The Residents
is an American avant-garde music and visual arts group. They have created over sixty albums, created numerous musical short films, designed three CD-ROM projects and ten DVDs, and undertaken seven major world tours. Throughout the band's existence, members have ostensibly attempted to conceal their identity. However, the identities of two members have been solidly established—ironically, in large part through the band's own publicity efforts [1] [2] [3] -- and two other founding members' identities are generally agreed upon to be known as well [4] [5] [6]. Despite the fact these identities are well known, many fans continue to pretend band members have managed to remain completely anonymous throughout the group's existence [7].
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THE RESIDENTS TICKETS
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History
Origins
The Residents supposedly hail from
Shreveport, Louisiana, where they met in high school in the 1960s. In 1966, members headed west to
San Francisco,
California. After their truck broke down in
San Mateo, they decided to remain there. Like all information pertaining to the early days of the band, this is provided by The Cryptic Corporation and may or may not be invented.
While attempting to make a living, they began to experiment with tape machines, photography, and anything remotely to do with "art" that they could get their hands on. Word of their experimentation spread and in 1969, a British guitarist and multi-instrumentalist named
Phil Lithman [8] and the mysterious
N. Senada (whom Lithman had picked up in
Bavaria where the aged avant-gardist was recording birds singing) paid them a visit, and decided to remain.
The two Europeans would become great influences on the band. Lithman's guitar playing technique earned him the nickname
Snakefinger, after his frantic playing on the violin during the performance with The Residents at
The Boarding House in San Francisco 1971, where his fingers' speed made them look like snakes in the eyes of the less-musically proficient but imaginative Residents.
The group purchased crude recording equipment and instruments and began to make tapes, refusing to let an almost complete lack of musical proficiency stand in the way.
1969–1972: Residents Unincorporated
In 1969 the group began to make the first of their unreleased tapes. Rumors have surfaced of two of perhaps hundreds of unreleased reel-to-reel items titled
Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor
and
The Ballad of Stuffed Trigger
. The titles may be in question (as is the idea that these were album-length recordings), but the first title has been confirmed by a former head of the now defunct Smelly Tongues fan club. Further evidence of pre-1970 recordings surfaced with the release of the song "I Hear You Got Religion", supposedly recorded in 1969, and released originally as a downloadable track from Ralph America in 1999. Cryptic says there are lots of tapes dating back decades, but they were all recorded before the group had officially become "The Residents" so the band does not consider them to be part of their discography.
While the album
The Ballad of Stuffed Trigger
has never been released in any form,
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12] Uncle Willie, former Residents fan club president, wrote in his book
Uncle Willie's Highly Opinionated Guide to The Residents
that, while searching through the band's archives, he came across "a suite named 'The Ballad Of Stuffed Trigger'," but not a complete album.
In 1971 the group sent a reel-to-reel tape to Hal Halverstadt at
Warner Brothers, since he had worked with
Captain Beefheart (one of the group's musical heroes). Halverstadt was not overly impressed with "The Warner Bros. Album" (he describes it as "okay at best" in "Uncle Willie's Cryptic Guide to the Residents"), but awarded the tape an "A for Ariginality". Because the band had not included any name in the return address, the rejection slip was simply addressed to "The Residents". The members of the group then decided that this would be the name they would use, first becoming Residents Unincorporated, then shortening it to the current name.
The first performance of the band using the name "The Residents" was at the Boarding House in
San Francisco in 1971. That same year another tape was completed called
Baby Sex
. The original cover art for the tape box was a silk-screened copy of an old photo depicting a woman fellating a small child. (Considered artistically rude at that time, it would be viewed as child pornography today.)
In 1972 they moved to San Francisco and formed
Ralph Records. By this time, The Cryptic Corporation was operating as a partnership and incorporated to take over the running of Ralph Records.
1972–1980: Album Era
Before the "
Santa Dog" single and while recording
Meet the Residents
, The Residents undertook one of their first major projects: the ambitious
Vileness Fats film project. Intended to be the first-ever long form music video, The Residents saw this project as the opportunity to create the ultimate
cult film. After four years of filming (from 1972 to 1976) the project was reluctantly canceled because of time, space and monetary constraints. Fourteen hours of footage were shot for the project yet only about three-quarters of an hour of that footage has ever been released.
