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For other uses, see Resident.

The Residents
Genres	Experimental rock, avant-garde
Years active	1969-present
Labels	Ralph Records Cordless Recordings Mute Records
Website	www.residents.com

The Residents are an avant-garde music and visual arts group who have created 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.

Historical

1969-1972: Their Early Years

Note: Everything in the Residents' early history is "allegedly". You can assume that adverb from here on in. It's all part of the Residential mystery.

The musicians from Shreveport, Louisiana, who were to become known as The Residents met in high school in the '60s. Brought together by common interests (such as J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye) and common dislikes (such as the redneck culture of Louisiana), the four (or perhaps five at first) got together in 1966 and headed west. Aiming for San Francisco, they came up short, landing in San Mateo when their truck broke down. Rumour has it that the truck was simply abandoned, and the city eventually towed it away.

While trying to earn a living they would muck about with tape machines, photography, and any other artsy technology which they could get their hands on, just to see what they could do. Word of their experimentation spread and, in 1969, a British guitarist named Philip Lithman decided to visit them in California to see what they were all about. On the way, he stopped in Bavaria where he met up with a strange and mysterious fellow by the name of N. Senada, who was busily recording bird songs. N. Senada decided to join Lithman, and together they made their way to the US West Coast. The group and the newcomers got along famously, and the two Europeans were to become great influences on the band, Lithman with his guitar playing and N. Senada with his Theory of Obscurity and other bits of philosophy.

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.

The Warner Bros. Album

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 and at the time living at ENSENADA Street). 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 name Residents was at the Boarding House in San Francisco in 1971. That same year another tape was completed called Baby Sex.

1972-1981: Organized Noice Era

Santa Dog

The 1972 two disk "single" Santa Dog, supposedly about "a wiener dog in a Santa suit" and with a title that's an anagram of "Satan God", was the first published recording by the people soon to be known as The Residents.

The package was the founding release from Ralph Records and consisted of two 45s in a hand silk-screened gatefold sleeve which was printed to look like a Christmas card from an insurance company. This sleeve included '50s-ish drawings illustrating each song surrounded by text saying "Season's Greetings from Residents Uninc." and announcing the upcoming Vileness Fats project. 500 copies were pressed but only 400 were usable because of various problems. Some of the sets were shrink-wrapped before the varnish on the silk-screening was dry and the packages had to be torn apart to be opened. Of the 400 usable copies, 300 were sent out to friends, record companies, and anyone else who came to mind. Richard Nixon was sent a copy, as was Frank Zappa, whose copy was returned "No Longer At Address" and was later given away in a contest.

Santa Dog consisted of four songs, each attributed to a different composer and musical group:

1. Fire -- (Wanda Play) Ivory & The Braineaters
2. Lightning -- (M Givens) The College Walkers
3. Explosion -- (Della Gnue) Delta Nudes
4. Aircraft Damage -- (B Barnes, C America) Arf & Omega featuring The Singing Lawnchairs

The last track, Aircraft Damage, was written for Vileness Fats. It is the chant Arf & Omega, Siamese twin tag-team wrestlers, use to try to summon the Indian princess Weescoosa to help them save the town of Vileness Flats. Shortly after this release, the band left San Mateo and relocated to San Francisco.

Santa Dog was conceived as a piece to use to mark time. For that reason, the band has released a number of re-workings, to hail transitions or milestones in the history of the band: Santa Dog '78, '88, '92, ‘99, '06. A live version, performed in for the 1989/90 New Year's Eve convert on the Cube-E tour, appears on UWEB's Liver Music CD.

Vileness Fats

Historically, one of THE RESIDENTS’ primary obsessions has been the creation of alternative worlds. Sometimes this has been accomplished with sound - Mark of the Mole, Not Available, God In Three Persons; sometimes with live performance - The Moleshow; and sometimes with video - The Third Reich N’ Roll, It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World, and, perhaps more than any other project - the unfinished feature length video, Vileness Fats.

