SONIC TRANSPORTS: THE RESIDENTS ESSAY, PART 1

Meet The Residents

My Name Is Nobody

The first unusual thing about Meet The Residents – even before you get the record on the turntable – is that you never meet The Residents: The artists haven’t signed their names to their debut album. There are no faces either, only a nutty distortion of The Beatles. Which isn’t as evasive as you might think, because Meet The Residents takes the vocal and instrumental innovations of The Beatles – and Captain Beefheart – and rockets them out into deep space. Listening to the White Album or Trout Mask Replica, you’re never sure what you’re going to hear from one cut to the next; With Meet The Residents, you can’t predict what you’ll be hearing from one moment the next.

Forget about predictions – you can’t always be sure what it is you’re actually hearing. A lot of this music is utterly inexplicable, as in how are they making that sound? You can’t even grasp the well-it’s-a-synthesizer straw, because this low-budget, 1973 recording was plainly done by hand: It’s basically voices, piano, and winds; some guitar, bass, drums; occasionally, brass and violin; and lotsa percussion (undoubtedly including all sorts of household items and toys and debris and who knows what else). There are some distortion effects through mic and instrumental preparations, but it’s The Residents’ use of tape, the tracks they’ve razored and overdubbed and remixed and re-speeded, which makes their sound so uniquely bizarro.

And all these bizarrely unique tracks are served up dripping with a deliberate eccentricity and a playfully grotesque sense of humor. Listening to this music, you can feel The Residents staring straight out at you, their teeth bared in the kind of fixed grin that’s ordinarily symptomatic of clinical dementia.

By the time the needle has lifted, Meet The Residents seems to have been everything: really bitchen, funny as hell, abrasive, druggy, exotically lush and dreamy, relentlessly surprising, amateurish, highly sophisticated, incoherent, visionary, and even vaguely insulting (if you’re the type who takes personally an insult from someone who sleeps in the subways). The album can leave you feeling put on, put down, and put through a wringer. Of course, my feeling is that anybody who’s worked so hard to put out music as novel and stimulating as this is actually putting you on a pedestal (but maybe that puts me in the minority).

How do things like this happen? Well…

Louisiana Story

The Mississippi River demarcates northeastern Louisiana, hatcheting into the state’s profile a 60-degree wedge: the bridge of a nose, the nostril of which is Baton Rouge, state capital and official orifice through which the government snorts information and money. An alternate passage branching off the Mississippi is the Red River, which cuts west in a diagonal across the state and eventually tilts straight up for a northwardly spurt into Arkansas. But some 15 miles southeast of the Red River’s tack – nestled in its valley, perhaps? – lies a berg that, after New Orleans, is the largest city in the state: Shreveport.

From this humble, if not crippling, locale came what is probably the most bizarre phenomenon in the history of American music.[1] Baby-boom babies all, The Residents found each other when they were high school students in the early 1960s, and built a friendship around well played 45s, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, television, and their own secret clubhouse. Graduation left them facing a future of college, jobs, and/or the draft, all within the redneck idiom they’d come to know and hate. So they made a break for it, and circa 1966, took off for San Francisco.

They settled a few miles South of S.F., in San Mateo, and pretty soon musical instruments and recording equipment began piling up in their digs. By 1970, they’d edited their jams, experiments, noises, accidents, etc., into two album-length reel-to-reel tapes, Rusty Coat Hangers for the Doctor and The Ballad of Stuffed Trigger. A year later, they felt ready for The Big Time and submitted a third opus to Warner Brothers; somewhat prematurely, they called it The Warner Brothers Album and adorned it with the company’s logo. Not having bothered to adopt a group name, and not caring to divulge their own identities, they sent the tape anonymously, with only a return address. The material was deemed unsuitable for Warners’ needs at the present time, and came back some months later in a package addressed to “Residents” – an appellation that they figured they might just as well keep, and it was as The Residents that they completed a fourth tape, Baby Sex.

In 1972 they relocated to San Francisco and started their own label, Ralph Records – the name a holdover from their high school days, when ‘calling Ralph’ was the popular euphemism for puking. Santa Dog, a package of two 45s, was the first Ralph emission, released that same year, a few days before Christmas. In April of 1974, Ralph launched its first LP, Meet The Residents.