"Santa Dog" is considered by The Residents themselves and their fans to be the "official" start of the band's recorded output. This is so because it was the first to be released to the public. Shortly after this release, the band left San Mateo and relocated to San Francisco. They sent copies of "Santa Dog" to west coast radio stations with no response until Bill Reinhardt, Program Director of
KBOO-FM in Portland received a copy. 'Santa' had the strange kind of sonic weirdness he was looking for and it was played heavily on his popular (Radio Lab) show. Bill met The Residents at their Sycamore St. studio in the summer of '73 with the news of his broadcasts. They were overjoyed that they had finally gotten media acceptance and he was celebrated with the news that KBOO was the first station to play a Residents record on the air. Inviting him in and treating him like family, Bill was given exclusive access to all their eclectic recordings. Copies from the original masters of "Stuffed Trigger",
Baby Sex
and the
Warner Bros. Album
were now in his possession. He promoted these along with
Meet The Residents
regularly on his radio program. There was considerable resistance to the commercial viability of Residents material. To aid in their promotion, Bill was given 50 of the first 1000 copies of
Meet The Residents
. Some were sent to friends, listeners and critics and two dozen were left for sale on consignment at Music Millennium Records where they sat unsold for months. It should be mentioned that KBOO DJ, Barry Schwam (Schwump, who also recorded with the Rez) promoted them on his program as well. Eventually KBOO air-play attracted many loyal fans and Portland, Oregon became the epicenter of a worldwide cult phenomenon.
The Residents, at this time, were at a rough point in their career. There was internal turmoil, which supposedly resulted in a large, "embarrassing" food fight. They decided to resolve this tension in 1974 by allegedly recording what would later become
Not Available
—representative of N. Senada's
Theory of Obscurity taken to its logical conclusion. The album was recorded and then placed in storage to be issued only when everyone had forgotten about it. However, contractual obligations related to the much-delayed release of
Eskimo
forced its release in 1978 after the band had almost forgotten about it. The Residents were not bothered by this deviation from their plan since the 1978 decision to release the album would not affect the philosophical conditions under which it was originally recorded.
The Third Reich 'n' Roll
came next, a pastiche on 60's rock 'n' roll with an overarching Nazi theme represented visually on the album cover, which featured
Dick Clark in an
SS uniform holding a carrot, with a number of Hitlers dancing on clouds behind him. On each side of the record was a single composition, approximately 17½ minutes long, using recordings of classic
rock & roll songs that were spliced, overdubbed and edited with new vocals, instrumentation and tape noises. The original songs were finally removed leaving entirely new and bizarre performances. The music video for this album was shot on the sets that were built for
Vileness Fats.
Following
The Third Reich 'n' Roll
came
Fingerprince
, a particularly ambitious project not unlike the earlier
Not Available
recordings. The band's original intention with
Fingerprince
was to release it as the very first "three-sided" album – they had found a way to simulate a third side by arranging the grooves on one side of the vinyl album to play a completely different program of tracks depending on which series of grooves the needle was dropped on. However, this idea was dropped when the band discovered that the
Monty Python comedy troupe had executed the very same idea three years earlier with their
Matching Tie and Handkerchief
album. The "third side" was later released as an EP entitled
Babyfingers
, and the
Babyfingers
tracks have since been re-integrated into the
Fingerprince
album on the CD reissues.
The Residents followed
Fingerprince
with their
Duck Stab/Buster & Glen
album – their most easily comprehensible album up to that point. This album got the band some attention from the press (namely
New Musical Express,
Sounds and
Melody Maker), and dropped most of their reliance upon the
Theory of Obscurity.
Eskimo
(1979) contained music consisting of non-musical sounds, percussion, and wordless voices. Rather than being songs in the orthodox sense, the compositions sounded like "live-action stories" without dialogs. The Residents remixed the "songs" in
disco style, the results of which appeared on the
EP Diskomo
.
Eskimo
was reissued in
surround sound on
DVD in 2003.
