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‘A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 2’: Ongoing ‘visual history’ of the Residents reaches the ‘80s and ‘90s
08.11.2023
10:18 am
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‘A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 2,’ now available from Melodic Virtue

Arguing for the timelessness of the Residents’ music in the introduction to this book, Penn Jillette claims that the Faceless Four were the soundtrack to Madonna and Sean Penn’s star-crossed love.

I first met and worked with Madonna during the time this book chronicles, and the very first thing she talked to me about was The Residents. She was in awe that I had met and worked with them. It’s a mistake The Residents fans make over and over again. We often think that we’re the only ones who understand the brilliance of North Louisiana’s Phenomenal Pop Combo, but all anyone has to do is hear them to know there’s something different and wonderful there. Madonna explained to me that the other Penn, the Sean one, had rammed The Residents down her throat and she swallowed it greedily.

It sounds preposterous, but then you picture them on the set of Shanghai Surprise, smoking cigarettes in their trailer with “Sorry” emanating from the hi-fi, or maybe tearing up PCH past Paradise Cove in Sean’s 1987 Buick Grand National, windows down, with the live-in-Holland “Cry for the Fire” cranked loud enough on the tape deck to overcome the noises of traffic, wind and surf, and it sounds even more preposterous. It must be bullshit.
 

The Residents at sea with Jefferson Starship and Huey Lewis, June 2, 1984

Or must it? Weigh the evidence on the other side of the scale. The Eye Guys appeared in the music video for Jefferson Starship’s “Layin’ It On The Line.” David Byrne, Andy Partridge and Lene Lovich sang on Commercial Album. The Residents met James Brown. They had a hot tub. And their members were uncredited, so for all anyone knew, Miles Davis, Ukulele Ike, Charo and Del Shannon were under those eyeball heads. Would Sean and Madonna really have risked missing that band? If they weren’t listening to the Residents in 1985, what were they listening to?
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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08.11.2023
10:18 am
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Michael Gira on Swans’ new album, ‘The Beggar’
06.23.2023
11:08 am
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The poster in vinyl copies of ‘The Beggar’, out today on Young God Records (illustration by Nicole Boitos)

Does time slow to a crawl during a Swans performance, or does it approach the speed of light? At the two-hour mark, have your feet really floated off the ground? If it’s a commonplace to compare a Swans show to a ritual, that’s because the shows really are like rituals in at least three respects: as reliable techniques for ecstasy, as exchanges between officiants and audience, as sacrificial acts. Like Sufi trance music, say, or Penderecki, the sound scrambles your sense of clock time, building and prolonging an almost unbearable tension, the expectation that a secret is about to be disclosed, that another dimension in time is close at hand, that the band’s labor will eventually divert the timestream’s flow from the horizontal to the vertical axis. Swans are one of the best live bands going.

The Beggar is Swans’ sixteenth studio album and the sixth since Michael Gira reformed the band in 2010. It continues the remarkable streak Swans have been on since that year’s My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, a series of records that not only keep faith with the band’s early work, but enrich it. I asked Gira a few questions about the new double LP by email.
 

Michael Gira in Berlin (photo by Nicole Oike)

I feel obligated to say how much The Beggar seems to be about death. Am I exaggerating?

Well, at my age it would be silly to avoid the subject, but the use of the word in some of the songs has a different implication in each instance, I would hope, none of which I’d consider to be morose. It’s just a fact of life, like having a bowel movement. The fact that it’s coming sooner rather than later at this point does lend an increased urgency, though I remain just as stunned by the raw and inexplicable fact of my existence as ever. I sometimes stare blankly at the blurring scene in front of me for minutes at a time, hoping to catch a glimpse of the fabric of the air tearing and revealing what’s hidden behind it. It feels like it’s screaming for release. I hope I’m able to witness what it is before I terminate.

In Phil Puleo’s zoological illustration of the band on the tour poster, you appear as a pink poodle. Maybe it’s a question for Phil, but can you shed any light on the correspondences between band members and animals?

This particular group “promo shot” was conceived out of desperation to avoid at all costs another deeply regrettable photo of a rock band. I had noted with amusement Phil’s highly skilled efforts at memorializing people’s pets in finely crafted watercolors he sometimes executes on commission. So I thought, why not superimpose our heads on animals and have Phil illustrate it? I sent an email to everyone asking them to choose their own animal and provide Phil with a headshot. I have no idea why the others chose the animals they chose, but in my case a pink poodle is obviously apt! In the case of Phil choosing an ape for himself, that has to do with an incident from decades ago. There was a section in a long and ponderous instrumental where suddenly Phil would pound the hell out of a mounted kick drum with hard mallets, solo, with no particular rhythm, but played with incredible physical force and it would thunder against the walls of whatever venue we were performing in. Very dramatic. He’d leave brief silences between the volleys for added impact. It was somewhere in Germany I suppose, that placed perfectly in one of those silences someone shouted out in a deep voice with a thick German accent “He… plays… like… an… APE!!!” Ever since then I have often referred to Phil lovingly as Mr. Ape.
 

 
Recently on social media you wondered whether your last thought will be of Chris Burden’s “Velvet Water.” Is “Los Angeles: City of Death” about anyone in particular? I suppose it could be a self-portrait, but I also think of Chris Burden crawling through broken glass on Main Street, crucified on the Beetle in Venice, airing his “Poem for L.A.” on local TV.

Yikes! To have a haphazard post from an idiotic social media site quoted back to me is like being taken to task for something thoughtlessly scrawled on a public restroom wall while taking care of business. Actually, not dissimilar I suppose! Anyway, Burden was one among many formative art figures from my youth in LA. His work remains powerful, if opaque. To me the early stuff is poetry. Each visceral act is perfectly contained in a few short, dry sentences. Through the Night Softly (crawling bound over broken glass) was broadcast like a commercial on TV and it’s wonderful to think of a random unsuspecting LA TV watcher suddenly encountering such an image late at night. I always conflate it with Van Gogh’s Starry Night for some reason. In fact I refer to it in a line in a song I wrote about a different harrowing event, called “When Will I Return?” But anyway, when I wrote “Los Angeles: City of Death” I’d been suffering from intense bouts of nostalgia for the place while fully aware that the LA of my childhood no longer exists and also that I was actually ecstatic to leave it behind and watch it recede beneath me through the window of the airplane as I headed for my new life in NYC, decades ago. In a way though, LA is the flowering root from which all that’s beautiful and hideous in American culture grows, a place of awesome glamour, sunlight and artifice, concealing depravity, greed and thoughtless cruelty just beneath its surface. It’s the original land of sprawling subdivisions, shopping malls and choked freeways, the home of the giant simulacrum Disneyland, and as it metastasizes out into the desert hills it kills everything beneath it and within its reach. The whole place is an environmental, psychic and cultural cancer zone. Naturally, hovering above it is a malignant sun, trying its best to broil everything it can touch alive. And now of course come the fires, and then the floods, and soon I suppose an earthquake that will dump the whole mess into the sea. But I have tremendous memories of the place! I love it. I’m still drawn to it somehow. An impossible dream, but if I had the money I’d buy a house on the beach in the South Bay area in an instant and live there for the rest of my life.
 

Bill Rieflin, 1960-2020 (via Bandcamp)

Please talk about Bill Rieflin’s contributions to Swans, particularly in the latter period.

