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Rock vérité
The Flaming Lips as Fearless Freaks, plus Radiohead, Nirvana, and the Dandy Warhols

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The Flaming Lips were never meant to be international rock stars. Hell, they’re from the Oklahoma City suburb of Norman. It’s never been a hotbed of post-punk creativity. Not 15 years ago, when they first started putting their loud, primal, feedback-filled jams on tape. And certainly not at any point in the ’80s, which is when frontman Wayne Coyne and one of his many brothers took their first clumsy steps toward creating what the Flaming Lips would become in the ’90s. That’s when "She Don’t Use Jelly" made them one of the most improbable modern-rock hitmakers of the decade, an accident that, as Coyne’s friend and neighbor Bradley Beesley documents in The Fearless Freaks: The Wondrously Improbable Story of the Flaming Lips (all week at the Brattle), only spurred the already eccentric Lips on to even stranger feats of musical mayhem.

Beesley’s film never quite comes together as a narrative. Then again, neither has the Lips’ career. Instead, it plays out as a series of often amusing, sometimes dark, always fascinating vignettes about this very strange manchild whose youthful enthusiasm gives way as his beard thickens and grays to a kind of worldly wisdom. Some of the most entertaining footage follows a diabolically inspired Coyne around the rundown neighborhood he calls home as he collects junkyard odds and ends for the makeshift set of Christmas on Mars, a "sci-fi film about a sick, psychotic Santa Claus in outer space." No one seems to have any idea that the neighbor with the spaceship in his backyard regularly plays to huge festival audiences.

But it’s during the making of Christmas on Mars that we’re also introduced to the dark side of the Lips. First, Coyne tells us that long-time guitarist Ronald Jones has left the band because "he couldn’t deal with" drummer Steven Drozd’s drug problem. Drug problem? What drug problem? Coyne has already made it clear that far from being the acid-gobbling madman twisted tunes like "Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus with Needles" and "Guy Who Got a Headache and Accidentally Saves the World" might suggest, he’s a drug-free adult. And he mentions Drozd’s drug problem so matter-of-factly, it almost slips by unnoticed as he moves on to describe the band’s now legendary "Parking Lot Experiment" and "Boombox Experiment," events at which the Lips conducted orchestras of volunteers armed with pre-recorded cassette tapes and either car stereos or boomboxes in powerful symphonic productions. That in turn led to 1997’s Zaireeka (Warner Bros.), an album of four CDs designed to be played at the same time. Drozd is the band’s musical genius, equally proficient on drums, guitar, and a variety of keyboards. So the band soldier on as a trio with original bassist Michael Ivins.

If this all sounds a bit complicated, well, that’s why the film works best as a series of vignettes. Because it isn’t long before the fun gives way to a devastating black-and-white sequence in which Drozd looks up at the camera, prepares a shot of heroin, and admits that he’s been using for "five or six" years. It’s a shocking moment that stops the film dead in its tracks. But as the band come back into focus, we find Drozd working out drum beats and keyboard parts for the next album and are told that he’s cleaned up and left the mean streets of Norman to live the healthy life somewhere in upstate New York. All is well in the world of the Lips as Coyne demonstrates the best way to get the fake blood he uses as a stage prop out of a white suit. Hot or warm water sets the stains. A long soak in cold water, however, does the trick.

Rock films as revealing as The Fearless Freaks are rare. The Stones, for example, have gone to great lengths to keep Cocksucker Blues out of circulation. But there are a few. Shot over a year or so, Grant Gee’s 1999 Radiohead: Meeting People Is Easy (Thursday at the Brattle) offers priceless footage of dour frontman Thom Yorke being denied entry to a NYC nightclub and a behind-the-scenes look at a band who have yet to master the art of enjoying rock-stardom. Although advertised as a film about the Dandy Warhols, Ondi Timoner’s 2004 DiG! (Tuesday at the Brattle) is also a disturbing look at Anton Newcombe, the dysfunctional leader of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and their dysfunctional rivalry with the Warhols. And though David Markey’s 1992 1991: The Year Punk Broke (Wednesday at the Brattle) was meant to be a Sonic Youth/Nirvana tour documentary, it’s taken on new meaning as we’ve learned more about the drug-addled life and death of Kurt Cobain.


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