You’ve got to admire the aura TheResidents have created for themselves. Through tight-lipped secrecy andobfuscating layers of mythology and misinformation surrounding the band’s rootsand personnel, The Residents occupy a position of mystery virtuallyunparalleled in the history of popular music. When you’re dealing with a groupwhose albums sound like missives from an alternate dimension, the prospect of alive show can’t help but prompt some wild speculation. Was it to be a rockshow? Performance art? Perhaps there would be men in suits with eyeballs forheads, or was that indelible image already too predictable for a group aselusive as this one? Best to simply expect the unexpected.
And it was exactly the unexpected thattranspired. Onstage sat a facsimile of an average living room complete withcouch, tables and faux fireplace. Into these domestic environs strode thegroup, lead singer “Randy” occupying center stage in a bathrobe and boxershorts together with a bald cap and grotesque old-man makeup, flanked on thefar left and right by “Chuck” on keyboards and “Bob” on guitar, both lookingpositively inhuman in dark, reflective, full-body suits. Fourth member “Carlos”had retired, Randy said. “Fuck Carlos,” he later added.
We were invited into The Residents’home so they could “sing a few songs and tell a few stories,” which perfectlyencapsulates the show’s mixture of straightforward music performance and dramatheatrics. The song selection drew heavily on more recent material, eschewingthe outré cover songs and claustrophobic keyboards that marked classic albumslike The Third Reich ’N Roll and Commercial Album in favor ofairier soundscapes, full of ringing guitar, extended tones from the keys, andoften surprising textures. Occasionally, though, they kicked up the volume andplayed what sounded like the disturbed mutant cousin of some more familiarriff-heavy guitar rock.
Their current national tour has beendubbed “The Talking Light” tour, presumably in reference to the three circularscreens suspended above the band, onto which were projected a periodic seriesof films with distorted close-ups of strange characters telling macabrepersonal tales about fear, neuroses and violence.
Taken together, this carnivalesquehodgepodge of music, props, films and lights became more than the sum of itsparts; it was an entire twisted world brought vividly to life for two solidhours. Funny, mesmerizing and at times genuinely unsettling, the performancecame off like the stage version of some lost David Lynch movie. With TheResidents, like with Lynch, one feels compelled to include a cautionary “it’snot for everyone” to the uninitiated, but those willing to surrender to theirsingularly surreal vision, to delve into something so unfamiliar and more thana little menacing, will undoubtedly find an abundance of strange pleasures.
Photo by Dale Reince
