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Staring at Sound: The True Story of
Oklahoma’s Fabulous Flaming Lips
traces the band’s history from its earliest days playing local dives to
their current status as cult kings, from ambitious noise rock to ambitious
studio symphonies, and from borrowed equipment and menial jobs to
state-of-the-art studios and elaborate, exuberant concerts. With enviable
access to the band, Chicago-based music critic Jim DeRogatis effectively
builds on the band’s recent documentary, the Bradley Beesley-directed The
Fearless Freaks: The Wondrously Improbably Story of the Flaming Lips, as
well as the band’s own autobiographical liner notes. He incorporates a
wealth of research and represents numerous points of view, remaining
accessible and level-headed in the retelling. — Pitchfork
With some rock band biographies, back
story is just something to skim en route to later fame-induced decadence.
With Oklahoma’s Flaming Lips, it’s quite the opposite. DeRogatis, the pop
music critic for The Chicago Sun-Times and the author of a biography of
Lester Bangs, does a nice job rendering the 60’s and 70’s cultural dust bowl
that produced these alt-rock lifers. Whether you find the Flaming Lips’
noisy excursions and psychedelically embellished melodies endearing or a bit
grandiose, their leader, Wayne Coyne, emerges in “Staring at Sound” as a
fascinating character: a mid-American mix of organic capitalist, badgering
colloquist and charismatic quester. DeRogatis’s account of the band’s early
road-warrior touring echoes the D.I.Y. pattern of any band crisscrossing the
country during the all-ages-club heyday of the late 80’s. But his focus on
Coyne results in lots of pithy quotations from a guy who had his hometown
scene wired from Day 1. With an audience initially made up of Coyne’s own
working-class family, the Lips moved on to a large and loyal following that
still comes to shows assured of big melodies, swirling guitars, bubbles,
bear suits and other trip-friendly spectacles. — Laura Sinagra,
The New York Times
The Flaming Lips just released its 12th
album, At War With The Mystics, after 20 years of recording and
touring. Chicago Sun-Times writer DeRogatis, author of the wonderful Lester
Bangs biography Let It Blurt, manages to draw a line, albeit a wiggly one,
from the band’s beginnings as enthusiastically atonal punk rockers in
Oklahoma City to their present day success as world renowned art-rock
visionaries. DeRogatis tells the story simply, with testimonials from past
and present band members, friends, family, fans, collaborators and others.
He’s thorough and exhaustive, though I did detect a few minor factual
anomalies. Wayne Coyne, the Lips’ leader, emerges as an archetypically
relentless innovator whose near-heroic discipline belies a practical and
whimsical approach to art and life. It’s almost too bad there’s already a
terrific documentary on the band (The Fearless Freaks) but Staring
at Sound stands as one of the best band bios of all time. —
Richard Pachter, The Miami Herald
DeRogatis is polite, jolly and generous,
not the stereotypical rock critic who inhales three smokes a minute and
hasn’t left his room for two days. When talking about something he
adores--like music, obviously--he’s energetic, and the effect is charging.
Get him to talk about the Flaming Lips, and you don’t have a chance. —
New City
(For the paper’s cover story profile of Jim DeRogatis, click here.)
Their new CD, “At War With the Mystics,”
and their well-timed biography “Staring at Sound: The True Story of
Oklahoma’s Fabulous Flaming Lips” by Chicago pop-music critic Jim DeRogatis’
marks one more artistic (and perhaps commercial) high point for the band.
The Lips are one of the few experimental acts who seem to remember, and
care, that the audience is listening. “Mystics” is an invitingly freakish,
downright pretty and even moving record: one part early Pink Floyd, one part
the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” and one part small-town science museum. It
features shimmering keyboards, fuzzy psychedelic guitar and everyday found
sounds - a creaking door, a beeping alarm - and the songs are tethered
together with what sounds like signals from outer space. — Lorraine Ali, Newsweek
Staring at Sound, by Chicago Sun-Times pop critic Jim DeRogatis, brings the very
improbable career of the Flaming Lips screaming to the page. The author,
who's covered the band since 1989, has seen it all—lineup changes, mood
swings and more than one turning point… [and he] depicts what is, by any
measure, a mesmerizing chronology of a pop music success story. — Mark
Brown, The Tulsa World
In Staring At Sound, DeRogatis
mirrors his work in 2000’s Let it Blurt by reverting back to his days
as a cub reporter in New Jersey and digging deep for long dormant facts and
articles by the book’s subject… finding the little nuggets that no one,
oftentimes not even the subject’s themselves, knew about. — Static
Multimedia
Following up his bio of famed rock critic
Lester Bangs, the Chicago Sun-Times’ DeRogatis tackles one of pop music’s
true eccentrics: Wayne Coyne, the Flaming Lips’ eternally optimistic
frontman and master of on-stage ceremonies. This 270-page paperback
chronicles the Lips’ unlikely rise to weirded-out, major-label stars, the
rare band that scored its first hit record some 20 years into its career.
