Wayne Coyne: ‘Not Exactly Domesticated’
October 14th, 2008
The New York Times featured the house of The Flaming Lips‘ Wayne Coyne and his wife Michelle Martin-Coyne last week in the Home and Garden section.
At Home With Wayne Coyne
Not Exactly Domesticated
by Steven KurutzWHEN he isn’t on tour, or in the recording studio making sublimely weird music, Wayne Coyne, the singer, guitarist and guiding force of the Flaming Lips, can often be found puttering around his home here — although “home” may be an inadequate word for it.
Mr. Coyne’s main residence is a two-story, red-brick structure with a stone gargoyle on the roof. But he has also, over the years, acquired the three houses behind it, one of which has been painted purple and converted into storage space, while the others have been turned into guesthouses. The vacant lots on either side of the main house belong to him as well. In Flaming Lips circles, the ever-expanding property is known simply as the compound.
“It’s our firewall,” Mr. Coyne said, standing under a pecan tree in the fenced-in courtyard surrounded by the houses. “It staves off the crack dealers.”
Staving off crack dealers isn’t usually a concern for rock stars of Mr. Coyne’s stature. His band has toured the world; released 12 albums, including “The Soft Bulletin” and “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,” which combined have sold nearly two million copies; and influenced a generation of artists, from Radiohead to Coldplay. And his latest project, “Christmas on Mars,” a film he was the co-director of and stars in with bandmates and friends — and which he filmed largely at the compound — will be released next month. Yet Mr. Coyne, 47, still lives a few blocks from where he grew up, in a neighborhood of mostly one-story shotgun shacks with chipped paint and weedy yards. Large dogs standing guard on sagging porches suggest the crack reference wasn’t a colorful metaphor.
Living here, he says, gives him freedom. “You can do what you want — when we rehearse, nobody ever complains about the noise.”
