The Flaming Lips have built a reputation on their far-out stage antics and penchant for psychedelic sounds. The cornerstone of that public persona is frontman Wayne Coyne, who serves as a Willy Wonka of sorts for audiences’ trippy and terrifying boat ride through the tunnel of the band’s music.
Though Coyne, 59, has calmed down with age as well as the arrival of a new baby and the purchase of a safe and fuel-efficient Volvo, there was a time when he partook in his fair share of psychedelics. In the latest episode of Comedy Central‘s Tales From The Trip web series, Coyne recounts the time he went through a drive-thru on acid and things got a little too real.
In the video, released last week, Coyne immediately sets the scene with the hypothetical, “Seeing fresh human blood in a big amount is always a little bit shocking, imagine seeing that the first time that you did acid.” With that, we’re taken back to 1977 when Coyne was just 16 years old.
Even at 16, Coyne gave off the aura of someone who knew his way around different dimensions. Thus, even though it was his first time taking LSD, all of the other kids with whom he was wading into the proverbial were under the impression that he was an experienced psychonaut. Things started out mundane as Coyne and his teenage companions walked around the neighborhood, feeling the wind in their hair and laughing the laugh of drug-addled adolescence.
As the night wore on into early morning and everyone else starts to come down, Coyne isstill in the throes of his trip. As everyone’s appetite returns, he somehow is elected as the one to take them through the drive-thru up the road. As if consorting with the straight world while high on psychedelics wasn’t terrifying enough, Coyne and his party arrived just following an attempted robbery.
It appears that the car in front of them tried to reach through the drive-thru window and pick up the register. Fortunately for the restaurant, the register was bolted to the counter. Unfortunately for the would-be thieves, one of them sliced his wrist open while breaking the glass window. The drive-thru attendant, unfazed, hands over the bag of burgers to a terrified Coyne through the broken glass while also wiping up the blood. While the overall experience may have been scarring for the budding musician, it taught him a valuable lesson, “I never ordered cheeseburgers on LSD again.”
Watch Wayne Coyne talk about his horror movie drive-thru experience while on acid in the clip from Tales from the Trip below.
Tales from the Trip – Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne Had an Existential Crisis at a Drive-Thru on Acid
[Video: Comedy Central Originals]