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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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‘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…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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03.14.2023
10:36 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…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
|
03.07.2022
07:21 am
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New ‘visual history’ book celebrates 50 years of the Residents! Sneak peek and exclusive premiere!


‘A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1’
 
For about 50 years now, the Residents have operated in secret, hiding their identities behind masks and costumes. But now you can see the members of the band full nude!

Yes, the Residents are the subject of a handsome new coffee-table book from Melodic Virtue, the publisher of like retrospectives about the Butthole Surfers, Pixies, and Ministry. The Residents: A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1 collects beautifully printed reproductions of art, photos, correspondence, press clippings and ephemera from the first 13 years of the Eye Guys’ career, opening in their humble San Mateo dwelling in 1970 and concluding on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before the triumphant 1983 Uncle Sam Mole Show
 

‘Not Available’
 
While their faces remain mostly obscured in these pages, the Residents’ bare genitals are reproduced in black and white in more than one spread, so if you ever run into a pants-less member of the group, you’ll have no trouble recognizing him! That alone is worth the price of this volume. 

But let’s suppose you’re jaded about seeing the Residents’ junk; say you’ve already got enlargements of the Delta Nudes CD cover tacked up all over your walls, and Kinko’s quality is good enough for you. Well, how about a sharp full-color photo of the Mysterious N. Senada’s saxophone and another of its case, bearing the word “COMMERCIAL” in giant red capital letters? Do you have that, Mr. Great Big Residents Fan? How about shots from inside Poor Know Graphics’ design studio circa 1972, hmm? You got pictures of Snakefinger’s wedding? I’m so sure. What about the fucking floor plans for the Residents’ old Sycamore Street headquarters in San Francisco?
 

‘Eloise’ from ‘Vileness Fats’
 
Many of the book’s contents are things I’d hoped to find inside—shots from the set of Vileness Fats, beautiful stills from Graeme Whifler’s “Hello Skinny” film, W.E.I.R.D. fan club papers—but nearly as many are treasures I didn’t know I’d been missing, such as images from a proposal for an Eskimo opera, or screenshots from a prototype Mark of the Mole video game for the Atari 2600, or a snap of a promotional packet of Residents brand Tunes of Two Cities aspirin (to treat “the newest headache” from the band). Old favorites like the black-and-white promo photo of the band shopping for groceries are accompanied by contact sheets and other prints from the shoot. Turn the page, and it’s like The Wizard of Oz: the Residents are standing in the checkout line in Technicolor.
 

‘The Act of Being Polite’
 
Peppered throughout are testimonials from the group’s many-generational cohort of colleagues and fans. Collaborators and Ralph Records alumni like Mole Show emcee Penn Jillette, members of Tuxedomoon and Yello, and all of Renaldo & The Loaf get in reminiscences. Don Preston of the Mothers of Invention tells how he came to play his Moog parts on Eskimo; Patrick Gleeson conveys his delight at the Residents’ “fuck-you-ness”; Andy Partridge of XTC (a/k/a Commercial Album guest Sandy Sandwich) apostrophizes the Eyeballs in verse.

Then there’s Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten remembering the Berlin record store that turned him on to The Third Reich ‘n Roll in the Seventies, and Les Claypool takes us to the living room in El Sobrante, California where his teenage girlfriend first played him Duck Stab on her Marantz. Danny Elfman hears a different path his own life might have taken when he listens back. And bringing down the mean age of this all-star gang are some of the Residents’ “children”: Eric André, members of Steel Pole Bath Tub, Death Grips, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum…
 

Handwritten ‘Lizard Lady’ lyrics from the ‘Duck Stab/Buster & Glen Notebook’
 
The book includes a seven-inch of “Nobody’s Nos,” an unreleased song composed for the early masterpiece Not Available. There’s also a signed deluxe edition that comes with a picture disc of “Nobody’s Nos” and a supplementary 24-page book of notes and handwritten lyrics from the making of Duck Stab/Buster & Glen. Mercy.

Below, the band Star Stunted (Sam Coomes, Rob Crow, Zach Hill, Mike Morasky, and Ego Plum, all of whom contributed to the book, along with its author, Aaron Tanner) performs the Residents’ 1972 holiday heartwarmer (heartwormer?) “Santa Dog” in an exclusive Dangerous Minds premiere.

It’s a Christmas miracle!

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Residential: Homer Flynn on the Residents’ ambitious ‘God in Three Persons’ show at MoMA
The Residents’ press conference at the Lincoln Memorial, 1983
The Residents demolish ‘We Are the World’
Take a walk around a masterpiece with the Residents’ ‘Eskimo Deconstructed’
‘Oh Mummy! Oh Daddy!’ The Residents’ first show as The Residents, 1976

Posted by Oliver Hall
|
12.15.2021
05:18 am
|
Exclusive premiere of the Residents’ new video, ‘Bury My Bone’
06.26.2020
10:28 am
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Like their masterpiece Eskimo, the story of the Residents’ new album starts with a cryptoethnomusicological discovery: in this case, the complete recorded works of an albino bluesman from western Louisiana named Alvin Snow.

Under the stage name “Dyin’ Dog,” the story goes, Snow cut ten agonized electric blues originals with his band, the Mongrels, before falling off the face of the earth in 1976. Whether the last straw was the death of his pet dog, the death of his elderly ladyfriend, or the death of Howlin’ Wolf, no one can say. Only these screams of rage and shame remain.

