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<\/p>\nFew in the early 1970s might have predicted that one of music\u2019s strangest (and most original) acts would continue to tour and release new music well into the 21st century. But San Francisco-based avant garde collective The Residents have always confounded expectations.<\/p>\n
Though the group\u2019s history is by design murky and mysterious, it\u2019s generally accepted that the steadfastly anonymous group (of an unspecified number of persons) relocated from Louisiana to the Bay Area in the 1960s. Longtime Residents spokesman (group member?) and graphic artist Homer Flynn says that the individuals who would eventually create art as The Residents were drawn to the region. Coming from the American South, then home to political figures like George Wallace (\u201cthe original Trump,\u201d Flynn suggests), they were impressed with San Francisco\u2019s \u201csense of openness and fresh look at society and culture.\u201d<\/p>\n
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But they could easily have ended up elsewhere. \u201cIf they had a good landing spot in New York, they might’ve wound up there,\u201d Flynn suggests. \u201cBut as it was, they had friends and contacts in the Bay Area.<\/p>\n
By the late 1960s \u2014 years before they started billing themselves as The Residents \u2014 the collective began working in multimedia. The Residents were inspired by elements of the San Francisco hippie scene, yet considered themselves apart from it. \u201cThey kind of felt like they were on the fringes of that,\u201d Flynn says.<\/p>\n
Even in their earliest days, The Residents \u201chad a very strong commitment to a broad range of aesthetics,\u201d Flynn says. And because music was among the most accessible types of media, he says that they focused on that as their entry point. \u201cThey really didn’t consider themselves to be musicians as much as sound makers,\u201d he says. \u201cI think they considered themselves to be more of an art collective than a band or a group of musicians.\u201d Yet The Residents viewed multi-track recording as a gateway to creative expression.<\/p>\n
But for The Residents, the visual side of things has always been just as important as the music. Working under the alias Pore No Graphics, Flynn would be responsible for much of The Residents\u2019 visual iconography. From its distinctive album art \u2014 with mashups of The Beatles, Adolf Hitler, Dick Clark and other disparate historical and pop culture elements \u2014 to the group\u2019s tuxes, top hats and giant eyeballs, The Residents were distinctive and out-there visually in a way that matched their outsider music.<\/p>\n
To the uninitiated \u2014 or to music listeners fed a steady diet of commercially-oriented pop \u2014 The Residents\u2019 music can sometimes seem primitive or even haphazard. But though the creative collective sounds like nothing else, its sources of inspiration include some serious, highbrow artists. \u201cThey were huge fans of Sun Ra,\u201d says Flynn. He also mentions modern composers Harry Partch, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley as influences upon The Residents\u2019 musical aesthetic.<\/p>\n
The Residents\u2019 first public performance was in 1971 at a then-new venue on Bush Street, The Boarding House. Home to pop music and stand-up comedy shows, it might not have seemed a good fit for the avant-garde collective. But The Residents (joined by Philip \u201cSnakefinger\u201d Lithman) showed up for a Monday night open mic session. \u201cAnybody could go in and do 10-15 minutes,\u201d Flynn says.<\/p>\n
Flynn describes The Residents\u2019 premiere as \u201calmost a guerrilla attack on the club.\u201d Following what Flynn characterizes as \u201ca bunch of acoustic guitar playing folk singer types,\u201d The Residents were different<\/i>. He says that some in the audience appreciated it: \u201cThey were bored out of their asses and thought, \u2018Thank God something’s<\/i> happening!\u2019 But other people were like, \u2018Get this shit out of here!\u2019\u201d Flynn notes that the performance elicited the intended effect. \u201cPeople reacted,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd that was the most important thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Homer Flynn says that in the late \u201970s, The Residents\u2019 first three LPs \u2014 Meet the Residents<\/i>, The Third Reich \u2018n Roll<\/i> and Fingerprince<\/i>, each pressed in quantities of 1,000 copies or fewer \u2014 were hard to find. While The Residents\u2019 homes were filled with boxes of unsold records, there were very few places where discerning consumers could purchase them.<\/p>\n
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But after toiling in the under-underground for a decade, The Residents received something akin to a big break. In 1977 or \u201978, Paul Rambali, a writer for London-based NME<\/i> (New Musical Express<\/i>) visited San Francisco and discovered those records at Chris Knab\u2019s Aquarius Records on Castro Street. Rambali \u201cwrote up all three albums,\u201d Flynn says, \u201cgiving them two five-star and one four-star reviews. At that point, the records started flying out the door; The Residents regained their bedrooms.\u201d<\/p>\n
The group has occasionally flirted with mainstream success: Their 1979 album, Eskimo<\/i> (described by Flynn as \u201cthe most uncommercial album ever released\u201d,) sold in relatively massive quantities. \u201cIt drop-shipped 10,000 units on its first day,\u201d Flynn says. \u201cAnd it sold another 10,000 pretty quickly.\u201d The Residents would go on to create and release a massive body of work; to date there have been more than 60 Residents albums, 10 DVDs, numerous multimedia projects, many tours and a long list of art installations.<\/p>\n
The art collective that perversely billed itself on its debut LP as \u201cNorth Louisiana’s Phenomenal Pop Combo\u201d has, in its own strangely singular way, continued to exemplify San Francisco\u2019s tradition of hybridizing music and visual art.<\/p>\n
Flynn seems a bit amused when he notes that among the group\u2019s European fans, The Residents epitomize their romantic notions of San Francisco, of \u201cwhat a wild and crazy place it is.\u201d Quite recently, he was contacted by book publisher Taschen. The K\u00f6ln, Germany-based publisher is in the process of creating a book featuring iconic photos of the world\u2019s great cities. \u201cAnd what they want from me,\u201d Flynn says with pride, \u201cis that photo of The Residents at the Golden Gate Bridge. They felt like that was the perfect reflection back on Europeans\u2019 vision of San Francisco.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nobody knows for sure who\u2019s behind the masks at a Residents performance. And while it\u2019s understood that the lineup has changed over the years (spokesman Hardy Fox passed away in 2018), the group\u2019s anonymity seems to lend itself to the potential of continuing indefinitely. \u201cThe Residents are completely open to that,\u201d Flynn says. \u201cI see The Residents more as a spirit or a concept than a band or even an art collective.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stay tuned for more from The Residents…<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Few in the early 1970s might have predicted that one of music\u2019s strangest (and most original) acts would continue to tour and release new music well into the 21st century. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21702,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,38,41],"tags":[4651],"class_list":["post-21700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-avant-garde","category-incredibly-strange","category-interview","tag-the-residents","cat-7-id","cat-38-id","cat-41-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21700"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21703,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21700\/revisions\/21703"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}