The Flaming Lips' first live document features a gigantic UFO, an army of fans in alien and Santa costumes, streamers, strobes, smoke machines, balloons, and massive amounts of confetti-- and that's just the first song. Most bands build up to this sort of explosive spectacle, but for the Lips, it's a starting point. Their shows are as much about spectacle as they are about music, which explains the hybrid technology on UFOs at the Zoo: The Legendary Concert in Oklahoma City. This document, which is neither simply an album nor simply a concert film, is being issued as an MVI album, which means it plays on DVD players but not CD players, and contains bonus digital material. In other words, it presents the visual and the musical with equal emphasis, but will likely be outdated before the second-gen iPhone is out.

But for now, UFOs at the Zoo is about as close as you can get to the controlled chaos of a Lips show without actually buying tickets. The opening segment features shots of fans in a bacchanalian frenzy intercut with clips of zoo animals looking curious, dignified, and quiet. It's a nifty joke that goes on about a minute too long, creating a you-are-there mix of suspense and impatience. Pretty soon Steve Drozd, Michael Ivins, and surrogate drummer Kliph Scurlock descend from underneath the UFO, and Wayne Coyne appears in a giant bubble, which he takes into the crowd for a tremendous feat of crowd-surfing. What follows is half-party, half-rave, half-freak-out-- which is one too many halves but speaks to the maximalism of the show. There's the by-now traditional nun puppet, the mechanical bird that Coyne flies around stage like he's a child making airplane noises, a megaphone that spews dense smoke, and a mic-mounted camera that gets you a little too close to his beard.

Of course, this would all be obnoxious if the music wasn't part of the equation, if it suffered even the slightest. But the Lips are in their element on stage, and even the creakiest musical idea sounds persuasive broadcasting across a sea of spastic bodies. Songs from the lackluster At War With the Mystics sound good in this setting: "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" might have been written explicitly for the sort of crowd participation Coyne uses it for, and "Vein of Stars" possesses a cosmic curiosity under the dark Oklahoma sky. Still, the old material got the band and the crowd moving more happily, especially "Love Yer Brain" (from 1987's Oh My Gawd!!!...the Flaming Lips), which makes an especially triumphant closer.

There's an enthusiastic DIY quality to these proceedings: all the effects, whether musical or visual, are homemade, usually held together by duct tape and crossed fingers. Drozd's arsenal of instruments and equipment looks like he built everything himself, and to his credit, he probably did. The gigantic spaceship, which Coyne allegedly built in his backyard and which rises vertically to form a stage backdrop, is obviously a tinkered-with contraption, and in between-song footage, several stagehands wonder aloud whether it will fall and kill the band. This is a homegrown version of the arena rock show, slyly subversive of mainstream pyrotechnics and much more invested. The band-- especially Coyne-- appear genuinely pleased with their gimcrackery and excited to watch the crowd's reaction to each and every balloon burst and confetti explosion. When Coyne tells the crowd they're the best audience in the world and then explains that he really means it, it's obvious he really means it.

The Lips' affection for their fans comes across as neither forced nor commercially motivated, and UFOs at the Zoo is the endearing chronicle of the obsessiveness of the musicians as well as of their fans. Short documentary-style interstitials interview hardcore fans who have traveled from all over the country, some in full costume (my favorite was the girl in the nun costume, who needed a Wayne Coyne puppet), others trying to check fake blood in their carry-ons (3-oz. containers, dude), and one working out "The Sound of Failure" on acoustic guitar. They comprise a joyous throng whose excitement seems barely contained, even when it's intensified by dope or booze. And Coyne presides over it with a kind of hippie benevolence that allows room for some realistic-to-the-point-of-pessimistic philosophies about life and music. When he and the band finally leave the stage, the camera settles on the crowd, who mill about the amphitheatre, reluctant to leave the spectacle behind.