The Residents

Coordinates	23°54′″N95°41′″N
Name	The Residents
Background	group_or_band
Origin	Shreveport, Louisiana, United States
Genre	Avant-garde Experimental music Multimedia art Post-punk
Years active	1966 1969–present
Label	Ralph Records Pre Records Charisma Records Cordless Recordings Mute Records
Associated acts	Snakefinger Renaldo and the Loaf
Url	www.residents.com

The Residents is an American art collective best known for avant-garde music and multimedia works. The first official release under the name of "The Residents" was in 1972, and the group has since released over sixty albums, numerous music videos and short films, three CD-ROM projects, ten DVDs. They have undertaken seven major world tours and scored multiple films. Pioneers in exploring the potential of CD-ROM and similar technologies, The Residents have won several awards for their multimedia projects. Ralph Records, a record label focusing on avant garde music, was started by The Residents.

Throughout the group's existence, the individual members have ostensibly attempted to operate under anonymity, preferring instead to have attention focused on their art output. Much outside speculation and rumor has focused on this aspect of the group. In public, the group appears silent and costumed, often wearing eyeball helmets, top hats and tuxedos - a long-lasting costume now recognized as their signature iconography.

Their albums generally fall into two categories: deconstructions of Western popular music, or complex conceptual pieces, composed around a theme, theory or plot. They are noted for surrealistic lyrics and sound, and disregard for conventional music composition.

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 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.

The album The Ballad of Stuffed Trigger has never been released in any form. 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. Fifteen 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 1973 with the news of his broadcasts. They were overjoyed that they had finally got 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, The Residents gave Reinhardt exclusive access to all their eclectic recordings, including copies of the original masters of "Stuffed Trigger", Baby Sex and the Warner Bros. Album. 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. KBOO DJ, Barry Schwam (Schwump, who also recorded with The Residents) promoted them on his program as well. Eventually KBOO airplay 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. According to official Residents lore, there was internal turmoil which resulted in a large, "embarrassing" food fight; they decided to resolve this tension in 1974 by 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 in order 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 1960s rock and 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 and 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 NME, 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, starting with Mark of the Mole, was to be released. A tour ensued, and was narrated nightly by Penn Jillette. 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 backdrops 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 two-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, 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 cowboy 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 performed by an elderly Elvis impersonator 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 1980s, 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 1990s, 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.

In February 2005, The Residents toured Australia as part of the "What is Music?" festival, performing a two hour retrospective set entitled the . 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 May 21 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.

November 3, 2009 saw three new releases. The Ughs! is a mostly instrumental album made up of music composed earlier in their career, which had been completely reworked for the Voice of Midnight album. Ten Little Piggies is a "futurist compilation", ten songs from projects that may or may not be released in the future. Finally Is Anybody Out There is a DVD collecting all the Bunny Boy videos from the series posted on Youtube. The episodes are streamlined and not exactly the same as the originals.

In January 2010 the Residents began a national tour entitled Talking Light, which featured singer "Randy" wearing an old man mask, and the other two wearing dread lock wigs and some kind of optical gear over their faces. The songs were stories about various characters' obsessions with invisible siblings, fictional serial killers, people in mirrors, among others. One of these performances was featured as part of the edition of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival curated by Matt Groening in May 2010 in Minehead, England.

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 do not 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, Cook himself 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.

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 "It is possible 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.

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 experimental band Cromagnon shared members with the band.

Discography

Albums

Meet the Residents – 1974

The Third Reich 'n Roll – 1976

Fingerprince – 1977

Duck Stab/Buster & Glen – 1978

Not Available – 1978

Eskimo – 1979

Commercial Album – 1980

Mark of the Mole – 1981

The Tunes of Two Cities – 1982

Title in Limbo with Renaldo and the Loaf – 1983

George & James – 1984

Whatever Happened to Vileness Fats? – 1984

– 1985

Census Taker – 1985

– 1986

God in Three Persons – 1988

The King & Eye – 1989

Freak Show – 1990

Our Finest Flowers – 1992

Gingerbread Man – 1994

Hunters – 1995

Have a Bad Day – 1996

– 1998

– 2000

Icky Flix – 2001

Demons Dance Alone – 2002

– 2003

12 Days of Brumalia – 2004

I Murdered Mommy – 2004

Animal Lover – 2005

River of Crime (Episodes 1–5) – 2006

Tweedles – 2006

Night of the Hunters – 2007

The Voice of Midnight – 2007

Smell My Picture – 2008

The Bunny Boy – 2008

Postcards From Patmos – 2008

Anganok – 2009

Hades – 2009

The Ughs! – 2009

Arkansas – 2009

Ozan – 2010

Strange Culture/Haeckel's Tale – 2010

Dollar General – 2010

Talking Light Rehearsal – 2010

Compilation albums

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

Ten Little Piggies – 2009

Chicken Scratching With The Residents – 2010

Live albums

The Mole Show Live at the Roxy – 1983

The 13th Anniversary Show Live in the U.S.A. – 1986

13th Anniversary Show: Live in Japan – 1986

The Thirteenth Anniversary Show – 1987

The Mole Show Live in Holland – 1989

– 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

Talking Light – 2010

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

– 1983

Safety is the Cootie Wootie – 1984

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

Multimedia projects

Vileness Fats (unfinished film project) – 1972–1976

The Mole Show/Whatever Happened to Vileness Fats? (VHS) –1984

Freak Show (CD-ROM) – 1991

The Eyes Scream: A History of the Residents (VHS) (with host Penn Jillette) – 1991

Twenty Twisted Questions (Laserdisc) – 1992

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

Live! On The Outskirts (DVD) – 2002

Demons Dance Alone (DVD) – 2003

The Commercial DVD (DVD) – 2004

(DVD) – 2005

The Way We Were (CD/DVD) – 2005

Cube E Box (CD/DVD) – 2006

The River of Crime (podcast) – 2006

Timmy (Internet video series) – 2006

The Bunny Boy (Internet video series) – 2008

Icky Flix Live (DVD) – 2009

The Mole Show (Kabuki) (CD/DVD) – 2009

Is Anybody Out There? (DVD) – 2009

References

External links

The Residents Official Historical Site

Official MySpace page

Official YouTube page

Residents Lovers Forum

The Moles present The Residents

Further reading

Meet the Residents - America's most eccentric band!, Ian Shirley, SAF Publishing, Wembley, UK, 1998 ISBN 0 946719 12 8

Category:American artist groups and collectives Category:American experimental musical groups Category:Musical groups from California Category:Music of the San Francisco Bay Area Category:Outsider music Category:Pranksters Category:Bands with fictional stage personas Category:Cordless Recordings artists Category:American progressive rock music groups Category:Mute Records artists