العربية
中国
Français
Deutsch
Ελληνική
हिन्दी
Italiano
日本語
Português
Русский
EspañolTHE RESIDENTS
The Residents are an avant-garde music and performance collective, who have released nearly sixty albums, created numerous musical short films, designed three CD-ROM projects, and undertaken six major world tours. Throughout their career, spanning nearly four decades, they have maintained complete anonymity. All public relations, interviews and promotions are handled by their spokesgroup, The Cryptic Corporation.
They are known for their secrecy, singular art, prolific releases and embrace of new technology.
History
Origins
Because of the obscure nature of the band, it is difficult to compile a history that is completely accurate. What follows is information from unauthorized accounts which may or may not be entirely reliable.
The Residents supposedly hail from Shreveport, Louisiana, where they met in high school in the 1960s. In 1966, members headed west to San Francisco, California. After their truck broke down in San Mateo, they decided to remain there. Like all information pertaining to the early days of the band, this is provided by The Cryptic Corporation and is potentially false. Newer information indicates they are probably from Slidell, Louisiana, and picked Shreveport as the "place to be from" since it is the city in Louisiana that was furthest from Slidell.
Whilst attempting to make a living, they began to experiment with tape machines, photography, and anything remotely to do with "art" that they could get their hands on. Word of their experimentation spread and in 1969, a British guitarist and multi-instrumentalist named Philip Lithman and the mysterious N. Senada (who Lithman had picked up in Bavaria where the aged avant-gardist was recording birds singing) paid them a visit, and decided to remain.
The two Europeans would become great influences on the band. Lithman's guitar playing technique earned him the nickname Snakefinger (upon seeing a picture of Lithman playing the violin, a future Resident exclaimed that his little finger resembled a snake).
The group purchased crude recording equipment and instruments and began to make tapes, refusing to let an almost complete lack of musical proficiency stand in the way.
1969-1972: Residents Unincorporated
In 1969 the group began to make the first of their unreleased tapes. Rumors have surfaced of two of perhaps hundreds of unreleased reel-to-reel items entitled ''Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor'' and ''The Ballad of Stuffed Trigger''. The titles may be in question (as is the idea that these were album-length recordings), but the first title has been confirmed by a former head of the now defunct Smelly Tongues fan club. Further evidence of pre-1970 recordings surfaced with the release of the song "I Hear You Got Religion", supposedly recorded in 1969, and released originally as a downloadable track from Ralph America in 1999. Cryptic says there are lots of tapes dating back decades, but they were all recorded before the group had officially become "The Residents" so the band do not consider them to be part of their discography.
In 1971 the group sent a reel-to-reel tape to Hal Halverstadt at Warner Brothers, since he had worked with Captain Beefheart (one of the group's musical heroes). Halverstadt was not overly impressed with "The Warner Bros. Album" (he describes it as "okay at best" in "Uncle Willie's Cryptic Guide to the Residents"), but awarded the tape an "A for Ariginality". Because the band had not included any name in the return address, the rejection slip was simply addressed to "The Residents". The members of the group then decided that this would be the name they would use (first becoming Residents Unincorporated, then shortening it to the current name).
The first performance of the band using the Residents moniker was at the Boarding House in San Francisco in 1971. That same year another tape was completed called ''Baby Sex''.
In 1972 they moved to San Francisco and formed Ralph Records. By this time, The Cryptic Corporation was operating as a partnership and incorporated to take over the running of Ralph Records.
1972-1980: Album Era
Before the Santa Dog single and while recording Meet the Residents, The Residents undertook one of their first major projects: the ambitious Vileness Fats film project. Intended to be the first-ever long form music video, The Residents saw this project as the opportunity to create the ultimate cult film. After four years of filming (from 1972 to 1976) the project was reluctantly cancelled due to time, space and monetary constraints. Fourteen hours of footage were shot for the project yet only about three-quarters of an hour of that footage have ever been released.
Santa Dog is considered by both The Residents themselves and their fans to be the "official" start of the band's recorded output. This is so because it was the first to be released to the public. Shortly after this release, the band left San Mateo and relocated to San Francisco.
The Residents, at this point, were at a rough point in their career. There was in-band turmoil, which supposedly resulted in a large, "embarrassing" food fight. They decided to resolve this tension in 1974 by allegedly recording what would later become Not Available - representative of N. Senada's Theory of Obscurity taken to its logical conclusion. The album was recorded and then placed in storage to be issued only when everyone had forgotten about it. However, contractual obligations (related to the much-delayed release of Eskimo forced its release in 1978 after the band had almost forgotten about it. The Residents were unbothered by this deviation from their plan since the 1978 decision to release the album would not affect the philosophical conditions under which it was originally recorded.
