D Howland Abbott
There are several long-standing theories regarding the identities of the Residents. One of the earliest (and most amusing) is that the Residents are in fact the Beatles. This was an appealing notion to listeners in the early 1970s, who were still reeling from the sudden self-destruction of the collaborative effort between those strange, beautiful boys. It didn’t help that the Residents’ first full-length record, Meet the Residents, boasted artwork lifted directly from the Beatles’ album Meet the Beatles, with the faces of John, Paul, George and Ringo having been altered with a marker so that they had crossed eyes, nose rings and devil horns. Some fans held onto this belief for many years, but most eventually abandoned it when they were forced to acknowledge that the Residents’ output simply didn’t sound like it could have possibly been made the same group of people.
Another, nominally more likely guess was that the Residents were a side project of Don Van Vliet, also known as Captain Beefheart. Captain Beefheart was an avant-garde composer and musician, as well as a childhood friend and artistic contemporary of the legendary Frank Zappa, who was releasing music that sounded nearly as strange as the music of the Residents at the time. The similarities are undeniable, from Beefheart’s unhinged howl to the schizophrenic changes of tempo which characterized his early recordings. Although this theory has never officially been disproven, an astute listener will recognize that the sounds the Residents produced had a strangeness to them that was distinctly their own.
My own personal conjecture, when I had only just recently discovered the Residents, was that the Singing Resident had some familial connection to Les Claypool, the virtuosic bass player and front man of 90’s alt-funk band Primus. Claypool’s singing voice—such as it is—sounds uncannily like the Singing Resident’s drawl, and he is an unabashed acolyte of those mysterious eyeballs.
I learned that none of these theories are correct on the afternoon of October 31st, 2002, as I stood at the front of a very long line which was forming in front of the Warfield Theater in San Francisco. I was waiting to see the Residents perform for the first time, and I had arrived nearly eight hours before the doors of the venue were supposed to open. I needed to be as close to the stage as possible.
My father had flown me to San Francisco from Utah, where I still lived at the time. He had no point of reference for the Residents, but even at that early stage of my fixation it was obvious that it was important for me to be there. Dad had been taking me to shows since I was twelve years old, and he always had an eye for the ones that mattered. Although I was only just becoming familiar with the Residents in 2002, they had been all I could talk about for months. For my part, I was just happy to be there. For his… Well, it was no grand gesture. Just a father doing something nice for his son, and perhaps a little bit of cosmic foresight. For more than an hour, the line consisted of only my father and myself, until a sincerely overweight man in his mid-forties took his place behind us. My excitement over the occasion made me uncharacteristically gregarious, and I struck up a conversation.
After chatting for a few moments about our favorite Residents projects, the overweight gentleman got a look on his face which indicated that he was about to attempt to blow my mind. He reached into the satchel he had strapped to his back and removed a green folder, and out of the folder he very carefully pulled an old newspaper clipping advertising the Residents’ 1977 album Fingerprince. It was an interesting artifact, but I was obviously underwhelmed until the man said, ‘Look closer.’
He handed me the clipping, and I saw that it had been autographed by the Residents. Although the clipping was yellowed and battered, there were two clearly legible signatures in the margins. The first said ‘A Resident’. The second said ‘Mr. Resident’.
‘You’ve MET them!?’, I gasped, almost not believing but having difficulty denying the visceral reaction I’d had to those handwritten words. He said he had. ‘Who ARE they??’
The man smiled at me cryptically and said, ‘I COULD tell you their names—could but won’t—but then you’d know, and the names wouldn’t mean anything to you anyway.’
I stood in that spot for another six hours, processing this information. It had never occurred to me that the Residents might not be anyone but the Residents. Their meticulous protection of their identities had made my guesses comically overblown.
The first evening that I spent with the Residents was one of the most important of my entire life. The performance that they were touring in 2002, for their most recent album Demons Dance Alone, was uncharacteristically somber. Demons Dance Alone was written and recorded in the three weeks or so following the terrorist attacks the previous September; it finds the Residents in a contemplative mode, raising questions that have no answers. Press materials released for Demons indicated that one of the Residents had family aboard one of the hijacked airplanes. This information was surprising for the fact that it was a deeply personal revelation from the men behind the masks—much more so than anything they had admitted to during the first thirty years of their collaboration.
