The Residents

From Freepedia

The Residents are an avant garde music and visual arts group. They started performing in the early 1970s and released their first album in 1974.

They are known for their eccentric, quirky music and mysterious personalities.

1 Who are the Residents?
2 Early history
3 Noted projects
4 Albums
5 Multimedia
6 Singles
7 External links

Who are the Residents?

Throughout their 30+ year history, The Residents have always cloaked their lives and music in obscurity. The band members, who appear to be four or five in number, refuse to grant interviews, and do not identify themselves by name or even individual pseudonyms. Concerts and photo shoots are always performed in full disguise, most recognizably in white tie tuxedos, top hats and giant eyeball masks. However, in 2002, a highly unusual event did occur in which a supposed Resident unmasked himself. To quote Spencer Owen, "At a Los Angeles release party for Icky Flix, the Residents' new DVD collection spanning three decades' worth of music videos, attendees supposedly had the opportunity to 'Meet a Resident.' A tuxedoed man, sans eyeball head, stood amongst the crowd, chatting and signing photos. Fans participated as if he were the real deal. Those fans probably came home and bragged to their friends about the incredible occasion. But the event can't be seen without some skepticism. There's a 50% chance that the man either was or was not a Resident."

Any interviews or PR work are done directly by the band's hired management team, known as The Cryptic Corporation, which was formed by Jay Clem, Homer Flynn, Hardy Fox, and John Kennedy in 1976. These four are often rumored to be band members as well but have denied this.

It is believed that at least one member of the group is female, and it has been speculated that the group may include well-known musicians who, perhaps, are under contract to other record companies, which would necessitate maintaining some form of anonymity. Many other rumors have come and gone over the years, including the idea that the band members are physically disfigured, or are in fact The Beatles in disguise.

For their part, The Residents simply feel that artists do their best work without the influence of an audience, should only be judged by their work, and that a band members' genders, ethnicities, line-up changes, and most importantly daily life outside of the band should be irrelevant to listeners.

Early history

Due to the obscure nature of the band, it's difficult to get an accurate history of The Residents. What follows is information from one authorized account.

The Residents originally hail from Shreveport, Louisiana, where they met in high school in the 1960s. In 1966, members headed west to San Francisco, California. After their truck broke down in San Mateo, they decided to remain there.

Whilst attempting to eke out a living they experimented with tape machines, photography, and anything remotely to do with "art" that they could get their hands on. Word of their experimentation spread and, in 1969, a British guitarist named Philip Lithman and the mysterious N. Senada (who Lithman had picked up in Bavaria) paid them a visit, and decided to remain.

The two Europeans would eventually become great influences on the band. Lithman's guitar playing technique earned him the name Snakefinger.

The group purchased crude recording equipment and instruments and began to make tapes, refusing to let an almost complete lack of musical proficiency stand in the way. One of their first public performances was at the Longbranch in Berkeley, California.

By 1970 they had completed two tapes, Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor and The Ballad of Stuffed Trigger. In 1971 the group sent a third tape to Hal Halverstadt at Warner Brothers. Unfortunately, despite having worked with Captain Beefheart, Halverstadt wasn't at all impressed with "The Warner Bros. Album" and it was rejected. Because the band had not included any name in the return address, the rejection slip was simply addressed to "The Residents". This is where the band got the name.

The first performance of the band using the "Residents" moniker was at the Boarding House Club in San Francisco in 1971. That same year another tape was completed, the charmingly named Baby Sex with its cover lifted from the pages of a Danish porn mag.

In 1972 they moved to San Francisco and formed Ralph Records.

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

In the mid 1980s, one member's eyeball mask was stolen, so it was replaced with a giant skull mask. The eye was returned in 1985 by a devoted fan who discovered where the thief lived and stole it back. It was put into retirement because it was now "unclean" and had become nothing more than a superfluous shell with no soul.

