In the Flaming Lips’ song and video “Mother Don’t Be Sad” frontman Wayne Coyne tells the tale of being held at gunpoint as a young man when he worked at Long John Silver’s … it cines close to story Rchard Brautigan might have written. Coyne obviously didn’t die all those years ago at the fast-food restaurant – he wasn’t even injured – but the experience did alter the course of his life. “Well, until then, I could probably say I didn’t realize I was really alive … I never really thought about it. We were living such an insane, healthy, wonderful, happy life – my brothers and all of our friends just running around doing the craziest shit ever. But then I’m laying on the floor thinking: ‘This is how I’m going to die.’” Coyne said he had a lot of anxiety as a younger man that he didn’t want to follow in his family’s working-class footsteps – that he wanted to go into music. This experience, he says, cleared all that up for him. “After this robbery, for a little while, I just thought, ‘It doesn’t matter. They don’t care. They want me to do music,’” he recalled. “So, I think it helped me in that way – to not feel like I had abandoned these things that my father had worked for. So, I have to say, I think it was probably the greatest gift a young person could have – to suddenly get a new perspective on what’s important in your life.”