Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard (17 page)

The Residents are outsiders among outsiders, strict adherents to a “Theory of Obscurity” that contends the best and purest art is made without any consideration for, or feedback from, an audience. They’ve produced dozens of albums over the past three decades and managed to maintain anonymity by disguising themselves in all public appearances. Their trademark disguise, large eyeballs they wear on their heads, along with a standard top hat and tuxedo, is a brilliant deconstruction of pop music’s cult of personality; the costume makes it impossible to identify and define band members (apparently four of them) in terms of age, race, gender, beauty, charisma, or sexuality and forces listeners to deal exclusively with the music itself.

While constantly operating on the periphery of pop, the Residents offered themselves as a powerful symbol of artistic independence and substance over celebrity. They pioneered a low-fi Dadaist style with no constraints except a commitment to the unusual. With bits of quirky-jerky noodling, electronic and industrial sound collages, a twisted Zappa/
Beefheart
humor, an avant-garde compositional sense, and childlike playfulness, the Residents prefigured the essential elements of punk, post-punk, new wave, and post-rock – and informed the styles of current groups from Primus to They Might Be Giants – without ever becoming part of a definable musical movement. And as bands and genres have come and gone, the Residents remain a step ahead of popular currents.

Dave Dederer, Presidents of the United States of America:

Discovering records like the Residents in high school was like finding another world. It was truly alternative at the time. If you had the records, you were one of a handful of people who did. It had an appeal on that level.

All we know of the the Residents’ early history is what they’ve told us: The members attended high school together in Shreveport, Louisiana, and moved to San Francisco in the early ‘70s. They made four albums’ worth of material before their first release – before they even had a name. They sent one of their early tapes, unsolicited and unidentified, to the Warner Bros, executive that signed
Captain Beefheart
. When it was returned to “Resident” at their address, they had found their name.

It was clear that to maintain the desired level of anonymity, the Residents would have to handle all business operations themselves. They set up their own label, Ralph Records, to release Residents material, and their own design company, Pore No Graphics, to create album art. And soon after, four “friends from Shreveport” arrived to form Cryptic Corporation, a marketing and management company that served as an umbrella organization for all Residents-related projects. Cryptic members such as Jay Clem and Homer Flynn have served as band spokespeople as well. By keeping close control over both the creative and business affairs of the group, the Residents served as an important model for future generations of do-it-yourselfers.

Tim Gane, Stereolab:

It’s music that came from another solar system. The way the Residents recorded wasn’t like anybody else, it was just so special. They sum up all sorts of reactions and emotions and I can’t see really why. It’s very poignant music. We had this design [on our early self-released singles], which I liked because I thought it looked like the guy from Ralph Records.

Throughout their more than 25-year career, the Residents’ primary order of business has been the mangling of pop convention. They immediately took aim at the top: their 1973 debut,
Meet the Residents
, parodied the Beatles’ first album. The follow-up,
The Residents Present the Third Reich and Roll
, featured classic ‘60s songs redone as if from a Nazified parallel universe and offered an outrageous but potent satire of pop music as fascism for youth. Perhaps the group’s most cutting stab at the heart of music culture came with 1980’s
Commercial Album
. Featuring 40 one-minute songs (to fit in ad slots which they bought on local radio stations), the record explored music as a sales tool and mocked the Top 40 format that made music’s emotional value meaningless by ranking songs according to commercial success.

Sean O’Hagen, High Llamas:

I like the anonymity they’ve maintained without being totally faceless. I don’t tike the idea of pictures or people knowing what we look like or who’s actually in the band. We’ve never had any pictures of us on our records. I like the idea of having a floating membership, with a name, a musical community, and the sound. The Residents managed to do that.

Later works continued to offer the Residents’ bizarre perspective on otherwise familiar material: The
Eskimo
album practiced phony ethnomusicology; their
American Composers
series (offering Residents-style covers of Gershwin, Sousa, Hank Williams, and James Brown) and
Cube E
series (attacking early American music and Elvis songs) were good for kicks as well. A deranged cover of the Rolling Stones’
Satisfaction
in 1976 came right in time for the Residents to emerge as a visible outside influence on punk irreverence, and later, with the semipopular
Duck Stab / Buster & Glen
album, on new wave eccentricity.

David Byrne:

Their influence was in just the fact that they existed. Not directly musically, but the fact that they are doing such original work is encouragement. You can take it as, “It’s okay to go that far out, to push things that far. Somebody else is doing it in their way, so I can do it in my way.”

Video has been at the forefront of the Residents’ work from the start. Acknowledged as one of the first groups to develop narrative music video, the Residents weaved together visual and musical ideas years before MTV existed. And unlike today’s videos, work such as
One Minute Movies
(a companion to their
Commercial Album
) had more in common with avant-garde film than cola advertisements. By the early ‘80s, when the group went on tour with their
Mole Show
– a fantasy “opera” about the struggles between the immigrant laborer Moles and the industrial xenophobe Chubs – the Residents were pioneering a concept that blurred the lines between concert, theater, visual art, video, animation, and dance.

In the ‘90s, the Residents have increasingly incorporated computer technology in their work. Recordings have become less of a focus, and the group has made a reputation for itself in the world of CD-ROM. Beginning with 1993’s
Freak Show
, the Residents have produced award-winning discs that mix music with software design, computer animation, video, and narrative. In 1994, they were one of the first groups to offer an enhanced CD that could be played in both a disc player and drive. As removed from mainstream music as ever, the Residents have also managed to maintain their place at the forefront of art.

