Steven Drozd talks about life, death and robots as Flaming Lips’ classic album turns 20
At age 8, Steven Drozd received a snare drum and a cymbal from his father.
Vernon Drozd — a renowned progressive polka star in Texas in the 1970s — didn’t feel inclined to invest further until he felt confident that his son would stick with these rudimentary tools.
“There were no toms, he wasn’t going to buy me a Peter Criss kit,” Drozd says. “The first thing he taught me was a polka waltz country shuffle. ‘First things first: Learn that.’ So the first things I picked up weren’t Aerosmith or Thin Lizzy or the things I was listening to on the radio.”
Instead, he picked up music from Texas Saturday nights, songs connected to the Old World, like “Moravia Waltz” and “Sonny’s Polka.”
The elder Drozd died in 2015. While in a nursing home in La Grange, he told me years ago, “Where else should I have had him start? Just learn the shuffle.
“It worked out, though,” Vernon added, winking, “didn’t it?”
The father was endlessly proud of his son, who in 1991 started playing drums with singer, songwriter and guitarist Wayne Coyne’s little-heard and very weird Oklahoma City band, the Flaming Lips. Steven Drozd’s drumming possessed an intriguing and inimitable sense of syncopation, a spacey feel for time that perhaps could only have emerged from a musician raised on polka, Willie Nelson and heavy players like Black Sabbath’s Bill Ward.
The Butthole Surfers frontman Gibby Haynes told me in the early 2000s that Coyne “is hiding the best drummer in rock and roll behind a guitar.” He said so because when the Lips’ guitarist quit in 1997, Drozd stepped up from behind the drum kit and helped Coyne turn the Flaming Lips into what it is today: a group that leans on pop and psychedelia to create a type of music instantly identifiable as its own.
This month the Lips presented a 20th anniversary version of its hit album “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” full of extras: radio performances, live concerts, demos and odd covers. Where “The Soft Bulletin” from 1999 introduced the Lips as alternative rock innovators at the turn of the century, “Yoshimi” codified the Lips’ strange status as the rare cult band to cross over to sustainable success.
By the time the Lips made “Yoshimi,” Drozd was far more than the band’s drummer. He was an instrumentalist capable of bringing a kaleidoscopic range of sound and feeling to Coyne’s words and thoughts — already hard-wired for sweetness and melancholia.
“Wayne has a theory that a lot of the melodies I come up with have this Eastern European sadness that may be from my father,” Drozd says. “So maybe there’s something to that…?”
Looking back
Drozd strikes one as the sort of artist who doesn’t get hung up in the past, which makes him a fitting collaborator for Coyne. The Flaming Lips cut a distinctive path over the years, one that tracked away from an old-school music biz system of releasing an album every few years. Lips releases instead more resemble a river, flowing endlessly. The forward-thinking process makes a look back 20 years more logical for fans of the band than for the band itself.
“We’ve played a lot of those songs over the years, but I guess there are a few we didn’t,” Drozd says. “But it doesn’t feel like there was this jump in time where I forgot those songs. I guess when I hear it now, the album sounds more joyful than I thought when we were working on it.”
“Yoshimi” contains contradictory yet complementary themes about youth and age, fear and bravery, conflict and resolution, life and death. It’s a fascinating album to revisit two decades later, simply because there’s a fulcrum beneath it: a younger listener will teeter toward the themes of youthful energy and skirting responsibility. An older listener totters toward something more somber.
Following a breakthrough
Several years ago, Coyne described the Lips’ success to me as such: “We do what we like, and our audience has given us this great life that we have. They’re interested in what we do. It’s just a coincidence of you making Frito chili pies and the world liking Frito chili pies.”
But consensus on said Frito chili pies took time to emerge. Coyne started the band almost 40 years ago, several years before Drozd joined.
The Lips, with Drozd as drummer, enjoyed a left-field alternative rock hit in 1993. But sustained success — that which turned the Lips into festival mainstays — took longer. The breakthrough came with “The Soft Bulletin” in 1999. Had “The Soft Bulletin” tanked, “Yoshimi” might not have received financing from Warner Bros. The demos and song sketches included in the new reissued set might not have been preserved. Which is a fascinating thing to consider because “In the Morning of the Magicians” — a beautiful and mournful piece that starts with a seemingly disjointed instrumental passage before becoming a haunting lyrical tune — is revealed through the demos as almost an afterthought to another song.
Coyne is eight years older than Drozd, which is an interesting disparity to consider — one that likely enriches their breadth of influence.
“He has a love for Tom Jones that I just don’t have,” Drozd says. “And to Wayne, it’s the Beatles, the moon landing and the Manson murders story. That’s Wayne right there. That’s his DNA. I was born in 1969, so there are things we missed experiencing at the same time. So it’s funny: He knows I’ll never like Tom Jones like he does. And he’ll never like Rush like I do.”
Growing up in southeast Texas
For the younger Drozd, playing with his dad was a proving ground removed from what he heard on the radio. As a kid growing up around Richmond and Rosenberg, Drozd’s path to Rush coincided with preteen gigs keeping time for Vernon Drozd and the Texas Brass. He enjoyed a peculiar youth, one that led him to his career, but one that wasn’t devoid of sacrifice. The Drozd family endured a breadth of tragedy that involved addiction, incarceration and some lives ending too soon.
While Drozd struggled in Oklahoma City, he found some sense of stability with his role in the Lips. He has a pair of teenage kids and has enjoyed a productive spell with a band that continues to command larger audiences for its concerts while also finding buyers for more peculiar releases, like a small-batch recording housed inside a human skull.
They do realize that everyone they know someday will die. But lost in appreciation of the Lips is Coyne’s statement in the same song “that happiness makes you cry.”
We are complicated vessels, and after decades of songs about sex and cars … perhaps spaceships offer some grander platform for heavier questions without such primal urges.
Drozd speaks proudly that his kids, 15 and 17, follow their own musical interests, while also making time for the Lips, a band their father didn’t start, but a band that wouldn’t be where it is today without him.
A guy who speaks to his affinity for “Zeppelin, the Beatles, Stravinsky, Mahler and Coltrane,” likes that they “enjoy some of this music I’ve been involved in writing.”
At some point, they’ll tip to the other side of the fulcrum, becoming adults — possibly parents — capable of seeing this particular Flaming Lips’ time capsule as something that rises above time and existing as an album for the young and the old alike.