Credit: Dangerous Minds / Album Cover

The Residents never stopped one-upping themselves.

You can take or leave the music. Honestly, a lot of experimental music just isn’t for me, and any time I’ve put on a Residents record, I can’t say that I’ve lasted longer than a minute or two. However, being a band that makes music seems to be, like, the seventh most important thing on their list of things to do. Just below making thinly veiled political statements and just above getting those natty tuxes dry cleaned. If anyone has the hook up, let me know.

Top of the list of The Residents’ list of things to do seems to be, always and forever, “do weird shit”. That is the part that I have time for. It’s always depressing when you hear a band’s absolutely baffling music, then look a little deeper and find some gormless chump named Kevin muttering something about “making music for himself and if anyone likes it, that’s a bonus”. There’s no shortage of ambition and creativity in what The Residents do, not just in the music but in every aspect of their being.

There’s the unforgettably eerie look consisting of those amazing eye masks. There are their concerts, which rarely have the same set list twice. There’s the backstory that rivals most comic book super-heroes for sheer depth and complexity. It’s not even simply that the band themselves have lore associated with it, individual albums have backstories that put most full bands to shame.

There’s The Warner Bros Album, a record specifically designed to get them signed to the record label of the same name. Stars and Hank Forever, a mashup album of Hank Williams and John Philip Sousa. God In Three Parts, an hour-long talking blues opera about an evil Svengali manager who falls in love with the female half of a set of conjoined twins. Bloody hell.

What was the weirdest album by The Residents?

One would imagine that the band would run out of these ideas fairly quick, but the truth is, I haven’t even covered the weirdest album concept by The Residents. One so baffling that it might just be a full-on fiction. One always has to look out for this kind of Kayfabe within the world of The Residents, lest you find yourself getting into arguments as to whether N Senada was a real person or not. Whether it’s true or not is almost beside the point, though.

The idea behind Not Available is so funny that it works as a piece of fiction even if it isn’t a literally true story. The story goes that in the early 1970s, tensions in the band were at an all-time high. As a way of dealing with their personal problems head-on, the band decided to turn their strife into music. I mean that literally by the way. Not in the sense of playing songs inspired by their internal problems, I mean, the band would just say their internal problems to each other directly and make an album based on those words.

It seems strange to have an album by The Residents one could call “nakedly personal”, but Not Available was it. While the record was released in 1974, it wouldn’t be released until 1978. The story behind this was that the band made a demand of their record label to only release the album once the band had forgotten about it, explaining the four-year gap between its recording and its release.

Is it entirely true? Maybe not, maybe so. It fits in with the band’s “theory of obscurity” ethos, which is that an artist’s purest work is created without an audience, but perhaps the band just wanted to sit on the record until they felt a little more comfortable with it. Either way is a legend worth printing, which basically sums up the appeal of The Residents in a nutshell.