DISCOGRAPHY

Meet the Residents
(Ralph, 1974; ESD, 1988)
; the defiantly eccentric debut album, reissued with the initial four-song release,
Santa Dog
.

The Third Reich and Roll
(Ralph, 1976; ESD, 1987)
; a parody of fascism in the commercial culture of pop music.

Duck Stab / Buster & Glen
(Ralph, 1978; ESD, 1987)
; the closest they came to a pop record, this was reissued with the
Goosebump
EP.

Not Available
(Ralph, 1978; ESD, 1988)
; a 1974 recording that was made with no intention of release.

Eskimo
(Ralph, 1979; ESD, 1987)
; a bit of fake ethnomusicology that is nevertheless one of their most musically successful recordings.

Diskomo
/
Goosebump
(Ralph, 1980)
; a disco remix of
Eskimo
, with an added EP of nursery rhyme-based songs.

The Commercial Album
(Ralph, 1980; ESD, 1988)
; the best-known album, a collection of 40 one-minute songs (increased to 50 on the reissue).

March of the Moles
(Ralph, 1981; ESD, 1988)
; the first installment of the
Mole Trilogy
, including the
Intermission
release.

The Tunes of Two Cities
(Ralph, 1982; ESD, 1990)
; the second part of the
Mole Trilogy
.

Residue of the Residents
(Ralph, 1983)
; a compilation.

George & James
(Ralph, 1984)
; the first of the
American Composers
series, featuring the music of George Gershwin and James Brown.

Whatever Happened to Vileness Fats
(Ralph, 84; ESD, 1993)
; soundtrack to a documentary about the band’s aborted
Vileness Fats
project, reissued with their
Census Taker
soundtrack.

The Big Bubble
(Black Shroud-Ralph, 1985; ESD, 1990)
; skipping the third part, this is the “fourth” and final part of the
Mole Trilogy
.

Heaven?
(Rykodisc, 1986)
; a random and decontextualized compilation.

Hell!
(Rykodisc, 1986)
; same as
Heaven?
, but with worse songs.

Stars & Hank Forever
(Ralph, 1986)
; the second of the
American Composers
series, spotlighting the music of John Philips Sousa and Hank Williams.

The Eyeball Show (13
^th
Anniversary) Live in Japan
(Ralph, 1986)

God in Three Persons
(Rykodisc, 1988)
; a record investigating sexual obsession, also released in excerpted instrumental form as
God in Three Persons Soundtrack
.

Buckaroo Blues & Black Barry
(Ralph cass., 1989)
; the combined first and second parts of
Cube E
, a Residents-style deconstruction of early American music.

The King & Eye
(Enigma / Restless, 1989)
; the third part of the
Cube E
project, a collection of Elvis songs done in the Residents’ inimitable style.

Stranger Than Supper
(UWEB Special Products, 1991)
; a collection of live recordings and rarities.

Freak Show
(Cryptic Official Product, 1990; ESD, 1995)
; the band’s first CD-ROM project.

Our Finest Flowers
(Ralph / ESD, 1993)
; a “greatest hits” collection to celebrate the group’s 20
^th
anniversary, it features reconstructed and recombined bits of past songs.

Gingerbread Man
(ESD, 1994)
; an Enhanced CD, also released as music-only, featuring a series of character sketches.

Bad Day on the Midway
(Inscape, 1995)
; a CD-ROM game, released in music-only form as
Have a Bad Day
(ESD, 1996)

Hunters: The World of Predators and Prey
(Milan / BMG, 1995)
; the soundtrack to a Discovery Channel series on wild animals.

Our Tired, Our Poor, Our Huddled Masses
(Rykodisc, 1997)
; a terrific two-CD 25-year retrospective.

TRIBUTE:
Eyesore: A Stab at the Residents
(Vaccination, 1996)
; a collection of quirky post-Residents artists such as Primus, Stan Ridgeway, Cracker, and Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 doing Residents songs.

PERE UBU

David Thomas, Pere Ubu (from Search & Destroy #6, 1978):

The vision is to create modern music. If indeed we are not going to reach the future, somebody better bring the future now.

In their mix of classic ‘60s rock with wheezy synthesizers, harsh found sounds, fractured and angular song structures, and absurd humor, Pere Ubu was a pre-punk band with a post-punk sound. More organic and tuneful than most experimental music, but too stark and disjointed for consideration by the mainstream, they were purveyors of strange folk music for a post-industrial age. Commonly branded “avant garage” for their duel loyalties to down-home rock and out-there noise, Pere Ubu’s imprint can be detected on husky-voiced guitarists such as Frank Black and Bob Mould (as well as their respective original bands, the Pixies and
Hüsker Dü
), and on newer obscurantists like Pavement and Guided by Voices.

Bob Pollard, Guided by Voices:

They swam in a sea of their own, they did their own thing. Along with that whole Cleveland thing, Pere Ubu were way ahead of their time.

At its core, Pere Ubu is a Cleveland band. Its roots were in the suburban Midwestern tradition of garage rock, but they played like a band of intellectuals lost in a post-apocalyptic no-man’s land (which in the pre-urban renewal ‘70s, was just what Cleveland looked like). Pere Ubu arose in 1975 out of the ashes of Rocket from the Tombs, one of a small group of local bands (including the Electric Eels and the Mirrors) that played original music. Two Rocket alumni, David Thomas (whose stage name was Crocus Behemoth) and Peter Laughner, put together a group of local musicians (which Thomas named Pere Ubu after a character from a play by the French absurdist Alfred Jarry) as a one-time only studio band to record two Rocket favorites,
30 Seconds over Tokyo
and
Heart of Darkness
.