Three Two One Contacts

Sometime back in the mid 90's I lived downstairs from this guy named Aaron who once claimed that he knew the guy who stole the eyeball head from the Resident member who now wears the black skull mask in the band. He told me that after a Residents gig in Washington D.C. a guy he knew, who was apparently a bit of a klepto, took him into the parking lot after the show, opening the hatch to the back of his car, and showed him the giant eyeball that he somehow purloined. Even though I can't recall how or why the one band member now wears a black skull mask, it still made for a funny story, as highly skeptical as I am over its authenticity. But my fascination and affection for The Residents goes back a bit of a ways, and I hope I can remember some of the timeline as I'm typing it all out. Starting, of course, with their obvious visual aspect.

It was right around the same time, early to mid 1980's, when MTV would show that one Residents' video with the occasional cryptic reference to their image without ever really mentioning who they were or basically, what their deal was other than being from San Francisco -- which I figured out when MTV was doing a contest right around the same time where the winner would go on a cruise around the city with other Frisco artists including Journey, Jefferson Starship, AND The Residents! (I would later learn that the band really hails from Shreveport, Louisiana and later defected to San Francisco, which they would then become integrated into that city's famous avant-garde scene)

Speaking of Jefferson Starship, it was also during the very same time that they were running ads for the cruise contest (which I really wanted to enter but I wasn't eighteen years old yet) when the channel was also heavily rotating their video to the song "Laying It On The Line" which, mysteriously, also featured The Residents in background scenes. Something that blew my friends' minds when I showed it to them years later, but only piqued my curiosity even more at the time.



I spent much of the late 80's and early 90's digging up anything Residents that I could find. In the form of vinyl, The Simpsons creator Matt Groening's book about the band (written in the 70's!), and whatever music magazine articles I could dredge up at the time. I managed to get most of their early output on record, quite a feat since their first album came out in 1972 (on their own label, Ralph Records), although vinyl was still slightly easier to come by back then, and not all of The Residents's works were out on CD -- in fact very little -- at that time. And I was hooked. Joe was hooked. Our friend Geena was hooked. And the three of us spent probably the majority of the year 1990 mining the music stores for anything by Ralph Records, automatically drawn to anything with four eyeballs in top hats. It was definitely a wacky era, and safe to say their exposure opened my mind to most anything avant-garde or slightly askew musically than even one listen to Trout Mask Replica did for me back in college. Yup, them's were some good times, by gum.

Our favorite album, still to this day, is their 1976 release Third Reich And Roll which famously featured an image of Dick Clark on the cover dressed as a Nazi. The album is little more than twisted fractures of old rock & roll classics, from "Rock Around The Clock", "Telstar", and even a German version of "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag". Joe once said that the album reminds him of an imaginary story about a last man to survive a nuclear holocaust, who wanders the scorched earth trying to remember what music once sounded like with his brain half eaten by radiation. It's all I can think about any time I hear anything off this album.

This video for their version of "Land Of A Thousand Dances" is an example of the album's sound, and I love how rudimentary the production values are to where one of the band members runs out in front of the camera seconds after the video starts rolling, because he is obviously mounting and starting the camera first.



Collecting Residents music videos and concert tapes became another obsession for awhile. One of my keenest unearthings was a then extremely rare video of The Residents feature film Whatever Happened To Vileness Fats?, which is footage taken from their fourteen-hour unfinished movie Vileness Fats, shot in black and white between the yeas 1972 and 1976. After dropping the project, bootleg copies of the footage that were stitched together without dialogue (they never got around to filming sound, other than the soundtrack and a few lines here and there) into some form of semi-cohesive plot circulated universities and sci-fi conventions, but was never releases in any official capacity. In fact I'm not sure if it still is unreleased to this day. I may have to research that eventually. I still have the rickety old thing on VHS.

A short clip from Whatever Happened To Vileness Fats, featuring Fats' mother, who used to make me cry just looking at her. I got this film back in late 1991, shortly after my own grandmother passed away from cancer, and this woman looks so frighteningly like her it almost hurt to look at the screen, even all the way down to the frames of her glasses. Except, of course, for the weird bulbous body and Dr. Caligari house and whatnot.



It was also around the time of 1991 that the band was going through its "Cube-E" period, where the group began to explore the history of American music in a three-part project that focused on country music (Hank Williams), blues-based "negro" influences (James Brown) and rock 'n roll (Elvis Presley). One of the most mind-warping moments I can still remember was tuning in to my favorite show Night Flight and catching a bizarre moment with Conway Twitty singing as the Residents in their "cubist" eyeball full-body costumes danced merrily behind him. For years I thought I had dreamed this, seeing as how I often used to watch Night Flight in a half-asleep, post-partied-out haze. God, I miss that show.



Anyway, my time is running up here and I have to dash off to buy a new pair of shoes. I'll blather on more about The Rez in a later post. But in the meantime, get a copy of Icky Flix on DVD if you still can. Lots of great Residents video footage, including other Ralph Record parallel universe Resident affiliates Renaldo And The Loaf. The Conway Twitty/Residents collaboration is actually an "Easter Egg" in the opening menu.