Transmissions from the Satellite Heart

Transmissions from the Satellite Heart came out in 1993 but it wasn’t untill the end of 1994 where “She Don’t Use Jelly” starts to be played on like Beavis and Butt-head and alternative radio stations By then we had already been playing and promoting and going to radio stations and going to MTV’s and stuff like that for a little while and it didn’t surprise us that it was working a little bit, but then it always is kind of weird when it starts working better than you think. Then we went on a very long tour with the band Candlebox and we’re out there playing our little noisy little songs. We would most night start to play and the entire audience wouldn’t be there yet but the audience would absolutely hate us and there’s a certain energy you get from that kind of hatred. It can be quite fun to play to people that want to kill you and it gives you a kind of a power, but we would play “She Don’t Use Jelly” even to that audience and, even in the flow of their their hatred, they would like that one and then we’d play the next song they’d go back to being outwardly hateful. Then of course Beavis and Butt-head in a way that they would make fun of you was really endearing and clever, so them talking about it was just a way of people hearing your music and and that would get radio stations to play it even if they were making fun of or whatever. Popularity is a funny thing you know, it’s like once something is kind of popular it has the potential to grow and grow and grow and when Beverly Hills 90210 called us, if this would have been you know a year earlier or six months earlier we probably would have thought, “well no we’re too cool, we don’t do those sorts of things.” But we had just done a lot of stuff by then and it occurred to us that it would be ridiculous and absurd and funny, and it didn’t really matter if it was artistically good or bad or whatever. I think they had for good reason they had a lot of restrictions about what could be backstage there could be no pot, no drugs, no alcohol or any of that but some some of the people involved in The Flaming Lips were pretty pretty determined and pretty imaginative of how they want to spend their day. So there were there was some ruckus about that but some of the cast members were really fans and really fun, and some of them were kind of you know could care less and this one of the day to be over with.
We did kind of talk amongst ourselves like it seems weird that the one episode that we’re on is such a disaster that there’s no way it will air. It just didn’t seem possible that it could work we saw them saying lines, they would do them five or six times. At the end of the badly done, from our perception, takes there was no big celebration, it just sort of felt like yet another grueling day on the set, and we thought, “well that probably won’t air and no one won’t ever see us.” Three weeks later it’s on TV and it looks wonderful and all the things that we thought seemed like a disaster were just business as usual.

– Wayne Coyne, Yahoo