A chance to Meet the Residents
Trippy art collective has been pushing the musical envelope for four decades
Meet the Residents was released in 1974. “The First Album by North Louisiana’s Phenomenal Pop Combo” by San Francisco-based art collective the Residents featured an augmented image of the Meet the Beatles cover. The Fab Four’s faces were covered with collage cut-outs and graffiti. EMI and Capitol threatened legal action.
A second cover featuring four figures attired as the Beatles, but with crustacean heads — John Crawfish, George Crawfish, Paul McCrawfish and Ringo Starfish — was released. Any similarities between the two groups ceased there.
From the best-known, four-gianteyeballs-in-tuxedo-look to numerous variations, the Residents’ entire career has been carried out in total anonymity.
“It’s good for people to know, particularly at times like this, that you can remain anonymous and pursue art for art’s sake,” said the president of the Cryptic Corporation, which oversees the Residents’ affairs. “In the same way that they have pushed the limits of technology, the group has pushed the limits of the way that music is perceived in the mainstream media with its fame obsessions. It’s all about the art creation.”
Meet the Residents was the first salvo by the Residents and the band has been steadily producing for over four decades. Blending avant-garde music with genre-vaulting multimedia projects ranging from short film and video to CD-ROM and DVD releases and the 2015 documentary Theory of Obscurity, the group is often on the cutting edge of tech. Yet it also operates as a basic bass, drums, guitar, vocals combo whose music fits alongside such boundary-pushing artists as Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and Pere Ubu.
“At the moment, the group has reconstituted as a pretty classical four-piece band who, for the most part, are playing material from the catalogue as a straight-up group would, live without almost any samples,” said the president. “The group is so solid and a great lighting guy they worked with back in the day has returned, which is wonderful. Then there is a bit of video as well.”
Which all sounds like any other musical performance of note. But most “straight-up” rock bands don’t feature a singer in a skin-tight cow onesie backed by musicians with weird beak head masks named Eekie, Erkie and Cha Cha. And then there is the music itself.
The Residents specialize in deconstructing the classic song into strange cut-and-paste snippets of off-kilter instrumentation that favours rhythmic textures far more than melody. Long before the idea of industrial music, this crew was performing classics such as James Brown’s It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World so it sounded like so many Tin Men hammering beats on their bodies while a trippy, mechanical voice messed with the lyrics.
What does the president thinks it is that keeps people coming back to the band?
“At this point, after 45 years, they are still having fun,” he said. “And that’s as good as it gets in making art. There’s no question that people pick up on that honesty.”
There is also a new album coming from the band titled, Intruders. Expect to hear some of it on the In Between Dreams tour, which is focusing on more dreamlike and spacey songs from the group’s career.