The Third Reich 'n' Roll came next, a pastiche on 60's rock 'n' roll with an overarching Nazi theme (represented visually on the album cover, which featured Dick Clark in an SS uniform holding a carrot, with a number of Hitlers dancing on clouds behind him). On each side of the record was a single composition, approximately 17 ½ minutes long, using recordings of classic rock & roll songs that were spliced, overdubbed and edited with new vocals, instrumentation and tape noises. The original songs were finally removed leaving entirely new and bizarre performances. The music video for this album was shot on the sets that were built for Vileness Fats.
Following ''The Third Reich 'n' Roll'' came Fingerprince, a particularly ambitious project not unlike the earlier Not Available recordings. The band's original intention with Fingerprince was to release it as the very first "three-sided" album - they had found away to simulate a third side by arranging the grooves on one side of the vinyl album to play a completely different program of tracks depending on which series of grooves the needle was dropped on. However, this idea was dropped when the band discovered that the Monty Python comedy troupe had executed the very same idea three years earlier with their Matching Tie and Handkerchief album. The "third side" was later released as an EP entitled Babyfingers, and the Babyfingers tracks have since been re-integrated into the Fingerprince album on the CD reissues.
The Residents followed Fingerprince with their Duck Stab/Buster and Glen album - their most easily comprehensible album up to that point. This album got the band some attention from the press (namely New Musical Express, Sounds and Melody Maker), and dropped most of their reliance upon the Theory of Obscurity.
Eskimo (1979) contained music consisting of non-musical sounds, percussion, and wordless voices. Rather than being songs in the orthodox sense, the compositions sounded like "live-action stories" without dialogs. The Residents remixed the "songs" in disco style, the results of which appeared on the EP ''Diskomo''. ''Eskimo'' was reissued in surround sound on DVD in 2003.
''The Commercial Album'' (1980) consisted of 40 songs that, like Eskimo, rejected traditional song structure. Each consisted of a verse and a chorus and lasted one minute. The songs pastiched the advertising jingle although the songs were not endorsements of known products or services. The liner notes state that songs should be repeated three times in a row to form a ''pop song''. With a leap of promotional imagination, The Residents purchased 40 one-minute advertising slots on San Francisco's most popular Top-40 radio station KFRC forcing 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 also credited with the creation of the first music video. When MTV was in its infancy, The Residents' videos were in heavy rotation since they were among the few music videos available to broadcasters. The Residents' earliest videos are in the New York Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection and were eventually released together in 2001 on the ''Icky Flix'' DVD, which includes an optional audio track of remixes. Snakefinger presented projected films of the Residents prior to live performance during this time. Other network competitors to MTV such as the USA network presented Residents videos but the videos were not on MTV.
1981-1990: Performance Era
The 80s saw the release of the ''Mark of the Mole'' album (and its sequels) and the band's first official tour (The Mole Show), narrated nightly by Penn Jillette. Many think, after observation of official clues in liner notes such as those found in Demons Dance Alone, that the Mole Show caused several members of the Residents to leave, leaving Mr. Skull to studio duties. The Mole Trilogy is still missing some of its volumes (only parts I, II and IV have been released) which are, allegedly, lurking somewhere in the periphery of the Residential imagination, not entirely lost.
Backstage at the Hollywood Palace show in December 26 1985 one member's eyeball mask (Mr. Red Eye) was stolen, so it was replaced with a giant skull mask. The eye was returned by a devoted fan who discovered where the thief lived and stole it back (although Homer Flynn has stated that the person who returned the mask was most probably the thief himself). It was put into retirement because it was now "unclean" (and in a bad condition) and had become a superfluous shell.
In the late 80s they created the epic recording "God in 3 Persons", a story about the exploitation of two siamese twins with healing powers by a male dominant force and "The King & Eye", a surreal biography of Elvis Presley and the birth of rock and roll.
1991-1997: Multimedia Era
One of the noted Residents projects of the 90s is "Freak Show." This marked the beginning of The Residents' obsession with emerging computer technology in the 1990s. Much of the music was made with various MIDI devices. "Freak Show" also served as the name for a CD-ROM that was released by the Voyager Company on March 1, 1995, shortly after Laurie Anderson's first multimedia CD-ROM experiment, ''Puppet Motel''. "Freak Show" was also a stage performance by a theater company at the Archa Theater in Prague that premiered on November 1, 1995, and a comic book. Several of the songs were also performed live during the 1997 25th anniversary concerts at the Fillmore in San Francisco. After the CD-ROM's success, the album was re-released as The Freak Show Soundtrack with a different cover. A limited edition, The Freak Show Special Edition, was released in 2002 to mark their 30th anniversary.
