Oklahoma's Stardeath ready for ‘Birth’
Music: Apprenticeship with uncle’s Flaming Lips pays off for Dennis Coyne
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Buzz up! By Gene Triplett - Entertainment Editor - newsok.com and The Oklahoman Published: June 12, 2009
His flying saucer-riding, space bubble-inflating apprenticeship has been long, hard and sometimes a little dangerous, but Dennis Coyne has finally graduated from roadie to rock star with the release this week of Stardeath and White Dwarfs’ full-length major-label album debut, aptly titled "The Birth.”
Nearly a decade of days and nights crewing for uncle Wayne Coyne and the Flaming Lips has finally paid off with a recording contract and a move from backstage to front as the opening act on the Lips’ upcoming summer tour.
"I was the bubble tech for years and years and years,” nephew Dennis concedes with mock weariness, referring to the giant inflatable hamster ball his uncle climbs into every night before rolling off a spaceship-shaped prop onto the upraised hands of cheering Lips fans.
In fact, Dennis Coyne’s close proximity to the band predates his conscious memory, since his father, Kenny Coyne, took him to his first Lips show before he was a year old. So it’s scary to imagine that an early live performance of "Trains, Brains and Rain” might still be rattling around in that part of his subconscious that retains the traumas of infancy.
But if that is the case, such deep-seated disturbances might partially explain why Dennis felt compelled to pick up a guitar and carry on the family tradition established by his uncle of inventing the kind of weird, fantastical, psychedelic pop-rock found on Stardeath’s first release.
However, songs such as "New Heat,” with its galactic percussive gallop and melodic sunburst choruses, and the altered-state dreaminess of "The Age of the Freak,” which sounds a lot like an "Ummagumma”-era trip, are more likely the products of ’s lifelong influence over Dennis as he grew up in the same rough-and-tumble midtown neighborhood as his dad and uncle before him.
"It was such a gradual thing because it was kind of the monthly thing that our family would do when I was growin’ up, was go see the Lips play either in or Oklahoma City or down in or something,” said Dennis, 26.
"So I was always aware, but it didn’t start to change me and really have a heavy influence on me until, you know, 1998, 1999. ... Once I started playing music I could really appreciate what was going on there. And it happened around the time when they were starting to get into their most experimental phase of music.”
Not long after he graduated from , Dennis took his first trip to with the Lips, beginning his long apprenticeship with the band at age 18.
There’s been a lot of fake blood over the dam since then, as Dennis watched the Lips’ stage show evolve into the confetti- and balloon-showered, animal- and Santa-costumed, multimedia rock ’n’ roll circus celebration that it is today.
"The most ridiculous things that I’ve done with them would probably be things like blowing the bubble up for while we’re in the top of the UFO, and him going off the front and then me having to climb off the back while it’s raising up into the air,” Dennis says. "But there are so many things that are outrageous when you’re out there with them on a daily basis that there really isn’t one instance that sticks out for me.”
The music, however, has left a deep impression, and Dennis is the first to acknowledge that fact.
"I think first and foremost he’s been an influence on me just like any great uncle would be an influence on somebody growin’ up, because they’re a great family member,” he said. "But then, musically, it would just be a complete lie to say that he hasn’t been a major influence on me, just because I’ve always been around his band (multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd, bassist Michael Ivins, drummer Kliph Scurlock). I’ve been seein’ them play since I was a little kid.
"So I think in those aspects of my life, he’s been a pretty major influence on me.”
But Dennis will leave the over-the-top showmanship to Uncle Wayne.
"I don’t know that I can do that,” he said. "That space bubble just looks too dangerous to me.”
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