(There’s a mini-documentary on the Residents’ YouTube channel about Dyin’ Dog, and Homer Flynn of the Cryptic Corporation discussed the legend of Alvin Snow with us last December.)
 

The Residents’ new album, out July 10

Dyin’ Dog’s songs about sex, death, death, sex and death came out last year on a now quite scarce seven-inch box set released by Psychofon Records. On the new album Metal, Meat & Bone: The Songs of Dyin’ Dog, the Residents interpret the Alvin Snow songbook with help from the Pixies’ Black Francis, Magic Band and Pere Ubu alumnus Eric Drew Feldman, and other high-quality musical guests. The album also reproduces Dyin’ Dog and the Mongrels’ demos in full stereo abjection.

John Sanborn’s video for the Residents’ take on “Bury My Bone,” exclusively premiered below, is mildly NSFW. Then again, in time of plague, work itself is NSFW. And this is a blues song about a dog looking for a hole to bury his bone in, for fuck’s sake.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Residential: Homer Flynn on the Residents’ ambitious ‘God in Three Persons’ show at MoMA
Take a walk around a masterpiece with the Residents’ ‘Eskimo Deconstructed’
Exclusive video and music from the Residents’ new album, ‘Intruders’

Posted by Oliver Hall
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06.26.2020
10:28 am
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Residential: Homer Flynn on the Residents’ ambitious ‘God in Three Persons’ show at MoMA


God in Three Persons 2020, courtesy of the Cryptic Corporation

Next month, the Residents will perform their 1988 narrative album God in Three Persons at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show will combine new video projections by the artist John Sanborn with a live performance by the Residents and vocalist Laurie Amat, whose contributions to the original LP are memorable. 

Homer Flynn, the president of the Cryptic Corporation, has handled the Residents’ affairs since the 1970s. I called him just before Thanksgiving, interrupting his graphic design work on an upcoming release involving the Mysterious N. Senada to pepper him with questions about the Residents’ next moves.

Dangerous Minds: Has God in Three Persons ever been performed in front of an audience before?

Homer Flynn: Well, not in the way that it’s being done now, I’ll put it that way. You know, the Residents always felt that God in Three Persons was probably the thing that they had done that most lent itself into being expanded into more of a theatrical-slash-visual form. And one way or another, they’ve kind of worked around with that for some time now. But what happened was that they made contact with a producer, a guy named Steve Saporito in New York, and, you know, one of the Residents did a solo performance, I don’t know, seven or eight years ago, in San Francisco and New York. It was called “Sam’s Enchanted Evening.” And Steve, that producer, was the one responsible for getting that to New York, and afterwards he asks, “Well, what else are you interested in doing?” And the first thing in the meeting that came up was God in Three Persons. And so, in a lot of ways, that kind of picked up the energy, in that way. 

But they did a reading of God in Three Persons for ACT, the American Conservatory Theater, which is a very well-established theater in San Francisco, and that happened, I think, a little over two years ago or a little over three years ago. They got some interest at that, but then the woman who was the artistic director left, and there was a big changeover. And they are still interested, but meanwhile, in between, they’d also been talking to the Museum of Modern Art, and the interest really started picking up there, so the energy started going in that direction.

So in answer to your question, they did do a reading of it at ACT about three years ago; they also worked with an American classical composer and conductor who was doing a museum show at a contemporary art museum in Rotterdam, and they performed some pieces of it with him as part of a museum installation. And then they did some more pieces of it at a performance in Bourges, France, just this past April. So they’ve done pieces of it here and there, but they’ve never done anything nearly as extensive or ambitious as what they’re doing now.
 

Homer Flynn, courtesy of the Cryptic Corporation
 
Can you tell me how it compares to the original touring show that was planned? I don’t know how far along that got.

You know, that really didn’t get very far. They had some conversations with BAM, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, oh, back in the late Eighties, about potentially doing God in Three Persons with them. But ultimately, what happened was that, one, they felt like they were not gonna be able to do justice to it in a touring scenario, and then also, two, before anything could happen, they completed their King & Eye album, you know, which was all Elvis covers, and they just felt like that was gonna lend itself much more to touring than God in Three Persons. So at that point they kinda dropped God in Three Persons as a performing piece and moved towards The King & Eye, which ultimately became their Cube-E tour. That was probably about ‘89.

It would probably have been harder in a number of ways to stage God in Three Persons in ‘89. For one thing, you have the video doing some of the work in this version—

Absolutely.

—but also the content. The end, I find it hard to imagine taking that on the road with the ending it has, which I think is still pretty shocking, actually.

Yeah. Well, in some ways, it almost seems like it’s more shocking now than it was then. But it also feels, in a lot of ways, you know, the whole idea of the twins being very gender-fluid—you know, that idea was kind of completely off the charts, at that point, and now it actually feels very much in line with the times, in a lot of ways.

Is [genderqueer porn star] Jiz Lee playing both of the twins?

Yes. Right. Correct. There are a few shots that John did where he brought in another one, another person that looked very similar to Jiz, so there would be some times when both of ‘em were in the frame, and he wasn’t having to do video doubling or whatever. But for the most part, Jiz plays both twins. 
 