1998-2005: Band Era
More recently The Residents have recorded the dramatic album "Demons Dance Alone" (also a tour and DVD in 2002) and "Animal Lover" in 2005.
Singer Molly Harvey began as a Ralph employee but by the mid-90's contributed to virtually all of The Residents many projects. The Residents increased reliance on Harvey--essentially handing her half of the vocal duties since at least Demons Dance Alone--seems to uncoincidentally parallel their artistic revitalization. Nolan Cook, Carla Fabrizio, Toby Dammit, Eric Drew Feldman, and many other artists continuously worked with the band over the last five years, recording and performing live. The new artists helped to counter what All Music Guide derided as a "sonic palette [confined to] factory presets from their new Macintosh audio" of the CD-ROM era. [1]
In February of 2005 the Residents toured Australia as part of the "What is Music?" festival, performing a two hour retrospective set entitled the ''33rd Anniversary Tour: The Way We Were''. These shows saw a fairly minimal band; three eyeball-headed Residents (one on guitar and two laptop/sample operators), a "stage hand" performer, and a male and female vocalist in costumes reminiscent of the Wormwood tour. They added video projections and unusual flexible screens to the stage set, creating an unsettling ambience. The performances on the ''Way We Were'' tour were recorded and were released on CD and DVD in 2005.
2006-present: Storyteller Era
Summer of 2006 brought the internet download project, River of Crime (Episodes 1-5). River of Crime was their first project with Warner Music Group's Cordless label. Following the success of River of Crime, The Residents launched their weekly Timmy video project on YouTube. In 2007 they did the music for the documentary Strange Culture.
Who ''are'' the Residents?
Much of the speculation about the members' true identities swirls around their management team, known as "The Cryptic Corporation." Cryptic was formed by Jay Clem (Born 1947), Homer Flynn (born April 1945), Hardy W. Fox (born 1945), and John Kennedy in 1976, all of whom denied having been band members. (Clem and Kennedy left the Corporation in 1982.) The Residents per se don't grant interviews, though Flynn and Fox have occasionally commented to the media. Nolan Cook, who has been working with the band recently, denied in an interview that
Fox and Flynn are the Residents, saying that he has come across such rumors, and they are completely false.
William Poundstone, author of the ''Big Secrets'' books, claimed Flynn and possibly Fox are likely members of The Residents, probably the group leaders; this is probably the most widespread belief among the group's fans. A subset of that belief is that Flynn is the lyricist (a conclusion buttressed by the fact that his voice bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the Singing Resident) and that Fox writes the music. In addition BMI's online database of the performance rights organization [of which the Residents and their publishing company, Pale Pachyderm Publishing (Warner-Chappell), have been members for their entire careers], lists Flynn and Fox as the composers of all original Residents songs. This includes those songs written pre-1974 (the "Residents Unincorporated" years), the year Cryptic formed [2]. However, many have pointed out that a songwriter can copyright a song under any name he/she chooses; the person named in the copyright assignment receives all royalties and legal requests and other information for the song, which, if Flynn and Fox are merely trusted managers who both handle the Residents' business and protect their identities, makes them the logical choice to be assigned the copyrights.
Cryptic openly admits the group's artwork is done by Flynn (among others), under various names that, put together, become Pornographics, but the pseudonym is rarely spelled the same way twice (examples: Porno Graphics, Pore No Graphix, Pore-Know Graphics); and that Fox is the "sound engineer" — meaning that he is the main producer, engineer, master, and editor of all their recordings. (Since 1976, the Residents' recordings have all listed their producer as "The Cryptic Corporation," presumably meaning Fox in particular.) Many other rumors have come and gone over the years, including the idea that the band members are physically disfigured; that 60s psychedelic band Cromagnon shared members with the band; and that the band members are in fact The Beatles in disguise.
Trivia
★ Simpsons creator Matt Groening (who wrote a mostly fictional article about the band's history) and journalist Jim Knipfel are fans of the band.
★ Les Claypool is a fan of the band, and they are a main influence on Claypool's musical trio, Primus who covered "Sinister Exaggerator" on their Miscellaneous Debris EP, as well as "Hello Skinny" and "Constantinople" on the re-release of their album Frizzle Fry.
