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Flaming Lips host first annual 'March Of 1,000 Flaming Skeletons' Halloween parade
10/29/2007 1:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Lyndsey Parker
This year, when the Oklahoma Gazette invited resident Okie eccentrics the Flaming Lips to participate in its annual "Ghouls Gone Wild" Halloween parade, the Lips enlisted their biggest fans to join the March Of 1,000 Flaming Skeletons--a "spectacle celebrating the mysterious, the supernatural, and the otherworldly," according to the band's recruitment email.
"A symbolic procession glorifying the beauty of death and the boundless flame of love and life," the Flaming Lips' Halloween march took place on Saturday, October 27, with approximately 1,000 fans (the exact number that the Fire Marshall actually permitted is still up for debate) dressed in matching skeleton bodysuits and carrying lit torches through the streets of Oklahoma City. Fans paid a $25 fee to join the parade, but were allowed to keep their skeleton costumes, their "beautiful, one-of-a-kind, weird-ass" commemorative T-shirts, and their memories of this unique event forever.
There was a slight snag in the proceedings when the peripheral-vision-blocking skull masks that the band had ordered for parade participants were deemed unsafe for the fiery march. "We do not want anyone catching on fire!" Lips frontman/master of ceremonies Wayne Coyne explained in a pre-parade pep talk he gave while standing atop a motorized Segueway. "The worst thing in the world would be for [fans] to come out and then go home and be scarred for life. That would be horrible!"
However, fans didn't seem to mind going maskless, arriving at the event with their faces elaborately painted instead. The band also provided theatrical makeup for fans to paint themselves up on-site, and Coyne took the time to autograph the unused masks for fans. (He also signed one pregnant fan's third-trimester belly and one young fan's student ID card.)
The actual march was held from 7-9pm, with the skeleton-suited Lipsheads chanting and brandishing tiki torches; meanwhile an original Wagnerian march song, penned by the Lips just for this occasion, blasted out of a technicolor-painted, dry-ice-smoke-spewing soundsystem on wheels. Coyne trailed behind the marchers, rolling along in his famous clear plastic "space bubble" as the Lips' hit "Do You Realize" played. Coyne's wife Michelle followed alongside, dressed as Wonder Woman and photographing the proceedings.
"I knew if we put this thing out there that we would get just the cream of the crop of Flaming Lips fans. Thank you guys for coming through for me once again," gushed Coyne, who lingered long after the parade ended to sign autographs and take photos with the fans he repeatedly thanked for "being brave." He then sent the costumed revelers off into the night, ordering them to "go party and freak people out!"
The March Of 1,000 Flaming Skeletons took place just two days after an alley near in Oklahoma City's Bricktown district was officially rechristened "Flaming Lips Alley" in the hometown band's honor.
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