1996-1997: The Parking Lot Experiments

Introduction

Rumours first surfaced of some strange happenings in Oklahoma City during the late summer/early Autumn of 1996. Following the departure of Ronald Jones, Wayne Coyne had turned his hand to new sonic endeavours. Wayne had always wanted to experiment with multiple sound source recorded music, so he began to organise some little sound experiments. It began with a few tape recorders in the back room, and then evolved into getting 10 of his friends cars together to play yet more adventurous compositions before Wayne decided to go the whole hog and sit in that back room creating 40 tapes that would play together. The final result was eventually dubbed the 'Flaming Lips Parking Lot Experiment'. 40 cars were arranged to form a kind of wholly unusual soundsystem in a covered car parking space, and were then used to play out a strange, fluid 20 minute sound composition. Perhaps the best way to describe the actual sound that came from that kind of surreal orchestra is as being some how extra real. A sound so fluid and full that it was almost a tangible presence in the air...

Several instances of The Parking Lot Experiments followed during 1996 and 1997, as the band played several different compositions of music and found sound, using the tape decks from 30 to 40 cars carefully arranged in various parking lots around the US. Aside from a brief resurrection using car CD players at the Roskilde Festival in 1999, the Parking Lot Experiments were superceded in 1997 by the Boombox Experiments. The following text was supplied in November 1996, and is a singularly excellent way to learn the full details of the Parking Lot Experiments and hopefully obtain a sense of how it sounded....

The following text comes from an e-mail sent in America by Bruce McGuire. Mr McGuire was sent this text by the author, Jeff Johnson (aka Johnsoon), who as well as being a friend, went with Mr McGuire on his recent trip to Oklahoma City (OKC.) The trip was made to spend Halloween with Wayne Coyne from the rock band 'Flaming Lips'. Whilst there they witnessed Wayne's planned experiment in sound entitled, at least for now, 'The Parking Lot Experiment'.

As much as possible the text is in the original as supplied by Mr Johnson. Any additions from Bruce are in BLOCK CAPITALS.

Part 1

[....] Then Wayne took us [Mr JOHNSOON & Mr McGUIRE] to a room in back cluttered with cassettes, a 4 track recorder, and a bunch of elaborately mapped-out blueprints for his Parking Lot Experiment, the second of which he is going to try to pull off on Sunday. This was our reason for the road-trip.

The Parking Lot Experiment involves 40 cassettes of 40 different sounds, noises, and bits of music Wayne has recorded. Every Sunday, from now until Thanksgiving, he is trying to get 40 people to bring their cars (with tape decks) down to a parking lot where they will each crank the tapes from their cars simultaneously. He is envisioning an orchestra of sorts. He commented on his troubles with the last show, and how much he learned by doing it. There were several miscues on everybody's part, but he still was able to get a feel for how to make it work. He walked around the lot with a giant bull-horn and served as the conductor.

For example, some people's tape decks were weaker than others and you just couldn't hear anything. His "1st chair" cars, the stars of the operation, were the ones with the booming systems. He had his hands full.

Part 2

Saturday November 2nd

He [WAYNE] took us to this back room where he does "sound checks" for the experiment. He's got 30 boom boxes all lined up, basically in the same positioning that he would like the cars to line-up, and then he loads 30 test cassettes and fires them all off at once. The boom boxes let him know which tapes are fucked up. After a few run throughs, everything seems to be cool. Then Wayne sits down in the middle of all of them and starts talking about what he is trying to do. He doesn't want this to seem like some high-falutin' art project - his words. But he is also sick of doing the plain ol' rock thing - his words again. He knows people are going to think he's nuts, but if they could just see the whole thing in motion, he knows that they would change their tune. Then he ends up saying he's not trying to "convert" anybody anyway. He's way too fucking cynical for that. He just wants to have some fun.

Part 3

So, Saturday came and went without much fanfare at all. Wayne was busy toiling away in different rooms in the back of his compound. Me [AUTHOR JOHNSOON] and McGuire came in and he quickly put me to work making numbered signs for each car. That way he could have an easier frame of reference to keep shit under control - like, "Hey, car 14, turn it down!" etc. It was fairly tedious work, but I enjoyed having some part in the project.

Anyway, on Sunday everybody busted ass over to this parking lot at a place called Bellini's. As people showed up, Wayne directed traffic and positioned everybody's cars where he wanted them. A lot of OKC yokels and wowed Lips fans arrived, willing to participate in the experiment. I was pretty impressed at how open people were to Wayne's idea.

He handed out "practice" tapes to everyone and then they all went back to their cars. Using a bullhorn, Wayne hollered, "1-2-3- go," and then the tapes rolled. The practice tapes just announced the number of everybody's car, spaced out in perfect order, with about 2 seconds of lag time between each car.

Even though the task of popping a tape into a car's tape deck and hitting play doesn't seem too demanding, a couple of people still managed to fuck it up. Someone's radio blasted an REO Speedwagon tune by accident, and Wayne just pointed to the car and yelled, "Turn 'at shit off!" and kept on walking while everybody chuckled.

Then he handed out the real tapes to everybody. Borrowing from the playbook of Rocky and Bullwinkle, this week's masterpiece had 2 names. It was called "Sleepin' on the Roof," or "Should We Keep the Severed Head Awake".

Wayne provided a brief description of the whole thing by saying that it was based on a summer night when his air conditioner broke, forcing him to seek relief by sleeping on the roof. Only it turned out to be not a very sound sleep. He drifted in and out of consciousness. The different tapes in the cars rolled, playing out his night on the roof.

As he went to sleep things like mosquitoes buzzed in his ears. He dreamt of a gigantic traffic jam, and a billion honking cars. He woke to his dogs barking and people swearing at each other, he nodded back off to a symphony of guitars. He woke again to the sound of his heart beat and the neighbor's loud and taunting air conditioner.

It all sounded way more intense than I could describe. Wayne spent days talking about how crappy it was gonna sound, but for the 23 minutes or so that it lasted, it generally blew me away. It didn't sound anything like a bunch of cars with cruddy tape decks playing weird shit. There was a method to the madness. Sounds weaved in and out and met each other in a way that reminded me of early Public Enemy records, if Aphex Twin and Kevin Shields were part of the Bomb Squad.

Of course Wayne's description, "A moth in my ear turns into a flock of hummingbirds with threads tied around their necks carrying drops of blood...", is way more poetic than how I just described it.

Everybody congregated in between the cars, looking at each other, and then looking at their feet. Some people laughed, while others paid close attention or yawned. Wayne shuffled back and forth between them all in the yellow raincoat he's been wearing everyday for months. At times he would casually point to something coming out of a car and grin, and then he'd just keep walking.

Wayne's sister had a VW bug with the rear speakers pulled out, and mounted loosely on the roof. At the end, with the sounds of an air conditioner rattling thru them, she looked at Wayne and motioned for him to come over. "Umm, Wayne? Are you breaking my speakers, here?" He just kind of laughed and shook his head no. Then everybody gave the tapes back, shook hands, chatted with each other and hit the trail. The evening was a complete success.

Introduction

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