★ Claypool also made reference to The Residents in the song The Air Is Getting Slippery with the lyrics "Now if you want an encore, you might hear Is it Luck, but me I'd rather play The Residents because I don't give a fuck."
★ The eyeball mask theft from the Hollywood Palace show is referenced in the Cracker song "Ain't Gonna Suck Itself".
★ The cover of The Residents' LP ''Eskimo'' appeared in a Spanish TV commercial of FNAC
★ The Residents were to work on a Bad Day on the Midway television series with David Lynch, but said series was too strange for the networks.
★ ''Eskimo'' was considered for a Grammy Award, but not nominated. The Residents were still invited to the ceremonies, and shared a table with Donna Summer.
★ In the afformentioned Groening article, it is mentioned that they called themselves "The New Beatles" for a brief period of time, before "The Residents".
★
★ Eskimo was for a time going to be made into an opera, but the project was abandoned.
★ In the episode Showdown at Cremation Creek (Part I) of Venture Brothers, the character "The Alchemist" holds an eyeball-looking orb up to his head, saying "Look, I'm in the Residents!"
★ On the Penn & Teller tape "Cruel tricks for Dear Friends" after one of the segments, the video "Act of Being Polite" plays.
★ For their 10th Anniversary special they locked Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller) in a hotel room for 4 days with nothing but their albums and paid/forced him to record his thoughts as he listened to them. The result was a limited edition cassette that was later re-released as a CD.
★ After recording an entire album of songs that were one minute long in 1980, The Commercial Album, the group purchased one minute advertising spots on San Francisco’s most popular Top 40 radio station and had the entire album, all 40 songs, played by the station over a period of three days. Billboard Magazine wrote an editorial about it questioning whether it was advertising, payola, or art.
★ The Residents are often credited with inventing the form of the music video. Five of their earliest videos are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
★ In 1991 The Residents released their album, Freak Show. In a show of media strength it came out as an LP, CD, soft and hard bound graphic novels, video, award winning CD-ROM, and a live production that ran for 21 performances at the Archa Theater in Prague, Czech Republic. The live performances were conducted by Czech musician Miroslav Wanek and performed by an expanded version of his band Uz Jsme Doma.
★ The Residents, in 1993, wrote a ten hour score for The Discovery Channel nature show, Hunters.
★ They have also scored 5 shows of Pee Wee’s Playhouse and assorted programs for MTV.
★ Two years in a row, they won awards from Entertainment Weekly magazine for top computer entertainment software. 1995: Freak Show CD-ROM, 1996: Bad Day on the Midway CD-ROM.
★ Marlboro cigarettes commissioned a performance piece for a German promotion in 1997, Disfigured Night. Paranoid that the group was making fun of them, Marlboro asked that there be no appearance by Residents’ regular, Mr. Skull.
Body of Work
Albums
★ ''Meet the Residents'' - 1974
★ ''The Third Reich 'n' Roll'' - 1976
★ ''Fingerprince'' - 1976
★ ''Duck Stab/Buster & Glen'' - 1978
★ ''Not Available'' - 1978
★ ''The Residents Radio Special'' - 1979
★ ''Eskimo'' - 1979
★ ''Babyfingers'' - 1979
★ ''The Commercial Album'' - 1980
★ ''Mark of the Mole'' - 1981
★ ''The Tunes of Two Cities'' - 1982
★ '' - 1983
★ ''Title in Limbo'' - with ''Renaldo and the Loaf'' 1983
★ ''The Mole Show Live at the Roxy'' - 1983
★ ''Residue of the Residents'' - 1984
★ ''George & James'' - 1984