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang

Only a few of Meet The Residents’ cuts are discreetly compartmentalized after the fashion of most pop albums. Most often, one crazy patch of music abuts another, or else the songs dovetail and slippery segues, where a phrase abruptly collapses into a seizure of repetitions which draws in weird new life forms that crowd out the old piece altogether – that’s how the voice of “Boots” gets you into “Numb Erone,” how “Numb”’s piano leads to “Guylum Bardot”… (Whether you’re hearing more of “Numb” or the start of “Bardot” is your problem.) Ultimately, the album takes on the free-association quality common to a lot of Surrealist art. Or if you prefer, the whacked-out sounds and hallucinatory overlappings of Meet The Residents makes it the musical equivalent of head comics. After all, The Residents may have been living in San Mateo in the late ‘60s, but they didn’t exactly sit out San Francisco’s acid-soaked Summer of Love – I doubt if they passed up anything that could help them shed their Shreveport skins.

You certainly won’t find many shreds of Louisiana in Meet The Residents. “Infant Tango,” one of the best cuts on the album, culminates in a raucously noisy, upbeat dance for winds and brass: a procession that’s always reminded me of the jaunty music played by the Black funeral bands of New Orleans (all the way down to the rough harmonies of rusty intonation and/or cheap instruments.) But that’s probably just me. The closest the album comes to an explicit Southern allusion is the home-with-my-pappy-the-colonel piano that opens “Spotted Pinto Bean.” And those harmonious gals a-singin’ “Spotted Pinto bean is leaving, / Leaving on a midnight streaming / Tears behind him all the way” also suggest something autobiographical: a vitellone making a break for it – and probably up to no good out there, in light of the ominous explosion of distant thunder which closes the cut.

The image of the homeboys far from home & family and house & hearth is also in “Seasoned Greetings,” where a shining Resident face says, “Merry Christmas, Mom. Merry Christmas, Dad. And Merry Christmas, Sis. I love you,” to the quivering delight of a climaxing piano. In part what’s slipping out here are the loony Christmas records The Beatles sent to their fan clubs. (In a few years, The Residents would be mailing seasoned greetings to their own W.E.I.R.D. devotees.)[3] But maybe they did get too busy to go home for Christmas (if they’ve ever visited “home” again): “N-ER-GEE (Crisis Blues)” picks up right from “Seasoned Greetings,” with a Stepin-Fetchit-on-mescaline voice saying, “It’s Christmas, but nobody seems to be raisin’ much of a fuss.”

Escape is what this record is all about: escape from mom and dad and family, escape from Christmas and Thanksgiving and church and marriage and school and business and the military; escape from music and art too, from how we’ve been told to hear and see and think and live; escape from tradition, public opinion, respectability – all the code names for conditioning. And like every bust out, Meet The Residents is also an education in how you can breach the walls too.

The Wild Bunch

James Agee described how, in the golden days of the Keystone Studios, Mack Sennett used to hire

a “wild man” to sit in on his gag conferences, whose whole job was to think up “wildies.” Usually he was an all but brainless, speechless man, scarcely able to communicate his idea; but he had a totally uninhibited imagination. He might say nothing for an hour; then he’d mutter, “You take…” and all the relatively rational others would shut up and wait. “You take this cloud…” he would get out, sketching vague shapes in the air. Often he could get no further; But thanks to some kind of thought-transference, saner men would take this cloud and make something of it. The wild man seems in fact to have functioned as the group’s subconscious mind, the source of all creative energy.[4]

What The Residents did is make the Wildman chairman of the board. True Surrealists, they deliberately set out to release the subconscious and let it call more of the shots – how else could they expect to dredge up anything, musical or otherwise, which would be untainted by their conditioning?

The asylum staffed by the inmates. Each Resident would be a wild man for the rest of the group, cancelling out what was egotistical, pretentious, or derivative in the others’ ideas. Together they’d be destroying intentionality by multiplying intentionality (to use John Cage’s expression). This approach opened them to musical surprises reminiscent of the Surrealists’ “exquisite corpses,” where several artists would create a single drawing without seeing the preceding collaboration(s): At the end of the evocative, beautifully paced “Rest Aria,” you’re all set to bliss out on a reprise of the piano opening, but the ivories suddenly have a goofy saxophone tagging along with them.

