Wayne Coyne recalls thinking the Flaming Lips' '90210' episode was 'such a disaster that there's no way it will air'
Even Steve Sanders, an admitted non-fan of alternative music, felt "these guys rocked the house!" But Coyne thought it "didn’t seem possible that it could work."
“Popularity is a funny thing,” muses Wayne Coyne, the charismatic frontman of venerable Oklahoma eccentrics the Flaming Lips, as he reflects on “She Don’t Use Jelly” — which took more than a year after its June 22, 1993 release on the Lips’ surprise breakthrough album, Transmissions From the Satellite Heart, to become the band’s only major radio hit.
“Once something is kind of popular, it has the potential to grow and grow and grow. When Beverly Hills, 90210 called us, if this would have been a year earlier, or six months earlier, we probably would have thought, ‘No, we’re too cool; we don’t do those sorts of things.’”
Nowadays, hipster bands think nothing of promoting their music via television placements and cameos. But a quarter-century ago, when the Flaming Lips performed “She Don’t Use Jelly” in front of Dylan McKay and DJ David Silver at the Peach Pit After Dark — aka Valerie Malone’s fictional teen nightclub — it was a baffling pop-culture moment.
“It occurred to us that [going on 90210] would be ridiculous and absurd and funny. It didn’t really matter if it was artistically good or bad or whatever,” says Coyne. He actually remembers thinking the 90210 shoot was such a debacle that he assumed the episode, titled “Love Hurts,” would be shelved.
“We did kind of talk amongst ourselves [on the set that day], like, ‘It seems weird that the one episode that we’re on is such a disaster that there’s no way it will air.’ It just didn’t seem possible that it could work!” Coyne chuckles. “We saw them saying lines, and they would do them five or six times, and everybody at the end of the badly done — from our perception, anyway — takes, everybody’d kinda be like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ Yay. No big celebration. It just kind of felt like yet another grueling day on the set. And we thought, ‘That probably won’t air, and nobody will see us.’ And three weeks later, it’s on TV and it looks wonderful! All the things we thought seemed like a disaster were just business as usual.”
Even before 90210 came along and introduced the shaggy-haired psych-rock band to millions of impressionable teens, the Lips had a hunch that “She Don’t Use Jelly” — which eventually cracked the top 10 of the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart and even went to No. 53 on the Billboard Hot 100 — might be their breakthrough single. “I remember even when I played it the first time, playing it for [band multi-instrumentalist] Steven [Drozd], he was like, ‘Oh, yeah — that little [musical] turnaround? That's you. You're gonna be able to do that, and people are gonna get that,” says Coyne.
However, it still took a while for the band (who’d already released four albums on indie label Restless Records and one on Warner Bros.) to realize just how big a quirky tune about tangerine hair dye and Vaseline on toast, accompanied by a low-budget, fisheye-lensed music video starring Coyne’s then-wife Michelle lolling around in a backyard kiddie pool, would become.
“Transmissions From the Satellite Heart out in 1993, but it wasn't until the end of 1994 where ‘She Don't Use Jelly’ started to be played on Beavis and Butt-head and alternative radio stations and all that sort of stuff. … It didn't surprise us that it was working a little bit. But then it always is kind of weird when it starts working better than you're think. It's like, ‘Oh… people are really liking this little song.’”
Coyne fully realized the “little song” was clicking with the mainstream once he started playing it night after night for uninitiated audiences on an unlikely tour with third-tier grunge band Candlebox, who were extremely popular at the time. “We’re out there playing our noisy little songs, and we would, most nights, start to play … and the audience there would absolutely hate us,” he recalls. “There’s a certain energy you get from that kind of hatred, and it can be quite fun to play to people who want to kill you; it gives you a kind of a power. But we would play ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ even to that audience, and they would, even in the flow of their hatred, say, ‘Oh, we like that one!’”
Coyne adds with a wry chuckle: “And then we’d play the next song, and they’d go back to being outwardly hateful.”
Despite their conversion of a few Candlebox fans, the Lips were determined to keep experimenting and keep moving away from conventional alt-rock. However, the success of “She Don’t Use Jelly” ironically afforded them the luxury of pursuing one of the most unique careers in rock — one that has included Zaireeka, a recording experiment that required the listener to play four CDs, on four separate stereo systems, at the same time; limited-edition music released on USB sticks submerged in gummy-candy fetuses, brains, and skulls; the ultimate funeral anthem, “Do You Realize??”; a musical based on the 2002 album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots; an utterly bizarre sci-fi holiday movie, Christmas on Mars, starring Fred Armisen and an army of giant marching vulvas; a track-by-track recreation of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon featuring Peaches and Henry Rollins; a surprise collaborative album with one of the biggest pop stars on the planet, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz; and COVID-safe “bubble concerts” at height of the pandemic. They’ve even managed to pick up three Grammy Awards along the way.
And much of their strange path can be traced back to one of the strangest cameos in teen TV history.
Going back to the band’s surreal experience on the Beverly Hills, 90210 set, Coyne remembers that one unnamed female cast member made it obvious that she disliked the Flaming Lips even more than some of those above-mentioned fickle Candlebox fans did. (“It was at the end of a long week, and she probably didn’t like the episode anyway,” he shruggingly says of her bad attitude.) But he recalls that another 90210 actor was a bit friendlier.
“For good reason, they had a lot of restrictions about what could be backstage [during the Peach Pit scene] — there could be no pot, no drugs, no alcohol, or any of that. But some of the people involved in the Flaming Lips are pretty determined and imaginative in how they want to spend their day, so there was some ruckus about that,” Coyne laughs. “Some of the cast members were really fans, and really fun, and some couldn’t kind of care less and just wanted the day to be over with. … There was a blond dude who talked to us all day. But I think mostly he wanted to get wasted with Steven [Drozd]. I think he was like, ‘Where’d you get the booze?’ I think that bonded their friendship even more.”
That “blond guy” may have been Ian Ziering, whose Steve Sanders character uttered the most infamous, iconic, and immortal line of the “Love Hurts” episode, probably echoing the thoughts of mainstream radio listeners who gave the Lips a chance at the time: “You know, I’ve never been a big fan of alternative music — but these guys rocked the house!”
Coyne giggles, still incredulous that the 90210 episode actually made it onto Fox. “These were really lines! Even when you say it now, it feels like this is not a finished phrase for a real actor in a real show to put into the world. And yet, when [Ziering] says it… I kind of believe him.”
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