Shrouded and Proud: Companion Notes for An Hour for The Residents

The Residents stand in time as an extraordinary avant-garde art collective and musical ensemble, one who have ceaselessly pushed the boundaries of what constitutes legitimate artistic expression since their inception in the late 60s. Enveloped in an alluring aura of enigma, they have cloaked their true identities for large parts of their career in line with their own self-postulated “Theory of Obscurity”. Their reputation for groundbreaking experimental music has manifested itself in a recording career that is fearless in its plundering and combining of genres, including fusions of many shades rock, jazz, electronic, and industrial styles. In many ways their sonic creations were some of the most influential to defy the post-war pop convention, daringly dismantling pop musics song structures and gleefully diving into the realm of the peculiar and thought-provoking. Conceptually the Residents have woven together a dizzying panoply of obscure narratives plucked from history or their own minds and have also rendered captivating visual products in their mesmerising live performances, record sleeves and music videos. With an extensive and diverse discography that has spanned over an impressive four decades, The Residents have forged an indelible legacy within the art and music realms, continuing to ignite inspiration and captivate their ardent fan base. To coincide with a recent “An Hour for the Residents…” broadcast on Noods Radio that celebrates the band, profiles some of their influences as well as sharing various interview excerpts from over the years Spice Route has released some companion notes to the show for your delectation……

I realise that this may be an extreme exercise in both information overload and pissing in the wind. It’s highly presumptious that anyone would want to listen to an hour of my waffle and then follow that by reading 3000 words of supplementary toss! But if you’re feeling particularly masochistic I would suggest reading these notes first as they will help the uninitiated with orientate themselves in the vast and alien “Residential” landscape.

You see companionship is necessary as you’re about to descend in to a strange mirror world - a parallel universe where the rules of pop music have been dispensed with. In this world the Beatles did not call themselves the Beatles instead naming themselves the Residents and the band come from Shreveport, Louisiana rather than Liverpool. They privilege the tape recorder over their instruments, they wear masks and costumes to conceal their identity as the final product they release is far more interesting than their back stories or physical appearance, live shows are an opportunity for story telling and subversion rather than screaming fans and stadiums. Ladies and gentlemen it’s time to Meet The Residents.

Above is an from one of the first live recordings of the Residents albeit in a prototype manifestation before they had actually called themselves the Residents instead calling themselves Residents Uninc. Residents, Uninc. took the stage at the San Francisco club The Boarding House's regular "Audition Night" (an open mic night available to poets and performers) on October 18th 1971. Their performance lasted around thirty minutes and consisted mostly of loosely composed avant-garde musical pieces and poetry.

The group (who were dressed as high school cheerleaders) were introduced to the stage by a recorded tape featuring the voice of their mentor, the Bavarian avant-garde music theorist N. Senada, who also accompanied the group on saxophone. British multi-instrumentalist Philip Lithman later to be known by the sobriquet Snakefinger, performed alongside the group on violin, and the fabulous Miss Peggy Honeydew took to the stage near the end of the show to perform "D For Doorknob". The show closed with a recitation of the chant "The Letter 'C'" (also known as "The Three Most Important Things In The Whole Wide World”).

The performance is really the perfect calling card for the Residents as it ushered an unsuspecting audience into a crazed circus of noise rituals, freeform behaviour, demented chanting and cleverly contrived primitivism. It would set a design template for all future residents works that in the words of Ian Shirley, the official biographer of the band, was disturbing, unsettling, avantgarde yet strangely compelling. Or perhaps Homer Flynn, head designer for the band, said it best when he said that the two things the Residents really enjoy is making music that people have not heard yet and taking music that people have heard and making it sound like music that they haven’t heard yet. The feeling of uneasy familiarity that the band instilled in the audience that night with a performance that was part music hall show, part tribal ritual and part free jazz freak out was just the start of things to come in terms of playing with expectations…..

INFLUENCES

The Residents were an absorbent bunch and plucked fruit from a range influence trees - some of them musical, some of them non-musical. The films of David Lynch, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder and Federico Fellini; the writings of Marshall McLuhan and Kurt Vonnegut and visual arts particularly from the Dada camp were all shared influences amongst the band.

