Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne talks The Womb gallery opening tonight in Oklahoma City, Brady District Block Party Saturday in Tulsa
Wayne Coyne performs with the Flaming Lips at the Tabernacle in Atlanta in May. (Photo by Michelle Martin-Coyne)
Oklahoma City-based psychedelic rockers The Flaming Lips have a busy weekend planned in their home state.
At 7 tonight, The Womb, a colorful new gallery space at 9th and Broadway in Automobile Alley, opens. Lips frontman Wayne Coyne and a couple of his good friends, Rick Sinnett and Jake Harms, have pooled their creative and financial resources to open the new gallery.
In an interview with The Oklahoman’s Heather Warlick-Moore, Sinnett, a native Oklahoma painter who is on a mission with Harms to paint 11 giant murals along Route 66, said he and Coyne, who are longtime friends, came up with the idea for The Womb one day while visiting over a cup of coffee at Coffee Slingers in Automobile Alley.
The grand opening of The Womb art gallery in Automobile Alley is at 7 tonight. (Photo by Zach Gray, The Oklahoman)
“We know that we love art, we love art galleries and museums and this and that … but they’ve kind of become mundane,” Sinnett said, reflecting on that conversation for Heather. “We know what we don’t like, and we want to create an atmosphere that’s a little more engaging. We don’t know exactly how or what it is that we’re looking for, but we know we’re looking for something just a little more engaging and invigorating.
“I don’t want to make it seem like we don’t appreciate all the little art spaces and galleries that are already in Oklahoma City. But for me, I want something that is just more radical,” Coyne said in a recent interview with The Oklahoman’s Gene Triplett. “We don’t have anybody to answer to other than our own tastes. That to me is what it really is about.”
Coyne personally invited New York artist Maya Hayuk to come to OKC to paint the psychedelic mural on the gallery’s facade.
Inside, artist Bigfoot has been creating the gallery’s first big installation all week, preparing for the gallery’s grand opening at 7 tonight. For more information about the gallery, go to http://wombgallery.com.
“This is just an extension of how I live anyway, having this gallery,” Coyne said. “It’s about art and ideas and about people with energy. … I would say it’s kind of a futuristic, psychedelic art space … hopefully full of energy and ideas.”
Coyne won’t be at the opening because he is on tour, but he said he has invited several famous people to attend tonight’s soiree. And he said patrons might even be treated to a special arrival from Edmond’s freestyle BMX star Mat Hoffman via his flying jet pack.
However, Coyne will be in his home state Saturday when the Lips headline the inaugural Brady District Block Party in Tulsa. The event will feature special guest Primus, along with bands Mutemath, Civil Twilight, AWOLnation, Solid Gold, Particle, That 1 Guy, The Pretty Black Chains. For tickets and information, go to www.bradyblockparty.com.
The block party is scheduled from noon to 11:30 p.m. Saturday at the corner of Boulder and Cameron in downtown Tulsa. In his interview with Gene, Coyne gushed about the fun the Lips are having touring with the newly re-formed Primus, one of the most popular cult bands of the ’90s.
“These shows that we’re playing with Primus, everywhere we’ve gone with them, these are mega-shows,” Coyne told Gene. “We’re playing a show in Red Rock (Morrison, Colo.) to 10,000 people, 10,000 people in Kansas City. These are big events. So I’m urging everybody to go to Tulsa to see this.
“Even though it’s not like the Weezer show, it’s a kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Primus has gotten back together. I don’t know if they’ll stay together or if they’ll end the group … but it’s a big deal to see them. And for us and them to play together. They’re another group that’s been trying to get us to do some shows with them for quite a few years, and we know Les Claypool from here and there.
“And it’s a great thing for this show to be able to come to Oklahoma. It’s a big deal. Everybody should just come up and party with us on a Saturday night in Tulsa. I mean we haven’t played Tulsa since Dfest in 2007. And plus we don’t get to play outside very often because a lot of times we’re playing the New Year’s Eve thing and it’s too cold then.
“So we get to play outside, and we all get to smoke pot and have fun, and it’s a Saturday night and I think it should be marvelous. I think by the time we play at 10 o’clock at night it should be a great part of the night. So let’s say (expletive) the weather. If the people in Long Island can sit through an hour of a monsoon last night, certainly the people in Oklahoma can all just run around naked for a couple of hours. That would be my suggestion.”
The chief Lip also chatted with Gene at length about the band’s recent two-night stand literally sharing the stage with Weezer at New York’s Jones Beach amphitheater.
“Well, I’d say it was marvelous,” Coyne told Gene about the shared show with Weezer. “You don’t really know what the Weezer fans are gonna think of the Flaming Lips. I always know that the Flaming Lips fans, you know, they just love music and experiences; whatever’s in front of ‘em, that’s great. We didn’t know what the Weezer fans would think, but I think it turned out great.”
To read more of Gene’s interview with the always-intriguing Coyne, click here.
To read more of Heather’s story about The Womb, click here.
-BAM
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