When The Flaming Lips released “Hear It Is” in 1986, the music world didn’t really care.

The album sold less than 50,000 copies and was quickly placed in the bargain bin. The same thing happened to 1987’s follow-up “Oh My Gawd.”

Yet, the group’s first two releases were popular enough to land a major label record deal with Warner Brothers Records in 1992, partly because the label hoped The Flaming Lips could capitalize on the success of Jane’s Addiction (which was also on the Warner Brothers label at the time).

The group’s first release on Warner Brothers, 1993’s “Transmissions From The Satellite Heart” wasn’t an immediate success. A year after its release, it was almost guaranteed a spot in the bargain bin with the rest of the group’s CDs.

Then a strange thing happened.

More than a year later, a song from that CD started getting a lot of radio rotation. “She Don’t Use Jelly,” which was more of a quirky novelty tune than a poignant statement, slowly crept up the charts.

A video was thrown together for it and was placed into heavy rotation on MTV as part of that channel’s Buzz Bin series.

Suddenly, group members Wayne Coyne (vocals/guitar), Michael Ivins (bass) and Steven Drozd (drums) were reaping the fruits of success. The group performed on “Late Night With David Letterman,” had a guest slot on “Beverly Hills 90210” and contributed a song for the “Batman Forever” soundtrack.

But nobody really expected the group to move on from its hit-single status to do something innovative and ground-breaking. The Flaming Lips were quickly pegged to join the “one hit wonder” graveyard.

Then last year, the group released its four-disc masterpiece, “Zaireeka” and changed the music world forever.

The parking lot experiment

“‘Zaireeka’ is just a part of an exploration or evolution that really has no direction,” Coyne said. “We just kind of keep going from one thing to the next, and it’s ended up at this. But I’m not sure if what we’re doing now is where it’s actually going to end up. A year from now, we could be doing something completely different, again.”

Coyne, an Oklahoma native, prefers not to contemplate which direction the band will be traveling next. Considering the exploratory nature of his current work, that’s hardly surprising.

The only things that he has considered are whether or not “Zaireeka” should be followed up and that his current musical projects have left him less than satisfied with the way recording and concert industries are currently run.

“As far as ‘Zaireeka’ goes, I’m not even sure that it should be followed up,” he said. “It just depends on what we feel like doing. I’m sure that the record company won’t pressure us to follow it up. Mainly, the only thing that matters is what the group feels comfortable doing. We always do what we want to do, and these experiments are not going to change that.”

But to consider Coyne’s dissatisfaction with the recording and concert industries, it is imperative to understand what The Flaming Lips are currently doing and how the group got from point A to point B.

“It all started out with something we were recording on a four track,” Coyne explained. “We simply had four different tracks that we made a tape of. After recording one night, we went to this restaurant to eat. Afterwards, when we were walking back to our cars, we noticed how loud it was in the parking lot, like our feet and the car doors.

“So, one night we decided to do this thing,” he continued. “We gathered our tapes and went back to the restaurant to eat. Afterwards, we sat in the covered parking lot for a couple of hours and we played these tapes to see what would happen. That was kind of intriguing.”

The next week, the group gathered a couple more people together, and they headed back to the restaurant’s covered parking lot. The group had made copies of its four-track recording and distributed one to every person with a car. Coyne directed vehicles to different areas of the lot, got in the middle and counted down. On the count of one, everybody turned their tape decks on.

“Then this piece of music would emanate from different parts of the parking lot,” Coyne elaborated. “It sort of filled it with this weird, unconnected, ambient but not quite ambient, sort of music. So that kind of started the whole thing; it kind of gave it its base. We thought that with a little bit of work, we could do something with this.”

The group immediately began experimenting with the parking lot idea. First, the group added more people and cars, eventually assembling crowds of hundreds of people. The group also started adding more tapes with different and similar things recorded on each one.

“They turned into these large events,” Coyne said, “and people would start bringing their friends. There would be several hundred people at these things simply because we wanted to try out these ideas. Even though they weren’t really concerts so much, it was a great opportunity for lots of people to come together, and it was a great way for us to get comments about the music.”

The parking lot experiments culminated at last year’s South By Southwest conference, where the group staged a performance that included several hundred automobiles and several hundred different tapes.

“I was afraid there was going to be a big wreck,” Coyne said, “or that somebody was going to get ran over. But it worked out pretty good. A lot of people were really impressed, and some people were really confused.”

But while people were figuring out what to think, The Flaming Lips was figuring out how to advance its quickly growing concept.

A new era of sound

The Flaming Lips four-CD boxed set, “Zaireeka,” was released last year to tremendous media acclaim. The set is based on all of the elements that made the parking lot experiments successful. Each one of the CDs has the same eight songs, but the songs are somewhat different on each disc.

