It’s a dream job for a Flaming Lips fan—22-year-old Jake Harms
is the band’s “animal wrangler,” the man in charge of the props and
dancers for every Lips show. (The title is left over from when dancers
used to wear bunny and zebra costumes.) In 2006, that equaled
approximately 3,000 dancing Santas and aliens, 15,000 balloons, and
over a ton of confetti.
Harms has only been the animal wrangler for a few months—he
was first hired as a driver, after slipping a note under the band’s
Oklahoma City office door. Here’s an illustrated guide, explained by
Harms, on how to deliver the Best Concert Experience Ever.
“Minimum I like to run 10 aliens and 10 Santas on each side. Then I
can move up to 15 or 20, but it depends on the venue. I usually look
for ladies, girls that are excited—you can just tell who’s gonna
dance good.
“Lily Allen was a Santa Claus, she and her crew. She came backstage
three sheets to the wind with like a full bottle of Jäger and
thought she was better than everybody else. She tried to run the show,
get all her crew up onstage. So I get them all up onstage, and about a
song into it they all leave! So I was stuck with an empty slot of
Santas.
“A good show, we’ll go through 40 pounds of confetti, no problem.
Every time we say ‘realize’ in the song [‘Do You Realize?’], confetti
gets shot.
“We usually do about 200 four-foot balloons each show. Those ones we
really go crazy with during ‘Ta-Da.’ That’s when Wayne [Coyne] goes out
in the bubble, comes back, and right when his feet touch the stage, we
start sending out these 200 balloons.
“During ‘The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song,’ we launch out these seven-foot
balloons, massive rubbery ones, 10 to 15 of those right when that song
starts as Wayne is setting off his confetti launchers. The launchers
are packed with a shitload of rolled up streamers, packed with a
drumstick, and set off with a fresh CO2 cartridge. Then they go back in
Wayne’s box so he’s got enough that he can cycle through.
“We got the chest strobe, the megaphone, the rope light. There
probably should be crazy names for them, now that you mention it. All
that stuff—I’m not gonna give away the secret of what it is, but
it’s very household stuff. The megaphone with smoke bombs is just a
megaphone with smoke bombs. The rope light is something you get at
AutoZone or whatever.
“Those are actually Wayne’s hands. He had a place here in Oklahoma
City model them exactly after his hands.
“There are no people telling us what to do, it’s just Wayne, like,
‘Come on motherfuckers, we’re gonna do this, and it’s gonna work!'”
