Normally about this time – two years removed from album release, marking up the skies while flying between festival appearances – Wayne Coyne would retreat into filmmaking.

Appearing: Thursday, July 7th and Friday the 8th at Aragon Ballroom, and Sunday, July 10th at Dave Matthews Band Caravan in Chicago.

For nearly a decade, he and The Flaming Lips worked tirelessly on Christmas On Mars, a no-end-in-sight struggle like Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. The process became so consuming that it felt as if it had always been there, and now (it reached completion in 2008) it gives Coyne the sensation that his sunglasses are still on top of his head even though he removed them hours ago.

“Or when someone has their hand cut off and there’s this ghost sensation of something being there,” he cracks. “For so long I’d see locations and be like, ‘I like it! I could shoot Christmas On Mars there! I could do that!’ I think I’ll always do that. Everyday, I think, ‘What are we gonna do today?’ And someone says, ‘We made that movie.’ I’ve dug a hole somewhere that will always be there.”

The result is Coyne cooped up in a Newark hotel room on a layover, and you know he’s going crazy. He says he’s drawing. “It looks sunny and hot and an excellent summer day. But I’m not really part of it.” He won’t complain, however, because he has clear memories of how the Lips used to travel. Independent rockers in the late ’80s weren’t the most well-kept bunch, which often led to problems at international desks.

“The very first time we went to Europe and spent some time there,” Coyne recalls, “there was that horrible, Lockerbie, Scotland plane crash. We had been in Europe for about six weeks and looked, you know, pretty homeless, beat-up, could be criminals, whatever. We were flying out of England, and we when we pulled into the customs agent it was late at night, we were tired, might not have been very friendly, and weren’t aware of the process. And they kicked us out and made us re-enter the country three different times. We had to catch this plane flying out of England, but we couldn’t get in. We realized little by little that they kept picking us out because we looked like 1988’s version of weirdo terrorists.”

Today, airport clerks recognize Coyne far and wide as the white leisure-suit clad, salt-and-pepper coiffed ringmaster who entertains festivalgoers with head wounds, friends dressed in rabbit suits, and by jumping into a clear plastic orb and crowdsurfing. If the days of looking like a Robocop castoff seem far away, this permutation of the Lips singer is still of recent vintage.

Fittingly for this year’s tourdates, Coyne, Stephen Drozd, and Michael Ivins have been intermittently reviving the album that reintroduced them to the public at large: 1999’s The Soft Bulletin. The band will perform it front-to-back at one of two Aragon Ballroom appearances (their recreation of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon takes center at the ensuing Dave Matthews Band Caravan). Fans who checked out early will only remember their ‘93 hit “She Don’t Use Jelly” and a freak appearance at “Beverly Hills 90210″’s Peach Pit. The rest of the music world sees Bulletin as the distillation of Coyne’s infamous “parking lot” experiments and 1997’s Zaireeka!, a four-disc album requiring each CD be played simultaneously on different stereos. Coyne remembers it as almost the end.

“When we were doing it,” he reveals, “we really thought it was going to be the last record we made. At the time, we weren’t very popular. We had an audience, but Warner Bros. was going through a lot of changes, and, though I’m not positive, I felt like we were going to be dropped after The Soft Bulletin was done. We weren’t even positive that it was going to be released. We were recording in what we felt was a void of like, ‘This is coming to an end.’ We were fighting with all of our might, but we were also accepting the freedom of saying, ‘If this is the last record we get to make, why don’t we just do what the fuck we want?’”

Instead of some embittered kiss-off, The Flaming Lips made one of the tenderest, most beautiful albums in rock history. The sweeping opener, “Race For The Prize,” follows some scientists charged with saving the planet. “Waitin’ For Superman,” a title since appropriated by a documentary on the failures of public education, tackles the emotional toll borne by superheroes. Loved ones nearly die from spiderbites, undetected injuries bleed, and it’s all presented weightlessly.

“It didn’t have any meaning other than the meaning it had for us when we did it,” he explains. “But now when we do these songs like ‘Feeling Myself Disintegrate’ – people come up to me every night we play it and say, ‘When my friend committed suicide, that song helped me understand it and not want to hate them.’ And that’s something you can’t do when you’re just writing a song. Songs take on meaning and become something, so now when we play it we understand there’s this thing happening to people in the audience and they’re reliving some horrible, powerful, life-changing experience. It’s a big deal. I’m not saying it’s a big deal like we’re The Rolling Stones. I’m saying we would never play it and think they don’t care about it anymore. We care. It can be an overwhelming moment, and I want it to be. I think music, when it’s at its most powerful, it overwhelms us and we want it to. It’s all those things that have happened in the 12 years it’s been out. People come to this music and think it already has a meaning, and that’s wonderful. We don’t have to do it anymore.” Sensing his tone, he quips, “It’d be horrible if it meant something we didn’t like.”

– Steve Forstneger

For the full piece, grab the July issue of Illinois Entertainer, available free throughout Chicagoland.