Noted projects

The title of the record Third Reich & Roll was derived from the name of the original Nazis. The Residents adorned the record with art and photography doctored to depict corporate businessmen in the industry of music as Nazis. Each side of the record was one composition (approx. 17 ½ minutes in length) composed of tapes of classic rock & roll songs spliced and edited together with vocals, percussion and tape noises overdubbed. The effect of their performances was that the pre-recorded songs were ruined on purpose, thus transforming them into something bizarrely different. It is assumed that The Residents, however, viewed this process as de-ruining the songs, transforming them into how they should sound without corporatization.

The Residents took the "theory of obscurity" to logical conclusion when they allegedly recorded Not Available in 1974 with the intention of not publishing it. They placed it in storage to be issued when no one remembered it. Contractual obligations forced its public issuance in 1978, after the band had almost forgotten of it. The Residents weren't bothered much by this deviation from their plan, however, since the 1978 decision to release of the album couldn't affect the philosophical conditions under which it was recorded in 1974.

Eskimo (1979) contained music consisting of conventionally non-musical sounds, percussion in one composition, and wordless voices. Rather than being true songs (in the traditional sense), the compositions sounded like live-action stories without dialogue. It was almost nominated for a Grammy. The Residents remixed the "songs" in disco style, the results of which appeared on the EP Diskomo. Eskimo was issued in surround sound on DVD audio in 2003.

The Commercial Album (1980) consisted of 40 songs each structured of one verse and one chorus performed once each in the time of approx. one minute, rather than the conventional structure of three identical verses plus a chorus repeated three times in the span of approx. three minutes. The music was in the style of advertising jingles, although the songs were not endorsements of any known products or services. To promote the album, The Residents purchased 40 one-minute advertising spots on San Francisco's most popular Top-40 radio station, which forced the station to play each track of their album over three days. This prompted an editorial in Billboard magazine questioning whether the act was art or advertising.

The Residents are credited with the creation of the first music video. When MTV was new, The Residents' videos were in heavy rotation, as they were among the few available. The Residents' earliest videos are in the New York Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection. The videos were eventually released altogether in 2001 on the Icky Flix DVD, which includes an optional audio track to hear remakes of all the songs.

Also in the 80s was the Mark of the Mole album and its sequels, plus the band's first official tour, narrated nightly by Penn Jillette. The Mole Trilogy is still missing one of its albums which is allegedly lurking somewhere in the periphery of the Residential imagination, not entirely lost... however, no one is holding their breath.

Following this was the American Composer Series which consisted of cover songs of an American composer on each side of an album. Due to a quagmire of legal red tape the Composer series was shelved indefinitely after the initial release.

The Residents were also one of the first bands to release multi-media CDs, featuring the work of illustrators such as Steven cerio, the first two of which were both voted by Entertainment Weekly magazine for top computer entertainment software. They contributed to soundtracks for The Census Taker, Pee Wee’s Playhouse, a Discovery Channel nature show titled Hunters, plus assorted commercials for MTV. The band continues to release new material, special re-releases of out of print material (The Residents have over 700 songs to their name), and more DVDs. They still tour, but very minimally.

Since mid 1990s, singer Molly Harvey has continuously worked with the band, recording and performing at live shows. But since the band defines "The Residents" as a strictly anonymous entity, she is not so much a "band member" as much as a "frequent/permanent guest star", as was the case for guitarist Snakefinger.

In February of 2005 the Residents toured Australia as part of the "What is Music?" festival. They performed a roughly two hour retrospective setlist entitled 33rd Anniversary Tour: The Way We Were. This set saw a fairly minimal stage setup featuring three eyeball-headed Residents (one on guitar and two laptop/sample operators), a "Stage hand" performer, as well as the Male and Female vocalists in a costume-theme reminiscent of the Wormwood style. They added video projections and strange flexible "screens" to their stage layout which created a very odd ambience. All of these performances on the Way we Were tour were allegedly recorded as audio and video so it may surface as an official release in some form in the future.

Most recently the Residents (or more accurately the Cryptic Corporation) have begun their own Ebay ventures by auctioning off various and sundry paraphenalia from the Rez/Cryptic archives.