Commercial Album
(1980) consisted of 40 songs, each consisting of a verse and a chorus and lasting one minute. The songs pastiched the advertising jingle although the songs were not endorsements of known products or services. The
liner notes state that songs should be repeated three times in a row to form a "pop song". The Residents purchased 40 one-minute advertising slots on San Francisco's most popular Top-40 radio station at the time,
KFRC, such that the station played each track of their album over three days. This prompted an editorial in
Billboard
magazine questioning whether the act was art or advertising.
When
MTV was in its infancy, The Residents' videos were in heavy rotation since they were among the few music videos available to broadcasters. The Residents' earliest videos are in the New York
Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection and were eventually released together in 2001 on the
Icky Flix
DVD, which includes an optional audio track of remixes.
The Mole Show: The start of the Live Era
In 1981, a trilogy of albums was to be released, starting with
Mark of the Mole
, was released. A tour ensued, and was narrated nightly by
Penn Jillette. Many think, after observation of official clues in liner notes such as those found in
Demons Dance Alone
, that the Mole Show caused several members of the Residents to leave, leaving Mr. Red Eye to studio duties. The Mole Trilogy is made up of parts I, II and IV.
This tour is also noted for being the first time The Residents appeared on stage wearing their trademark eyeball masks and tuxedos. The performance featured The Residents in front of painted back drops used to help illustrate the story. Penn Jillette would come out between songs telling long intentionally pointless stories. The show was designed to appear to fall apart as it progressed: Penn pretended to grow angrier with the crowd, and lighting effects and music would become increasingly chaotic, all building up to the point where Penn was dragged off stage and returned, handcuffed to a wheelchair, to deliver his last monologue. During one performance, an audience member assaulted Penn while he was handcuffed to the wheelchair.
The 13th Anniversary show
After their Japanese distributor approached them for a 2 week run in Japan, The Residents created the 13th Anniversary tour. While the musical performance was more mainstream, the stage show was another over-the-top spectacle, featuring inflatable giraffes, dancers in eye ball masks illuminating the darkened stage with work lights, and a lead vocalist who seemed to change costumes throughout the show from wearing his eyeball mask to wearing a Richard
Nixon mask, and at one point wearing only a wig and fake ears. After the two-week run in Japan, the Residents took the show through the US. During the US run of the tour, the band encountered a few problems, having the tour manager fan a members keyboard because of overheating, being booked in a pool hall, and having someone run on stage only to be thrown back into the audience, the tour was still successful however. For the New York run of shows, they ranked 3rd in ticket sales behind
Eric Clapton and
Jerry Garcia.
Backstage at the Hollywood Palace show in
December 26 1985, one member's eyeball mask (Mr. Red Eye) was stolen, so it was replaced with a giant skull mask. The eye was returned by a devoted fan who discovered where the thief lived and stole it back, although Homer Flynn said the person who returned the mask was most probably the thief. It was put into retirement because they said it was "unclean" and in a bad condition—a superfluous shell. After this, the lead Resident was known as Mr. Skull.
The last show of this tour was in
January 1987 at
The Warfield in
San Francisco, CA, with a special appearance by
Penn & Teller.
Cube E
"Cube E" was a three-act performance covering the history of American Music. It was a step up from previous shows, featuring more elaborate dance numbers and sets. It was also the first show composed exclusively of music written for the show. The show was almost entirely backlit, with blacklights highlighting fluorescent pieces of costumes and set.
They introduced the first part, which covered cowboy music, on German television as "Buckaroo Blues". It featured the singer and two dancers wearing giant cowboys hats around a glowing campfire. Part two was called "Black Barry" and focused on slave music and the blues. The act ended when a giant cube head rose from the back of the stage. Part three, "The Baby King," featured Elvis songs with an elderly Elvis impersonator performing songs for his grandchildren. The show ended with an inflated Elvis dying as a result of the
British Invasion.
Wormwood
Based on Bible stories, Wormwood featured the Residents departing from pre-programmed music and again using a live band. The band wore
ecclesiastical robes and performed in a brightly lit fluorescent cave. The male and female lead singers switched leads, depending on what characters they needed. Act one consisted of one-off stories about individual Bible characters. Act 2 focused on suites of songs about Bible figures such as
Abraham,
Moses, and
King David. During a performance in Athens, Greece, Nolan Cook, their guitarist, had to leave the stage after taking a rock to the head from an audience member.
