Street Roots • April 24-May 1, 2015
walk away from his last semester and
diploma.
“I knew I wanted to do music, and I didn’t
really feel like I needed to go to school.”
It wasn’t just that he learned he could
survive without school, but he had an
insatiable hunger to express himself through
music and art, and fulfilling that calling
became his primary objective.
Wayne recalled this outlook becoming the
norm of his inner circle. “We had organized
our lives around making and recording
m usic.... School just didn’t matter.”
Home mattered. It’s where he had
everything he needed to thrive: his records,
his brothers, transportation, steady income
and freedom.
While the success that followed was
anything but ordinary, the circumstances
Wayne endured along the way were typical
for someone who wanted to make music and
be a member of a rock band.
“Creative people will use anything they
have. If you take away their paints, they’ll
use mud. If you take away their mud, they’ll
use their blood. If you take away their blood,
they’ll fucking just use dust. They will do
anything they can to do their thing.”
Most any job or source of income is
acceptable as long as it achieves the desired
means to an end, which in Wayne’s case was
making and recording music.
Enter Long John Silver’s.
Wayne worked diligently for the fast-food
chain from 1977 until the early ’90s. He was
the employee who could do the job of two or
three and handle the busiest times of night
with ease.
“I loved it. I didn’t want it to be a full-time
responsible job; I just wanted to put in
enough time so I could get some money and
do.my music and art.”
His decade-plus stint in the professional
fish stick industry is best known for one
night, when two men attempted to rob the
restaurant at gunpoint.
“I was 16. These dudes came in, and they
were so fucking jacked up and pissed off,
and they’ve got these guns. They are just
raging, and you feel like they’re going to get
the money and fucking kill you. I remember
lying on the ground just thinking, ‘This is
how it ends.’
“And nothing can get you like that. You
can’t see.a movie, hear a story; you can’t
even have a dream like that and know what
it’s like in real life. But they didn’t kill us.
And I think for a little while after that,
whatever insecurities I had about making
music, they just didn’t matter anymore. The
six months or so after the robbery, I really
made this stride towards doing my own
thing. It’s what made me think I could write
my own songs.”
Citing his logic from those early days, he
said, “I worked to make money. Then, I’d
get to go do my music ... which didn’t make
any money.”
Enter his secondary income stream:
selling marijuana.
Unlike the stories of ruthless drug
dealers viciously defending their turf or
hopeless addicts abandoning all priorities,
Wayne’s foray into the illegal marijuana
industry was merely an opportunistic
business venture.
“I didn’t smoke pot, but everybody was
coming to my house and doing it with my
brothers anyway,” so selling pot offered a
risky, yet easy, way to make a return to
support his artistic ambitions.
Page 9
Asked about avoiding the law during that
time, Wayne conceded, “I was absolutely,
absolutely lucky I didn’t get caught because
... that would’ve been horrible and probably
would’ve changed my whole life. It would not
have been worth the risk. When you’re 17,
you don’t really know what the risks are.”
Wayne says many of his friends - who
had paid their library fees and earned
diplomas — landed better jobs and made
more money (at least initially), “but all they
did was work all the time. When you’re
young, it’s easy to think I want to be a rock
star, and then stuff happens and you’re 4 0 .1
wanted to do music, not just have it as an
idea or dream.”
"Creative
people
w ill use
anything
they have.
If yon take
away their
paints,
th e y'll nse
mad« If yon
take away
their sand?
th e y'll nse
their bleed«
They w ill do
anything they
can to do their
th in g /'
The Flaming Lips
“The first place we played (in Oklahoma
City) was the Blue Note. The stage is still
there, and it looks virtually the same today.
Nobody else in town would even let us play.
We played Minneapolis, San Francisco, ,
Dallas and Austin before we were able to
play any of the cool places here in OKC.”
The Flaming Lips, with Wayne on guitar
(arid .still employed by Long John Silver’s),
Michael Ivins on bass guitar and his brother
Mark on lead vocals, released their first
album in 1983, “The Flaming Lips.” It would
be the only Flaming Lips album without
Wayne as frontman. The band went on to
record three more albums in the 1980s
before signing with Warner Brothers in
1991, ultimately closing the hushpuppies
chapter of Wayne’s working career.
Shortly thereafter, they bought the house
he still lives in today near the Plaza District
for $20,000. When asked why they stayed in
Oklahoma, Wayne replies, “We never
planned to have a different life.... I mean, «
we go all around the world and stay places
anyway,” so why wouldn’t they just stay
living here?