‘Holy Kiss of Flesh,’ the ‘almost danceable’ single version of ‘Kiss of Flesh’ (via Discogs)
 
I have a sense that the story of God in Three Persons is about show business, more than anything else, and I wonder if the Residents see it that way.

Well, it’s interesting that you would say that. How do you make that connection?

Maybe the horrible celebrity environment we live in has just permeated every last fold of my brain. There’s something about the Colonel Parker aspect of Mr. X, and the road show, freak show aspect of the story.

Well, it’s interesting you would say that, especially given the fact that Cube-E, you know, The King & Eye, with Elvis and the obvious Colonel Parker connection, and then Freak Show were the next few things that came after that.

Right. Elvis is a thread, in a way.

In a way, yeah. The Residents—well, they’ve always found connections in, shall we say, unpredictable ways. 

One of the things that’s interesting about seeing what the Residents are gonna do at MoMA is, with this piece, the lyrics carry so much of the story, it seems like there would be a lot of really interesting staging decisions. At some places what’s happening in the lyrics is really explicit, and in other places, I’m not exactly sure what’s going on in the story. Can you tell me about the staging?

In the same way that the original piece is really a monologue set to music, the staging will be similar, but there will be other performers. The primary additional performer will be a shadow Mr. X, who will be a dancer that, at times, will be like a kind of a doppelgänger, in a way, echoing Mr. X. And then, other times, there will be three projections in the performance. One will be the primary projection which will go all the way across the back of the stage. But then there will be another narrow vertical screen that will kind of come up and down, and it will bisect that larger screen. And then there will be a third screen that the shadow Mr. X will carry, at times, and then there will be another performer holding a hand-held projector, in order to project upon the hand-held screen. So that’s the basic setup, from a performance point of view. And then, of course, all the music will be live.

Staging Mr. X with a double: I can’t help but make the connection with the songs that inspired the album: “Double Shot,” which is two, and “Holy, Holy, Holy,” which is about the Trinity. And that’s kind of what the story is about, right?

Right, exactly. Yeah. But, you know, the Residents kind of love dualities, and you see dualities reoccuring throughout their pieces all the time. The twins are a certain duality, and Mr. X and the shadow Mr. X become another duality, and there’s probably other ones in the same piece, too. It all kinda fits in with the Residents’ world.
 
Much more after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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12.06.2019
12:22 pm
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Take a walk around a masterpiece with the Residents’ ‘Eskimo Deconstructed’
05.28.2019
05:59 am
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With any longstanding musical career, fans tend to favor one particular era of a band or performer’s back catalog—the years that provide your go-to albums—and this is usually at around the point where you came in. Early Fall? Brix-era Fall? Post Brix-Fall? We all have a preference. Will you only ever bother with the gloomy first four Cure albums, or do you prefer their poppier late 80s/early 90s albums after they broke through in America? Sixties Zappa or Joe’s Garage? When faced with a choice of thirty albums to choose from the same source, we almost always tend to stick with our top two or three favorites, the cream of the crop. Who wants to listen to the 29th best Rolling Stones album, the 22nd best Kinks record or god forbid middling Jandek?

The Residents are a group whose fans have strong opinions about when the band was at their best. After all they’ve put out over a hundred releases. For me, it’s the run of albums that goes from 1977’s Fingerprince to 1980’s Commercial Album. I recently expressed this to a friend of mine who opined that once the Residents reoriented what they were doing in service to their live performances and starting incorporating MIDI into everything, that there was a noticeable drop-off in musical quality. I think this hits the nail pretty squarely on the head.

The album that is, to me at least, the very apex of the Residents singular art form, is their 1979 album Eskimo. Although quite different to everything that preceded it and all that came after, too, Eskimo is an album that stands tall among the classic post-punk albums released that year (Metal Box, Cut, Fear of Music, Unknown Pleasures, Secondhand Daylight, 154) and one that stands apart from all of them as well. It’s also when their famous eyeball costumes debuted. There is literally nothing else like it. Not by the Residents, not by anyone. Eskimo is the Residents’ avant-garde ambient poetic masterpiece.

If you’ve never heard it before, Eskimo is a purported (it’s totally fake) ethnomusicological “documentary” study of the lives of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic Circle, as if it’s assembled from phony field recordings. Each track is paired to a loose narrative in the liner notes which is “acted out” sonically with sound effects, howling winds, nonsensical chanting, grunts, whistles, homemade instruments, seal and walrus sounds. What you hear on the album is the product of the Residents working in the studio alongside of Henry Cow’s Chris Cutler on percussion, former Mother of Invention Don Preston on synthesizers, and Snakefinger on guitar. It’s not exactly “music” but it’s close enough.

In the context of the Residents’ ongoing Cherry Red pREServation series, Eskimo was recently re-released along with bonus tracks like the “Diskomo” single, the 20-minute long “Eskimo Acappella Suite,” the Residents’ songs from the classic Ralph Records compilation Subterranean Modern as well as unreleased demo recordings from the Eskimo period and later related rehearsal and live recordings from the 80s. It’s excellent and obviously comprehensive.

