By Dave Oberhelman

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Standing in line awaiting the Aragon Ballroom doors to open for the Flaming Lips concert on July 7, a giddy vibe emanated from fans who helped draw the Oklahoma City veterans to Chicago for three gigs in four days, topping any city on the Lips’ Summer 2011 tour. As newcomers strode the gravel path to the end of the 100-yard queue they were greeted by polite applause. A bearded 40-something captivated younger fans by performing Lips songs on ukulele.

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Despite often dire lyrics, celebration is paramount to the Flaming Lips concert experience particularly in the years since singer Wayne Coyne, bassist Michael Ivins, multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd and, much later, tech-turned-regular drummer Kliph Scurlock morphed from a late-1980s, garage-punk band – yet steeped in Pink Floyd – to a pomp-rock outfit. Its big themes are presented with big sound, big vision. (Given the band's early penchant for pouring flammable liquid on an upside down cymbal, lighting it and then crashing the cymbal, hallucinatory adrenalin blended with maximum volume may have served as its prior muse.)

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Thursday the Lips performed in entirety their commercial-breakthrough album, The Soft Bulletin. While in a past Chicago concert lead Lip Coyne’s prodding for sing-along euphoria seemed tedious and distracting rather than encouraging, at the Aragon he was (mainly) focused at the matter at hand.  There was little need to ratchet up the multi-generational crowd that filled the sold-out main floor and balcony of the legendary “Brawlroom.” The material, musicianship, lighting and Coyne’s antics again confirmed these late bloomers’ position among top live acts and, perhaps, rock’s foremost eccentrics.

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The Soft Bulletin, released in 1999, came 14 years after their recording debut and five years after the 1995 semi-novelty hit, “She Don’t Use Jelly.” Discounting the little-heard “Zaireeka” – just one quirk in a career full of them, it’s an ambient four-disc set designed to be played one disc apiece in four different players simultaneously  – “The Soft Bulletin” elevated the band from cult curiosity to hall-filler.  The progress followed with its 2002 masterpiece, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, for which the band received its first Grammy Award for an instrumental track, “Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon.”

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The bombastic instrumentation produced on The Soft Bulletin by the quartet plus engineer Dave Fridmann, augmented at the Aragon by two additional musicians, a guitarist-percussionist and keyboard player, is typified in the album-opening “Race for the Prize,” a synth- and drum-fueled ode to a pair of scientists in a duel to the death. Always up for a good time, Coyne quickly entered his inflatable space bubble/gerbil ball for a bouncy trip on the upraised hands of the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd, rolling to the soundboards and back onstage.

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As Ivins plucked away in time-honored solitary bassist fashion stage left and Coyne carried on at front-center, Drozd, the group’s true musician, chimed in on guitar, keyboards and backing vocals. The wiry Scurlock, who had supplanted Drozd on drums during the original Soft Bulletin tour, chain-smoked cigarettes between songs or while Coyne conducted the crowd. Otherwise he ferociously bashed away.

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The band performed under a light rig that arched, rainbow-style, from one side of the stage to the other. This bathed both musicians and audience in warm blues, yellows, reds and, during crescendos or emotional peaks, blasts of blinding white light. Lasers and a refractive “disco globe” sent jagged beams out from behind the band; lighted rods suspended from the Aragon ceiling occasionally provided cooler whites in syncopation with the music. As tradition holds at Lips shows female recruits, wearing identical blue-and-white skirts reminiscent of Little Bo Peep meets St. Pauli Girl, adorned stage right and left, swooning and waving.

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Songs about aliens and zoo animals have mainly passed from the Flaming Lips’ catalog. Themes of helplessness, ethereal curiosity and the meaning of life – and death—have remained. Endearingly armed with one of the most frayed, oft-strained and pedestrian voices in rock, Coyne’s Everyman explored those themes on songs such as “A Spoonful Weighs a Ton,” “Waitin’ for a Superman” and “What is the Light?”

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“The Spiderbite Song” referenced an actual injury Drozd suffered which at the time threatened his ability to continue in the band, while “Buggin’” combined Drozd’s joyful piano line, Ivins’ Chris Squire-like bass and Coyne’s lyrics about mosquitoes on the album’s most single-ready tune.

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Drozd’s lush synthesizer orchestration lent equal amounts power and poignancy to The Soft Bulletin’s two instrumentals, “The Observer” with Coyne kicking in a single-note guitar solo; and the album-closer, “Sleeping on the Roof.”

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For this writer, at least on par with “Race for the Prize” – a natural recent concert opener due to its immediate explosion of melody, light and dozens of huge balloons spilled out into the crowd – is The Soft Bulletin’s penultimate number, “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate.”

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Among Coyne’s explorations into loss of potency this time, as he has said, on a cell-by-cell basis starting practically from birth, it’s a beautifully haunting piece – just two verses and the title repeated as chorus – sparked by Drozd’s plaintive ending guitar solo.

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Among the Flaming Lips’ many projects was a 2010 cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album, and their first encore was a strong performance of that landmark’s finale, “Brain Damage/Eclipse.” They concluded by playing their greatest commercial single to date, “Do You Realize??” A concert staple since it was performed in support of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Drozd’s alto-voiced “One, two, three, four” opening and strummed guitar signaled the Aragon crowd would leave on a high.

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In his longing vocal Coyne states that everyone he knows "one day will die." He's equally invested in the opposite concept that "happiness makes you cry." While we're here, that's worth celebrating.

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The setlist (click a song to watch video):

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Race for the Prize

A Spoonful Weighs a Ton

That Spark That Bled

The Spiderbite Song

Buggin'

What Is the Light?

The Observer

Waitin' for a Superman

Suddenly Everything Has Changed

The Gash

Feeling Yourself Disintergrate

Sleeping on the Roof

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Brain Damage/Eclipse

Do You Realize??

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The Flaming Lips

July 7, 2011 @ The Aragon