The stage show based on Demons Dance Alone was profoundly beautiful. Taking the stage for the first time without the trademark Eyeball masks, the Residents were dressed in shrouds made from reconstituted camouflage tarps, looking like a cross between sinister beekeepers and ambulatory trees. The Singing Resident himself was wearing a dapper camouflage tuxedo and a grotesque tragedian’s mask. He shared vocal duties with the beautiful and mysterious Miss Molly Harvey, who collaborated with the Residents onstage and on record between 1999 and 2004.
The Residents were in a confessional mode that evening; the rule of the Demons Dance Alone tour stated that over the course of each performance, every one of the performers was required to come forward and make a personal statement, whether it be in the form of an instrumental solo or a monologue. These statements were, of course, somewhat convoluted and cryptic—they were still the Residents, and of course they couldn’t lower the veil too much. The goal—and the overwhelming effect—of this new, world-weary incarnation of the Residents was to present a song cycle designed to guide the viewer through the various stages of the grieving process. The crowd was ushered through anger, denial, bargaining and acceptance as the tone and color of the selections on the set list ebbed and flowed.
The climactic moment of the Demons Dance Alone tour involved a brief appearance by one of the Eyeball masks. It was brought to the front of the stage, wrapped in a red velvet sheet, by the dancing demon himself—a man in a red leotard and a satanic rubber mask, who symbolized the specter of death that lodged itself above the doorframe of everyone living in America at the time of the attacks. Removed from the shoulders of the performers, with the velvet flowing out beneath it, the Eyeball looked like a disembodied head. The Singing Resident sang a sweet song to it, gave it a kiss on the place where its cheek should be, and it was carried away. This was the official retirement of the image that had defined the Residents for three decades.
I was sitting front and center, less than five feet away from the Singing Resident as he capered around the stage. Close enough to see the fillings in his teeth when he would throw his head back and roar. Close enough to peer up under the bottom edge of the mask to an unfamiliar face.
I have thought many times in the years that have passed since that evening that I would not be okay if I had not been there to witness it. I was all of twenty years old when the terrorist attacks occurred; I was living on my own for the first time, just finding my footing in a world which already felt dangerous, when suddenly everything changed. I was afflicted, as many people were, with severe post-traumatic stress after that morning when I watched, terrified, as the towers fell—first one, and soon the other.
I distinctly remember the days immediately following the attacks during which all air traffic was grounded. The world was still as everyone held their breath, their ears tuned to the deafening silence of empty clear skies. On Saturday, September 17th, 2001, a military airplane created sonic waves in the airspace over my home in Provo, Utah and I ran outside into the late summer sun fully expecting to die. I looked up and down the street, and there were all of my neighbors with their necks craned to the sky, that same look of horrified anticipation on their faces.
A Residents performance on Halloween in San Francisco—their home turf—is tradition, and the Demons Dance Alone tour stands as their greatest achievement. I believe that I was at point blank range for the finest performance that they ever gave, and I thank god for it. That the Residents were capable of seizing that enormous terror and transforming it into something beautiful and helpful is a testament to their versatility and power.
The Demons Dance Alone tour was generally considered to be the Residents’ last. The farewell gesture to the Eyeball mask solidified in the minds of the Residents’ few and faithful fans that we had seen the last of them. I considered myself unbelievably lucky to have seen them just that once, and for six years I was resigned to the belief that the once would have to be enough.
However, towards the end of the 00’s, they suddenly became very active again: between 2008 and 2013, I saw them perform another six times. The Eyeballs were summarily gone, but it seemed that the Residents were eager to prove that they had other tricks up their sleeves. In one performance, the Singing Resident was an emotionally damaged man in a filthy, full-body bunny suit who believed that he was the only person on the planet capable of preventing a Biblical apocalypse. In another, he was an elderly clown wearing a bathrobe and ridiculously oversized shoes. These were relatively stripped down performances, but no less powerful. For five years, the Residents toured with relative regularity, and I became accustomed to crossing state lines to witness and internalize the statements which characterized the final stages of their career.
Intermission
I suppose that now is as good a time as any to admit that I have been lying to you, dear reader. I have known for years what the Residents’ names are. One can’t go as far down a rabbit hole as I have in pursuit of an obsession without discovering this kind of information. Personal information was much easier to protect in the 1970s and 1980s during the peak of the Residents’ career and before the advent of the internet. Truthfully, it doesn’t take a very discerning Residents fan to put the pieces together and make a guess which ends up being uncomfortably close to the truth.