But what comes next seems almost unprecedented for musicians who have so seldom offered any insight whatsoever into their creative process. Eskimo Deconstructed (available only on vinyl) is a two LP set that basically provides Eskimo‘s component parts in a manner that allows the listener to discern exactly what went into the making of this oddball concept album. In other words all of the layers of Eskimo, the chanting—listen for “Coca-Cola adds life,” “Don’t squeeze the Charmin,” “Are we not men? We are DEVO,” “You asked for it, you got it” (a mid-70s Toyota tagline) and “You deserve a break today” (from a McDonald’s campaign)—the tape manipulations, conversations in gibberish, the ship’s mast creaking in the wind, splashing water, crying babies and other sound effects are laid out like an autopsy. There’s even a CD of synthetic wind sounds that, being a fan of Don Preston’s Filters, Oscillators & Envelopes 1967-82 album, I’m going to guess is Preston making an hour’s worth of howling wind noises on a Minimoog to serve as a sound bed for the work. He’s so adept at achieving this sound that for some time it’s impossible to tell if it’s an analog synthesizer or someone holding up a microphone in a particularly vicious snowstorm. Cutler’s and Snakefinger’s key contributions, laid bare as such, can also be appreciated for what they brought to the party.

Continues after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.28.2019
05:59 am
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Insanely good a cappella renditions of Negativland, Residents, and Captain Beefheart songs
04.12.2019
10:01 am
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The 180 Gs’ ‘Commercial Album

When Negativland’s DVD Our Favorite Things appeared a dozen years ago, it came with a bonus CD called 180 d’Gs to the Future! The Music of Negativland as Performed by the 180 Gs. Negativland claimed the disc’s astonishing a cappella interpretations of “Christianity Is Stupid,” “The Playboy Channel,” part of Helter Stupid and other catalog classics were the work of a “talented posse from inner Detroit” known for its gospel, R&B and doo-wop stylings.

Naturally, I suspected these were lies. While I marveled at the technical skill of the 180 Gs’ performances, the expert blending of their vocals and the creativity of their SATB arrangements of essentially unmelodic material, I thought Negativland had probably hired some guy for scale who records call signs for radio stations, or maybe processed and layered the honeyed voice of Richard Lyons using some 21st century harmonizer as yet unknown to me. The novelty record seemed to be another Negativland hoax, along the lines of their supposed role in a multiple axe murder in Minnesota, or their supposed discovery of a new primary color.

Even today, the 180 Gs’ Manhattan Transfer-ized rendition of “Christianity Is Stupid” sometimes gets stuck in my head, but I hardly thought about the group until last month, when the excellent Klanggalerie label associated with the Residents released the 180 Gs’ Commercial Album, an a cappella performance of all 40 one-minute songs on the Residents’ 1980 LP. A Google search led me to the Bandcamp page of one David Minnick (who actually does, it seems, hail from Motor City), where the 180 Gs’ cover of the Cardiacs’ Sing to God also resides in its double-CD entirety.
 

The 180 Gs (via Soundcloud)

The Residents covers are a gas, as Homer Flynn of the Cryptic Corporation affirms in his liner notes for the 180 Gs’ Commercial Album:

WHY? What inspires someone to take on such a monumentally demanding and difficult job, especially one so highly unlikely to escape the shadow of the original. After tossing this question around for a couple of days, I could only come up with one answer - FUN! And it sounds like fun, making me smile again and again, hearing their voices imitating synthesizers, guitars and basses, whistling to re-create keyboard parts and beating their bodies as mock percussion. But the thing that’s most impressive about the album is that the Gs are not merely imitating the Residents’ masterpiece of minimalism, but reinventing it, while staying completely faithful to the source material. Like the originators, the 180Gs are creating their own alternate musical universe, just as curious and original as that of The Residents. […]

Listening to the 180Gs singing Fred Frith’s singular guitar solo, while imitating Andy Partridge’s eccentric phrasing on Margaret Freeman is a delight, not unlike their mimicking of Snakefinger’s vocal and Frith’s bass playing on Ups and Downs. And sometimes they add their own little twists, like making Give It to Someone Else a bit less sinister while creating a curious exercise in joyful voyeurism.

 

Below, I’ve embedded the 180 Gs’ take on “Frownland,” the first cut on Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica, and further down is the entire Commercial Album. Find more at David Minnick’s Soundcloud and Bandcamp pages.
 

 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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04.12.2019
10:01 am
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Crucial new Residents box set collects the scattered pieces of the never-finished Mole Trilogy
04.05.2019
10:30 am
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The Residents’ ‘Mole Box,’ new from Cherry Red
 

We had to borrow money from our parents to get us this show! It takes, it takes three weeks for a check from Louisiana to clear the banks! All he wanted to know was, who were—who were the Chubs and who were the Moles? It—it—it seemed like an easy question. I mean, we were the Moles, that was real obvious, we figured that—just like that, we figured that out immediately.
                                                —The Mole Show Live at the Roxy, 1982

The Mole Show—a stage production based on the Residents’ ambitious Mole Trilogy project, a kind of science fiction epic about labor, race and rock music inspired by The Grapes of Wrath—was the first show the group took on the road. Dramatizing the conflict between the ugly and industrious Moles and the cute, suburban Chubs, it was emceed by Penn Jillette, whose role was to make the audience want to kill him. He would begin by insulting the band (“Rather flashy, in a low-tech sort of way”) and come unglued as the show went on, culminating in a total meltdown between “The New Machine” and “Song of the Wild”; long after his mike had been cut, he’d be dragged offstage screaming “THIS IS A FUCKING RIPOFF! THE RESIDENTS ARE TAKING YOU FOR A GODDAMN RIDE!” Jillette would reappear onstage for “Satisfaction,” but Groucho-glassed, gagged and handcuffed to a wheelchair—”a castrated clown in the seat of a cynic.”

