Throughout rock and roll lore, there are stories of bands breaking away from
familial bonds to create identities of their
own. However, even though local freakout
artists Stardeath and White Dwarfs are
closely related to The Flaming Lips — lead
singer Dennis Coyne is Wayne Coyne’s
nephew — it’s a shadow that the band is
more than happy and grateful to be under.
“It would be hard to get yourself out
from under that shadow if you’re trying
to, but the way we look at it, we’d be
foolish to think that we were going to just come in and start doing music and
become our own entity,” Dennis Coyne
said. “We embrace it, and we enjoy being
lumped in with them. We think they’re
one of the best bands ever, and to be
lumped in with one of your favorite bands
ever is never a bad thing in my mind.”
And like the Lips’ New Year’s Eve
concerts that have become the stuff of local legend, Stardeath and White
Dwarfs are proudly carrying that torch,
performing their “fourth or fifth unof-
ficial” concert to ring in the New Year.
It has been a goal of Coyne’s ever since
seeing his uncle’s band do it in Chicago
in the early aughts.
“It just seemed like such a different
way to spend New Year’s than I ever had
in my life,” he said. “Growing up in
Oklahoma, I’d spend it with my friends
and we’d go downtown and hit some
bars, see the fireworks. And all that was
great, but it was a different sort of trip to
see the band play on New Year’s.”
Not only is this New Year’s Stardeath
and White Dwarfs show their biggest yet,
its bill includes Chainsaw Kittens’ Tyson
Meade, New Fumes and Takeoff Eyeslow.
But what the band is most hyped about
is their full performance of David Bowie’s
seminal 1972 album The Rise and Fall of
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
To Coyne, it is the quintessential New
Year’s album.
“We all love that record, and it’s one
of my favorite records of all time,” he
said. “As we were starting to think about
a record to do, you got to think about
other things like, ‘Is it something iconic
that people can sing along to?’ I mean,
who is more synonymous with New
Year’s Eve than David Bowie? It feels like
something you’re supposed to hear on
New Year’s. It was an easy choice.”
As for the vibe of the show, Coyne
only has one piece of advice: Be “ready
to party.”
“The whole thing is going to be a
party,” he said. “We’re all going to get to sing songs that we know, we’re playing
with people we want to play with and if people want to come up on stage and
do Ziggy Stardust with us, they can do
that too. People should just expect to get
their minds blown. Everybody deserves
to have their minds blown on New
Year’s Eve.”
