Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne Lost his Virginity to Steely Dan

Posted on Sep 3rd 2010 2:30PM by Chandler Levack
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Ian Gavan, Getty Images

Any Flaming Lips fan knows that playing 'Do You Realize?' at a pivotal romantic moment is a surefire closer to any makeout session. But for frontman Wayne Coyne, it was the sweet sounds of Steely Dan that were the soundtrack to the loss of his virginity.

"Trust me, the album wasn't my choosing," Coyne tells Spinner. "It was 1977, and I was over at my girlfriend's house and 'Aja' was playing. I'm pretty sure it did add to the awkwardness."

A man who experiences everything deeply, Coyne says that the perfect sexual experience is part "of the dilemma of the imagination."

"Having sex is a human experience that completely overwhelms and obliterates the mind," he adds. "Even as it happens to you over and over, you're always battling what is really happening and what you would like to happen. Occasionally what's actually happening does trump your imagination, but it's hard to stop your mind from thinking 'here's what this means' versus 'here's what this could be.'"

But for a man who gets to spend his day job crowd surfing in a giant bubble, isn't reality occasionally better than what you could imagine?

"Not at all, because being onstage comes with the same awkwardness that sex does. I'll be onstage thinking, 'this seems to be going really well,' and all of a sudden some smell wafts in and I'm like, 'what the f--- was that?' Details like this derail you from an uninterrupted inertia towards happiness, and yet sex and performance relieves us and can push us into another world.

'When my father was dying of cancer, there was so much suffering and my wife and I would have tons of sex just to be able to experience these moments where we didn't have to think about this other horrible thing. That's a horrible burden to put on sex," says Coyne, whose uplifting 'Do You Realize' pointedly notes "that everyone you know someday will die."

"But reality can be a real motherf---er."