The show’s success in Europe did not save it from becoming, in the words of band biographer Ian Shirley, a “financial disaster.” As the Beach Boys abandoned Smile, the Residents left the Mole Trilogy unfinished, at an incalculable cost to American culture.
 

Penn gagged and handcuffed (via residents.com)

Audiences at the Residents’ first tour would see the band members as silhouettes performing behind a burlap scrim, while stagehands and dancers in Groucho glasses manipulated the props and scenery illustrating the first part of the saga, concerning the Moles’ exodus and subsequent conflict with the Chubs. Painted canvas backdrops represented the alien landscapes of these beings’ all-too-familiar worlds; years later, as if to exorcise the memory the show, the Residents cut the backdrops into strips and sent them out with Ralph orders, which explains the piece of the Mole Show set I have in my closet.
 

The Residents behind the scrim (via residents.com)

Even with the show scripted to fall apart, everything went wrong. Penn Jillette’s appendix exploded in Madrid shortly before the band performed on the TV show La Edad de Oro, and the tour’s stage manager took on the emcee’s role, antagonizing the audience and mocking the show. Uncle Willie’s official Residents guide explains how this Brechtian element of the performance was supposed to function: 

The Mole Show was conceived to tell a fable about a culture that is forced to co-exist with a different culture, and, naturally, the inevitable “anger, confusion, and frustration” inherent to the situation. But, The Residents knew that just telling an audience about this would never do. They scripted the show so that a major character would “rebel” against the performance. In an illusion of “breaking the proscenium,” he would express his “anger, confusion and frustration” over his role in the show thereby bringing the whole performance to an awkward and disturbing end. The audience would leave confused as to what was real and what was not. The Residents were successful. Audiences left the theaters in Europe and the USA feeling just as The Residents expected, “angry, confused and frustrated.”

 

via residents.com

Anger, confusion and frustration haunted the Mole Show. Two members of the four-man Cryptic Corporation, Jay Clem and John Kennedy, had quit just as the Mole Show was getting off the ground, contributing to the parlous state of the Residents’ finances. Ian Shirley writes that the tour ended in a deep hole of debt, with the band’s gear confiscated by an English shipping company and the members swearing off touring forever on the flight home. In order to mount the show one last time at the New Music Festival in Washington, D.C. in October ‘83, a gig the band took to pacify its creditors, the Residents had to cobble together an approximation of their live setup and rebuild all the sets and props from scratch. (This was the storied last performance of the production included in this set: the “Uncle Sam Mole Show,” all of it previously unreleased except “Happy Home/Star Spangled Banner.”)
 

via residents.com

These disasters probably explain why the Residents never finished the series. The group had envisioned the Mole Trilogy in six parts, “a trilogy of pairs”:

Initially the project was designed to be a collection of six albums: three of the LPs were intended to tell an epic story, connecting several generations of two fictitious races, while the three additional albums were designed to serve as musical “illustrations” for this story. It was to be a trilogy of pairs, with each contributing both to the narrative and cultural context of the ongoing saga.

The first pair of albums, Mark of the Mole (1981) and The Tunes of Two Cities (1982), followed this scheme: Mark told the beginning of the narrative, while Tunes presented ethnomusicological artifacts of the Chub and Mole cultures. While releases bearing the disclaimer “THIS IS NOT PART THREE OF THE MOLE TRILOGY” proliferated—Intermission, The White Single, Residue of the Residents, George & James—Part Three never appeared. But its complement, Part Four, did: an album by the Big Bubble, a group that sings in the outlawed language of the Moles. Their big break comes at a rally for the nationalist Zinkenite movement, which celebrates the Moles’ traditional culture, even though most of its members are products of mixed Mole-Chub marriages. This, presumably, was to have been the story told by Part Three of the Mole Trilogy.
 

Black Shroud recording artists the Big Bubble, from Part Four of the Mole Trilogy, ‘The Big Bubble’

Mole Box, the latest in the Residents’ pREServed series of expanded reissues, collects all the surviving pieces of the Mole Trilogy. This means all the canonical Mole releases: the studio albums Mark of the Mole, The Tunes of Two Cities, and The Big Bubble, along with the excellent Intermission EP, a collection of “extraneous music” from the Mole Show. Each of the albums is supplemented with outtakes, demos, live recordings, or other material from the Residents’ vaults.

The Residents Present the Mole Show Live in Holland is the record of the tour already in circulation. Here, in its place, we get recordings from the beginning and end of the tour, with an October ‘82 performance at LA’s Roxy on one disc and the final “Uncle Sam Mole Show,” recorded a year later, on another.

The final disc is the real treasure. Early instrumental mixes of the Mark of the Mole sessions are quite beautiful (“The New Machine”!); they’re represented by the Residents’ new 25-minute edit, “MOTM Mix One Concentrate.” Among much other material of interest on this disc (including all of Intermission) are two never-before-heard tracks likely to have come—the Residents won’t say for sure—from Part Three of the Mole Trilogy, “Going Nowhere” and “Now It Is Too Late.” A third track, “Marching to the We,” taken from the download-only Mole Suite, seems to provide another glimpse of the abandoned LP.

