The Flaming Lips released “She Don’t Use Jelly” in 1993 off their album
Transmissions from the Satellite Heart.
It’s their biggest radio hit, reaching #9 on the Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart and #55 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Lead singer, Wayne Coyne, explained to
Rolling Stone
: “We used to do these silly experiments: You drink out of a glass of water, then you spit into the water and drink it. There would be this disconnect of, ‘Christ, I’m swallowing my own spit!’ So I took that a little bit further. A lot of times people will use Vaseline on their lips because they don’t have lip balm, but the idea of putting it on food and eating it repels them.”
Coyne told
Uncut
magazine June 2008: “When we recorded ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ we knew we were making something special. Whatever the absurdness of it, you could understand that I’m talking about toast and Vaseline, and it had some kind of innocent little sexual thing that ran through the whole song. That was kind of cool for us because up until then all of our songs were so asexual. I think we felt that there was this sort of the Guns ‘N’ Roses mentality to rock ‘n’ roll, and we were something different. We really had a lot of area to explore that didn’t include a bunch of naked women- but here we felt like, ‘Oh, what the f–k, let’s go for it.’”
After reading reports yesterday that Luke Perry (Dylan from 90210) suffered a massive stroke I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the time The Flaming Lips appeared on 90210. After the success of the song the band was invited to play the Peach Pit, the hangout of choice for the 90210 gang, where Steve Sanders (Ian Ziering) said, “You know, I’ve never been a big fan of alternative music, but these guys rocked the house.”
The Flaming Lips on 90210
The Flaming Lips “She Don’t Uses Jelly” 1993
