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The Residents

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The Residents
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The Residents

The Residents are an avant garde music and visual arts group. They formed in 1966 and released their first record in 1972, a double-disc 45 RPM recording entitled Santa Dog. They have released nearly sixty albums, created numerous musical films, designed three CD-ROM projects, and undertaken six major world tours. They are still active and have released a new video-CD-Internet project in June 13th 2006, entitled "The River Of Crime" and said to be modeled after the radio dramas of the 1940s. A new full length CD ("Tweedles") is expected in October 2006 on MUTE Records.

They are known for their secrecy, singular art, and embrace of new technology.

Contents

Who are the Residents?

Throughout their 30+ year history, The Residents have always cloaked their lives and music in obscurity. The band members, always shown as being four in number, refuse to grant interviews, and do not identify themselves by name or even individual pseudonyms. Concerts and photo shoots are always performed in full disguise, most recognizably in white tie tuxedos, top hats and giant eyeball masks, although there is speculation that the "eyeball era" is over.

For their part, The Residents may feel that artists do their best work without the influence of an audience, should only be judged by their work, and that a band members' genders, ethnicities, line-up changes, and daily life outside of the band should be irrelevant to listeners. Given that their members speak only through their work, however, even their attitudes can only be inferred.

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, Homer Flynn, Hardy Fox, and John Kennedy in 1976, all of whom denied having been band members. (Clem and Kennedy left the Corporation in 1982.)

William Poundstone author of the Big Secrets books, claimed Fox and Flynn are the Residents; 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 has 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, 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-1976, the year Cryptic formed [BMI.com online listing of songs written or co-written by Homer Flynn] [and Hardy Fox], accessed May 24, 2005. Cryptic openly admits the group's artwork is done by Flynn, under the name Porno Graphics, a pseudonym rarely spelled the same way twice (example: Pore No Graphix); and that Fox is the "sound engineer". Many other rumors have come and gone over the years, including the idea that the band members are physically disfigured, or are in fact The Beatles in disguise.

Early history

Due to the obscure nature of the band, it is difficult to get an accurate history of The Residents. What follows is information from unauthorized accounts which may or may not be entirely reliable.

The Residents originally 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.

Whilst attempting to eke out a living they experimented 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 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 eventually become great influences on the band. Lithman's guitar playing technique earned him the name Snakefinger (upon seeing a picture of Lithman playing the guitar, a Resident exclaimed that his little finger resembled a snake).

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. One of their first public performances was at the Longbranch in Berkeley, California.

In 1971 the group sent a reel-to-reel tape to Hal Halverstadt at Warner Brothers, since he had worked with Captain Beefheart. 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 band unanimously decided to use that name ever since.

The first performance of the band using the "Residents" moniker was at the Boarding House Club 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.

Around this time, the band adopted N. Senada's "Theory of Obscurity", which states that the artist can only produce pure art when the expectations and influences of the outside world are not taken into consideration. uri is N. Senada's.

Noted projects

One of the first projects The Residents undertook, before even the Santa Dog single, was the ambitious Vileness Fats film project, which was later reluctantly cancelled, after four years of filming (from 1972 to 1976). Fourteen hours of footage was shot for the project, of which only about three-quarters of an hour have ever been released. The Residents saw this project as the opportunity to create the ultimate cult film. It was intended to be the first-ever video clip.

The album Third Reich & Roll, an obvious yet amusing pun, tackled the theme of the corporate music industry. The sleeve, adorned with swastikas, showed Dick Clark dressed in full Nazi regalia, surrounded by tiny dancing Hitlers. 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, or "ruined" versions. It is assumed that The Residents, however, viewed this process as "de-ruining" the songs, presenting them how they should sound without "corporatization".

The Residents took the Theory of Obscurity to its logical conclusion when they allegedly recorded Not Available in 1974 with the intention of not releasing it. Placed in storage to be issued when no one remembered it, contractual obligations forced its release in 1978 after the band had almost forgotten about it. The Residents were unbothered by this deviation from their plan since the 1978 decision to release the album couldn't affect the philosophical conditions under which it was recorded in 1974.

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 dialogue. 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 approximately one minute. The songs pastiched the advertising jingle even-though 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.

The Residents are also credited with the creation of the first music video.[All Music Guide biography of The Residents] 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 80s saw the release of the Mark of the Mole album (and its sequels) and the band's first official tour, narrated nightly by Penn Jillette. The Mole Trilogy is still missing some of its volumes (only parts I, II and IV have been released) which are, allegedly, lurking somewhere in the periphery of the Residential imagination, not entirely lost, but no one is holding their breath.

Backstage at the Hollywood Palace show in December 26, 1985 one member's eyeball mask (Mr. RedEye) 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 nothing more than a superfluous shell.

In the 90s they created the epic recording "God in 3 Persons", a story about the exploitation of two siamese twins with healing powers by a male dominant force; "The King & Eye", a surreal biography of Elvis Presley and the birth of rock and roll; and "Freak Show", a title that intended to depict that freaks are still being ostracised by society and laughed at - they just don't get paid to do that any more.

More recently The Residents have recorded the dramatic album "Demons Dance Alone" (also a tour and DVD in 2002) and "Animal Lover" in 2005.

The Residents were also one of the first bands to release multi-media CDs, featuring the work of illustrators such as Jim Ludtke. The first two of which ("The Gingerbread Man" and "Bad Day on the Midway") were both cited as top computer entertainment software by Entertainment Weekly. They have also contributed to a number of soundtracks including Pee Wee's Playhouse. The band continues to release new material (they have over 700 songs in their catalogue), special re-releases and more DVDs. They have toured three times in the last decade, though speculation is that this period of heavy touring is over.

Since the mid 90s singer Molly Harvey has continuously worked with the band, recording and performing live. The Residents increased reliance on Harvey--essentially handing her half of the vocal duties since at least Demons Dance Alone--seems to uncoincidentally parallel their artistic revitalization.

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 ambience. The performances on the Way We Were tour were recorded and were released on CD and DVD in 2005.

Albums

Multimedia

Singles

Trivia

References and footnotes

External links

 

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