Wayne Coyne doesn't go anywhere without his diaper bag. Over the course of more than 30 years of traveling the globe with the Flaming Lips, the colorful frontman and elder statesman of psychedelic rock has found that it's a must to carry a manageable shoulder bag with a surplus of compartments to hold necessities like cell phone chargers, Chapstick, and his passport. "We travel so much that if you have to really get ready every time, you'd spend your whole week unpacking and then five minutes later packing again, so you just need one thing," Coyne told us backstage at Austin's Moody Theater last week during SXSW.

No one requires a convenient, easy-to-use bag more than frazzled parents with infant children, and Coyne's life can often be just as chaotic, hence the unconventional carryall. But just as important for Coyne as having easy access to the essentials is having a place to toss the various trinkets he picks up on the road, and in 2012, one such trinket got him into a bit of trouble at the Oklahoma City airport.

After a Flaming Lips show in Arkansas, the band went to a party at the house of an artist "who had spray-painted some rifles and pistols and grenades in pink and gold." Coyne told him he liked the art, and when the band was leaving at four or five in the morning, the artist presented Coyne with a golden grenade to take home. Like everything else, he threw it in the bottom of this bag. Fast-forward to a week later when he's going through security at the airport.

"I'm going through the detector and they look at me—there are three or four people looking at the screen—and they're looking at me and they go, 'Do you know you have a grenade in here?' And I was like, 'Um, yeah, I do. Yeah...'"

Carrying a grenade through security is grounds to all but shut down the airport, and the story made headlines. Oddly enough, Coyne found that he also had fireworks and drugs that had never been detected at the bottom of the same bag, which has since been retired. Here's his new bag (A), which has yet to get him into any trouble:

Tamir Kalifa Esquire

The current contents include a gorgeous edition of Alice in Wonderland (B), a custom-made pair of glasses with prescription pills adorning the frame (C), safety pins to hold together his various suits and costumes (D), and a roll of duct tape (E), which he never leaves home without.

Tamir Kalifa Esquire

For a veteran traveler like Coyne, the road contains few surprises, but he's anything but complacent when it comes to exploring new cities and finding fun things to do, whether it's sight-seeing at Stonehenge or hanging out in an art studio with "two or three local weirdos" in Medicine Hat, Canada. For Coyne, who's long been active on Twitter and Instagram, a new experience is a click of a button away. "If you're on the bus, nowadays with access to Twitter and Instagram and stuff, you have access to people ,and if we're looking for something to do, within 25 minutes we can kind of say, 'Hey, we're here, what's going on?'"

Coyne recognizes the value of having rich experiences on the road in part because it helps him appreciate his hometown of Oklahoma City. "Traveling teaches you so much," he says. "In the beginning when you don't have any money and you're scared of everything in the world, you go back home and think how it's stable and you understand everything. Little by little you go out more and more and you come home and instead of where we live becoming more boring or just something we're used to, I think we'd get richer and richer from the experiences. We'd come home and we'd see where we live in a really great light."

Tamir Kalifa Esquire

Coyne experiences the world with more than just a diaper bag, though. You didn't think the lead singer of one of the most colorful bands in music history was only going to be rolling with a drab black-and-white bag, did you? Here's his suitcase for clothes and larger items (F). The wheel is mended with—what else?—duct tape.

Tamir Kalifa Esquire

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