Losing Bill (and just a year before that, his wife Frankie) was like having a vital internal organ removed without anesthesia. The ache is still there and I try not to think about it. Bill was one of the most exceptional human beings I have ever encountered. His intelligence was boundless and his dry wit and unexpected insights were a joy to experience. Working with him once every year to 18 months or so was always a high point of my life, in that not only did I get to make music with him but I got the chance to hang out with him as well. He always brought a fresh and vital perspective to any song he worked on. Typically, he would have never heard the song before and I’d play it for him in the studio, and it would be immediately apparent what instrument he’d play. He performed! He didn’t just play a part. Whatever he played always had the stamp of his personality in it. He played piano, bass guitar, electric or acoustic guitar, organ, synthesizer, percussion, drums, and he sang, too – whatever it was deemed a song needed. Once, rather than play something, he erased the end of someone else’s repeating short guitar measure throughout a song – and it worked beautifully. He taught me the trick of sometimes recording onto a new track of a song without listening to the song itself in playback, so that the performance would have an unexpected effect. Anything to avoid the inevitable doldrums that often creep in after long hours in the studio. Sometimes he’d double an existing full-kit drum performance exactly, just adding slight nuances and accents along the way to ensure vitality. He played a tambourine to a song sitting in a swivel chair with the mic in front of him and he swirled slowly in a circle as he played so that the tambourine would fade in and out throughout the performance. He played very aggressive, climactic chords on a piano to a song that intentionally was lacking a time signature, so that the downbeats were entirely random (the band had played this with eye contact to maintain unity) and he nevertheless landed with his chords exactly on each downbeat flawlessly. He played a ride cymbal with a tiny nail so that there was no tone, only the slightest bit of glassy percussion and the sheen of sustain. He was never dull, never predictable, and always brought the right amount of pathos or humor to a song, whatever was called for that I myself would have never imagined. He was a titan of a human being and an unparalleled musician and a master of aesthetics. I am less of a person without him on this earth.

How did it come about that Norman Westberg opens the show?

Swans reformed in 2010 and the line up of musicians from then until 2018 was myself, Norman Westberg, Phil Puleo, Kristof Hahn, Christopher Pravdica, and Thor Harris (later replaced by Paul Wallfisch). At the end of that 8 year period we’d spent so much time together and hashed through so much music that it seemed there was nowhere to go with that configuration musically. I decided to continue Swans with a revolving lineup of musicians. As it turns out, everyone except Norman and Thor has slowly seeped back into the picture after the passage of a few years. I love Norman as a person and a musician. I suspect in the near future he’ll be back in the fold, but in the meantime he is great as a solo artist so I thought this would be a way for him to properly shine. We get to tour together again after all.
 

The cover of ‘The Beggar’ (illustration by Nicole Boitos)
 
Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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06.23.2023
11:08 am
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Kenneth Anger RIP: The Magus of American Cinema dead at 96
05.24.2023
10:39 am
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Sad news to report, Kenneth Anger, the Magus of American cinema has died, aged 96. He’d been living for some time in an assisted living facility in Southern California. 

His art representatives at the Sprüth Magers gallery sent out the following press release:

With deep sadness, Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers, along with the entire gallery team, mourn the passing of the visionary filmmaker, artist, and author Kenneth Anger (1927–2023).

Through his kaleidoscopic films, which combine sumptuous visuals, popular music soundtracks, and a focus on queer themes and narratives, Anger laid the groundwork for the avant-garde art scenes of the later twentieth century, as well as for the visual languages of contemporary queer and youth culture. His earliest works, such as the 1947 black-and-white ecstatic short, Fireworks, established Anger as an enfant terrible of the filmmaking underground. In his works of the 1950s and 1960s, he pushed the camera apparatus to its limits, incorporating double exposure, found footage, and manipulations of the celluloid itself. Anger’s personal occultism, explored most deeply in his masterpieces Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Invocation of my Demon Brother (1969), and Lucifer Rising (1972), was a constant in his practice, with the act of transgression—from sacred to profane, from culture into counterculture, from old to new cinematic forms—becoming his defining mode of creation.

Kenneth was a trailblazer. His cinematic genius and influence will live on and continue to transform all those who encounter his films, words and vision.

Kenneth Anger (1927–2023) was a pioneer of avant-garde film and video art. His iconic short films are characterized by a mystical-symbolic visual language and phantasmagorical-sensual opulence that underscores the medium’s transgressive potential. Anger’s work fundamentally shaped the aesthetics of 1960s and 1970s subcultures, the visual lexicon of pop and music videos and queer iconography. The artist considered his life an artwork in its own right and frequently wove elements of myth, fact and fiction into his biography. His works can be understood as an integrative part of this life-as-artwork.

Anger’s keen perfectionism led him to assume all the usual filmmaking roles himself from the very beginning: In an unusual synthesis he handled all of the camera work, set design, costume design, film development and editing and acts as director, producer and actor in one. Even his earliest productions show the themes and artistic strategies that define his oeuvre. His experimental montage technique eschews spoken dialogue. Though possessed of certain narrative traits, its real power lies in a specific kind of suggestion. Anger’s first work, the 14-minute Fireworks (1947), was so provocative that the young artist was hauled to court on obscenity charges. Subject matter in the short film includes homosexual cruising, sailor fetish, sexual violence and gore. Its black-and-white images appear governed by an archetypal dream logic: phallic fireworks explode, the protagonist’s guts are crudely cut open to reveal a compass in his viscera and a sailor walks through a shot with a Christmas tree on his head. His 38-minute Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) sees this dream logic tip completely into a surreal Technicolor color frenzy. The result is a sexually charged, orgiastic mixture of myth and ecstasy somewhere between period film set, opera stage, Kabuki theater and nightclub.

Later films including Scorpio Rising (1963), Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) and Lucifer Rising (1972–80) develop this exuberant visual language further and also involve an expansion of their film-technique repertoire. Cine-sculptural strategies including double exposure or physical manipulation of the celluloid, the striking contrast of superficial pop music and disturbing images, the integration of found documentary footage and the use of subliminally-charged religious and mythological symbols enhance the films’ completely hypnotic effect. Influenced by the theories of the British writer Aleister Crowley, these works are also distinguished by a clear affinity for the occult and the enactment of an explicitly “perverse” imagination. Images of motorcycle gangs, orgies of violence, Egyptian deities, archetypal volcanic and desert landscapes and satanic rituals produce highly atmospheric, psychedelic psychodramas rife with breaches of taboo, sexual neuroses and voyeuristic fantasies.

Anger is also the author of Hollywood Babylon (1959), a book that anticipates the highs and lows of celebrity journalism. Mainstream Hollywood cinema is both the matrix of Anger’s work and its antipode. The visual lexicon of his films refers again and again to its dominant images while simultaneously subverting them in a radical way. At the heart of his practice was the fundamental, mind-expanding power of the film medium, a power absent in the genres of mainstream cinema practices. Anger considered cinematographic projection a psychosocial ritual capable of unleashing physical and emotional energies. The artist saw film as nothing less than a spiritual medium, a conveyer of spectacular alchemy that transforms the viewer.

I last saw Kenneth myself in September of 2022 when I interviewed him for an upcoming TV docu series I’m making on modern occultism. He was in good spirits that day, but obviously very, very frail.

I think it goes without saying that “they don’t make ‘em like that anymore” but Anger was always a one-off. The world became a lot less interesting today. RIP Kenneth Anger.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.24.2023
10:39 am
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‘Faceless Forever’: The Residents hit the road for their fiftieth anniversary!


