Check out photos from last night's Flaming Lips-hosted and Plastic Ono Band-assisted New Year's Eve Freakout #5.
Best Freakout yet?
With Plastic Ono Band, Phantogram, a proclamation from the mayor, Beatles covers, and the Flaming Lips' usual giant laser hand-firing, space bubble surfing, psychedelic face-melting antics, it's hard to argue against it.
A few highlights:
-Phantogram played an excellently trippy, dark-toned set.
-A very cool 15-ish-minute intro video for Plastic Ono Band that featured a ton of old home footage of Yoko with John Lennon, and shortly, but beautifully, captured her life dedicated to art and activism for peace.
-The NYE countdown when Lips manager and ACM@UCO CEO Scott Booker presented Yoko the official proclamation, on behalf of the mayor. Read it here.
-A full-on, everybody-hugging-and-holding-hands rendition of John Lennon's "Merry Christmas (War is Over)."
-A monstrous 15-minute Lips cover of The Beatles' "She's So Heavy" that included a hypnotic, dissonant Nels Cline guitar solo.
-Seeing Sean Lennon snag my friend Tate's camera to shoot video of Wayne addressing the crowd before the set. Lennon basically just asked him about the camera, then asked if he could try it out. When he did, Tate just sorta shrugged and looked at me, like "What am I gonna do? He's Sean Lennon."
-Always-ecstatic Lips frontman Wayne Coyne tweeted the set list about two hours before they even took the stage. The new song "Drug Chart" unfortunately got scratched.
Check out the rest of my photos and my friend Nathan Poppe's below.
Music Hugh Foley Editor’s note: With Saturday marking Woody Guthrie’s 100th
birthday, we asked music scholar Hugh Foley for his take on why Guthrie
still matters. A professor at Rogers State University in Claremore,
Foley is the author of the Oklahoma Music Guide IIand a founding board member of the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame.
Rock Joshua Boydston
It’s taken four years since Mind the Fox’s formation for the Oklahoma
City rock outfit to finally offer a full-length debut album, but from
the sounds of Songs for the Needy, it’s been worth the wait.
Comedy Rod Lott
If movies could be drug-tested, The Phynx would be in big
trouble. The 1970 comedy is not just an obscurity, but an oddity, like a
hallucinogenic brew mixed by Peter Max and Hanna-Barbera. Newly rescued
from Nowheresville by Warner Archive, the film is a spy spoof on the goofball level of Get Smart — in spirit, that is, not creatively.
From behind the scenes at his Oklahoma-based talent agency, Jim Halsey helped change the face of modern music. A new exhibition of memorabilia is proof positive.
Visual Arts Louis Fowler Starmaker: Jim Halsey and the Legends of Country Music through April 5 Gaylord-Pickens Oklahoma Heritage Museum 1400 Classen Drive oklahomaheritage.com 235-4458 $5-$7