In the late 80s, they created the epic recording
God in Three Persons
, a story about the exploitation of two
Siamese twins with healing powers by a male dominant force and
The King & Eye
, a surreal biography of
Elvis Presley and the birth of rock and roll.
1991–1997: Multimedia Era
In the 90s, they created
Freak Show
. This marked the beginning of The Residents' obsession with emerging computer technology in the 1990s. Much of the music was made with MIDI devices.
Freak Show
also served as the name for a
CD-ROM released by the Voyager Company on March 1, 1995, shortly after
Laurie Anderson's first multimedia CD-ROM experiment,
Puppet Motel
.
Freak Show
was also a stage performance by a theater company at the Archa Theater in Prague that premiered on November 1, 1995, and a comic book. Several of the songs were also performed live during the 1997 25th anniversary concerts at the Fillmore in San Francisco. After the CD-ROM's success, the album was re-released as
The Freak Show Soundtrack
with a different cover. A limited edition,
The Freak Show Special Edition
, was released in 2002 to mark their 30th anniversary.
1998–2005: Band Era
More recently The Residents recorded the dramatic album
Demons Dance Alone
(also a tour and DVD in 2002) and
Animal Lover
in 2005. Singer
Molly Harvey began as a Ralph employee but by the mid-90s contributed to virtually all of The Residents' many projects. The Residents' increased reliance on Harvey—essentially handing her half of the vocal duties since at least
Demons Dance Alone
—parallels their artistic revitalization.
Nolan Cook,
Carla Fabrizio,
Toby Dammit,
Eric Drew Feldman, and many other artists continuously worked with the band over the last five years, recording and performing live. The new artists helped to counter what Allmusic derided as a "sonic palette [confined to] factory presets from their new Macintosh audio" of the CD-ROM era.
[13]
In February 2005, The Residents toured Australia as part of the "What is Music?" festival, performing a two hour retrospective set entitled the
33rd Anniversary Tour: The Way We Were
. These shows saw a fairly minimal band; three eyeball-headed Residents (one on guitar and two laptop/sample operators), a "stage hand" performer, and a male and female vocalist in costumes reminiscent of the Wormwood tour. Video projections and unusual flexible screens were added to the stage set, creating an unsettling ambiance. The performances on the
Way We Were
tour were recorded and were released on CD and DVD in 2005.
2006–present: Storyteller Era
Summer of 2006 brought the internet download project,
River of Crime (Episodes 1–5). River of Crime was their first project with Warner Music Group's Cordless label. Following the success of River of Crime, The Residents launched their weekly
Timmy video project on
YouTube. In 2007 they did the music for the documentary
Strange Culture
and also released a double instrumental album,
Night of the Hunters
. On the
Fourth of July, 2007, the planned October release of their latest project with
Mute Records,
The Voice of Midnight (a music theater adaptation of
E.T.A. Hoffmann's short story "
Der Sandmann), was announced on their website.
On the
21st of May they announced on their website that their first North America tour since
Demons Dance Alone for a project entitled
The Bunny Boy is set to begin on
October 9 in New York – later an earlier date was added for Santa Cruz. Soon, it was announced that the tour will also include Europe, starting
November 13. On
June 3, the Residents.com website boasted the planned release of
The Bunny Boy
which was released on
September 1. The website had posted information in which Foxboro claimed this would be a Farewell Tour; it was later revealed that this was nothing more than a mistake by Foxboro.
Identity
Much of the speculation about the members' true identities swirls around their management team, known as "The Cryptic Corporation." Cryptic was formed as a corporation in California by Jay Clem (Born 1947),
Homer Flynn (born April 1945),
Hardy W. Fox (born 1945), and John Kennedy in 1976, all of whom denied having been band members. (Clem and Kennedy left the Corporation in 1982.) The Residents themselves don't grant interviews, though Flynn and Fox have conducted interviews with the media.
Nolan Cook, a prominent collaborator with the group in both their live and studio work, denied in an interview that Fox and Flynn are the Residents, saying that he has come across such rumors, and they are completely false. However, he is considered a member of the band by some, as he is known to wear the same head coverings as the rest of the group during live shows, even wearing the trademark eyeball mask during the Wormwood tour.