THEM! courtesy of the Cryptic Corporation

When everyone lives in the future, the present is au revoir.
—Delta Nudes

Last Christmas marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Residents’ first release, “Santa Dog.” Ralph Records gave away most of the initial pressing as a free gift, mailing copies of the double seven-inch record, which presented itself as a compilation of songs by four groovy groups, to friends, tastemakers, and prominent figures.

If the White House had not refused its complimentary copy of “Santa Dog,” President Nixon, his wife Pat, and their daughters, Tricia and Julie, would not have been deprived of the chance to spin it a few times on the Blue Room hi-fi as the Yule log crackled in the fireplace and the bombs of Operation Linebacker II pulverized North Vietnam. Though side one, “Fire,” credited to Ivory and the Brain Eaters, would have been the Nixons’ likely favorite, the First Family would have read in the sleeve notes that side four, “Aircraft Damage” (B Barnes–C America), credited to Arf and Omega featuring the Singing Lawn Chairs, was “FROM THE RALPH FILM ‘VILENESS FATS’ COMING SOON TO A THEATER NEAR YOU.”

Fifty years is a long time. Today, Dick and Pat are buried in the cold ground, original copies of “Santa Dog” fetch as much as a Pontiac Grand Prix, and you can tell Tricia and Julie that Vileness Fats really is coming to a theater near them! Sort of: every date of the imminent “Faceless Forever” U.S. tour will open with a screening of Triple Trouble, the Residents’ new feature film, which revisits their abandoned movie project of the early seventies and incorporates some of its footage into a brain-syruping psychodrama about Randy Rose, Jr., a lapsed priest harried by fungus in his encore career as a plumber.

Like the new Residents encyclopedia by Jim Knipfel and Brian Poole (also titled Faceless Forever), the Triple Trouble screenings and live shows are part of the Residents’ fiftieth anniversary festivities. I caught up with the group’s spokesperson, Cryptic Corporation President Homer Flynn, who once again graciously fielded my questions about the Residents’ diet, wardrobe, hair products, LaserDisc easter eggs and CD-ROM cheat codes.


In the atomic shopping carts, 1974 (courtesy of the Cryptic Corporation)

What can you tell me about the tour?

Well, you know, it’s a fiftieth anniversary tour, so it’s really retrospective. I mean, the selection of material for this tour, you know, came about in a kind of almost random, haphazard way. I mean, this is the third time it’s been scheduled. So it started out two, three years ago as a “Dog Stab” tour with the idea at that time that we were mainly interested in having them promote the Metal, Meat & Bone album, which was new at that point. But then we added a good chunk of Duck Stab! material to that. Kind of trying to come up with a balance between what was new and we wanted to promote and what the band wanted to play and then what the fans were interested in. And then that tour got cancelled, and then rescheduled and slightly jiggered around a little bit, and then that one got cancelled.

Well, by the time that happened, we were looking at the fiftieth anniversary and Metal, Meat & Bone, while everybody likes the album, it’s still not as relevant from a marketing and promo point of view. So ultimately, we left a good chunk of Metal, Meat & Bone in there, left a good chunk of Duck Stab! And then ultimately, they filled in with a lot of other classic Residents material. And I think it’s a good set. [Laughs] It’s not the way anybody would have chosen to put it together, but the last three years have been crazy. What can you say?
 

At the Golden Gate Bridge, 1979 (courtesy of the Cryptic Corporation)

I’m still kicking myself for missing the Duck Stab! shows. There was a Third Reich ‘n Roll encore?

There was indeed. Yeah, and you know they had a lot of fun with that. I mean, you know interestingly, there is a guy, [Scott Colburn], an audio engineer in Seattle, who has been doing a lot of the remastering of the back catalog series that Cherry Red has been putting out, and he’s a huge fan. He’s a great guy. And basically, he volunteered to go back and digitize all of the old multitrack original tapes. So all of a sudden, you know, you could take all of the original tracks from Duck Stab! and put them into Logic if you wanted to. And then all of a sudden that material was accessible again, and they got very excited about that idea.

They only did, that was kind of like, I call it the “California mini-tour.” It was the tour a year and a half ago that then ultimately, most of it was canceled other than four or five, three or four California shows. So they never really got to the point with the Third Reich ‘n Roll material where they were super comfortable with it, because part of what’s happening is stuff is coming from the original tapes, and then part of it is being played, and it’s all pretty loose. And I think everybody would agree that some of it works better than others.

But I think they have in mind going back and revisiting that again. I mean, you know, they could do a suite from Eskimo if they wanted to. There’s a lot of possibilities with that material.

Since you mentioned it, there was a plan for an Eskimo opera or stage show at one time, right? But I don’t think that’s ever been a live show.

No, there never has. I mean, interestingly, this is my favorite story about that: there is a guy who was a programmer at the South Bank Center in London, a guy named Glenn Max. And Glenn was a big Residents fan. He booked them for a few different festivals and events while he was there. And there was a period, I don’t know, ten or twelve years ago, something like that, when the South Bank Center was shut down for remodeling, and he had it in his mind, he was looking for other venues around London in order to try to do different shows. One of his ideas was to do a version of Eskimo on ice.

More Residents, after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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03.14.2023
10:36 am
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DEVO’s Gerald V. Casale talks about going mano a mano with ‘The Invisible Man’!
12.06.2022
07:26 pm
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Illustration from ‘The Invisible Man’ by TOMO77

The poster that came with DEVO’s 1981 New Traditionalists album depicts the band sheltering an ethnically diverse triad of babies from the worst elements in American society: a horde of pirates, pushers, concert promoters, and Puritans looking to instrumentalize these newborns for their own unspeakable ends. Arrayed against this mob in matching JFK pompadours and Nutra work outfits, the men of DEVO face the challenge with poise and sangfroid, ready to open a cold can of whup-ass on these would-be baby-wreckers.

In the background, the uncredited artist represents the USA as a rolling lawn ornamented with a few topiary trees, their branches shaped into stacked orbs that taper like the steps of the DEVO energy dome, three leafy cocktail onions of descending size impaled on toothpicks stuck in the horizon. This is the landscape on which DEVO’s Gerald V. Casale stretches his legs in the music video for his latest solo release, “The Invisible Man.”

Once again, it’s “morning in America,” except for the glans-pated dweeb who dogs Jerry’s steps on the yellow brick road, subjecting him to sexual harassment, humiliation, and abuse. But as the story plays out, Jerry begins to suspect—his opponent’s neck tattoo of the D.R.I. logo notwithstanding—he’s once again doing battle with The Mark Inside, old Number One from The Prisoner.

Dangerous Minds caught up with Jerry by 21st-century videophone on November 22, 2022.
 

 
Before I ask you about “The Invisible Man,” it’s November 22. I’ve read a lot of DEVO interviews and I don’t know if you’ve spoken about this very much, so I thought it would be interesting to ask what you remember about the Kennedy assassination, and how you think that event affected your young minds.

Yeah! Probably, that was like the opening salvo in a barrage of timed traumas that just continued the next seven years, that pretty much twisted up everything in my life and set me on a fork in the road, kind of like the proverbial red pill in The Matrix.

I remember everything. I was in French class in my high school. We had a particularly sexy French teacher who was a graduate student, so she was probably, I don’t know, six or seven years older than us, and wore more trendy clothing, like herringbone-print skirts that were above the knee, and black boots, and little blouses that got the boys going. Anyway, suddenly the principal walked in, middle of class, and said, “Class, I have to tell you that the president of the United States has been killed today.” And [laughs] you know, you’re just, like, almost unable to process what you’re hearing, like it’s kind of real, but not really real? And then some of the girls start bursting out crying, and he goes, “And as a result of that, we decided to suspend all classes for the day and send you home.”