The world of Vileness Fats, consisting of a village, a cave, a desert and a nightclub, is tiny, claustrophobic and primarily populated by one armed midgets ...or “little people” - if we remain within those contemporary standards endorsed by the politically correct. So what purpose could THE RESIDENTS have possibly realized by creating this tiny world full of mutant midgets? Some would say it was a brilliant way of adapting to their limits: working in a small studio with a ceiling height of under 12 feet, THE RESIDENTS were still able to create a fairly large bridge set, a cave, and a night club by making all the actors squat down and hop. Others might say that the group was so naive and inexperienced that the only way they could possibly camouflage their spirited, but amateurish writing, acting, music, direction and production techniques was by creating a world that was so completely ALTERNATIVE, that it defied comparison to anything in the so called “real” world. With THE RESIDENTS, of course, one never knows, but what is known is that the group spent four years from 1972-76 shooting anywhere from 60%-75% of the projected feature length video. Then, as the project was headed towards the ending stages of production, the group suddenly abandoned its “all time underground masterpiece.” Some say the “movie,” as they called it, was brought to a halt by internal conflicts within the group, others say the technological challenges left in the remaining scenes, as well as post-production problems, were too difficult to overcome, while others point to the fact that, since there were no viable distribution channels available for movies shot on half inch B&W video in 1976, the group’s initial naiveté was finally overcome by reality. Again, we’ll never know.

Two versions of the incomplete feature have been released: the 32 min long “Whatever Happened to Vileness Fats?” (1984) and the tighter 17 1/2 min “Vileness Fats (Concentrate)” (2001), and both come across as artifacts from some hellish but mildly amusing nightmare - the claustrophobic product of a model railroad builder’s beyond bad acid trip. Due to the extremely poor audio quality of the original footage, both are primarily silent films with RESIDENTS’ soundtracks, and while there is some attempt to explain the plot, the result is not unlike pitching horseshoes in a closet - unsatisfying at best. Again, some say the obvious explanation is that there was no script - that the story and dialog was purely improvised, that THE RESIDENTS made it up as they shot. But, according to the group, these rumors are untrue, and so, after decades of whining, wheedling and flat out begging by their fans, THE RESIDENTS have finally consented to let the story be told ...and here it is.

Meet the Residents

Subtitled The First Album by North Louisiana's Phenomenal Pop Combo, Meet the Residents was released on April 1st, 1974, with a striking cover -- a defaced version of the cover of Meet the Beatles, the Beatles' first album from Capitol Records. The album had been recorded as a break from the huge Vileness Fats project. Like the band's first release, the 1972 single Santa Dog, this album was produced at home, creating sounds with tape effects and instruments -- which the band still didn't really know how to play. The Residents were not using synthesizers yet. Meet the Residents is more organized than Santa Dog, though, and demonstrated a little more skill with the instruments. The album was fairly close to the traditional album format: a series of songs, some seguéing into the next. The Residents put a lot of attention into the packaging as well as the music, though the defaced Beatles cover upset Capitol Records greatly. John Lennon proudly displayed his own copy at home. The cover also became the favorite piece of evidence for the old "The Beatles are the Residents" theory.

In addition to the infamous cover art, the record included liner notes on N. Senada's Theory of Phonetic Organization and a promotion for the Vileness Fats film. 1050 disks were made, though 200 had to be scrapped. These barely sold, so the band made 4000 seven-minute 7" flexy-disk samplers which were included in an issue of the February '74 issue of the Canadian art magazine,File, along with a blurb advertising the album at $1.99 per copy. It still didn't sell -- people thought it was a joke. An ad in the May 17, 1974 issue of Friday, a college magazine from San Francisco, offered a free sample, but even so The Residents only sold 40 copies of Meet the Residents in the first year of its release. Later, as the band became better known, sales of this first album started to pick up. In 1977, The Residents re-worked the tapes, cutting about seven minutes from the playtime, and released a new version. This release had a new cover, to keep Capitol happy, which depicted four figures with non-human heads: three with prawn-heads, the fourth with a starfish. These were identified as George, John, and Paul Crawfish and Ringo Starfish.

Not Available

In 1978, the “official” word was that The Residents had stated NOT AVAILABLE could never be released. The group claimed that they had recorded their musical film noir masterpiece in secrecy as a way of exercising their “theory of obscurity” to its fullest, and, In strict accordance with the theory, the work could never be released until its creators no longer recalled its existence.