Musically, their influences were just as varied, with the likes of Moondog, Frank Zappa and The Beatles rubbing in alongside Billy May’s Big Fat Brass or peculiar ethnographic recordings. However for the sake of brevity I’ve picked out three key musical influences and we’ve heard music from all three so far within the show……

Harry Partch - The iconoclast hobo composer developed his own form of musical notation and invented his own instruments to create a singularly brilliant sonic statement and his approach to the organisation of sound very much underpins the theory of phonetic organisation.

Sun Ra - The work and aesthetic of the brilliantly eccentric astral jazz genius made such an impression of the Residents that two of them decided to try and get close to the man by getting cast as extras on Space is the Place, a film being produced by Ra in Los Angles, and met and conversed with the man himself and were impressed by the fact that Sun Ra was never not Sun Ra.

Captain Beefheart - Beefheart’s fusion of absurdist wordplay within a musical soup of blues, pyschedelia, avantgarde composition and experimental rock would be a perennial influence for the Residents heard most clearly in the corrupted singing style of the mysterious Singing Resident.

A Potted History of The Residents

In the mid 60s a group of school friends from Shreveport Louisiana, home of bluesman Leadbelly, started committing some of their embryonic musical experiments to tape recorders whilst still at high school. Such experiments played with the idea of what a band should be recording and as well as primitive explorations of drums, piano and guitar would also involve the bashing of household miscellany and crazed chanting.

After graduating the friends resolved to move closer to the epicentre of the burgeoning hippie movement and so they moved to California settling initially in San Mateo where they lived and worked for five years. They chose to pool pay checks to setup a communal fund for the purchase of studio and recording equipment that would further their musical enquiries. Over time their musical chops and skill at editing and manipulating tape became more advanced and a demo tape was prepared for Warner Brothers.

The tape was sent anonymously with only a return address and no names given to the authors of the music and recieved and reviewed by Hal Halverstadt who the group had hoped would appreciate their earnest experiments and, ideally, offer a major label platform from which to disseminate their artistic vision. Halverstadt was not enamoured with the contents of the tape, describing in an accompanying note sent by return as "okay at best", but nonetheless awarded it an "A for Ariginality". The tape was returned, and addressed to "Residents, 20 Sycamore St., San Francisco,"

The rejection provided the band with their name and galvanised them to use their new studio premises at Sycamore Street in San Francisco as a base from which to setup their own independent label and self release and distribute their own material as well as like-minded acts.

in 1972 Ralph Records was born and the Santa Dog EP was the first release and marked the start of a five decade plus recording career which has seen the band release over 60 albums as well as a staggering array of cultural product in other mediums including music videos, art films, interactive computer games, elaborate stage shows and rock operas, crime podcasts and they’ve even had a duckstab at writing novels as well all alongside releasing and distributing music from the likes of Yello, Tuxedomoon and others on Ralph to a dedicated worldwide fanbase via mail order.

There are too many albums and too much material to be able to list it all but for those looking for an imitation in to the cryptic world of residential music I recommend Meet The Residents, Commercial Album, Eskimo, Demons Dance Alone and Cube-E as your starter pack. They have used concepts as diverse as train wreck stories from the 19th century through to studies of nazism and for those who appreciate dark and shade an album based on obscure tales from the old testament.

Throughout their careers the band have been early adopters of technological innovations and were amongst the first wave of artists to fully embrace the full capabilities of synthesisers and sampling in both their live and studio practices. The E-mu Emulator and ARP Oddysey made their way in to the Residents sonic palette very quickly after their respective releases and as Jay Clem from the Cryptic Corporation alluded to in the interview with him included at the start of the programme the main instrument of the Residents is the studio itself.

Whilst on the subject of the Cryptic Corporation it seems opportune the inescapable overlaps that the history of the bands appointed management and PR company has with the band.

The Corporation was founded on July 31st 1976 by four members, John Kennedy (original President, and administration), Jay Clem (production, business and publicity), Hardy Fox (sound engineer and A&R), and Homer Flynn (graphic design and advertising).

The corporation helped enable the expansion and acceleration of the Residents creative vision as a commercially viable enterprise chiefly by managing self invested money and creating an infrastructure of production and distribution that allowed the band to gain in notoriety and build an avid fanbase hungry for products from the Ralph records mail order company.

Over time members of the corporation have peeled away. Clem and Kennedy left in the 80s due to personal and business reasons whilst Hardy Fox sadly passed in 2018 due to brain cancer. This left only the brilliant visual mind of Homer Flynn who now acts as captain of the Corporation after he decided that President Trump had made the title a dirty word.