Writer Simon Crab blogged that he had interviewed Fox in the mid-nineties, and that Fox openly admitted that he and Flynn were the two members of the group.
[14]
William Poundstone, author of the
Big Secrets
books, compared voiceprints of a Flynn lecture with those of spoken word segments from the Residents discography in his book
Biggest Secrets
. After noting similar patterns in both, he concluded "the similarities in the spectograms second the convincing subjective impression that the voices are identical." He posited that "the creative core of the Residents is the duo of Flynn and Fox." A subset of that belief is that Flynn is the lyricist (a conclusion buttressed by the fact that his voice bears an uncanny resemblance to one which appears on many of the Residents' albums) and that Fox writes the music. In addition
BMI's online database of the performance rights organization (of which the Residents and their publishing company, Pale Pachyderm Publishing (
Warner-Chappell), have been members for their entire careers), lists Flynn and Fox as the composers of all original Residents songs. This includes those songs written pre-1974 (the "Residents Unincorporated" years), the year Cryptic formed.
[15]
Cryptic openly admits the group's artwork is done by Flynn (among others), under various names that, put together, become Pornographics, but the pseudonym is rarely spelled the same way twice (examples: Porno Graphics, Pore No Graphix, Pore-Know Graphics); and that Fox is the "sound engineer" — meaning that he is the main producer, engineer, master, and editor of all their recordings. (Since 1976, the Residents' recordings have all listed their producer as "The Cryptic Corporation," presumably meaning Fox in particular.) Many other rumors have come and gone over the years, one being that 60s psychedelic band
Cromagnon shared members with the band.
Noted Fans
The
funk metal band
Primus has covered several Residents songs, including "Hello Skinny", "Sinister Exaggerator" and "Constantinople". (Primus album
Frizzle Fry 2002 remaster combined both Hello Skinny and Constantinople into one track, track 14, while EP
Miscellaneous Debris, an EP of covers, contained Sinister Exaggerator at track 3). At Primus' 'banjo show', a show they performed entirely on banjo-based instruments, they covered Hello Skinny live and were joined by a member of the Residents onstage .
John Flansburgh and
John Linnell of
They Might Be Giants have said in interviews that they are Residents fans, and have credited the group as an influence
[16] as have bands such as
Animal Collective [17] and
Mr. Bungle.
In 1984, New York hardcore punk band
ISM released an EP titled
Constantinople
, the title song covered from The Residents'
Duck Stab/Buster & Glen
LP. Former
Anthrax member
Greg D'Angelo played drums on this recording.
Penn Jillette often refers to The Residents as one of his favorite bands.
Discography
Albums
- Meet the Residents
– 1974
- The Third Reich 'n Roll
– 1976
- Fingerprince
– 1976
- Duck Stab/Buster & Glen
– 1978
- Not Available
– 1978
- Eskimo
– 1979
- Commercial Album
– 1980
- Mark of the Mole
– 1981
- The Tunes of Two Cities
– 1982
- Intermission: Extraneous Music from the Residents' Mole Show
– 1983
- Title in Limbo
– with Renaldo and the Loaf
1983
- George & James
– 1984
- Whatever Happened to Vileness Fats?