The Flaming Lips live for the moment, and the Fearless Freaks’ live shows treat each song as if it is the main event. They amplify the emotion as much as possible so that there is a more-than-usual lull between each song as if the band have to once again muster up the energy to make the next one the moment of the concert.

For a full gallery from Friday’s show, visit www.illinoisentertainerphoto.com.

That give-it-their-all work ethic was once again on display as the headliners for WXRT-FM’s Big Holiday Concert. When the 75-minute set came to a close, it was clear the band chose to stick to their proven arena hits rather than focus on introducing the good-sized crowd to their less accessible, more psychedelic offerings of the most recent album, Embryonic. Except for a handful of new songs, the set varied little from the Lips’ appearance at this past summer’s Pitchfork Festival, although the sound at the Allstate Arena was much better.

After the background video screen visually “gave birth” to each band member, frontman Wayne Coyne floated on top of the floor crowd in an inflatable ball in what has become a standard opening gimmick for the Oklahoma City rockers. A confetti and oversize-balloon explosion, combined with the opening notes of “Race For The Prize,” signaled the start of the concert that combined the energy of a rave with the wonder of New Year’s and Christmas eves.

A menagerie of dancing, costumed hangers-on filled each side of the stage, with their energy matched by the crowd for fan favorites “The Yeah, Yeah, Yeah Song” and the much older hit — and mandatory concert rendition — of “She Don’t Use Jelly.” The band once displayed their subtle side with the mellow, orchestrated “In The Morning Of The Magicians,” accompanied by a stunning backdrop of an orange- and red-flecked sunrise video montage.

The momentum came to a bit of a halt during “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots,” as Coyne invited a couch-full of VIPs to sit on the stage during a stripped and lengthened synth and vocal arrangement.

Only three Embryonic songs made the set. Opening track “Convinced Of The Hex” was played early with a hard edge, and the Apache-shrieking vocals on “Silver Trembling Hands” reverberated through the arena. A thumping and marauding bassline was the energy behind “See The Leaves.”

The encore — the uplifting track “Do You Realize?” and a cover of “White Christmas” — combined for a memorable ending. Coyne used a megaphone to croon the vocals to the holiday classic as he was accompanied by hand-shaken sleigh bells — with falling faux snow providing highlights to his mop of graying hair.

The much-anticipated appearance by Phoenix was cut far short, as the band cited “a family emergency” for their drummer’s absence. The French synth-pop band’s remaining quartet took the stage under four isolated spotlights and told the disappointed crowd they were going to play “the way we write songs” — acoustically. A drum machine provided beats to three songs (including “Lisztomania”) that minimally resembled the band’s high-energy album offerings.

Pete Yorn provided a spirited 45-minute set, leading a four-man backing band like an acoustic maestro in front of an appreciative crowd. His set largely rocked, taking on additional energy not necessarily found on his recordings. Chiming guitars and a tambourine highlighted “Blackie’s Dead,” and Yorn tugged on the heartstrings with the confessional “Cry For You” off recent album Back & Forth. A cover of New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle” was a highlight of the set.

Chicago jazz-rock veterans Nicholas Tremulis Orchestra warmed up the crowd with a high-energy 20-minute set.

– Jason Scales

While we’re still waiting for Pitchfork to hire one of the black-metal bands they wrote so much about in 2008, there is a change in store for this weekend’s festival that proves they’re paying attention.

Last year continued the All Tomorrow’s Parties “Don’t Look Back” series, in which veteran bands revisit a classic recording. In 2007, that meant Sonic Youth playing Daydream Nation, Slint doing Spiderland, and Gza recreating Liquid Swords. Fifty-two (or so) weeks later we got Public Enemy (with a newly VH1′d Flava Flav) and It Takes A Nation Of Millions, Sebadoh and the questionably honored Bubble & Scrape, and an underwhelming offer of Mission Of Burma and Vs.

Instead, 2009 has “Write The Night,” for which ticketholders could vote on sets for Tortoise, Built To Spill, The Jesus Lizard, and Yo La Tengo. Competition with Lollapalooza has put strain on the rest of the weekend, which is bravely headlined by repeaters The National, Grizzly Bear, and The Walkmen, but also one of the premier outdoor-festival bands in The Flaming Lips.

Pitchfork, per its name, should be more about the breaking and unknowns, of which there are many. They lost the bidding for Yeasayer last summer, but the band’s lo-fi Peter Gabriel-ness should translate better in Union Park. Fellow Saturday bands Plants & Animals, Cymbals Eat Guitars, Bowerbirds, and The Antlers tweak known-quantity indie-rock formulae (psychedelia, Up Records, indie pop, and loneliness, respectively) and it’s not an afternoon without abrasions suffered from Fucked Up, Wavves, and Pains Of Being Pure At Heart.

(Only two substantial hip-hop acts this year as well: MF Doom and Pharoahe Monch.)

Sunday represents a more standardized indie-rock lovefest, with M83, Vivian Girls, The Thermals, Blitzen Trapper, Frightened Rabbit, and Mew. But the most pleasant surprise is the return of Chicago’s duellin’ basses Dianogah.