Due to financial pressures Flynn had to stop operating Ralph as an independent and in 2010 announced that the mail order operation would close. Since then Flynn has made arrangements with Cherry Red and Klanggalerie that has seen further and archival material released

What’s perhaps most notable in these dual histories is that, if one accepts the prevailing wisdom in rumour circles created by fans, the histories are in fact more closely entwined. In a pre-death message to fans Hardy Fox admitted to being a lifelong member of the Residents and their chief sonic architect. The rumour mills have long speculated that the Singing Resident is none other than Homer Flynn with some fans spectrally analysing speech patterns to confirm the match.

Such speculation to Flynn is ultimately misguided. In a recent interview he said that those that needs answers aren’t paying attention - obscurity is its own reward.

Perhaps he’s right about this. If we pay attention to the product and not the people the Residents have created a body of work that is singular and fascinating. Their ultimate boxset is housed in the MOMA permanent archive and their conceptual and theatrical approach to music making and performance art has influenced legions of bands and devotees to create and explore at the fringes rather than walk through the centre. The who is not really important the what is all tha matters….

FRIENDS / RElatives / admirers

The Residents cast a wide net both in terms of bands who they helped expose to the world via Ralph and also via their influence. Here is a subjective list of bands who have benefitted from either one, in some cases both, of these sources…..

Renaldo & The Loaf

One of those acts that who were early absorbers of the the Residents were then lucky enough to be able to hand deliver their demo tape to the Residents at their Grove Street studios whilst visiting the USA in the late 70s from their native Portsmouth. So impressed were the Residents by the fusion of multi-instrumental dexterity with off centre tape sliced story telling that the duo of Brian Poole and David Jansen were signed to Ralph without delay and went on to enjoy a fruitful relationship with the label whilst both entities were operational.

Nolan Cook

Nolan Cook is a texan born musician who entered the Residents touring and live functions in the late 90s. A void had been left by the death of Snakefinger and this was partially filled when Cook was enlisted. Cook’s excellent on the guitar can be heard from 1998 onwards.

Les Claypool

Bassist/vocalist for Primus Les Claypool owes and frequently repays a debt to the Residents. His band Primus may be best known as creating the South Park theme tune but in their early years as an experimental rock/funk hybrid they drank heavily from the residential cup.

Claypool has gone on to tour and record extensively with Residents in their later years and Primus have regularly covered Residents tracks in their lice sets and on their records.

Fans

The novel crowdfunded remix album released in 2017 called I AM A Resident proved just how pervasive and intoxicating the faceless influence of the Residents has been. The success and popularity of the project wherein fans were allowed to remix and reversion previously released tracks is testament to the widespread embeddedness of the Residents credo. The fact that a band can so readily be remixed and recast by their fans using their own sense of sonic playfulness seems to capture the power of the theory of obscurity. When removed from the cult of personality that surrounds most rock bands music becomes art that is malleable and can be readily remade and reclaimed by others.

Whilst there are now countless high profile anonymous bands (Slipknot, Daft Punk to name two) none have gone to the lengths that the Residents did to protect and mythologise their existence. Whilst without the Residents we would definitely have had daring and experimental music one feels that the likes of Throbbing Gristle and the KLF would have definitely had different existences with the absence of the pioneering conceptual and sonic work laid down by the Residents. Here are some of the places where i feel the influence of the Residents has filtered into.

We start with the now semi-retired American multi-instrumentalist James Pants. Signed to Stones Throw throughout his career Pants’s music that took the idea of a one-man basement band into strange worlds utilising elements of woozy funk, exotica, new wave, hip-hop and avant rock in a divergent soup.

We can head to Germany and the DIY electronics and hip-hop label Tax Free. Founded by Max Graef based on, to quote directly from Graef “a love of underdog music, no limits in experimentation and in general an anti-market attitude”.

Tax-Free affiliates Montel Palmer are an odd beat supergroup comprised of DJ Cool Berlin, Fizzy Veins, Peter Graf York, TBZ and Tulips. Their whacked out excursions traverse dub sonics, blunted no wavery and the experimental fringes of electro and hip-hop. The tracks are often accompanied by smeared Residential style vocals, courtesy of Fizzy Veins, and to my mind the music of this group is where the maverick experimentalism of the Residents has found a home in the 21st century. As a sidenote Fizzy Veins is a big Snakefingers fan!