And it was interesting, ‘cause [laughs] a girl that I was really interested in, in this kind of puppy way where I didn’t even understand what I was doing, she was crying, and something in me, despite the fact that I was really freaked by what I’d just heard, and kind of understood how serious that was, or how frightening that was, to the United States, I of course used it to offer to walk her home [laughs]. So, you know, the little budding man in me started taking over, and I felt all, like, you know, it was a real, I don’t know, what was it, Stand By Me moment, like these coming-of-age comedies. And I walked her home, and I had my arm around her, and had her holding my hand, and I felt so, like, brave and excited, and scared at the same time.
 

Detail from the ‘Village of the Damned’ poster
 
And then I didn’t go home right away. I thought I’m not going home, I’m not going home to my parents, ‘cause I was already at odds with them. ‘Cause they were blue collar and authoritarian, they didn’t understand me, they were policing my reading list and always criticizing me, and I felt like they didn’t understand how smart I was. So I decided to freak them out by just doing something I never did, which is I walked downtown and I went to the movie theater. I forget what was playing now; it was a black-and-white film, of course. It might have been Village of the Damned, English, great film.

And then, you know, when I got out of the theater it was already dark, ‘cause it was November in Ohio and it got dark at like five o’clock. And the moment I walked home, of course, I got attacked and talked to and screamed at. But then the television was on, and it was wall-to-wall coverage of the assassination. And, believe it or not, and I don’t know if other people have told you this, but you know the famous Zapruder film, where this guy was shooting, innocently, the arrival of the president in Dallas in his motorcade with a Super 8 camera, and it became the primary evidence of what the Warren Commission kind of bastardized. We saw it unedited, played over and over on TV. There were only three channels, they were all national, so the news—there was real news then, guys like Walter Cronkite just presenting things—would show it. I guess the country wasn’t centralized enough into some kind of CIA disinformation clampdown where you could see the impact, over and over and over! You could see the shots and her crawling on the trunk, Jackie Kennedy. You’d never see the Zapruder film that way again, because once the Warren Commission got ahold of it, they edited it, and what you saw afterwards in history, after that weekend, is never really the film.

And Ι saw the assassination then on Sunday, you know, we were Catholics and forced to go to church, so Sunday morning, television’s on, we’re watching [them] taking Lee Harvey Oswald from the Dallas police station to his court hearing, and we saw live the assassination of Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald, right there, with my parents [laughs] while we’re waiting to go to church! I was fifteen.
 

 
So it sorta blew a hole in everything, it sounds like.

Yeah! And then soon on the heels of that came the assassination of Martin Luther King, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the assassination of Malcolm X, as I was coming of age and reading and getting politicized and protesting against the Vietnam War. And it just all jelled. And it ended then with, you know, the National Guard killing four students and wounding nine on May 4, 1970, right in front of me.

There’s a kind of a straight line between those events, for you? Do you see it that way?

Yeah, it’s pretty much a three-stage rocket [laughs] right to supreme rage. Where you consciously put it all together, and you make a decision, and you’re on a path that sets you against all illegitimate authority forever. You’re a “difficult person,” resistive to authority. And that’s really what made me who I was, and really, I don’t think without it DEVO would exist.

I’m a big fan of the EZ listening stuff. There’s some EZ listening stuff on the new EP—

With vocals! With vocals, for the first time.

It reminds me a little bit of the Last Poets.

[Laughs] Well, I am one of the last poets now.

You are, Jerry. But as I look back at that stuff now, I wonder if there was a kind of idealism—there seems to be a real nostalgia underneath, maybe, for that New Frontier, early Sixties…

Yeah. And that’s understandable; we were fed a big heap of fantasy. And it was presented using science. When they showed you the future, it was based on innovation and technology and science. So the flying cars, the domed cities, the end of labor, it was a pretty fine middle-class fantasy of leisure and prosperity! It was a complete brainwash job.
 

Promotional photo from 1981 by Robert Matheu (via Club DEVO)

I keep waiting for that World’s Fair vision to materialize myself.

Yeah, well, forget it.
 
Read more after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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12.06.2022
07:26 pm
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Exclusive: Hand-carved Marionettes of the Rolling Stones, Howlin’ Wolf, Michael Caine and more
07.13.2022
10:05 am
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GEORGE_MILLER_STUDIO
George Miller’s marionette studio in Glasgow.
 
George Miller aka Kaiser George is an artist, musician, and leader of the cult band The Kaisers—hence the moniker Kaiser George.

Miller is also the talent behind KGM Marionettes - the home of quality rock ‘n’ roll and R ‘n’ B pop merchandise. Two years ago, Dangerous Minds introduced you Miller’s marvellous marionettes, prints, and trading cards. Since then, Miller has expanded KGM’s output to include some British rock ‘n’ roll legends like Johnny Kidd and Wee Willie Harris and more famous ones like the Rolling Stones.

Miller’s work is more than just fun. It is culturally important artwork which brings the joys of the Golden Age of rock ‘n’ roll and some of its greatest (though often neglected) stars to the Spotify generation.

What have you been working on since last we spoke?

George Miller: Initially the plan was to make a Top Trumps style card set, so the puppet making went into overdrive for quite a while in order to have enough cards for the game to work properly. The String Stars set featured only stars from the US, but we made the decision to include some of the more notable UK artists, which meant a fair bit more work, but good fun nonetheless. Johnny Kidd was particularly enjoyable to make and think I may have the only Wee Willie Harris marionette in the world, but I’d love to be wrong about that.

We now have enough characters for the Top Trumps style set, but that particular project has been put on hold for now, meaning I have a cupboard full of idle puppets, but they’ll be put to work eventually.

What has the response been to your marionettes and KGM merchandise?

GM: The response has been incredibly positive to the point where I feel I have to keep making the marionettes for as long as is humanly possible. Reading the comments folk put on Facebook and seeing the photographs of KGM merchandise on display in their homes is a real thrill. People really do seem to love the puppets and the merchandise, which makes all of us at KGM feel mighty good.

The puppets have been featured in a few national newspapers and a chap by the name of Austin Vince came to Glasgow to make a short documentary which will be shown at the Adventure Travel Film Festival in the Cotswolds in August. I’ll be there to give a kind of ‘Confessions of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Puppet Maker’ talk.

I was also asked to make a marionette of the artist John Byrne for his foundation’s charity auction, which I was delighted to do as I’m a big fan and he’s a brilliant subject for sculpting. Also he was a Teddy Boy in the 1950s, which makes me like him even more.
 
JOHN_BYRNE
Playwright (‘The Slab Boys’) and artist John Byrne who is also known for his album covers for the Beatles, Donovan, Stealer’s Wheel, and Gerry Rafferty.
 
GM: The KGM team got pretty excited when the new owners of Sun Records asked us if we could make a bubble gum card set of Sun artists, but unfortunately US image copyright law scuppered the project. Thank goodness we don’t have that in this country.

What new wonders have you for sale and are working on?

Currently we are still selling the original String Stars card set, plus greetings cards/post cards and also ‘String Stars Stand-ups’ which are cardboard cut-out figures of a select few of the marionettes - in full colour and attractively packaged, folks.

The current major KGM project features five young men you may not want your daughter to marry.
 
ROLLING_STONES_CARD
KGM Cards: The Rolling Stones.
 
Ah, the Stones! Tell me about the Rolling Stones marionettes and what your plans are for them. Why the studio? why the van?

