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The Residents

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The Residents

The Residents are an avant-garde music and visual arts collective who have created over sixty albums, created numerous musical short films, designed three CD-ROM projects, ten DVD's, and undertaken six major world tours. Throughout their career, spanning nearly four decades, they have maintained complete anonymity. All public relations, interviews and promotions are handled by their spokesgroup, The Cryptic Corporation.

History

Origins

Because of the band's wish to preserve anonymity, it is difficult if not impossible to compile a history that is complete and accurate as far as hard facts are concerned. This, together with the obscure nature of the band, makes The Residents history more a question of lore than biography. The facts that do exist are primarily the recordings and shows which are unquestionable as they do exist, but of the process that led to the creation of them knowledge and fact is scarce. Therefore the history of the band as it is portrayed in this article is based on what is known, not what is necessarily true, and it should be judged with that in mind. The only reliable sources are the albums and the shows and their products; all else is either speculation, lore among fans or information (or disinformation) from The Cryptic Corporation.

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 Philip Lithman and the mysterious N. Senada (who 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, a nickname he got after his frantical playing on the violin during the performance with The Residents at The Boarding House in San Fancisco 1971, where his fingers' speed made them look like snakes in the eyes of the less-musically proficient but imaginative Residents. It is also stated that one of The Residents took a snapshot of Lithman's fingers, during which they resembled the insignia of the hammer and sickle, earning him the nickname Comradefinger, a nickname which did not prevail.

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 entitled 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,[1] [2] [3] [4] 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.

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 due to 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 both 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.

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 17 ½ 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 away 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.

The Commercial Album (1980) consisted of 40 songs that, like Eskimo, rejected traditional song structure. Each consisted of a verse and a chorus and lasted 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. With a leap of promotional imagination, The Residents purchased 40 one-minute advertising slots on San Francisco's most popular Top-40 radio station KFRC forcing the station to play 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, 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. Skull 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 as if it was falling apart as it progressed: Penn would grow angrier with the crowd and the lights music and smoke would intensify, all building up to the point where Penn was dragged off stage and returned handcuffed to a wheel chair and the show would end. During one noteworthy performance, Penn was assaulted by an audience member while handcuffed to the wheelchair.

The 13th Anniversary show

After being approached by their Japanese distributor to do a 2 week run of shows 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 dressed in a garish yellow suit wearing a Nixon mask. After the two week run in Japan The Residents took the show through the US.

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 has stated that the person who returned the mask was most probably the thief himself. It was put into retirement because it was now "unclean" and in a bad condition, and had become a superfluous shell. From this point forward the lead Resident was known as Mr. Skull.

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 comprised exclusively of music written for the show. The show was almost entirely backlit with black lights highlighting fluorescent pieces of costumes and set.

Part one covering cowboy music was first performed 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 around bible stories, Wormwood featured the Residents departing from preprogrammed music and once again using a live band. The band wore ecclesiastical robes and performed in a brightly lit fluorescent cave. It featured the male and female lead singers switching leads depending on what characters were 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, one of The Residents had to leave the stage after being struck by a rock hurled from the audience.

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

One of the noted Residents projects of the 90s is "Freak Show." This marked the beginning of The Residents' obsession with emerging computer technology in the 1990s. Much of the music was made with various MIDI devices. "Freak Show" also served as the name for a CD-ROM that was 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 have 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-90's 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 --seems to incidentally parallel 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 All Music Guide derided as a "sonic palette [confined to] factory presets from their new Macintosh audio" of the CD-ROM era. [1]

In February of 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. They added video projections and unusual flexible screens 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.

Identity

Much of the speculation about the members' true identities swirls around their management team, known as "The Cryptic Corporation." Cryptic was formed 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, who has been working with the band recently, denied in an interview that Fox and Flynn are the Residents, saying that he has come across such rumors, and they are completely false.

William Poundstone, author of the Big Secrets books, claimed Flynn and possibly Fox are likely members of The Residents, probably the group leaders; this is probably the most widespread belief among the group's fans. 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 that of the Singing Resident) 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 [2]. However, many have pointed out that a songwriter can copyright a song under any name he/she chooses; the person named in the copyright assignment receives all royalties and legal requests and other information for the song, which, if Flynn and Fox are merely trusted managers who both handle the Residents' business and protect their identities, makes them the logical choice to be assigned the copyrights.

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.

Discography

Albums

Singles and EPs

Compilations

Live Albums

Multimedia Projects

References

  1. ^ All Music Guide review of Freak Show
  2. ^ BMI.com online listing of songs written or co-written by Homer Flynn and Hardy Fox, accessed May 24 2005
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