– 1984
- The Big Bubble: Part Four of the Mole Trilogy
– 1985
- Census Taker
– 1985
- Stars & Hank Forever: The American Composers Series
– 1986
- God in Three Persons
– 1988
- The King & Eye
– 1989
- Freak Show
– 1991
- Our Finest Flowers
– 1992
- Gingerbread Man
– 1994
- Hunters
– 1995
- Have a Bad Day
– 1996
- Wormwood: Curious Stories from the Bible
– 1998
- Roadworms: The Berlin Sessions
– 2000
- Icky Flix
– 2001
- Demons Dance Alone
– 2002
- WB: RMX
– 2003
- 12 Days of Brumalia
– 2004
- I Murdered Mommy
– 2004
- Animal Lover
– 2005
- Tweedles
– 2006
- Night of the Hunters
– 2007
- The Voice of Midnight
– October 2007
- The Bunny Boy
– 2008
Singles and EPs
- Santa Dog
– 1972
- Satisfaction
– 1976
- The Beatles Play the Residents and the Residents Play the Beatles
– 1977
- Santa Dog '78
– 1978
- Babyfingers
– 1979
- Diskomo
– 1980
- The Commercial Single
– 1980
- It's a Man's Man's Man's World
– 1984
- Kaw-Liga
– 1986
- Earth vs. the Flying Saucers
– 1986
- It's a Man's Man's Man's World
(Australia) – 1986
- Hit the Road Jack
– 1987
- For Elsie
– 1987
- Snakey Wake
– 1987
- Buckaroo Blues
– 1988
- Santa Dog 88
– 1988
- Double Shot
– 1988
- Holy Kiss of Flesh
– 1988
- From the Plains to Mexico
– 1989
- Don't Be Cruel
– 1989
- Blowoff
– 1992
- Santa Dog '92
– 1992
- Prelude to "The Teds"
– 1993
- Pollex Christi
– 1997
- I Hate Heaven
– 1998
- In Between Screams
– 1999
- High Horses
– 2001
- The Sandman Waits
– 2007
Compilations
- The Residents Radio Special
– 1979
- ''Please Do Not Steal It! – 1979
- Nibbles
– 1979
- Residue of the Residents
– 1984
- Ralph Before '84: Volume 1, the Residents
– 1984
- Assorted Secrets
– 1984
- Memorial Hits
– 1985
- The Pal TV LP
– 1985
- Heaven?
– 1986
- Hell!
– 1986
- God in Three Persons Soundtrack
– 1988
- Stranger Than Supper
– 1990
- Liver Music
– 1990
- Daydream B-Liver
– 1991
- Poor Kaw-Liga's Pain
– 1994
- Louisiana's Lick
– 1995
- Our Tired, Our Poor, Our Huddled Masses
– 1997
- Residue Deux
– 1998
- 25 Years of Eyeball Excellence
– 1998
- Land of Mystery
– 1999
- Refused
– 1999
- Dot Com
– 2000
- Diskomo 2000
– 2000
- Roosevelt 2.0
– 2000
- Petting Zoo
– 2002
- Eat Exuding Oinks
– 2002
- Best Left Unspoken...Vol. 1
– 2006
- Best Left Unspoken...Vol. 2
– 2006
- Best Left Unspoken...Vol. 3
– 2007
- Smell My Picture
– 2008
- Postcards From Patmos!
– 2008
Live Albums
- The Mole Show Live at the Roxy
– 1983
- The 13th Anniversary Show Live in the U.S.A.
– 1986
- The Thirteenth Anniversary Show
– 1987
- The Mole Show Live in Holland
– 1987
- Cube E: Live in Holland
– 1990
- Live at the Fillmore
– 1998
- Wormwood Live
– 1999
- Kettles of Fish on the Outskirts of Town
– 2002
- The Way We Were
(live CD/DVD) – 2005
- Cube E Box Set
– 2006
Multimedia Projects
- Vileness Fats
(unfinished film project) – 1972–1976
- Freak Show
(CD-ROM) – 1991
- Gingerbread Man
(CD-ROM) – 1994
- Bad Day on the Midway
(CD-ROM) – 1995
- Icky Flix
(DVD) – 2001
- Eskimo
(DVD) – 2002
- Disfigured Night DVD
(DVD) – 2002
- Demons Dance Alone
(DVD) – 2003
- The Commercial Album DVD
– 2004
- Wormwood DVD
– 2005
- The Way We Were CD/DVD
– 2005
- The River of Crime
– June 2006
- Timmy
– August 2006
- The Bunny Boy
– August 2008
References
- [1]
- [1]
- [1]
- [1]
- [1]
- [1]
- [1]
- Allmusic: Phil Litman
- [1]
- [1]
- [1]
- [1]
- Allmusic review of Freak Show
- Simon Crab's blog about interviewing Hardy Fox
- BMI.com online listing of songs written or co-written by Homer Flynn and Hardy Fox, accessed May 24 2005
- TMBG Podcast 36B
- Animal Collective