GM: The Rolling Stones marionettes have rather elbowed the Top Trumps project out of the way, which seems apt somehow. I thought it would be fun to do a band for a change and the Stones seemed the perfect choice, given that they all have tremendous facial features and also it was an interesting challenge to try to capture their ‘bad boy attitude’ while retaining enough toy-like charm to make people smile.

When they were completed and dressed in Ursula [Cleary]‘s wonderful outfits, they seemed so alive that we decided we just had to do a bubble gum card set, similar to the A&BC Stones set from 1965. The set will take the form of a loose visual narrative based on a typically busy day in the life of a successful British R & B group, in which they cram in a photo shoot, TV appearance, recording session etc before a riotous gig in the evening. As with all the other KGM stuff, it’s basically an art project masquerading as pastiche pop memorabilia. It feels like we’re somehow giving the concept of celebrity an inquisitive poke with a reasonably sharp stick.

Naturally, we have no desire to infringe anybody’s copyright, so the set will be called simply ‘England’s Newest Hitmakers’ and it’ll be up to the viewer to join the dots.
 
ROLLING_STONES_KGM_CARDS
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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07.13.2022
10:05 am
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Laibach on ‘Wir sind das Volk,’ a posthumous collaboration with playwright Heiner Müller
05.18.2022
06:55 am
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Laibach’s new album ‘Wir sind das Volk (ein Musical aus Deutschland)

Laibach’s latest project, a musical theater production based on texts by the German playwright Heiner Müller, has been staged in Berlin, Klagenfurt, Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Hamburg. As Laibach’s early work was not enthusiastically greeted by authorities in post-Tito Yugoslavia, so Müller, whose New York Times obituary described him as an “independent Marxist,” was banned for years from the East German stage. Indeed, the director of one of his early plays was rewarded with a trip to the coal mines.

Müller’s association with Laibach dates from 1984, when the group composed music for a Slovenian production of his Quartet. Laibach and Müller met in Berlin the following year, and he suggested that they collaborate; but though he apparently did use Laibach’s music in one of his stage productions, the collaboration did not come to pass before Müller’s death in 1995.

More than twenty years later, prompted by a suggestion from Anja Quickert, the head of the Internationale Heiner Müller Gesellschaft (International Heiner Müller Society), Laibach renewed their collaboration with the dramatist. As Laibach explains its approach to creating Wir sind das Volk in the press release:

We followed Heiner Müller’s own strategy of cutting and rearranging the material, taking his text and putting it into another context, rebooting it with music, in order to drag the audience into it or alienate them from it. Music unlocks the emotions and is therefore a great manipulative tool and a powerful propagandistic weapon. And that’s why a combination of Heiner Müller, who saw theatre as a political institution, and Laibach, can be nothing else but a musical.

Laibach kindly answered a few questions about Wir sind das Volk and related matters by email.
 

Photo by Valter Leban

Speaking in Dresden in 2014, South Korean President Park Geun-hye proclaimed: Wir sind ein Volk! What is the difference between this assertion and Laibach’s Wir sind das Volk?

Laibach: Wir sind das Volk is a more general slogan and Wir sind ein Volk is a more particular one. When East Germans demanded the change of policy and reunification of the two Germanies in 1990, one of the slogans of the protesters at the time was Wir sind das Volk—“We are the people”—which meant that it is the people who will decide, not the authorities. When the wall between the two countries actually started to crumble, the slogan on both sides of the wall quickly changed to Wir sind ein Volk—“We are a people, one people, one nation, one state…” In this spirit, in 2014, South Korean President Park Geun-hye, speaking of the idea of reunification of the two Koreas, proclaimed Wir sind ein Volk!, which, of course, in the context of South and North Korea, means that they are one nation, violently divided in the Korean War and which, in a certain perspective of time, should be again reunited, just like Germany was.

Please tell us about the production of Laibach’s posthumous collaboration with Heiner Müller. Why, for instance, does the album open with the figure of Philoctetes?

Back in 1984 we contributed music for Heiner Müller’s Quartet, a play that was presented at the Slovenian National Theatre in Ljubljana, directed by Slovenian director Eduard Miler. This was at a time when Laibach was officially forbidden in Slovenia and Yugoslavia, and we were grateful to Eduard Miler for being brave enough to include Laibach in this theatrical piece, performed by the national institution. A good year later, in February 1985, we met Heiner Müller by coincidence in Berlin, where we had a concert at some festival, and it turned out that he was very enthusiastic about Laibach and he also proposed that we collaborate on one of his upcoming theatre productions. Unfortunately, that did not happen (in the meantime we were invited by another legendary theatre and artistic director and in fact Heiner Müller’s fierce opponent, Peter Zadek, to work the score for Shakespeare’s Macbeth in 1987—and perform in it—staged at the Deutsche Schauspielhaus in Hamburg), but we were told that Heiner Müller had apparently used some of our music in a theatre production that he worked on. Heiner Müller passed away in 1995 and only a few years ago, in 2019, we finally received an invitation from Mrs. Anja Quickert, the head of Internationale Heiner Müller Gesellschaft (H. M. Society), proposing a project based on Heiner Müller’s texts, to be premiered and performed at the HAU (Hebbel am Ufer) theatre in Berlin. The premiere of Wir sind das Volk—Ein Musical nach Texten von Heiner Müller was held on 8 February 2020 and more shows followed after the pandemic. At this point something like 10,000 people have seen the musical, in spite of the epidemics.
 

The poster for ‘Wir sind das Volk’

Heiner Müller is one of the most prominent post-WWII German playwrights, writers, and intellectuals, and one of the main protagonists who radically practised the denazification of Germany and ruthlessly led German Volk through the purgatory of collective guilt. Our ‘musical’ speaks of this process of denazification, but also about Heiner Müller personally, about his observation of his own life in the postwar reality of this country, divided by the Cold War. He was very fond of German national traumas as well as of the time of German patriotism and this is the topic in most of his writings. The texts and songs for the musical were selected by Anja Quickert, who also was the dramaturge and director of the show. The musical opens with an extract of Müller’s interpretation of the Philoctetes, the tragedy where he dramatizes the state’s predicament as it finds itself adopting inhumane methods in order to achieve a humane future for its citizens. In presenting the state’s point of view, Müller boldly challenges Sophocles (Philoctetes) and Gide (Philoctète), who focus their plays on the individual, not the state. Müller’s radical rewriting of the myth negotiates the question of belonging: exclusion and inclusion in a society that wants to destroy the “other” and destroys itself by tolerating only an ability to function. In the part of the text that we are using in the musical, Müller is actually talking about his own childhood traumas and that is why this text stands at the beginning of the album as well.

We hear so much about populism in politics these days. Who are the people, and what do they want? As Freud might have asked, Was will ein Volk eigentlich?

People are the suppressed majority that occasionally smells the power of victory and then they want it all.

At least one reliable source reports that Russian propaganda is simultaneously insisting that Ukrainians are racially inferior to Russians and denying that Ukrainians have a distinct nationality. If citizenship in the NSK State is not based on language, nationality, ethnicity, or race, what are the criteria?

Possession of at least one Laibach album and a good sense of humor, especially when inferiority and superiority complexes are in question. For all else we are quite flexible.
 

‘Epiphany (Adoration of the Magi)’ by Gottfried Helnwein (via Denver Art Museum)

How does Laibach’s approach to working on theatrical productions (Krst pod Triglavom-Baptism, Macbeth, Also Sprach Zarathustra) differ from its usual working method? Do any principles of Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre’s work persist in Laibach’s approach?

