Portrait of Wayne Coyne

The first time that I ever saw the Flaming Lips play was in about 1984, and they weren't scheduled to play on that night. The show was in some warehouse in Norman, OK, and the headliner was Black Flag. There were two local bands scheduled to open, I think that they were the Diet of Worms and Brown 25. When the first one started Blag Flag had not yet arrived. When the second one started Black Flag had still not arrived. When the second one finished Black Flag had not yet arrived.

It was getting late and I think that it was a week night too. The small crowd was starting to filter out. Black Flag had called in to ask directions, or to say that they were still so far away, but this was prior to cell phones so there really was no good communication in times like these. That's when this band who had volunteered their equipment, the Flaming Lips, decided to play just to keep the waining audience entertained. Nobody knew who the Flaming Lips were, nor did they care. At the end of the night they knew, but they still didn't care. The Lips, being unscheduled, had wasted no time in imbibing, and their drummer at the time, Richard, was too drunk to remember their few songs. They wound up doing very sloppy hard rock versions of "Summertime Blues" and "the Batman Theme Song." When they had played the few songs that they could slop through they quit. Black Flag still had not shown, nor did they for the remainder of the time that I was there.

These days the Flaming Lips have got a reputation for their live shows, and so it might be difficult for a fan to conceive of Wayne standing there in his t-shirt, jeans, and work boots scratching his head on stage, but scratching his head is what Wayne did most of on stage back in those days. I would have painted Wayne rocking out if that's what I usually saw him do, but the truth is that Wayne only rocked out back then between episodes of scratching his head.

Wayne saw an art show of mine in about 1984, and he commented that he liked the paintings in black frames better than the ones in the natural wood frames. If he'd had his way then they would all have had black frames on them. (On the way back to Norman that day I pulled up beside Wayne's pick-up truck on the highway and yelled at him to ask why his truck was painted black. His reply was that he didn't like the natural wood finish.) Anyway, when I had done this painting and had plans of unveiling it at a group art show I not only put a black frame on it, but I actually titled the thing "Wayne, in a black frame." So that was the posted title on it when Wayne first saw it.

The collage elements in it are mostly from an early Flaming Lips promotional poster that Wayne had given to me. The mouth on the skull is from that poster, and the small photo of Mike Ivins. At this point it seems advantageous that I'd chosen Mike of the other group members to depict by this collage, as he's the only other original member left in the group.

 

Return to "Portrait of Wayne Coyne."