“I knew people from Oklahoma who
would move to L.A. or whatever and work 10
jobs while living in an apartment the size of
this couch we’re sitting on. People in L.A.
wouldn’t even have a practice space. How
you guys gonna be a band? And people in
New York had it even worse. People would
visit me in Oklahoma, and we had a house
and dogs and a yard. X I don’t begrudge
anyone for leaving. But I was here for my
own. My family’s from here. My brothers
and sister all live nearby. I had my own
reasons for living here.”
When asked how he managed the
newfound fame, Wayne shrugged with
humility. “We weren’t FAMOUS famous.
People just knew us because we made
music. It’s not like one day you’re making
10K and the next you’re making a niillion.
We got our money little by little.”
He described the gradual climb to wealth
in the most pragmatic way a rock star can:
“Little by little, I would be making more
money than my brothers. Then little by
little, a lot more. Then little by little, a fuck
lot more.”
But making a fortune wasn’t ever the goal
for this frontman.
“It didn’t matter what we did to make
money. At the core of who we were, we’d do
our music. But when you’re lucky enough to
have financial stability, that’s when you really
get to do great shit,” he said emphatically.
“When my mother got-cancer, that is when I
knew what I had worked so hard for. All that
WAYNE COYNE
(PICTURED AS A C HI
medical shit costs so much money and is so
stressful. Not having to worry about what to
do, to me that is a luxury.”
Homeless animals and careless pet
owners cause major issues across the
country, and for all the beauty Coyne sees in
Oklahoma City, this problem does more
than tug on his heartstrings; it rips them
out and shakes them violently.
He recounted the time he was driving
Cofdplay vocalist Chris Martin around ’
Oklahoma City for a quick tour before a
show about 10 years ago. The duo passed
several dogs that had been run over and left
in the streets.
“To someone who’s not used to that, it
seems like something appalling is going on
here,” he said, both ashamed and perplexed.
“I am hopeful that this won’t be a
problem here in the future; And when a dog
gets hit in the street, we will stop and care
about it, not just act like it’s a nuisance on
the way to something more important. ”
Coyne is taking action to help make a
better future for animals in his community.
A portion of the proceeds from The Flaming
Lips’ 14th álbum, released in October 2014,
are going to the Bella Foundation, which
supports homeless pet adoption and
provides assistance to low-income pet
owners in Oklahoma City.
“Dogs don’t want to -be. out on a farm with
thousands of other dogs. They want to be
sleeping in your bed watching Netflix.
“I’m lucky that enough people like our
music that I can do all this other stuff.” You
know, “other stuff’ like creating a
controversial art gallery in Automobile Alley
or leading thousands of torch-wielding
skeletons down Broadway in that infamous
hamster ball, or getting matching tats with
pop stars. That stuff.
Home
So how does such an eclectic, opinionated
personality cope with the comically
conservative contrast his home state
provides?
“I don’t begrudge the way Oklahoma is.
And the way I live would be impossible for
most people. I just do whatever the fuck I
w a n t... I text with the governor in
Denver. I was there when weed became
legal. It’s just one state away, but it’s a
different world there. Oklahoma is mostly
just these rural, little towns, and they all
vote and they all go to church. We’re really
living in their world. There’s no reason we
should just be able to change this little part
of the world and make everyone be like us,”
he said, lifting his extraterrestrial mask and
revealing a pragm atic appreciation for th e
conservative way.
“There is a portion of OKC that is young
and progressive. But a lot of people talk the
fuckin’ talk, but they don’t vote. We are run
by the people that vote. And if you don’t
vote, how is anything going to change?”
There are areas of the state that might be
a bit more wary of such an assertive, free-
spirited lifestyle, but Wayne’s not from
there. This one is his. This one is home.
When he realized the kids in his
neighborhood had only one or two houses to
visit for trick-or-treating during Halloween,
he decided to make his neighborhood a
better place and demonstrate just how
powerful a positive example can be. He set
up big decorations in the front yard and
hosted parties for the 20 or 30 lads from
the neighborhood.
He knew their plight.
“Their parents wouldn’t take them out.
They didn’t even have costumes! There was
nothing in my neighborhood for them.”
Recognizing the cyclical nature of
neighborhoods like his, it was increasingly
important to him that the kids knew, even
for those few moments on Halloween, that
someone was on their side.
Wayne still doesn’t quite understand
people’s shock in knowing he lives in
Oklahoma.
“People know that I’m from Oklahoma.
The Beatles are from Liverpool; The
Grateful Dead is from San Francisco. Where
you come from says something about your
identity.... You have to be from somewhere,
and I was already Wayne from Oklahoma.
It’s a story, and I either allow it to be a
story, or I go against i t ”
Courtesy o f IN SP News Service www
.street-papers.org/ The Curbside Chronicle