We approach each project in a completely different way. We don’t have any creative platform or templates to use either for theatrical productions or as ‘usual working method.’ Composing is always different because most of the time we work with a slightly different combination of people, and we therefore adapt to a common operating model. Within the theatre projects it is also important who initiates it, who leads or directs it. For these productions we create the material in communication and collaboration with directors, and we try to adjust to their ideas and their vision of how the music and sound should function, as much as we can. It is true, however, that usually it is best that producers and directors give us a totally free hand for the best results.

Is it possible to express one’s personality in Schlager music or Volkslieder without ruining the performance? For instance, giving voice to the German national character seems to suit Heino so well because he only uses emotions as signs of filial piety. “Folk music” in the US these days, on the other hand, consists almost entirely of people crying about their hurt feelings.

They really do it in pop and rock music too, there is a lot of ‘crying’ and trading in emotions in pop and rock music tradition. In principle we do not see much difference between pop-rock music and Schlager music or Volkslieder in Germany. In the context of the German national character, Heino, who deals with emotions perfectly, as well as Kraftwerk, who actually took a lot of their inspiration from Volkslieder and Schlager music—their versions are not contaminated by emotional hyperinflation. In America, on the other hand, it’s hard to imagine popular music—with the exception of hip hop and rap—without such emotional exploitations… What would Presley, Prince, Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Whitney Houston, Dolly Parton or Taylor Swift (etc., etc.) be without their hurt feelings? 

Singing in 1985, U.S.A. for Africa proclaimed: “We Are the World.” Is Laibach the world, too?

We are Africa and the Universe.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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05.18.2022
06:55 am
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‘Generations’: Exclusive interview with legendary photographer Scot Sothern
05.11.2022
08:52 am
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scotsothern_weirdo
‘Wierdo.’
 
Scot Sothern grew up in a photographic studio. His old man photographed weddings and portraits. He told him: When you take a portrait of the bride you gotta see her with the same love the groom has for her. It was a lesson Sothern never forgot.

Sothern worked around the studio. He started in the dark room then ended up taking wedding photos. He was expected to take over the family business. Sothern wanted to be a writer or maybe an artist like Andy Warhol.

It was the late 1960s. A time of revolutions. Sexual, social and political.  Sothern quit home in Springfield, Missouri and headed for Southern California looking for teenage dreams of sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ rock ‘n’ roll. He wasn’t making it as an artist. He wasn’t making it as a writer. Instead of giving up Sothern thought “fuck it, I’ll do whatever I want.” He started taking photographs. Kids making out at the skating rink. Working guys drinking at a bar. White working class people on the periphery. But no one was interested.

In the 1980s, Sothern documented the junkies, winos, and hookers. He followed his “hard-on.” He photographed his subjects with the same love a groom felt for his bride. He shot with a flashbulb or used sunlight. Nothing else. He showed his father his work. He liked the composition, the lighting, the power. The subject matter not so much. His brother thought he was “degenerate”. Sothern’s work said as much about his life as it did about the women and men he was photographing. He wrote the down their conversations. A short story of their lives. Still no one took an interest.
 
scotsothern_lowlife
From ‘Low Life.’
 
1990: Sothern has motor bike accident. He stops taking photographs. He starts writing. But no one’s interested. He returned to photographing the people most politicians want to forget. The poor, homeless, and fucked-up.

It took 40-years for Sothern to get established. 40-years of rejection slips, and sorry this ain’t our kinda shit letters. In 2010, John Matkowsky at the drkrm Gallery in LA put on Sothern’s first solo show Lowlife. At the age of 60, Sothern had arrived.

Over the past decade, Sothern has exhibited across the USA and in Europe. He has published several books and launched a parallel career as a writer. This month, These Days will exhibit two major Sothern exhibitions under the title Generations: Sothern’s earliest personal photographs, Family Tree 1975-1980, and his most recent body of work, Identity both of which “explore time, change, and the multi-directional evolution of America.”
 
scotsothern_generations
 
Tell me about your new exhibition ‘Generations’?

Scot Sothern: Well, Generations consists of two different bodies of works. The Family Tree photos were shot nearly fifty years ago and I think the original impetus was all about making my photography something more than portraits and snapshots. I was still in my twenties and mostly running wild, with little respect for the societal norms. I decided the best way to rationalize my lifestyle was to call myself an artist.

The other half of Generations, Identity, comes from looking for something new and wearing my politics on my sleeve. America has changed to a very different place since the Family Tree series, a lot the good of the Baby Boomer generation has decayed or was merely a delusion in the first place. A lot of things got fixed but in general America is fucked-up. I’m inspired by anger and I find I am inspired by younger generations of people who are reclaiming the identities that had been previously been kept in the closets.
 
scotsothernfonz
‘The Fonz.’
 
More from Scot Sothern after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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05.11.2022
08:52 am
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‘1970’: Spectacular, nearly unseen shots of Iggy Pop from an underground magazine called ‘Earth’
04.03.2022
09:22 am
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This is the shot available as a limited edition print
 
Bud Lee (1940-2016) is a great American photographer whose work has somehow been overlooked. A prolific contributor to Esquire, Life, Rolling Stone, and other magazines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, who regularly ran extensive portfolios of his work, he took iconic photos of figures as varied as Warhol’s Factory and its superstars, Tennessee Williams, Al Green, James Brown, ZZ Top and Norman Rockwell. Lee covered the Newark riots, and the funerals of Robert Kennedy Jr and Martin Luther King Jr for Life, trailed transgender performance troupe the Cockettes from San Francisco to New York for their ill-fated off-Broadway debut, and shot production stills on the set of Fellini’s Satyricon, Alice’s Restaurant, and Fiddler on the Roof.

Lee ‘retired’ from magazine work in the early ‘70s and and moved to Iowa, where he founded the Iowa Photographers’ Workshop, as a companion program to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He later moved to Tampa, Florida, where he married art teacher Peggy Howard and started a family. He became very active in the local arts scene around Tampa, Ybor City and Plant City, helping to stage a number of outrageous happenings, as the Artists and Writers Ball, an annual themed costumed ball that harnessed the same freaky anything-goes energy had had experienced in the company of the Cockettes and on Fellini’s movie sets. An aspiring filmmaker, Lee also shot a no-budget remake of Gone With The Wind with a cast entirely made up of children from local schools.

In August 1970, Lee turned his lens on Iggy Pop while attending one of the Stooges’ legendary shows at Ungano’s in New York, which was recorded by Stooges A&R, Danny Fields, heavily-bootlegged, and reported on extensively by underground rock magazines like Creem. During the show, backstage, and even at Iggy’s digs in the Chelsea Hotel, Lee took a series of incredible, candid photos of the Stooges frontman at the very height of his ‘Ig’-ness. A few were published in a short-lived underground magazine entitled Earth (as seen here). Most have never been seen.

Bud Lee’s estate, which oversees and manages his archive, has begun releasing limited edition, hand-numbered archival prints of Lee’s work as a way of raising funds to preserve his extensive archive of images and help realize special projects, including a planned monograph of his work. The second print in this series—the first was an amazing portrait of Al Green—which is only being made available for one week only, is a spectacular image of Iggy lying prostrate among the audience at Ungano’s. You can purchase a print HERE.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cover of the short-lived Earth magazine.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.03.2022
09:22 am
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‘Wormwood’: The Bible according to the Residents
03.07.2022
07:21 am
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‘KILL HIM!’: ‘Wormwood’ on stage (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)

The new Wormwood box set, the latest installment in Cherry Red’s pREServed series of Residents reissues, runs to nine CDs etched with nearly nine hours of music. Not quite James Earl Jones Reads the Bible territory (sixteen CDs, nineteen hours), it nevertheless presents the Residents’ 1998 biblical epic at a scale appropriate to the form. Perhaps God, sufficiently enraged by humanity to send plagues, pestilences, fires, and hurricanes, has also seen fit to unleash this mighty flood of scriptural content, which makes the meager 203 minutes of the Charlton Heston Presents the Bible four-DVD set look like a positive insult to the Almighty.

