When a group is helmed by someone like Wayne Coyne, it’s easy to assume they function more like a consensual dictatorship than a band. But while Coyne certainly has his faults, he’s also the first to admit his band is nothing if not the sum of their individual members and friends. In a 2018 Rolling Stone Interview, Coyne expressed a particular indebtedness towards Jonathan Donahue, frontman of Mercury Rev.

Like George Salisbury, Donahue was a fan of the band who wanted to help out. That meant first running sound for them before becoming their second guitarist, then engineering the demos for what would eventually become “In a Priest Driven Ambulance.” That album would later be recorded at SUNY Fredonia in upstate New York, made possible through a friendship between Donahue and Dave Fridmann who worked for the university. During those sessions, while The Flaming Lips took the day shift (except on “There You Are,” allegedly recorded in the middle of the night on an empty freeway), Donahue took the night shift to record Mercury Rev’s debut, “Yerself is Steam.”

Between “In a Priest Driven Ambulance” and its follow up (also featuring Donahue, as per AllMusic), Mercury Rev blew-up overnight, initiating a bidding war that ultimately ended in a short contract with Columbia Records. In the aftermath, Donahue amicably split with Coyne and company, but his short stint with them left an impression lasting well into the present.

A well known aspect of The Flaming Lips, endearing fans towards them since the beginning, is their unabashed strangeness. Over the years, they’ve also attracted a number of celebrity fans, leading to some otherwise unlikely collaborations with A-list pop stars. 2012’s Record Store Day release, “The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends,” is an album comprised entirely of said collaborations. Featuring guest appearances from such diverse artists as noise-rock legends, Lightning Bolt, and alt-R&B goddess, Erykah Badu, the album also marked the first time the band would collaborate with kindred–weirdo, Kesha.

Following “Heady Fwends,” Wane Coyne and Kesha reportedly began recording together, and in a 2013 Ask Me Anything session on Reddit Coyne spilled that they’d soon be releasing a collaborative album titled “Lip$ha.” Coyne continued to plug the collab tweeting in September: “Yesssss!! Lip$ha is happenin!!” Two months later, the album was called off without explanation. 

Nearly a year later, fans were given something of an explanation when news of Kesha’s lawsuit against collaborator Dr. Luke exploded into national headlines; days later, Coyne confirmed in a radio.com interview (via NME) that Kesha’s contract with Dr. Luke was the reason behind the album’s sudden shelving. To date, “Past Lives,” released on the deluxe edition of Kesha’s sophomore album, “Warrior,” is the only song from the “Lip$ha” sessions to see the light of day (save a few unconfirmed leaks). In 2016, Coyne expressed on his Instagram a willingness to leak the album in its entirety, which has also yet to happen.

Throughout the 2010s, Wayne Coyne continued adding to his motley roster of collaborators, rounding it all out with a feature by Mick Jones, lead guitarist and co-lead vocalist of The Clash, on 2019’s “The King’s Mouth.” However, long before becoming a favorite artists’ artist, they had an unplanned guest perform with them on BBC’s long-celebrated Top of the Pops.

According to Rolling Stone, Justin Timberlake and Coyne met while waiting for separate interviews at the same London radio station. The two got to talking, as Timberlake is a big fan, so naturally Coyne invited him to join them for a live tape performance later that week. Marking The Flaming Lips’ first brush with music royalty (though they’d previously also been joined by Ted Dansen), audiences on both sides of the Atlantic were stunned when an anonymous plush dolphin removed its head to reveal an actual pop-star inside. 

For Lips fans, the stunt simply added a new dimension to the band’s care-free persona. For Timberlake however, hot off his first foray into being a serious solo artist (via BBC music), the move was a first step in showing listeners he also had a hip and fun side. And though his instrument was reportedly unplugged for the performance, Timberlake was still committed enough to not only spend the week studying his part but also give himself blood-blisters during the actual taping.

Following “Zaireeka” and the ’96-’97 parking lot experiments which inspired it, The Flaming Lips set out to take their unique, if not cumbersome, creation on the road in 1998. While this could’ve easily meant something relatively simple like hiring extra performers to double, quadruple, or octuple their sound (a move orchestras have made work for centuries), the band instead opted to continue chasing the thread of unconventional performance and listening in what later became known as “The Boombox Experiments” (via Chicago Reader).

Similar to both “Zaireeka” and the “Parking Lot Experiments,” “The Boombox Experiments” were based on a series of one-off cassette tapes, made specifically for the tour. As Wayne Coyne told NME that year, the band was once again interested in elements of chance and audience participation. Therefore, handpicked and armed with crudely modified boom boxes, the band’s fans once again became their musical instruments. While the tour was largely comprised of tunes based on those released on “Zaireeka,” in a bid to up the ante of unpredictability and spontaneity Coyne also included a few tapes and tape-combinations that neither he nor the band had heard before their first sound test, as bandmate Steven Drozd reported to MTV. While never repeated since, the tour and its few shows were heralded as a success by band, fans, and critics alike, and remain one of the most interesting creative endeavors the band has ever embarked on.

From working-class kids in a rough part of Oklahoma City (via HuffPost) to one of the world’s best known alternative-rock groups, The Flaming Lips have followed an unlikely, if not archetypically, American career trajectory, to say the least. Yet, even amidst such notable highlights as playing backup band to both Beck and Miley Cyrus, producing an independent science fiction film, and releasing an LP that contained Kesha’s actual blood, one of their odder moments remains the time they were briefly featured on an episode of “Beverly Hills 90210.”

“She Don’t Use Jelly” became the band’s first (and only) major radio hit thanks to, as reported by Entertainment Weekly, their 1994 performance at Lollapalooza. After charting, the song soon attracted the attention of 90210’s producers, and the band was invited to perform on an episode for season five. Year later, in an interview with Yahoo, Wayne Coyne expressed disbelief that the episode ever even made it to air, stating, “We saw them saying lines, and they would do them five or six times, and everybody at the end of the badly done — from our perception, anyway — takes, everybody’d kinda be like, ‘Yeah, whatever.'” For whatever it’s worth, critics and fans still consider it a decent episode, even if the band’s inclusion doesn’t stand out as noteworthy enough to even mention.