Do you realize what this means? It means that, for all the world’s problems in 2019, at least the Residents fan can, at long last, stand tall, clutching a copy of the Mole Box, and proclaim, in good conscience: “THIS MIGHT BE PART OF PART THREE OF THE MOLE TRILOGY!”

Mole Box comes out today, April 5, on Cherry Red Records. Below, Penn Jillette and the Residents appear in a feature about the Mole Show on the BBC’s Riverside.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Oh Mummy! Oh Daddy!’ The Residents’ first show as The Residents, 1976
The Residents’ press conference at the Lincoln Memorial, 1983
RIP Hardy Fox, ‘primary composer’ and ‘co-founder’ of the Residents

Posted by Oliver Hall
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04.05.2019
10:30 am
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RIP Hardy Fox, ‘primary composer’ and ‘co-founder’ of the Residents
11.01.2018
08:35 am
Topics:
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Hardy Fox, 1945-2018 (via hardyfox.com)
 
Almost nine years ago, I was interviewing Hardy Fox, the president of the Cryptic Corporation, by Skype. He was telling me about hopes the Residents had expressed over the years for advances in stage technology: touring holographic productions that would fit on a disk, music that would cause everyone in the audience to have a simultaneous orgasm. And then he said the most surprising thing anyone’s said to me during an interview:

Actually, they always wanted to have an album, like a gatefold album that when you opened it, it was just a hole—and it would give you instant vertigo, like you would be terrified to open it because you could fall into it and get lost.

Like a bottomless pit—inside the record? Is that what you’re talking about, Hardy?

Exactly. It opens up—it would just terrify you because it would just be so empty.

I strongly suspected Hardy had more to do with the Residents than he let on, but I was too much a fan of the band to have any interest in unmasking its members, which would not only spoil the mystery, but unmask me as a discourteous jerk. Invading the privacy of the coolest people in the world doesn’t make you a brilliant sleuth; it makes you an asshole. Who wants to be the guy staking out Thomas Pynchon’s apartment with a telephoto lens? So I didn’t bring it up, nor did I have to, considering how he ended our conversation:

Actually, I feel honored that someone of your youth seems to have as much knowledge and information about things that I have spent my life working on, and so that somewhat honors me that it wasn’t just working out into the void that’s inside that album cover, waiting.

I supposed he could have been talking about all the marketing work he’d done for the Residents, but it sure didn’t sound that way.
 

 
Hardy’s former role in the Residents has been hiding in plain sight for some time now on the home page of his website. It’s right there in the first paragraph of his bio:

Hardy Fox grew up in Texas. After college he moved to San Francisco reveling in the free love days of 1967-68. He co-founded the much loved cult band, the Residents, where he was primary composer.

Hardy retired from The Residents in 2015 but continued to compose for the group through 2018. In addition to his work with that band, he has recorded as a solo artist under various names including Charles Bobuck, Combo de Mechanico, Sonido de la Noche, Chuck, TAR, among others.

Hardy talked about leaving the Residents and undergoing heart surgery in an interview with Musique Machine earlier this year. Last month, the dates “1945-2018” appeared on Hardy’s website and Facebook page, and he sent out a message to the Hacienda Bridge mailing list that began: “I’m 73. Dying of a head thing that will get me soon. So what.” On Tuesday morning, this notice turned up in my inbox, accompanied by the photo of Rod Serling below:

RIP
BRAIN CANCER
HARDY FOX
1945 - 2018

 

 
That evening, the Residents posted this obituary at residents.com:

It is with with great sorrow and regret that The Cryptic Corporation announces the passing of longtime associate, Hardy Fox. As president of the corporation from 1982-2016, the company benefited from Hardy’s instinct for leadership and direction, but his true value came from his longtime association with The Residents. As the group’s producer, engineer, as well as collaborator on much of their material, Fox’s influence on The Residents was indelible; despite any formal training, his musicality was nevertheless unique, highly refined and prolific. Blessed with a vital sense of aesthetics, a keen ear, and an exquisite love of the absurd, Hardy’s smiling face was a constant source of joy to those around him. He will be missed.

After a series of recent health problems, Hardy succumbed to a brief illness. He is survived by his husband, Steven Kloman.

Ave atque vale, Hardy Fox. Thanks for a billion hours of musical pleasure.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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11.01.2018
08:35 am
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Exclusive video and music from the Residents’ new album, ‘Intruders’
10.17.2018
10:19 pm
Topics:
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Phantoms crowd the mind. Whether it’s Guy de Maupassant’s Horla—the thing out there—or the barbarous horde conjured by a demagogue, there’s always some chimera troubling a body, threatening to violate one’s personal sovereignty. One day, it’s trying to adulterate the mustard in your sandwiches; the next, it’s plotting to turn your mailman against you. Pretty soon, it will take control of your nervous system and make you do things you don’t want to do, until it’s speaking your voice for you and puppeteering your person like a meatbag marionette. And where will you be then?

The Residents’ creepy new album, Intruders, is all about doppelgangers, haints, obsessions and delusions. The band co-produced the album with Eric Drew Feldman, the former member of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band and Pere Ubu, who is also credited as a guest musician, and Dangerous Minds has exclusive video about this record right here, plus the premiere of the album’s third track.

