.
In a dystopian sense of normalcy,
something that was safe for people who like our music and
who are fans of ours to come and actually do something...
Without knowing what has happened at the January shows,
we decide to announce the shows and we put the shows up for
sale.
We do two shows at one time, the March 12th and 13th shows, bam!
Those shows sell out in a matter of a minute.
And we quickly add two more shows to that.
So we add-- bam!
We add the-- bam!
We add the 11th and the 14th and those...
maybe that's too many "bams" at this point.
We are starting to think ahead a little bit.
So we go ahead and put on the very next weekend shows and we
start with March 19th and the 20th and-- bam!
And those sell out.
And, and without giving it too much thought,
we had a show for that Sunday, and-- bam!
It sells out as well.
♪"All We Have Is Now" by The Flaming Lips♪
I think the reason I'm a musician or an artist at all is
because I can't really stay focused on the same thing for
too long.
So if it gets too comfortable, it sucks anyway.
So for us, it was a great challenge.
At first it was sort of like, oh man,
okay, we're not going to be able to hear each other,
or are the drums going to sound like shit?
Like all these sorts of things and these these questions.
Doing nothing didn't really seem like an option for us.
I mean, I don't think we're the type of group that's going to
just sit around and wait for things to happen.
And I was happy to be doing something,
but playing drums in a bubble is a struggle.
So it was hard to figure out what was stressing me out.
But I guess it was just the dystopian things about it.
You're hearing all these fans and motors going constantly.
And just after a while, you're not seeing people's mouths.
And so you're not picking up on people's moods very well.
We did it I think as much for us and our sanity.
Like, I used to say, there are three stages of how you
experience your own performance.
There's first level.
Your equipment's fucking up.
You're fucking up.
And it's just the worst fucking thing ever.
Number two is nothing's going wrong.
You're really not able to just really enjoy it because you're
too nervous, even though nothing wrong is happening.
And then the top tier is everything is working.
You're not worried about anything.
Everybody loves it. And it sounds great.
And you're just able to enjoy it.
And whenever you get one of those,
you're like, "ha!"
I felt like it was safer to take him to the space bubble
show than it was even to take him to the grocery store where
he is touching the cart and touching everything else.
So, it was his fun COVID outing.
♪drums♪
I think our live show was getting better and better as we
went.
That was like peak people were playing at their best.
The sound man's got it...
as good as it's going to get.
I think for me personally, I burn out and I come back and
then I burn out.
I want to make music really bad for a while and I make that
music and we do stuff together and then we get done with them,
I'm like I can watch TV for a couple of weeks here.
I'm good.
I was feeling so sick last night after the vaccine...
I was just like...
feeling all the weird symptoms.
So we do these first nine shows, and though they're very
stressful and they're exhausting,
it really does go better and better each night that we go and
the audience gets better, and the audience gets louder and
it's more amazing and more amazing.
And from what we can tell, there's not one single case of
COVID that's been transmitted at the shows and it's just going
better than ever.
And so we decide to add this last show.
We think it's going to be the last show that we're going to do
on April 20th.
It's going to be a show where we play the entire American Head
album.
We're so proud that we get to play for you.
I think you've shown such a great example to everyone around
the world of how...
This is how we could do it.
There's lots of people who would say wouldn't it be funny
to have a whole concert where everybody's in a bubble?
And, of course, Wayne took that and made a cartoon out of it
early on in the pandemic.
But I think it's just so typical and magical of Wayne Coyne and
the Flaming Lips.
Part of us feels optimistic and a little strange about it that
by the time we play this show on April 20th,
the pandemic might even be over and maybe there wouldn't be any
need to be inside space bubbles.
But as we know now, that didn't prove to be that true.
And so even at the end of the very last show,
all things connected with COVID-19,
and this year of the pandemic, you don't really know when it's
over and when is the end.
♪"Do You Realize??" by the Flaming Lips♪
♪"Original Score" by The Flaming Lips♪