★ ''Whatever Happened to Vileness Fats?'' - 1984
★ ''Assorted Secrets'' - 1984
★ ''Census Taker'' - 1985
★ '' - 1985
★ '' - 1986
★ ''The 13th Anniversary Show Live in the U.S.A.'' - 1986
★ ''The Thirteenth Anniversary Show'' - 1987
★ ''The Mole Show Live in Holland'' - 1987
★ ''For Elsie'' - 1987
★ ''Snakey Wake'' - 1987
★ ''Buckaroo Blues'' - 1988
★ ''Santa Dog 88'' - 1988
★ ''God in Three Persons'' - 1988
★ ''God in Three Persons Soundtrack'' - 1988
★ ''Buckaroo Blues & Black Barry'' - 1989
★ ''The King & Eye'' - 1989
★ ''Liver Music'' - 1990
★ ''Daydream B-Liver'' - 1991
★ ''Freak Show'' - 1991
★ ''Our Finest Flowers'' - 1992
★ '' - 1994
★ ''Gingerbread Man'' - 1994
★ ''Hunters'' - 1995
★ ''Have a Bad Day'' - 1996
★ ''Pollex Christi'' - 1997
★ ''Live at the Fillmore'' - 1998
★ '' - 1998
★ ''Refused'' - 1999
★ ''Wormwood Live'' - 1999
★ ''Dot Com'' - 2000
★ ''Diskomo 2000'' - 2000
★ '' - 2000
★ ''Roosevelt 2.0'' - 2000
★ ''Icky Flix'' - 2001
★ ''High Horses'' - 2001
★ ''I Murdered Mommy'' - 2001
★ ''Eat Exuding Oinks'' - 2002
★ ''Demons Dance Alone'' - 2002
★ ''Kettles of Fish on the Outskirts of Town'' - 2003
★ '' - 2003
★ '' (Remix by ''Paralyzer'') - 2004
★ ''12 Days of Brumalia'' - 2004
★ ''I Murdered Mommy'' - 2004
★ ''Animal Lover'' - 2005
★ ''The Way We Were'' (live CD/DVD) - 2005
★ ''Cube E Box Set'' - 2006
★ ''Tweedles'' - 2006
★ ''Night of the Hunters''[1] - 2007
★ ''The Voice of Midnight- October 2007
Singles and EPs
★ "Santa Dog" - 1972
★ "Satisfaction" - 1976
★ "The Beatles Play the Residents and the Residents Play the Beatles" - 1977
★ "Santa Dog '78" - 1978
★ "Diskomo" - 1980
★ "The Commercial Single" - 1980
★ "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" - 1984
★ "Kaw-Liga" - 1986
★ "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" - 1986
★ "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" (Australia) - 1986
★ "Hit the Road Jack" - 1987
★ "Double Shot" - 1988
★ "Holy Kiss of Flesh" - 1988
★ "From the Plains to Mexico" - 1989
★ "Don't Be Cruel" - 1989
★ "Blowoff" - 1992
★ "Santa Dog '92" - 1992
★ "I Hate Heaven" - 1998
★ "In Between Screams" - 1999
Compilations
★ ''Please Do Not Steal It! - 1979
★ ''Nibbles'' - 1979
★ '' - 1984
★ ''Memorial Hits'' - 1985
★ ''The Pal TV LP'' - 1985
★ ''Heaven?'' - 1986
★ ''Hell!'' - 1986
★ ''Stranger Than Supper" - 1990
★ ''Poor Kaw-Liga's Pain'' - 1994
★ ''Louisiana's Lick'' - 1995
★ ''Our Tired, Our Poor, Our Huddled Masses'' - 1997
★ ''Residue Deux'' - 1998
★ ''25 Years of Eyeball Excellence'' - 1998
★ ''Land of Mystery'' - 1999
★ ''Petting Zoo'' - 2002
★ ''Kettles of Fish on the Outskirts of Town'' - 2002
★ ''Best Left Unspoken...Vol. 1 - 2006
★ ''Best Left Unspoken...Vol. 2 - 2006
★ ''Best Left Unspoken...Vol. 3 - 2007
Multimedia Projects
★ ''Vileness Fats'' (unfinished film project) - 1972 - 1976
★ ''Freak Show'' (CD ROM) - 1991
★ ''Gingerbread Man'' (CD ROM) - 1994
★ ''Bad Day on the Midway'' (CD ROM) - 1995
★ ''Icky Flix'' (DVD) - 2001
★ ''Eskimo'' (DVD) - 2002
★ ''Disfigured Night DVD'' (DVD) - 2002
★ ''Demons Dance Alone'' (DVD) - 2003
★ ''The Commercial Album DVD'' - 2004
★ ''Wormwood DVD'' - 2005
★ ''The Way We Were CD/DVD'' - 2005
★ ''The River of Crime June 2006
★ ''Timmy August 2006
References and footnotes
1. All Music Guide review of Freak Show
2. BMI.com online listing of songs written or co-written by Homer Flynn and Hardy Fox, accessed May 24 2005
External links
★ The Residents Official Historical Site
★ The Residents Official Blog
★ Official MySpace page
★ Official YouTube page
★ The Moles present The Residents
This article provided by Wikipedia. To edit the contents of this article, click here for original source.
psst.. try this: add to faves