Earlier in “Rest Aria,” the Disneyland-Baghdad atmosphere of its exotic oboe(?) melody is splintered by the addition of a dissonant, low-registered variation of itself. The melody is taken up again by an assured trumpet player, but it gets lost in a fruity tutti played with someone who apparently doesn’t know how to play the trumpet. Which brings us back to Sennett’s wild man: He couldn’t construct gags, but he was essential to Keystone komedy because he had a totally uninhibited imagination. In other words, it isn’t necessary to be a good musician in order to make good music. (In fact, it’s usually the people who are most concerned with the traditions of virtuosity who have nothing to say in their music – if indeed they have any music of their own to play.) What is necessary is that an individual’s musical actions “have a part in his spiritual consciousness. With this assurance, his music will have everything it should of sincerity, nobility, strength, and beauty, no matter how it sounds” – that’s what Charles Ives said, and he knew.[5]

With the exception of their pianist, The Residents of Meet The Residents clearly have no orthodox musical chops whatsoever. And you’re forced to deal with that right up front: In the album’s opener, “Boots,” they rub your nose in painfully unprofessional singing and a tinny buzzing piano. Putting their worst foot forward is more than a point of honor with them, it’s the point of their music. They don’t cover up deficiencies, they build songs around them – ‘Look at me, I can’t sing!’ ‘I don’t know how to play this instrument at all, lissen!’

That’s one reason why The Residents value anonymity. It doesn’t matter who they are, or who’s joined them on a session – you could be doing this too. You don’t have to know how to play anything, you don’t need any special equipment. You just have to know how to hear – or at least know what it is you don’t want to hear anymore. The Residents have bigger fish to fry than being ‘rock stars.’ They want to decentralize American pop and create a for-real ethnic music.

Pulling the stick out of music’s ass means doing away with the cult of the artist, so besides keeping their sticky names and faces off their work, The Residents make sure to laugh at the idea of stardom. Both ideas were in Meet The Residents original cover, a mutilation of The Beatles’ kissers from their American debut album, Meet The Beatles. This failed to tickle Capitol Records, who’d put a lot of money into the idolization of The Beatles, and they compelled The Residents to alter the cover; apparently they felt less threatened by Pore No Graphics’ crustaceanized version of The Beatles “She Loves You” sleeve.[6] But both covers make the same point. The Residents we meet are (pre-) punk vandals, spray-painting Duchamp mustaches all over the Louvre. In “N-ER-GEE (Crisis Blues),” a Resident starts to sing along with his well-played 45 of “Nobody but Me,” but the Human Beinz get stuck in a “boogaloo”-ing groove, a dance of death that blows the music apart in a gale of wailing instruments, cymbal smashes, and explosions.

The aggrandizement (= $uccess) of any rock star depends on the consumer’s alienation from his or her own character and potentiality. That’s Pop’s heart of darkness, and the beat always goes on. Meet The Residents had to step off with a psychotic rendition of Nancy Sinatra’s “Boots”: That music I gonna walk all over you.

If you don’t watch out.

FOOTNOTES

1. The information that follows is taken from a variety of sources, including the official biography, The Cryptic Guide to The Residents (published by Ralph Records).

2. In August of 1977, after the first pressing of Meet The Residents had sold out, the group released a re-mastered and edited (about 7 minutes shorter) version of the album. My comments refer to this revision, which on the whole improved the original.

3. The official Residents fan club, W.E.I.R.D. (“We Endorse Immediate Residents Deification”), folded in 1981 chiefly because it demanded too much time and effort from its noble volunteers, Philip Culp and Mimi King.

4. James Agee, “Comedy’s Greatest Era” in Agee on Film – Reviews and Comments. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968, pp. 7–8.

5. Charles Ives, “Essays Before a Sonata” in Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings. Howard Boatwright, ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1961, p. 80.

6. Does anyone out there recognize “crawfish” as a slang verb meaning “to back down”?

Links to:

SONIC TRANSPORTS: The Residents Essay, part 2

SONIC TRANSPORTS: The Residents Contents

SONIC TRANSPORTS: Contents

For more on The Residents, see:

Film Review: The Eyes Scream

Film Review: Triple Trouble

Music Book: Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music, Second Edition

Music Lecture: My Experiences of Surrealism in 20th-Century American Music

Music: Radio Show #7, Postmodernism, part 4: Three Contemporary Masters

Music: Radio Show #26, Surrealism in 20th-Century American Music