The Flaming Lips (EP)

The Flaming Lips is the Lips' debut EP, recorded in summer 1983. At this point in the band’s history, Wayne Coyne’s brother Mark was the lead singer – though Wayne wrote the songs, Mark sings on this one.

The band recorded this EP at Benson Sound, an Oklahoma City studio which primarily recorded Christian artists and “local jingles”. The studio had owed Wayne’s father Tom for some office supplies and, strapped for cash, offered him free recording time in lieu of payment. The recording engineer was a “staid Baptist [who] didn’t quite know what to make of the band.”.

The album was pressed by a mail-order pressing plant Wayne Coyne found in the back of famed punk zine Maximum Rocknroll. Coyne’s grandmother loaned him $1500 and some weeks later, the band had 1000 copies of their record – on green vinyl. The cover (designed by Wayne in his family’s kitchen with a Magic Marker) featured their drummer Richard English draped in a curtain in the back of Tomco – Wayne’s father’s office supply store and the band’s first practice space. Original copies also came with a four-color poster depicting a painting Wayne made of “a weird, Jimi Hendrix-after-the-apocalypse-looking guy playing the guitar.”

The Lips mailed this record out to as many college radio stations and punk magazines as they could find and were met with significant success – critics loved the EP, especially Byron Coley of Forced Exposure, who compared them to Black Oak Arkansas and the 13th Floor Elevators.

The EP was reissued in 2014 – once again on green vinyl, and packaged with a chocolate skull and an edible brain which contained a special golden coin which gave the owner free admission to any Flaming Lips concert.