Do you realize...?

Hot Karl was kind enough to offer me his spare ticket to the Flaming Lips show at Clutch Cargo in Pontiac tonight. The Detroit music scene is pretty weird, in that the clubs are rather far flung. Pontiac and Royal Oak are suburbs north of Detroit that have a lot of clubs, and there are a few live music venues in downtown Detroit. This was an hour drive from Ann Arbor.

The show was pretty cool. The Lips have this overarching sensibility of fun and optimism, and they do their best to infect the crowd. Confetti cannons, giant balloons, musical asides and singalongs are standard fare. Tonight, they handed out hundreds of laser pointers, which led to some predictable hilarity, but which were also used in a slower tune where the lead singer, Wayne Coyne, was lit up solely by the cumulative laser pointers of the crowd. He is a great, positive presence, but sometimes he can really ramble on between songs. For example, there was an extended anti-war rant that spanned two songs.

I'm familiar with three of their releases: Transmissions from a Satellite Heart, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and War of the Mystics. They played 4 or five tunes that I didn't know, and two of them were really great. The rest of the show was pretty well done, with some renditions more punchy than others. I thought "The W.A.N.D.", in particular, totally rocked. The closing song was, predictably, "Do You Realize", which I've long found to be moving and emotionally powerful. They did two encores, including "She Don't Use Jelly" and a fantastic cover of the Rolling Stones' "Moonlight Mile".

All in all, it was a nice show, and I had a really good time.

There was one issue that came up for me the following day. The show, and others on this tour, was apparently sponsored by Camel. Back when I lived in Charlotte, I was a smoker, and I would often be approached by reps from RJR and Philip Morris when I was out at a bar. In these cases, the establishment allowed the reps access to their patrons. So when I saw the ridiculous level of Camel presence at Clutch Cargo, I assumed they had secured permission from the club. As it turns out, they've been investing heavily into this Flaming Lips tour.

So why should I care? Smoking is legal, it was an 18 and older show, and the sponsorship was used to subsidize the extravagant cost of the arena-worthy Flaming Lips spectacle, rendered at the level of a club show. My ticket was $25, and there's no way that small crowd paid for that show at that cost. On the other hand, this band that seems to exude a "Make the world a better place" ethos is taking money from an industry that sells, exclusively, a product that is secretly addictive and leads to death and disease, not to mention poverty for those addicts who can't really afford them. They are also granting these people access to their fans. While I have trouble believing that a non-smoker would see the display at age 18 and say, "You know, I think I'll start smoking. The Flaming Lips tacitly said that it's OK.", I can't help but be disappointed in the mixed message put out by a band that touts "Changing the world" as one of their goals.

In the end, they aren't what they want me to believe they are because of this. It's not that I have so much invested in these three guys vis-a-vis faith in humanity, but there's a sense of loss there nonetheless.

BTW, the little larcenous seagull off to the left was forwarded to me by Jim Brodie. It apparently resides in Aberdeen, UK, and locals are so taken with its antics that they pay for the snacks that it steals. It only takes Doritos, and it shares its filthy lucre with other birds. [Edit: URL is no longer valid. Google "Aberdeen Thieving Seagull" if you want to see the video.]