But those steeped in the lore of The Residents’ milieu have long known that the recording of the album was in realty an exercise in group therapy. The real reason that the band wished to deny its existence was the fact that they felt that the work was too personally revealing. �∫

What is not generally known, though, is that, as part of their therapeutic process, The Residents actually considered the idea of creating an operetta based on NOT AVAILABLE. Casting the primary roles with the actual inhabitants of the group’s internal drama, they then began a series of loosely structured “rehearsals” with those players enacting the principal roles of Edweena, The Porcupine, The Catbird, Uncle Remus and Enigmatic Foe.

By enacting this pseudo drama within a psycho drama, the internal conflict, still not completely understood by all of the participants, became much more clear, as the player/characters instinctively acted out their roles. The love triangle between Edweena, Porcupine and Catbird became obvious (“Can two be more than three?”) as well as Remus’s role as the distant and objective commentator (“The aching and the breaking are the making of a soul.”). The purpose of the Enigmatic Foe was of course still unclea�´r when the rehearsals began, but once the Porcupine’s breakdown was known (“He thought the end was overdue, but day broke him instead...”), the role of the noble Foe, as Porcupine’s stand-in for the operetta’s climatic duel scene, became clear.

As the faux piece reached its peak, the trio - two holding pistols while the third hid in a bush - came to the realization that the lovely young Edweena had eloped with the independently wealthy and no longer uninvolved Uncle Remus. At this point, the tension, previously thicker than frozen mayonnaise, was shattered by the Porcupine, emerging from the shrubbery to paraphrase Shakespeare (“To show or to be shown...”).

With illusions of love shattered, the three were then able to forgive, embrace and even welcome the traitorous Remus back to the fold, once he had returned from his unexpected honeymoon.

The Third Reich 'N' Roll

This album is the first published example of two things for which The Residents became known: the concept album and music about music. Considered by some to be the cornerstone of The Residents' reputation, The Third Reich 'N' Roll consists of two tracks (one on each side of the LP), each a medley of deconstructed (dismembered?) covers of popular songs from the '60s.

In the original album liner notes, The Cryptic Corporation calls The Third Reich 'N' Roll The Residents' "tribute to the thousands of little power-mad minds in the music industry who have helped make us what we are today, with an open eye on what we can make them tomorrow." The ESD Classic Series CD liner notes call the album a "scathingly satirical look at '60's bubble-gum rock somehow twisted into shocking '70's bubble-gum avant-garde". Other descriptions included "Pop meets Dada", "the 60's as done by the 70's German avant-garde". Uncle Willie describes the album as "[taking] all your favourite bubble gum riffs from the sixties, dress[ing] them up in avant-guard drag, and send[ing] them into the streets to break windows".

The Residents put a lot of effort into the packaging and promotion of the album. In keeping with the "Third Reich" theme, the promotional photos featured men in swastika glasses and wearing giant swastika collars. The Nazi references and swastikas were a problem all through the album's history.

In fact, the album couldn't be released in Germany at all because the swastikas in the cover art are banned there. The band put out a "censored" version of the album cover in responce.

The Residents also made a short film to promote the album -- one of the very first music videos. It is in two parts. The first features The Residents, in newspaper costumes, dancing around to the album's version of Land of 1000 Dances in a newspaper world the band created in their studio. In the second half, a newspaper man is joined by an Atomic Shopping Cart, giant pork chops, and various other props from the Vileness Fats movie in a pixelated dance. The newspaper costumes caused more publicity problems for the band, though, since the tall, conical hoods led some of people to think that the group was promoting the Ku Klux Klan. In actual fact, the costumes were made that way because that was the simplest way to make a head-covering out of newspaper.

Ralph Records also released a special limited release of twenty-five The Third Reich 'N' Roll Collector's Boxes in 1980. The packaging was very elaborate: the disk was "hand pressed" in red marbled vinyl with a silk-screened sleeve and labels, all wrapped up in a black, velvet-lined wooden box. The box opened by a sliding panel which was hand silk-screened with the cover art, and contained two signed and numbered lithographs. The whole thing was bundled up in a draw-string bag made of fabric left over from a Christo's art project.

