Flaming Acid Trip

If I were a Grateful Dead fan, I'd sure feel like an asshole - especially while walking out after a Flaming Lips show. All those years that I had taken the onus of supplying the acid trip myself while expecting only the soundtrack from Jerry, Mickey and Phil and the boys – when the Flaming Lips have been serving up both in one mind-blowing package for years? Christ!

The Flaming Lips blew through Chicago on Aug. 30 as part of the Unlimited Sunshine Tour, which included Modest Mouse, De La Soul and headliners Cake. After De La Soul and Modest Mouse turned in solid sets while battling the heat and the notoriously poor Aragon acoustics, Flaming Lips staged a spectacle for the senses that brought everyone to their feet and even a few, it was rumored, to tears.

I must admit I wasn't completely sure what to expect, given my love-hate history with the band. But portents of a strange experience arrived almost immediately in the form of four enormous disco balls (perhaps twice as big as those exercise balls at the gym), which were placed by the band members (not the crew) in a row on the floor behind the instruments. Of course singer Wayne Coyne, decked out in a tan tuxedo, was recognized instantly by the crowd, which gave him a rousing ovation. Coyne soaked up the adulation and returned it with a raise of his fist and the only smile I've ever seen that bespoke humility, triumph and glee simultaneously. The raising of the Lips video screen elicited yet another roar from the veterans in the crowd. Oh yeah – they knew. Shortly after, the trip warmed its engines as eight people dressed in animal costumes began to mingle onstage with the crew. A yellow duck chatted up a pink and white rabbit. A spotted brown milk cow shot the shit with a horse. All the costumes were of the street promotion variety: cloth body suit with a detachable cloth head – creating a kind of "manimal" pagan vibe.

The booster rockets kicked in when the lights cut out. With a burst of balloons, smoke and confetti, the band lit into "Do You Realize?", one of Yoshimi's standout tracks and the whole world began to spin. Four mascots on each side jumping straight up and down in rhythm, shining klieg lights on the massive disco balls. Two of the band members in white rabbit suits but no masks playing keyboard and guitar. The video screen running a loop of a topless woman in bikini briefs performing vigorous and precise karate kicks and two rabbit-people wrestling (think Crunch Gym ads) with cosmic bursts of light providing the transitions. Before you could straighten your head out, the melodramatic melodies of "Race for the Prize" pulsed from the sound system. On stage, the pagan manimals continued their manic bouncing while Coyne flooded the stage with a smoke machine that he wielded like a mini-gun. Steven Drozd, the nominal drummer, had switched from the keyboard to his drum set, which he pounded furiously amid the flashing of a localized strobe light. Between verses Coyne pummeled him with smoke and confetti.

From here on, Coyne battled the video screen for the attention of the crowd. For "The Spark That Bled," he soaked his face with fake blood in the tradition of vintage WCW wrestlers like Rick Flair and the Von Erich brothers. The screen countered with the fight scene from Cool Hand Luke, the Teletubbies and their freaky baby-faced sun, a retinal-invasive surgery (the most disgusting and dirty trick of the night) and a short film in which Coyne walks into a pole and – you guessed it – bleeds profusely from the head.

The Lips provided the camp highlight of the show by covering Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out Of My Head," which, as reported by 25 earlier this year, recently became the new official national anthem of Australia (and by now probably New Zealand). The Lips slowed their rendition to a majestic crawl, complete with dramatic pauses, timpani flourishes and cymbal crashes, before riding it out with Coyne pouring his heart into a string of mid-tempo "Na na na, na na n-na nas." Throughout, the video screen ran a slow-motion loop of a naked hippie girl hurling a Frisbee as hard as she could into the air. Unfortunately, the Lips' own "She Don't Use Jelly" almost bested the Minogue cover for the evening's camp crown. You gotta say, it takes a unique act to almost out-camp a joke version of an inane pop song with a straight-faced rendition of one of its own compositions.

Just when the psycho-odyssey achieved a healthy hum, however, the Flaming Lips pulled the plug and exited the stage. Punch-buzzed and soaring, the crowd exploded in ecstatic applause, then waited slack-jawed for an encore (or an attack by giant spiders). When neither came, heads sank like balloons back to the moist crud-slicked floor of the Aragon Ballroom. While some stuck around for the promised helping of Cake, many simply walked out the door and on to the night's next trip - in search of a fitting follow-up to the show's true main course.