Wormwood: Curious Stories from the Bible, by one count the Residents’ twenty-third album, draws most of its lurid tales of rape, incest, and murder from the books of the Old Testament (though they also give us a Judas who understands betraying Jesus as his divine calling, as well as a five-and-a-half-minute instrumental based on Revelation). There are surprising takes on familiar stories—the same chapter from the Book of Daniel that inspired Johnny Cash to write “Belshazzar” moved the Residents to write “God’s Magic Finger,” and “Bathsheba Bathes” gives a decidedly less pious take on David than Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—and songs based on tales few other songwriters have dared to tell, like Jael pounding a tent peg into Sisera’s skull while he sleeps.

Though Wormwood boasts more circumcisions than any rock record since Saccharine Trust’s Surviving You, Always, not to mention the winning contributions of Molly Harvey and Carla Fabrizio, it has never been my favorite Residents album. But listening to this box set has given me a new appreciation of the size and ambition of the Wormwood project, and how fruitful this period was for the group. In context with eight discs of supplementary material, the original album comes to seem like a preliminary sketch for a sprawling creation that kept the Residents busy for about four years, and included some remarkable work.

The Residents do not, of course, grant interviews, but I was able to contact Homer Flynn, the president of the Cryptic Corporation, and Richard Anderson, who oversees the pREServed series at Cherry Red Records, and subject each of them to a battery of haranguing and hairsplitting questions about matrix numbers, obi strips and session dates. Choice excerpts follow. I should mention that Richard drew my attention to a Residents compilation LP that had escaped my notice called Leftovers Again?!, issued for Record Store Day last year. It starts with a concentrate of the legendary, unreleased early recording Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor and proceeds through material from the Residents’ tape archive throughout the Seventies. Much of the LP consists of “RDX” (as in “redux,” I believe) mixes, new presentations of the original recordings of beloved Residents songs that often feature sounds from the multitrack tapes that didn’t make the final mix.


The Residents, 1998 (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)

Homer Flynn

 
As it happens, I was in the audience at the beginning of the tour in Boston, so I didn’t really realize how much the material evolved and changed after that. Could you talk a little bit about how the show changed when it went on the road?

Well, you know, Residents stuff usually does change. They do albums and then—maybe this is typical of a lot of artists, I don’t know—but it’s kind of like, when somebody writes and records something, in a lot of ways that’s just a kind of first, brief glimpse into the material, and then as they start to perform it, they find out more and more what they feel like it wants to be, and more how it works, and particularly how it works in front of an audience. So honestly it’s kind of an unpredictable path that it takes, many times.

Another example: when they were doing the Cube-E tour, which was like ten years earlier, you know, the second half of it was all Elvis songs, and one that just really came to life so much in performance was “Teddy Bear.” You know, Elvis sang it as such a light, upbeat pop song, and the Residents just felt like there were all these really incredible, almost like S&M undertones in it, and that then really came out in terms of the performance. So it’s kind of typical, I think, in a lot of ways with them for these things to change.

Part of being in front of an audience, maybe, seeing what works and what doesn’t?

Exactly. What brings out the attention and reaction of an audience makes a lot of difference.
 

‘Mr. Skull Superstar’ (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)
 
There are a lot of things I learned reading the liner notes to this box set. I guess [show opener] “Nober” was only played in Boston and then dropped from the set.

I’m not really sure what the thought was behind that, at this point. Maybe they felt like it was a little too long or a little too slow of a way to get into the set, and they felt like they needed something that grabbed the audience’s attention more? But, like I say, you’re reminding me of something I’d long forgotten about, really.

Well, in the Fillmore show—maybe you can help me sort out the chronology, here, Homer, I think the Fillmore show came before the tour?

Yeah, I think so. I think everything was put together in San Francisco at the Fillmore, and then they took it on the road.

The live version of “KILL HIM!” towards the beginning of that is really a fierce piece of music.

Well, I think that was one of the stronger pieces from that show and from that album.

Did that show have the big gamelan orchestra?

It had the gamelan in San Francisco, yeah. And then I think they came back later and did some shows at the Brava Theater in San Francisco, and I think they brought the gamelan back for that again, too. But once again, it was a long time ago, and while I’ve been through the box set, I haven’t actually revisited and listened to all that stuff again. So you’re more up on it and more familiar with it at this point than I am.
 

A Resident (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)
 
If you can remember, then, maybe you can talk about the origin of the project. Did the Residents read the King James Bible, or how did the project come into being?

Well, they were looking for a project, and for the Residents, often they start with some kind of a concept. Things can work in different ways; sometimes they just start recording, and the concept finds itself in that process. But often, they would like to try to find a concept first, and I don’t remember exactly where the idea of the Bible came from, but when it came out, it was like instantaneously: “Yes! Yes! The Bible!”

You’re looking at a bunch of people who all were, you know, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants growing up in the South, and they moved away from that; almost needless to say, they’re not really that religious. But they started seeing the Bible as so much of the underpinnings of Western culture on so many levels, and the more research they did with it, the more true that became. There’s just a million things in terms of so much of our laws, and morals, and stories, even people’s names, people that you run into on a very common basis. You find out, this woman’s name is Ruth; okay, well, that comes from the Bible. And there’s so many like that, it then became a very fascinating subject to explore and then dig into.

And I think particularly, once again, so much emphasis over recent culture has been put on the New Testament, which is Jesus, and love, and all that. But the really meaty stuff is the old stuff. That’s what really got them excited.

I remember wondering at the time if the Residents ever felt overwhelmed by the heaviness of the material. It’s not like the Residents’ material is always happy, but this is just like unrelieved rape, murder, God wants more foreskins—

Yeah, mountains of foreskins. Yeah, right, exactly. I think they were kind of blown away by a lot of it, honestly. But once again, that just reinforced that decision to be moving in that direction, using that as content for their music.

When they were choosing the stories, were they looking for anything in particular? Was it the stories that jumped off the page?

They did research. One of the things they weren’t necessarily aware of—it’s obvious, I guess, when you think about it, but they weren’t necessarily aware of it—you know, what we call the Old Testament is the Jewish Bible, and it’s kind of ironic in a way that you can have these ideological conflicts between Christians and Jews when they all kind of base so much of their religion on the same writing. But there was a book that they found that was written by a rabbi. I’ve had reasons, for interviews like this, where I’ve wanted to name that book and I have not been able to locate it. I even looked on Amazon at one time trying to find it, I don’t know if it’s still in print or not. But this rabbi went through all of these Old Testament stories and brought out the deeper meaning in so many of them, so much of the stuff that was buried or kind of glossed over. In a lot of ways, that was probably the primary source of a lot of the material that they chose.
 

Detail from an early print on the ‘W***** B*** Album’ label (via Discogs)
 
Well, you mentioned that the Residents aren’t super-religious, but there does seem to be a preoccupation—I mean, not exclusively, the Residents’ catalog is so huge—but it does seem that the theme of religion comes up. At the end of that Mole Show video, there’s the joke Penn Jillette tells that one of the Residents told him, “Why did the little moron resurrect Christ?” Do you have any idea about the context of that joke?