Eskimo

Created over a period of three years (work began shortly after The Third Reich 'N' Roll was released), Eskimo was unlike anything anyone had heard before. Instead of an album made up of songs, The Residents produced a series of acoustic landscapes: each track is the sound of a story taking place, rather than the traditional song telling a story. The idea for the album is supposed to have come from the band's former collaborator, the Mysterious N. Senada, who had disappeared in the early 70s to search for music among the Eskimos (legend has it that he re-appeared during the making of the album with a tape of sound samples and a jar of arctic air to record). The Residents teamed up with drummer Chris Cutler and Don Preston (formerly a keyboard player for Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention), as well as their regular collaborator, Snakefinger. Inspired by such pieces of pop culture as the famous Santa Claus Coca-Cola ads, The Residents set about inventing an anthropological background for their Eskimos which didn't bear much resemblance to reality, but instead was based on pop perceptions of the northern peoples (nevertheless, the USSR release was classified as a "cultural documentary"). Each track relates a story which was told in writing on the inside of the album's gatefold cover. The stories are progressively more complex and dig deeper into the fictional Eskimo culture, starting with a simple Walrus Hunt and ending with a confrontation with the spirit world and a Festival of Death celebrating the end of the six-month night. The album shows, as did the mini-ballet Six Things to a Cycle on Fingerprince, the influence of Harry Partch. Like Partch, The Residents invented their own language and instruments. Most of the fake Eskimo tongue is made up of highly distorted English and is sung while breathing in to give it an alien texture. As the album progresses you can hear the slow invasion of American culture into the Eskimo lives as the Eskimo's spiritual leader, the Angakok, leads them in chants whose nonsense language becomes corrupted with phrases such as "Coca-Cola Adds Life". Eskimo almost didn't happen. When Duck Stab turned into a big success, the Cryptic Corporation started to promote it heavily. The Residents became worried that the business may have been moving too quickly -- not to mention the possibility that the promotions might endanger their anonymity. The Residents were already somewhat afraid that Eskimo might turn out to be dull and pretentious so they grabbed master tapes and disappeared. Desperate for some material to release (the band disappeared the day before the tapes were to go to pressing), the Cryptics pulled an old master tape off of the shelves and released that instead. It was an unnamed album which was never meant to be released, dubbed Not Available by the Corporation. It turned out that the group had flown to England and left the tapes with Chris Cutler. John Kennedy and Jay Clem of the Cryptic Corporation flew over to collect the tapes, which Cutler had been keeping at the National Safe Deposit Box Company in London. The New Wave press, which had become rather caught up in The Residents after Duck Stab, were quite keen on the whole "disappearing Residents" story, so the Corporation milked the event for its publicity value, playing up the mystery of The Residents' disappearance and releasing press photos of the tape exchange. The Residents themselves weren't in England. They had apparently gone on to Japan, then reappeared in San Francisco shortly after the tapes were recovered. On their return, the Cryptic Corporation presented them with a new 16-track recording studio as an apology for the misunderstanding. To celebrate the reunion, the band used their new toy to recorded Santa Dog '78, which, along with the original Santa Dog was given away free as a single to everyone on the Ralph Records mailing list as a Christmas gift in a package which included the story of the disappearance. When it finally did come out, Eskimo had one other eye-catching feature: it had the first cover featuring the Residents' newest costumes, the Eyeball heads. Originally the band had wanted silver spheres reflecting the arctic mists, but that idea proved impractical. The eye-heads, second choices though they were, turned out to be a powerful image: the costumes were so incredibly identifiable that they became the trademark look for the band. In spite of The Residents' fears about possible pretentiousness, Eskimo was a huge critical success. The music press in the UK loved it, hailing it as a huge milestone in the new music. Sales were phenomenal for an independent, underground album. The first pressing of 10,000 copies on snow-white vinyl sold out quickly. The adulation was so strong, in fact, that the band was afraid that their Eyeball-heads might get swollen from all the praise. To forestall this the band spoofed their own albums by creating a disco version called Diskomo. Released as a single, this instrumental work has gone through a number of revisions over its history.

Body of Work