It’s as inspiring as it is entertaining. — The Daily Camera
DeRogatis has been a fan of the Oklahoma
rock band The Flaming Lips since 1989 and tabbed their 1993 release
Transmissions from the Satellite Heart his pick as that year’s finest
release. But neither his admiration for their music nor closeness with the
band members, particularly frontman Wayne Coyne, prevented him from making
his book Staring At Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma’s Fabulous Flaming
Lips (Broadway) an unbiased, freewheeling account that details several
unflattering incidents in the band’s rise to stardom. — City Paper
Chicago Sun-Times pop music critic Jim
DeRogatis charts the unlikely rise of a few music-obsessed oddballs to rock
stardom in Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma’s Fabulous
Flaming Lips. The book has all the essential elements for a good rock
and roll biography—drugs, breakups, blood, fire—and even the willing
cooperation of the band itself. It’s part of the Flaming Lip’s populist
appeal that despite their success, they simply seem pleased that someone
would want to write a book about them. — The Daily Yomuiri
Jim DeRogatis interviewed on WNYC-FM’s “Sound Check”
Jim DeRogatis interviewed on The Current, Minnesota's hippest radio station
Jim is a constant
reminder that no matter who - whether it’s the band just a week old or the
million-dollar band with private jets - there’s no such thing as free
passes. If you speak with conviction and are honest with the facts, the
readers will decide on their own whether the music is good or bad. Question
his opinions, but what can never be questioned is his passion for the music.
And for that I stand and applaud him wholeheartedly. — Getting In Tune
Local rock critic Jim DeRogatis has spent
the last few years pestering members of the Flaming Lips for interviews,
haranguing them in the studio while they tried to get work done, bugging
singer Wayne Coyne’s significant other for photos of the band and digging
through years and years of smudged newsprint mining old interviews with and
profiles of the band. — Chicagoist
DeRogatis has been a fan of the band for
a long time and it’s apparent on every page, but he’s not a cheerleader.
Poking holes in the band’s Boom Box Experiment shows are just some of them,
but he isn’t focusing on the negative. He gives a more balanced form of
constructive criticism that doesn’t tip towards extremes. I think all great
rock bios shed more light on things that the fan didn’t know and Staring
at Sound is no exception. Information on things like the supposed
spiderbite that drummer/multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd had (as discussed
in “The Spirderbite Song”) wasn’t a spiderbite at all, how the tour with
Beck wasn’t all smiles and how the band stayed on Warner Bros. for so long
really interested me. This was fascinating and it didn't feel like tabloid-ish
gossip. Another by-product of great rock bios is when the reader gets the
urge to hear the spotlighted band's music. It had been a few months since I
had listened to Clouds Taste Metallic, The Soft Bulletin
and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, so I figured I’d put them in
my CD wallet. This helped keep the band's music on my mind as I read more
and more about their story, creating the always cool, multi-level fan
experience. — Theme Park Experience
It’s clear throughout the book that
DeRogatis is a big fan, though he’s as critical of the band’s weak material
as he is celebratory of its best. A far cry from his last book, the
canon-toppling collection Kill Your Idols, Staring at Sound
feels like an argument for the Lips to go down in history as one of rock’s
legendary acts. — Time Out Chicago
From Esquire, April 2006, The “Man at
His Best” Awards: No. 7. Bloodiest Style: Wayne Coyne.
“At first he shopped the thrift stores,
but when he discovered that the blood washed out more easily from more
expensive clothing, he turned to Armani and Dolce Gabbana.” — From
Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma’s Fabulous Flaming Lips, a
biography of the rock band by Jim DeRogatis
Chicago rock journalist DeRogatis (Let It
Blurt ) chronicles the Flaming Lips’ 23-year journey from local oddities to
nationally famous stars. Formed in 1983 by charismatic front man Wayne
Coyne, the Flaming Lips have enjoyed a career boasting almost all the
hallmarks of the usual indie band-except they’re not an indie band. They’ve
released nearly all their work on a major label, Warner Brothers, and are
one of the few bands of the 1990s to fulfill the terms of their contract.
Along the way there were many tense moments, lineup changes and struggles
(for 10 years, Coyne would come off tour to work as a fry cook at Long John
Silver’s). More than two decades later, however, in a testament to their
dedication and vision, the band has a platinum record under their belt.
Luckily for them and for their fans, they drew DeRogatis, one of the
nation’s best newspaper music critics, as a biographer. DeRogatis handles
the story soberly yet intimately, without relating the usual tales of
drug-fueled rock star excess, which the band has always eschewed. Although
the book lacks some flair for that reason, fans will appreciate that the
Flaming Lips have avoided cliché in their lives as they have in their music.
— Publishers Weekly
DeRogatis, the pop music critic at The
Chicago Sun-Times, makes ample use of his skills as both a street
reporter and a music critic here: As with any biography, there’s the usual
who, what, when, and where’s, but also an in-depth reading of the Flaming
Lips’ discography. So you’ll not only learn about founding member Wayne
Coyne’s blue-collar origins, his siblings and girlfriends, and the inside
poop on the band’s various members, managers, and record deals (as well as
its long and contentious history at Warner Brothers,) but also which of the
band’s many albums DeRogatis considers revelatory and essential, and which
ones he thinks missed the mark. Along the way, there’s an insider’s look at
Flaming Lips extravaganzas like its infamous Parking Lot symphonies, the
bizarre Zaireeka box set (featuring four CD’s that were designed to
be played simultaneously on four different CD players,) and the band’s
career-defining New Year’s Eve concert at Madison Square Garden which rang
in 2005. In between the lines, there’s a true American success story here,
an old-fashioned Horatio Alger tale of perseverance and hard work that
proves that if you stick at something you love, eventually you’ll succeed.
So many other great bands’ stories tell us something different, but at least
you can go into Staring At Sound knowing there’ll be a happy ending.
At least until the next record comes out. — Jersey Beat
Read
Staring at Sound's review from Popular Music and Society
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