Although a handful of the dozens of collaborators the Residents have worked with over the years have found themselves incapable of protecting the mystery and have spilled the beans, the Residents firmly deny what is essentially the truth about who they are. When their notoriety reached such a level that the cat was inevitably let out of the bag, they began to stretch the notion of identity even further, claiming that the people who are responsible for the Residents are in fact different personalities than the people who frequently appear onstage.
If you’re waiting for me to tell you who they are, you are going to have a long wait. I consider the keeping of that secret to be a sacred responsibility. If you really want to know, you’ll have to figure it out for yourself.
Struggle
About a week before the Northwest stops on the Residents’ Wonder of Weird tour, I contacted a friend of mine who enjoyed a brief collaboration with the Residents. I explained to him my desire to meet the Residents, and asked if he had any suggestions regarding how to approach them. This friend—who asked not to be identified, naturally—provided me with the email address of the Residents’ tour manager, an older German fellow named Hein Fokker, and told me that the best way to go about it was to try to set something up officially. I have never labored over any written communication so much in my life as I did over the note I sent to MR. Fokker.
I received his response in less than an hour: “Although I understand your urge we unfortunately cannot comply with your request while we never allow anybody backstage in the vicinity of The Residents.” I wasn’t surprised at all.
I was disappointed, certainly, but almost immediately after reading Mr. Fokker’s response I felt a tremendous sense of relief. I had asked permission to violate the sanctity of the most sacred place on my map, and whatever it may have meant to me it wouldn’t have meant a thing to them. I resigned myself to taking what they had to offer at those shows, just as I always had, and trusted that whatever these final performances presented would be enough to help me be able to say goodbye.
And so began the Weekend of Weird. I had been planning for months: buying concert tickets, securing bus tickets to Seattle for the first of the two shows on the Thursday of that week and making arrangements with my friends there to bring me back to Portland for the Friday show, hoarding money so I would be able to ransack the merchandise table, and just generally leaving not the tiniest detail to chance.
But my excitement for the Wonder of Weird tour and my enthusiasm for the Residents in general had been boiling over since the tour had been announced in January, and my promises to my friends that the performances were sure to be something strange, unique and exciting had convinced dozens of them to buy a ticket to one or both of the shows. I rode the bus to Seattle on the night before their scheduled appearance there, and I fell asleep thoroughly pleased with myself for having orchestrated and successfully executed such an elaborate plan.
I rolled out of bed on the morning of Thursday, February 21st, riding the subtle wave of mania that always rises on days when I am going to see the Residents perform. I made myself a cup of coffee, tossed myself into a chair, and opened my laptop. The show was canceled.
I thought it was a joke—a seriously fucked up joke that no one was laughing at. I tried not to panic, but I was panicking. The show would be rescheduled – but when? Would I be able to make it, considering I had sunk all of my money and time into making it here today? (The answer to this question: yes.) But would the Residents be able to make it to Portland? Was I going to get to see them at all? Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.
In the six hours or so between the time that the Seattle show was cancelled and the time that its rescheduling was announced, I was despondent. My friends began to gather—some had come from as far away as Alberta, Canada—but they gave me a wide berth. They didn’t know what to say to me, and I didn’t know what to say to them. We were in a holding pattern until the Residents’ revised tour schedule was announced, and when it was—they would make it to Portland on time, with the Seattle show miraculously moved to Saturday at the very last minute—I had to make entirely new transportation plans and re-coordinate with all of my friends to adjust to it.
Seattle to Portland on Friday morning. Portland to Seattle on Saturday morning. From Seattle back to Portland on Sunday morning. The Residents were busting their asses to make it out for the shows, and we were busting our asses to keep up with them. In my heart, I believe that they were spurred on somewhat by the sentiments I had expressed in the message I had sent to Hein Fokker—as I have said, the Residents don’t have many fans, but they have tremendous respect for the ones that they do have. If there was any doubt of this, that doubt was entirely dispelled by the performances which comprised their parting sentiments to me.
The Wonder of Weird
The stage was uncharacteristically minimal. A pair of inflatable snowmen stood holding inflatable candy canes, creating an arch across which was strung a banner which read ‘The Residents’. There was a small swiveling stool shaped like a pair of lips. A table to the left was covered in a Christmas-themed tablecloth, where ‘Chuck’ would put his keyboard and laptop.
