No offense to the second-largest newspaper in Oklahoma, but the storm events were best summed-up by front man Wayne Coyne’s Aug. 6 tweets, presented by Chicken-Fried News in glorious chronological order:
—“It’s cooling down a little!!! Gonna be sweaty party in the street!!!”
— “F**K!!!! Wind and rain destroyed the stage !!!!!”
—“Show is cancelled!!!! Devastation!!!”
—“Thought we were gonna die!!!”
—“But Flaming Lips fans are still happy and freaky!!!!”
Rolling Stone reported that the group’s 15-foot video screen toppled, prompting audible gasps from fans.
“We were all on stage thinking, ‘What are we actually going to do, here?’” bassist Michael Ivins told the magazine. “It was just pouring down rain. Then the screen started moving. There wasn’t a lot of space between the screen and an 8-foot drop. I basically had to leap over one of the legs (of the screen) to get out of the way. It was definitely pretty crazy.”
Still, Ivins claimed the incident wasn’t preventable.
“It was a freak thing that happened,” he told Rolling Stone. “Maybe the stage could’ve been facing a different direction. We could have tied the screen down, but it would probably have taken the whole stage down. We try to take as many precautions as we can, all the time. It’s just sometimes there’s stuff out of your control. You just never know what’s going to happen.”
You might even break your neck … or, at least, your guitar’s neck.
Steven Drozd posted a Twitpic of the mangled guitar head, chronicled with the aptly written caption, “Mother Nature f**ked us up in Tulsa. Luckily no one was hurt.” Well put, Steven.
That would’ve been something to fret about (cue drumroll with cymbal crash).