I know exactly what you’re talking about: “Why did the little moron resurrect Christ? To get to the other side.” And it’s one of those kind of jokes that, it’s funny on so many levels, once you stop and think about it? I certainly remember that, but I’m drawing a blank trying to think of what the origin of it was.

You know, another thing that was inspiring to them in terms of the Wormwood choice is, the Residents in general are not especially political, but this was around the time that the religious right started, the very beginning, I think, of it starting to become a political force. Which now, God, has turned into who knows what, but certainly not positive from my perspective or the Residents’.

But there’s so much hypocrisy involved in that. You know, I went to the Methodist Church when I was young. I think of so much of what the rhetoric and the dialogue and the content was, and it was so much about love and inclusion at that time, and they pretty much stayed away from politics. And it’s gone so far away from that. I think that the Residents, in some ways, were kind of delighted to pull out these weird, dark Bible stories, to kind of put it in the face of the religious right that would just as soon pretend that stuff didn’t exist.
 

via residents.com

This was the end of a period of not touring for the Residents. I wonder what their sense of being on the road was—there’s that funny version of the Grand Funk song [“we’re coming to your town, we’re gonna worship it down”]. But there’s a sense in which it’s the most traditional form of American show business to go on the road with a bunch of Bible stories. Do you have any insight into how they felt about that, or if they perceived themselves as participating… it’s not that far from a kind of revival show.

Well, yeah, in a way, I can see what you’re talking about. It’s almost like it’s an anti-revival show.

Yeah.

But in a way that kind of doubles back on itself and becomes sort of the same thing. They really weren’t seeing, I don’t think, that much implication in it. That Boston show, as I remember, there were people that protested that. There were maybe a handful, very few, instances of something like that. But from the Residents’ point of view, other than to their fans, they consider themselves to be fairly invisible, and consequently don’t warrant that much attention from the culture at large. So they never really had any sense that that would garner that much attention. And for the most part it didn’t, really. They’ve done other things, the whole Third Reich ‘n Roll stuff, whatever; it got a little outrage here and there, but on the other hand, it was pretty much ignored.

It seems like some of the outrage comes up in Berkeley. [Jim Knipfel’s liner notes mention that a Wormwood date in Berkeley was suddenly canceled.]

Well, and that’s where it came up for Third Reich ‘n Roll.

At Rather Ripped, right?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. You know, Rather Ripped was one of the first stores to really push and promote the Residents’ music, and it was the fifth anniversary of the store, and they said, “Okay, you can have the window of the store, do whatever you want to.” And they did [laughs] and Berkeley wasn’t happy with it! They were kind of shocked, I think, in a way. What’s fascinating to me is, I suppose it’s not so much the power of the swastika and Nazi imagery, it’s more that it still resonates so loudly within the culture, and from my point of view, and I think the Residents’ too, more so now than it did in the mid-Seventies, which, if you think about it, seems kind of strange. But we’re in strange times.
 

‘Fire Fall’ (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)
 
I know the Wormwood DVD I have is from Germany. Jim Knipfel mentions a show at the House of Blues in Las Vegas. Is there a video of that, too?

I don’t think there is. The most notable things about that to me was, one—I mean, the Residents were thrilled to play Las Vegas, but at the same time, what was notable was how few people showed up for the show. The Residents are not really a Las Vegas kind of an act. It wasn’t a mistake from their point of view, they were thrilled to be there, but I think, from the promoter’s point of view, if you think about it, the Residents are not the kind of act you go to Las Vegas to see.

But the other thing was that Penn and Teller came to the show, and they loved it, they just totally flipped out, they thought it was great.

I seem to remember the Residents appearing—maybe Penn and Teller had a variety show around that time?

Well, they’ve had a couple of three variety shows. There was a [video] that we put out for the Residents called The Eyes Scream. It was kind of an early best-of, in a way, but then [Penn and Teller] would do segments in between the videos to kind of glue it together.

I think there was maybe one show that the Residents and Penn and Teller did together in San Francisco?

Yeah, I’m trying to think which one that was. It was the end of a tour. It would either have been the 13th anniversary show or Cube-E. I remember it was a Bill Graham show, it was a big show.
 

‘A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1’

I love the Residents’ A Sight for Sore Eyes book, and I notice it’s hopefully titled “Volume One.” Are there gonna be more volumes, as far as you know?

The plan is three volumes, and I know that this one has done pretty well. So that should guarantee at least Volume Two [smiles], we’ll see from there. Everybody around here is extremely happy with it. As the keeper of the visual archives, I worked with Aaron [Tanner] pretty closely, and really enjoyed working with him and thought he did a fantastic job.

Do you ever come across stuff in the archives that’s surprising to you, doing this kind of stuff, or is it all pretty familiar to you?

I’ve run across stuff that I haven’t seen for a long time, that can surprise me: “Oh, I kept that!” [Laughs] I used to say that all the Residents’ imagery neatly divided up into two twenty-year segments. Well, now, it’s a lot closer to a twenty-year and a thirty-year [segment]. The first twenty years was all analog. I went digital with Photoshop and those tools in the early to mid-Nineties, so there’s not as many interesting artifacts.

I always tell people, if you are a production artist trying to create things that have to be reproduced, digital tools are fantastic. If you like the weird, old, crazy artifacts that got spun off one way or another through analog work, well, you don’t really get that very much anymore. Like so many things in life, there’s an upside and a downside.

I have a cabinet right over here with photographs in it, and a lot of those have never been digitized. Sometimes, I can find myself going back and looking for something, and that’s what can really surprise me—that picture got made, or that picture got made. Because, like I say, a lot of that stuff has never been digitized.

I’ve donated a lot of the Residents’ analog tape archive to the Museum of Modern Art, and at some point, I expect to be donating all of this film stuff, and I’m hoping that I can talk them into digitizing all of it so I will actually have it all in that form.

It must be a massive amount of stuff at this point.

It’s a lot. It’s a lot of stuff, yeah.


‘Burn Baby Burn’ (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)

Richard Anderson

 
It just happened that it was originally going to be six, then seven, then eight, then nine [discs], because people reached out to Carla Fabrizio, and she ended up coming up with a whole disc’s worth of extra stuff, and also Hardy would ask this guy Chris Kellas to record shows, and he recorded the [two-disc] Wormwood at the Fillmore show. That was kind of a late addition, so it kind of leapt from six to nine discs at the very last minute, actually.

And it was particularly interesting because the Fillmore show is different to the tour. It was just the album, whereas obviously for the tour they wrote a whole load of other songs.

And there’s the gamelan orchestra.

Yeah, right. I think the idea behind it, and with all of the box sets, really, is to show [how] these Residents live projects tend to evolve. They seem to do like a couple of dress rehearsals in San Francisco, figure out what was right and what was wrong about it, change it for the tour. So the idea for each of those is to, in a perfect world, I suppose, play them almost chronologically: demos, first live show, later demos, album, tour, whatever it is. Wormwood’s a strange one, obviously, ‘cause they went back and re-recorded the Roadworms thing in the middle of a tour.

So they themselves weren’t huge on the album; for some strange reason, they put the album out, and immediately decided to write loads more songs, and then re-record it whilst they were on tour. So it’s a strange project in the first place. In the early 2000s, Hardy talked about revisiting it and completely reworking it, and then nothing came of it, so this is, I suppose, the extension of that idea. It just grew and grew.
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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03.07.2022
07:21 am
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