User:Numb Erone/Sandbox
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| The Residents | |
|---|---|
| Genre(s) | Experimental rock, avant-garde |
| Years active | 1969-present |
| Label(s) | Ralph Records Cordless Recordings Mute Records |
| Associated acts | Snakefinger Renaldo and the Loaf |
| 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.
Contents |
[edit] Historical
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 1972-1981: Organized Noice Era
[edit] 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:
- Fire -- (Wanda Play) Ivory & The Braineaters
- Lightning -- (M Givens) The College Walkers
- Explosion -- (Della Gnue) Delta Nudes
- 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.
[edit] 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.