When I was a lad, the Cryptic Corporation—the team that has managed the Residents since 1976—meant Homer Flynn and Hardy Fox, at least after their partners, John Kennedy and Jay Clem, absquatulated in ‘82. Flynn and Fox ran the company until 2016, when Fox retired. (Residents.com reports the sad news that Hardy is seriously ill; he has revealed that he was a founding member of the band and has been the primary composer of their music.) Flynn, or “Captain Doc,” still at the helm, introduces the Residents’ latest album in the exclusive video below.

Intruders will be released by Cherry Red Records tomorrow, October 19.
 

 
After the jump, hear “The Scarecrow,” in which a bereaved James Brown fan is sure he sees the Godfather of Soul’s former bathrobe on a roadside scarecrow…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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10.17.2018
10:19 pm
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The Residents pay tribute to Sun Ra (and Barry White)
03.15.2018
09:09 am
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The MacPaint years: ‘George & James,’ Volume One of the Residents’ American Composer Series

It’s starting to look like the Residents are probably not going to finish that American Composers Series they abandoned back in 1986. The first volume, George & James, was a promising beginning: one side of George Gershwin tunes played in the style of the Mole Trilogy, one side of James Brown classics bellowed in a monstrous voice that made the Godfather of Soul sound like he was 100 feet tall and in danger of crushing the Apollo Theater beneath his feet. The Residents set out their ambitions in the liner notes:

THIS SERIES IS TO BE RECORDED DURING THE FINAL SIXTEEN YEARS OF THE 20TH CENTURY (1984-2000). WHILE EACH RECORD WILL BE RELEASED UPON COMPLETION, THE WORK, AS A WHOLE, WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE UNTIL 2001 AND WILL CONTAIN THE WORKS OF NOT LESS THAN TWENTY COMPOSERS.

 

Volume Two, ‘Stars & Hank Forever!’
 
But the American Composers Series ended abruptly after the second installment, an interpretation of the music of John Philip Sousa and Hank Williams called Stars & Hank Forever (with an excellent mash-up avant la lettre of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and Williams’ “Kaw-Liga”). Posterity was robbed of projected volumes such as The Trouble with Harrys, devoted to the work of Harry Partch and Harry Nilsson, and Bob and the Blob, a celebration of Bob Dylan and Barry White.

Other composers the Residents planned to include were Captain Beefheart, Smokey Robinson, Charles Ives, Stevie Wonder, Moondog, Scott Joplin, Brian Wilson, and Ray Charles.
 

The ‘Hit the Road Jack’ single
 
Residents discographer Uncle Willie says Sun Ra and Ray Charles would have shared a disc in the series:

“Hit the Road Jack” was considered by The Residents as the single from an album in the American Composers Series that was never finished. It would have combined the compositions of Ray Charles with Sun Ra.

It’s too bad Ra and the Residents appeared on different episodes of David Sanborn’s Night Music in 1989, or perhaps they might have jammed. But this taste of the Residents playing Sun Ra turned up on the 1991 fan club compilation Daydream B-Liver. “Daydream in Space,” a collage of leftover music from the American Composers Series, combines the Residents’ take on “Space Is the Place” with elements of the unfinished tribute to Barry White. A shorter edit of the track appeared on the posthumous Sun Ra tribute album Wavelength Infinity

See the Residents live in concert.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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03.15.2018
09:09 am
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‘Train vs Elephant’: New music from The Residents
02.10.2017
09:59 am
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If you count back to the release of their first single, “Santa Dog,” The Residents have been releasing work for 45 years. It’s amazing to ponder, almost half a century of continuous innovative productivity, in music, film/video, and interactive digital media.

Their initial burst of creativity resulted in a run of deeply weird and absolutely wonderful releases culminating in 1979 with the definitive opus Eskimo or in 1980 with the definitive opus The Commercial Album, depending on who you ask (I’m on team Commercial Album, if you’re keeping a tally). In the ‘80s, they embraced the BIG IDEAS that would define the rest of their career, most notably embarking on the multi-LP “Mole Trilogy.” In the ‘90s, they reached a commercial peak with three universally acclaimed CD ROM “albums”—fully interactive music and video projects that hybridized concept albums, video games, and animated films. In the 21st Century they’ve settled into a long string of conceptual releases that started with 1998’s Wormwood, wherein the band tackled THE BIBLE.

The Residents’ album concepts have often revolved around getting into the heads of the marginalized—they did a CD ROM about sideshow freaks (Freak Show), an online interactive missing-person mystery (The Bunny Boy), a first-person narrative of a sexual predator (Tweedles). So it was a surprise to learn that their new album would be about something as comparatively prosaic as train accidents. The band discovered a trove of turn-of-the-20th-Century news articles about the dangers of train travel, and, struck by the contrast between the eloquent expressiveness of the era’s newspaper writing and the utter mayhem of the events described, they conceived The Ghost of Hope. The album includes contributions from keyboardist Eric Drew Feldman, whose weirdomusic bona fides are enviable—he’s served with Captain Beefheart, Pere Ubu, and the Pixies, among many, many others.
 

 
It’s Dangerous Minds’ privilege today to share that new album’s track “Train vs Elephant.” Though the title would seem to be a straightforward enough description, we nevertheless reached out to the band for comment, and were treated to an exegesis by Homer Flynn, the Residents’ longtime spokesman and graphic designer, whose tenacious insistence that he’s not their singer has been widely disbelieved for about as long as he’s been their press mouthpiece.

