After guitarist Ronald Jones left the group in 1996, the remaining members began reinventing their sound and presentation. The result was a blurring of the line between art and audience participation - but the Lips experiments had more in common with kindergarten lessons in sharing than the usual self-indulgent performance-art tripe.

Their first foray was the Parking Lot Experiment. The band organized 60 cars (and their owners) to gather in a parking lot and play pre-recorded Lips music with the doors open. Next up was the Boom Box Experiment, in which audience members were given portable stereos to play at concerts. Participation experiments became an instrumental part of the Lips' performances and elevated their stature: If anyone still considered them druggy eccentrics, one-hit wonders or thoseguyswhowereon90210, they were forced to rethink the band. The Flaming Lips were breaking new ground.

In 1997, Warner Brothers released the Lips' most ambitious record: Zaireeka. Recorded across four full-length CD's designed to be played simultaneously, Zaireeka could have come off as a far-out, on the brink, self-indulgent piece of shit. Instead, it's the perfect "Let's get stoned and hear sounds coming from four different part of the house just like our first acid trip" album.

When asked about the progression of the past three years, Ivins says, "We've been working with huge arrangements for awhile. This is our second time as a three-piece and we didn't want to be limited in any way. We became more confident we would get better. But that's not to say we're more sophisticated."

Getting to this point had its own pitfalls. Before The Soft Bulletin the Lips had to solve the delicate question of, "When is it all too much?"

"We didn't know how to do all that," Ivins says We would react a little different after we poured over a song, but unless you have 50 hours of conversation [about a song, you don't really know what it means]. We had songs (on Clouds Taste Metallic) that we felt were sarcastic, and people would listen to them and they would think they were something else."

They found they were treading into deeper philosophical waters and that their musical influences went beyond Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. "I think early on we thought we were this rock band and when you're young you're not confident with your identity or appearance. It's not cool to like this music or that music," Ivins explains. "We threw it all out the window. To openly admit that you like Progressive Rock, it's a big thing. There's no enemy in music. To just react against [the idea of cool], it allowed us to be more free and accept ideas from what we like as long as it works."