When the Residents take the stage, I am always surprised that they are not ten feet tall, like I remember them. When they appeared this time, the Singing Resident was wearing a latex mask which looked like a very old man with a very long nose, covering the top of his face, and a Santa Claus suit. ‘Chuck’, who I generally refer to as the ‘Sound Architect’, was wearing a yuletide sweater and a bizarre head covering which looked like some kind of Rastafarian bug, with springy coils bouncing around over a pair of dark goggles. Their guitar player, ‘Bob’, was wearing a similar mask in conjunction with a pink-ish tuxedo with long, trailing tails.
‘Chuck’ and ‘Bob’ took the stage first. They sat at opposite ends of the stage, and just before ‘Randy’ came shuffling out they did a curious thing: their eyes met, and raising their hands they covered their faces, as if they were playing Peek-a-Boo with an infant. They held their hands there for about five seconds before the music began. This is something that takes place at the start of every Residents show I have ever seen; no comment has ever been made on it on stage or in print, but I get the sense that it is a ritual which extends forty years into the past.
The set-list was a Rezhead’s wet dream. The Residents don’t really have ‘hits’, so they can’t really play the hits, but the selections they worked up for the final tour were ridiculously obscure even for them. The majority were culled from extremely limited fan club-only releases, and most of the rest came from albums that most casual Residents fans have never heard or have forgotten. Ten minutes into the set, they played one of their Elvis Presley covers. It wasn’t ‘Teddy Bear’, but regardless that was the point when the tears began to run down my face. They didn’t stop until they had left the stage.
‘Randy’ delivered short, strange monologues which quickly devolved from chipper to disoriented to menacing. He mused on the Residents’ career and their strange place in the pantheon of ‘art’. And he spoke of obsession – at one point hunching over the swiveling stool and repeating in a screech which raised in pitch until it was nearly deafening: “Obsession. Obsession. OBSESSION. OBSESSION. OBSESSION! OBSESSION!” It was at this point that I began to think that he was talking to me.
Finally, the Singing Resident walked to the front of the stage and said, ‘For four decades, we have been marching forward. Marching to the sea. Marching to see what comes next. And I guess in life, that’s all you can do—just keep putting one foot out, and then the other, one step at a time until you see what lies in front of you.’
And then I became entirely certain that he was talking to me. To us, to the ones who had followed them over every burning bridge and through every locked door. To we, the obsessed. He was saying goodbye, and he was giving us the opportunity to say goodbye as well. Just that acknowledgement would have been good enough; they were not leaving any doors open, and I couldn’t bear the ambiguity if he had. We were being told that although the Residents were finally closing up shop, we just had to keep moving forward somehow, until we found something that would perhaps distract us for a short time from the hole they had left in our lives. In my life.
It would have been enough. But they had one more song for us. The week before the show, I said to my wife, ‘All I could ever ask for out of this life is to have this one song be the last song I ever hear the Residents play. It’s a long shot that they play it at all, and if they do the odds of it just happening to be the closing number are almost non-existent, but god damn it I’ve paid my dues and what I need from the Residents is for them to close this show with ‘Mahogany Wood’. In the moment that I realized that that was exactly what was happening, my knees buckled beneath me and I nearly fell to the floor.
‘Mahogany Wood’ is a sad and angry and beautiful song. It is a cry of the frustration of inadequacy: “I wish I was something / I wish I was good / I wish I was made of mahogany wood”
The room was filled with color and sound. I was less than five feet away from the Singing Resident, and he crouched down, bringing his face inches from mine. I could smell the rancid sweat of an old man who had been scrambling across the country in a tour bus in order to give me this moment. It was a perfect moment—more perfect than any awkward meet-and-greet in a tiny dressing room could ever have been.
As the song ended, something large and white began to rise from the back of the stage, being slowly inflated by a powerful fan. The Singing Resident capered around it, waving his arms in a lifting motion as if to encourage the thing. It only took a few moments, and when it had inflated fully I saw that it was an enormous, white Christmas tree. Sitting on top, in the place where an angel or a Christmas star would traditionally go… There was the Eyeball. Back from the dead. The Residents stood there with their backs to the audience, hands over their hearts, and genuflected before the Eyeball, clearly in awe as much as any of the rest of us that something so simple, yet so striking, had supported them and brought them across nearly half a century to be performing in Seattle on a windy February night to a group of people who weren’t even born when they released their first record. They stood like that for a full two minutes, to give time for the image to burn into my brain and to firmly indicate that this is it: THIS is the final statement the Residents are making.
It was beautiful.
