I will never forget. I was in high school and listening to alternative music and someone said “If you want to hear a weird band. You ought to check out the Residents and they have a new album of Elvis songs”
The implication being the Sex Pistols and the Cure weren’t mainstream but they sure weren’t as submervise as the Residents. I bought 1989s The King and Eye immediately.
In retrospect, it probably wasn’t a good jumping in spot ( the Allmusic review of 2.5 stars feels accurate) - I probably would have had a better reaction to their first two much more loved albums- but regardless I now had the Residents in my life.
In college, I became good friends with a big fan of the band. “Cult Band” is a term that gets thrown around a lot but they truly are the definition of that.
I have always been interested in what they are doing and they always seemed to be on the brink of new technology. I am probably not proud to say that my favorite moments of theirs are what might be their most accessible- 1991s Freak Show and 2009s The Ughs (in this case both of these albums are rated 3 stars on Allmusic and are some of the lowest ranked on that site. So it goes.)
I did get to see the Residents in concert which seems like a bucket list band. I believe it was the 2008 Bunny Boy tour. I don’t feel like I remember a ton of details bit it was certainly interesting
A key component of the Residents was the mystery. Certainly, more recent artists have taken similar approaches, but the Residents were surely the first major artist, and we loved to guess. Could it be one or all of the Beatles? That was far fetched but a lot of people thought it could be Frank Zappa.
As the Residents certainly aged, there was a bit of the lifting of the veil with some alignment to the group’s business company The Cryptic Corporation.
Hardy Fox who died in 2018 was identified as the bands main composer. Homer Flynn remains the band’s manager and shares the songwriting credits with Fox from the band onset.
The original four members of the Cryptic Corporation included Flynn, Fox, John Kennedy and Jay Clem. Kennedy and Clem left the corporation in 1982 around the time the band was in financial straits amidst an European tour.
In the last few years, I have made friends with Residents fans online and can be found in these corners of the internet and had exchanges with artists I never would have suspected.
I finally sat down and watched the band’s documentary 2017s Theory of Obscurity. For a band that doesn’t really have a “history”, this doc couldn’t be any better.
It is a history of the band who as weird as they were, somehow managed to stay in the spotlight. It also interviews all the members of the Cryptic Corporation and follows their journey from Louisiana to San Francisco.
It also interviews the people who worked with them throughout - early friends, later era celebrities like Penn Jillette and those bands that are closest to descendants of the band- Primus and Ween and perhaps their cousin Devo. (Who came to some of the same artistic aesthetics independently of the Residents but Jerry Casale complains here that the record company focus on Mothersbaugh broke the band teamwork).
There is a lot of early footage. There’s the story behind their iconic before their time videos and there’s a ton of behind the scene stories like Vileness Fats and their other memorable videos, the origin of the art including the iconic eye and a look at the fandom
I don’t know that the doc could be any better. It might have been nice to have more info than the brief flash of info on Ralph Records or collaborators like Snakefinger but it would be too much.
I recommend it to any Residents fan even if you only have the slightest appreciation for them or are just hearing of them. It is the kind of documentary that makes want to go out and create. It’s also an amazing story of a true American artist that transcends music into visual arts.
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