“Zaireeka” was specifically designed so all four of the CDs could be played together at the same time and compliment each other. But playing all four at the same time requires four different people and four different CD players. The CD players are supposed to be in different locations in the room to provide a lush musical atmosphere.

“The ‘Zaireeka’ set is an accumulation of all the ideas we had using separate sound sources,” Coyne explained. “Using separate sound sources to play whole pieces of music, but to have pieces of music that as a whole could be played together with other pieces of music to make it more whole, to make a bigger whole out of it.

“It all kind of mixes and blends together,” he added, “kind of like the way an orchestra works. But I really don’t like to compare it to an orchestra because people think it’s orchestra music when I say that. But it’s orchestrated sounds that turn into music.

“A lot of people think that when there’s a hundred-piece orchestra on-stage,” he continued, “that they are all playing something different. Well, they’re really not. There can be 30 violins, and sometimes the violins are playing the exact same thing. But it is the sound of 30 violins playing the exact same thing at the same time that makes it sound that way. And other instruments are playing things that are complimenting the main theme of the music.

“The same ideas are happening with what I’m doing,” he concluded. “Just because there are 50 cars out there or four CDs in the set, people shouldn’t readily assume that there is something different going on in each one of them. But at the same time, at any given moment, there could be something radically different happening in all of them. Or it could be the same thing playing in all of them at any variation in-between.”

The boom-box experiments

A couple of months ago, Coyne found himself at a Radiohead concert.

Although he is a fan of Radiohead’s recent release “O.K. Computer,” he likes the group’s debut CD, “Pablo Honey,” a little bit better. That CD’s hit single, “Creep,” is one of Coyne’s favorite songs.

Unfortunately, the group didn’t play “Creep” (although Coyne enthusiastically screamed for it all evening), and Coyne left feeling vaguely disappointed.

But it wasn’t just that he didn’t get to hear his favorite song, and it isn’t like he believes musicians should play their hit songs at every performance (his group refrains from playing “She Don’t Use Jelly” in concerts these days because it doesn’t fit into the group’s current style). He was disappointed because he thought that the concert should have been more innovative.

“There’s just so many times that somebody can go to a concert and enjoy themselves,” he explained. “The music is somewhat different every time, but the stage show is always the same. Pyrotechnics, flashy lights and stupid gimmicks. It’s either that or the band has no stage show. It kind of bores me sometimes.”

Coyne has a hard time finding any of today’s concerts innovative. He even thought that the Kiss’ reunion tour show he caught was pretty bland and predictable, despite the aerial maneuvers and blood spitting. “They’ve been doing the same thing over and over again for years,” he said.

Part of the penalty that Coyne and the other members of The Flaming Lips pay for creating one of the most innovative concert-going experiences ever is being bored by what the other guys are offering.

A Flaming Lips Experiment concert is like “participatory performance art.”

Except the group doesn’t perform, at least in the way modern audiences have come to expect anyway.

Coyne doesn’t sing or play guitar, Ivins never touches a string of his bass, and Drozd doesn’t even have a drum kit on tour with him. Instead of bringing instruments, the group packs along boom-boxes and tapes.

“At the beginning of each concert,” Coyne explained, “if you want to call it a concert in a nontraditional sense, we ask members of the audience to come up on stage and grab a boom-box. We bring 50 boom-boxes to each venue with the hope that 40 of them will work. There’s always a couple that will be broke and a couple that refuse to work properly. But if we have less than 40, that’s okay too.

“These 40 people are sent to different locations inside the venue,” he continued, “but are kind of arranged so the other guys and I can conduct different groups of participants.

“We tell them when to turn the music on and off, and other various things. For instance, we might have them turning the boom-boxes’ volume up and down. Or we might pause some of them at different times. It just depends on what we feel like doing.”

The music that emanates from the boom-boxes, which all comes from tapes that The Flaming Lips have actually configured and played for, is the performance.

It isn’t the type of spontaneous journey that The Grateful Dead is known for (“We are fairly limited with what we can do with a previously recorded tape,” Coyne said 0.

Instead, it’s more of a lesson on how music can be combined through differences and similarities, how outside sources can influence music, and how music can be used to construct a unique atmosphere.

The Flaming Lips will be bringing its incredible boom-box Experiment to Ames for Rock Veishea Saturday night at the Lied Recreation Center.

Tickets are $3 in advance or $5 at the door and are available to Iowa State students, faculty and staff, alumni and Ames residents.

A $5 advanced ticket package is also available for Rock Veishea and Dew the Rec.