MUSIC

Wayne Coyne's Oklahoma City home is an unusual at the Flaming Lips' music

By Steven Kurutz
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Sunday, October 12, 2008

OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. — When he isn't on tour, or in the recording studio making sublimely weird music, Wayne Coyne, the singer, guitarist and guiding force of the Flaming Lips, can often be found puttering around his home here — although "home" may be an inadequate word for it.

Coyne's main residence is a two-story, red-brick structure with a stone gargoyle on the roof. But he has also, over the years, acquired the three houses behind it, one of which has been painted purple and converted into storage space, while the others have been turned into guesthouses. The vacant lots on either side of the main house belong to him as well. In Flaming Lips circles, the ever-expanding property is known as the compound.

"It's our firewall," Coyne said, standing under a pecan tree in the fenced-in courtyard surrounded by the houses. "It staves off the crack dealers."

Staving off crack dealers isn't usually a concern for rock stars of Coyne's stature. His band has toured the world; released 12 albums, including "The Soft Bulletin" and "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots," which combined have sold nearly 2 million copies; and influenced a generation of artists, from Radiohead to Coldplay. And his latest project, "Christmas on Mars," a film he was the co-director of and stars in with bandmates and friends — and which he filmed largely at the compound — will be released next month. Yet Coyne, 47, still lives a few blocks from where he grew up, in a neighborhood of mostly one-story shotgun shacks with chipped paint and weedy yards. Large dogs standing guard on sagging porches suggest the crack reference wasn't a colorful metaphor.

Living here, he says, gives him freedom. "You can do what you want — when we rehearse, nobody ever complains about the noise."

And anywhere else, he added, "you couldn't shoot a movie in your yard." He built the sets for "Christmas on Mars," a "freaked-out druggy movie" about a group of astronauts spending the holiday on a space station, in the backyard and other parts of the compound, he said, often using household items. The result is a marvel of ingenuity: Hot tubs flipped on their sides became space-station walls; a Williams-Sonoma gelato maker served as the machine the astronauts used to make snow. (Coyne was in Austin on Saturday to present the movie at the Alamo Ritz; it screens again Monday. Visit originalalamo.com for more information.) "There's a thing called big junk week here, where people throw out large items," Coyne said. "I'd drive around and stuff would spark my imagination."

Coyne is clearly a lover of imagination-sparking items, which are on display, in one form or another, throughout both the film and the compound — and which lends them the same whimsical, childlike brio that his band is known for. Flaming Lips songs eschew standard pop music themes — in the group's biggest hit, "She Don't Use Jelly" (1993), he sings about a girl who dyes her hair with tangerines — and the band revels in playful experiments like the "Zaireeka" album (1997), four separate discs intended to be played simultaneously on four stereos in infinitely varying combinations. Flaming Lips concerts, meanwhile, are transcendent pop-art events: Coyne encourages fans to come in costume (sometimes as specific animals, or as Teletubbies or as Santa Claus) and at some point during each concert, he rolls over the crowd encased in a plastic bubble.

On this day, Coyne, who has a mop of curly graying hair and a gregarious manner, was wearing old bluish-green jeans and dusty sneakers. He looked like a combination of artist and tinkerer — one part Salvador Dali, one part Sanford and Son. As he pointed to props and leftover pieces of sets, it was easy to believe his claim that he had bought so much foam attic baffle and duct tape at the local Home Depot, a favorite haunt, that the store bulked up its supplies of those items.

"We are the duct tape masters," Coyne said.

"It's his medium," added Coyne's wife, J. Michelle Martin-Coyne, only half-jokingly. A slender blonde who is a photographer and a painter, she met Coyne in the late '80s when he was working as a fry cook at a local Long John Silver's between tours.

Martin-Coyne is overseeing a renovation of the main house, which explained the presence of what appeared to be a 10-foot-tall metal birdcage in the yard. In fact, it was the framing for a freestanding bathroom, or "pod," as she called it. "The interior will be white tile, and I'm putting a light in the pod that you can change from red to blue, like color therapy," she said.

The house is less a quiet sanctuary than a full-time Flaming Lips headquarters: a place where band members crashed in the early days; where rehearsals still take place in a cramped back room; and where Coyne can work up visual elements for concerts (like the mirrored disco balls sitting in an open-sided shed in the yard). On this particular day, the band's roadies were in a workshop behind the house building a "500-pound human brain," a Halloween display designed by Coyne (and actually made of lightweight foam). "There are still kids who think we showed off a dead guy," Coyne said, referring to the year he put a bloody, life-size rubber man on the porch.

It's a domestic setup that draws admiration from guests like Fred Armisen, a "Saturday Night Live" cast member who had a cameo in "Christmas on Mars." "If you're going to be a rock star, I think this is how your house should be," he said. "When I see a rock star in an estate, it always alienates me. But Wayne has this great place in Oklahoma City where he can make art and do music."

Before the couple bought the main house in 1992, Coyne and his bandmates were living in Norman, Okla., renting dingy apartments and scrounging for rehearsal space. Coyne's mother saw the house, which had been abandoned, and suggested he take a look. "It had been foreclosed on," he recalled, "and the bank was holding an auction. We bid $20,000, which was the most we could do. I was on tour, and Michelle called and said our bid won. It was like, 'Man, we're homeowners.' " While Coyne was on tour, Martin-Coyne learned how to fix the plumbing.

Both admit the living situation has been difficult at times, especially with the area's high crime rate. "If we hadn't been able to expand" and create a buffer zone, Coyne said, "we'd have been in trouble." Seven years ago, they purchased the home that belonged to their next-door neighbors and demolished it; the three other houses and two other lots have since expanded their property to about two acres.

Asked if he ever considered decamping to a fancier locale, now that the Flaming Lips command six figures to perform, Coyne said that the couple "did come to a point recently where we said, 'We're really going to do this place up or we're going to move.' " They decided to stay and renovate, adding a new wing that will include a den and a large master bedroom, and, of course, the bathroom pod. Martin-Coyne plans to cover the walkway on the side of the house and part of the roof with colorful mosaic tiling inspired by the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle.

Neighbors seem largely oblivious to the fact that a rock star lives down the street, even after all these years. But fans do sometimes seek the place out.

One Sunday evening not long ago, he said, "I was taking out the trash, and I saw this suspiciously slow-moving car." In this neighborhood, it was not unreasonable for him to wonder if he was about to be robbed, or worse.

Instead, someone yelled out the window, "Wayne, you rock!"