TRAIN VS ELEPHANT

September 17, 1894

At the time of this strange incident, the railway line connecting Teluk Anson and Tapa, in the western part of Malaysia had recently been completed, so exposure to train travel was relatively new. Several years later, a Malaysian man recalled the time in his youth when he found a sign shrouded in the undergrowth on the outskirts of his town: “THERE IS BURIED HERE A WILD ELEPHANT WHO IN DEFENSE OF HIS HERD CHARGED AND DERAILED A TRAIN ON THE 17th DAY OF OF SEPTEMBER 17, 1894.”

Curious, the man researched the incident, speaking to several people old enough to remember the suicidal encounter between the train and the elephant. Some felt the bull was seeking revenge for the death of a calf recently killed by the same train, while others felt the event was purely a territorial dispute with the elephant defending its turf from the newly invading “Metal Monster.”

The British engineer claimed the beast had staked its spot in the center of the tracks and no warning deterred its determined charge as the train thundered down the track at a speed of fifty miles an hour. While the impact of the crash killed the elephant, the bull did successfully derail the engine and three coaches.

 
Have a listen to new music from the Residents, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Ron Kretsch
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02.10.2017
09:59 am
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That time when XTC’s Andy Partridge sang for the Residents
09.23.2016
09:16 am
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Andy Partridge in the Black Sea tour program, via 10ft.it
 
During my childhood and adolescence, XTC was an enigma. When I first heard their minor hit “Dear God,” the band had already long since retired from the stage, and then for years after 1992’s Nonsuch, they seemed to have walked out on the record business, too. They could write a song so anodyne it has now crept into our nation’s drugstores, yet they could also render an apparently note-perfect cover of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band’s “Ella Guru.” None of the musicians I knew who had the chops to attempt such a feat even liked Beefheart.

So while I played my tape of Waxworks over and over again in my teenage bedroom, these were among my thoughts: Who was this Andy Partridge guy, anyway? How did he play those weird chords? Why was he so reclusive? Was it all because he was, like, mental?
 

XTC 1980: Dave Gregory, Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding, Terry Chambers
 
As you can see, the stray bits of gossip my imagination had to work with all focused on Partridge and his reasons for abandoning the road. I think that explains why I don’t remember wondering even once about the inner life of Colin Moulding—the writer and singer of “Making Plans for Nigel,” “Ten Feet Tall,” “Life Begins at the Hop,” “Generals and Majors,” and “Ball and Chain”—which should have been just as interesting to contemplate, in retrospect. But there were no tidbits on which the mind could feed. (Here in 2016, Moulding has not written any new material in over a decade, though he occasionally works with producer Billy Sherwood, while Partridge just wrote a song for the Monkees.)

It wasn’t until I found a copy of the authorized biography Chalkhills and Children that I learned the facts of the XTC story. In the intervening 20 years, I have, of course, forgotten most of these (except that Andy Partridge is not “mental”) and lost the book, but at that time I sort of expected XTC to tour again someday, and I would have given a fucking eye for one evening’s entertainment from the swinging swains of Swindon. Part of the mystique came from listening to bootlegs and watching Urgh! A Music War, and part was this: a stone Residents junkie, I knew that Andy Partridge sang lead vocals on the Commercial Album‘s antepenultimate track, “Margaret Freeman.”
 

Commercial Album (1980)
 
He was credited as “Sandy Sandwich,” though the jacket didn’t say which special guests sang which (ha ha) song, or songs; for that, you needed a copy of Ian Shirley’s Meet The Residents: America’s Most Eccentric Band! (recently updated), where you could read in plain English that Andy Partridge sang “Margaret Freeman” and Lene Lovich sang “Picnic Boy.”

Here’s Partridge’s answer to a fan’s question about the collaboration in the Swindon Advertiser:

The simple truth of the Residents rubdown was that they were fans of XTC and came to some shows in San Francisco. At one of these gigs they approached me and asked could I come over to their studio to sing on a track of the record they were working on, the Commercial Album.

I was delighted and of course agreed. They chose for the me the suitably Residential nom de mic of Sandy Sandwhich, put some coal in the headphones and off we went.

I had no instruction as to how any melody for the song went (titled “Margaret Freeman”) but was just encouraged to get odder and odder.

More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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09.23.2016
09:16 am
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The Residents’ press conference at the Lincoln Memorial, 1983
07.08.2016
09:12 am
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Our Tired, Our Poor, Our Huddled Masses
 
I’ve been collecting Residents ephemera since I was in short pants, and I have an unfortunate tendency to start talking like The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy if some poor soul mentions the band. But I’ve never seen this footage before.

Promoting their appearance at the 1983 New Music America festival in Washington, D.C.—their final performance of the Mole Show, a concert that’s come to be known as the “Uncle Sam Mole Show”—the Residents held a press conference on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and it’s captured on this camcorder tape.
 

The Residents at Mount Rushmore, 1981
 
Given the camera’s proximity to the limo the Residents emerge from at the beginning, the video seems likely to have been shot by someone inside the band’s organization. The members of the group, or four people wearing their eyeball masks and tuxedos with miniature American flags sticking out of the breast pockets, file onto the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in silence, fiddling with their costumes, taking snapshots, and posing for photographers.

More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
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07.08.2016
09:12 am
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