The Residents

[Drunk Monk]

The opening review vid reminded me of what McCartney does at his shows. That struck me as funny given that their Meet the Residents was based on the Meet the Beatles album cover. ED's review was spot on. I mentioned the Nairobi trio and even though I named them something else, ED got the reference immediately. We also both thought that the guitarist was doing his best to channel Snakefinger, but missed that serpentine almost comic lilt so signature in Snakefinger's riffs. I was going to call the weather balloon Rover and see who got it. Most of you probably do here. I felt it was like the Fat Elvis Residents, like a Residents lounge act, which had its own special dark place. After all, the band must be in their 60s now at least. And they are a trio now. Not sure what happened to the 4th member and haven't wiki-ed it yet as I've had a very busy morning here at work (Berkeley tournament tomorrow). The lead singer can still reach those screeching crescendos that set my teeth on edge. His body suit was very Attack on Titan, and would glow like rancid meat when the lights were right.

I agree that Constantinople was a high point, as well as some of the Commercial album tracks, and it made me revisit God in 3 Persons on my commute this morning - wow, what a masterpiece of twisted perversity on every level.

Some people brought their kids. What were they thinking? One behind us had to leave after 4 songs. Another made it through but is surely traumatized for life.

Great show, but I miss the eyeballs.

(btw I did not get pulled over with the contraband you gave me on the way home).

good to know.

[thatguy]

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/30-Years-Later-The-Residents-are-Missing-Another-Eyeball-304760781.html">http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/30 ... 60781.html</a><!-- m -->

30 Years Later, The Residents Are Missing Another Eyeball | NBC Bay Area


One of the original four eyeball masks from underground music and art group The Residents has gone missing in San Francisco.

A similar scenario played out 30 years ago in Los Angeles when "Mr. Red" was stolen from backstage after a performance at the Palace. That one was eventually returned, and the SFPD is hoping the same will happen with "Mr. Blue."

Homer Flynn, longtime collaborator and co-manager of The Residents, reached out to the SFPD recently to report that an attempted delivery to his Haight Ashbury home resulted in a missing irreplaceable artifact.

"Mr. Blue Original has been traveling in a museum show for the past three years," Flynn said via email Friday morning.

In addition to the eyeball mask, the original Residents at the Golden Gate Bridge photo was also in the package. "The eyeball is valued at $100,000. The photo is $20,000. Totally irreplaceable," Flynn said.

After traveling in a museum show called "Spectacle: The Music Video" to Cincinnati, NYC, and Australia, the last stop for the eyeball and photograph was the EMP in Seattle. "It was coming back to me via FedEx from Seattle when it disappeared," Flynn explained.

"Unfortunately no one notified me when the shipment was actually sent in early April," Flynn said, who was in New Orleans with his family when the package showed up at his house. "My best guess is that FedEx left it on the landing of my building and someone took it. I seriously doubt that they knew what was in the shipping box."

Flynn explained, "At this point FedEx still claims to have made the delivery which was signed for, but the signature is ‘B Ham.’ There’s no one with that name in my building and subsequent emails have indicated that no one was here when FedEx claims to have made the delivery."

The four original eyeball masks were made in 1978, and The Residents filmed some of the first ever music videos with them, eventually ending up in rotation during MTV’s incarnation in the early 1980s. A new documentary called "Theory of Obscurity: A film about The Residents" which chronicles their more than 40-year career recently showed at the San Francisco International Film Festival. (Full disclosure: NBC Bay Area employee Josh Keppel is a Producer on the film.) The film includes a scene where the Museum of Modern Art in NYC added one of the eyeballs to its permanent collection.

Flynn said he has never had a package stolen from his doorstep before, "but there have been a lot of times when FedEx made deliveries to my building and they put the package on the landing, rang the bell and drove away."

Flynn asked that if you see Mr. Blue, please contact the SFPD.

--tg

[Drunk Monk]

See what I did there? Blimy is a conjunction of Blind Me. And it's pirate slang which makes it particularly funny coming from me. Man, I gotta 'xplain all my best puns, don't eye?

[cranefly]

Blimy is a vastly under-appreciated word these days, fallen into disuse for no good reason. Few people realize that it appears twice -- twice! -- in Tolstoy's War and Peace, fewer still know that it appears in the Gettysburg Address, not to mention Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

You do it a great justice, DM. I kowtow before your effervescent pundom.

[El Dingo]

'Blimey' has an interesting origin. It's basically "Blind me":

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/cor-blimey.html">http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/cor-blimey.html</a><!-- m -->

[thatguy]

Nice interview with the director of "Theory of Obscurity: a film about The Residents". I'm impressed with their "boxed set". I would have posted this earlier, but it took me forever to get around to copying this off my phone.

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/564773/ToO_Interview-NBMSS_2015.03.02.mp3">https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/564 ... .03.02.mp3</a><!-- m -->

Trailer for the film:

[youtube]Ov5EqmOeuPY[/youtube]

--tg

[thatguy]

Coming soon to a winery near you:

:::THE RESIDENTS:::

Gundlach Bundschu Winery
Sonoma
April 7, 2018

https://www.ticketfly.com/purchase/event/1595560



--tg

[Drunk Monk]

Sonoma isn’t near any of us. 

Not as near as the Rio is to me, that’s for sure.

[Drunk Monk]

Remembering The Residents’ Hardy Fox, enigmatic vaudeville futurist
David Abravanel - October 31, 2018

 10 Comments
 

 

Today saw the loss (for real this time) of Hardy Fox, the pioneering artist from The Residents. We look back on the irreverent, surrealist work the band produced and Fox as enigmatic anonymous multimedia ringleader, projecting mystery to the very end.
CDM music writer-at-large David Abravanel offers this obituary.

To borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, the rumors of Hardy Fox’s death have been greatly self-exaggerated. Early this year, Fox posted a “1945-2018” epitaph on his website when revealing the diagnosis of an undefined terminal illness. The epitaph was later taken down. Now, the band and loved ones confirmed Fox passed away earlier today.
“As a child I would always describe my nightmares to my mother by banging on the piano and talking in strange voices.”
“As a child I would always describe my nightmares to my mother by banging on the piano and talking in strange voices.”
Charles Bobuck (aka Hardy Fox), This is for Readers (2016)
For five decades, The Residents chose to remain anonymous. Sure, you could figure things out easily enough – there was The Cryptic Corporation, “representatives” who spoke for the group and whose main mouthpiece, Homer Flynn, sounded an awful lot like the singing/reciting voice on The Residents’ albums (late publicly named as “Randy” and still a recording and touring member). But from mid-1960s inception to the present day, the band officially remains The Residents.

There was freedom in that anonymity – free from the expectation that comes with celebrity and hero worship, The Residents followed their own path. 1979 saw the release of the darkly ambient and creeping Eskimo, while the following year’s Commercial Album consisted of 40 short and digestible songs. In 1976, Third Reich ‘N’ Roll presented an often atonal and satirically repellent take on rock n’ roll classics, while later-career masterpieces like Wormwood (1998) and Voice of Midnight (2007) found a renewed focus on theatrical storytelling.
Anonymity also granted freedom to explore technology. The Residents weren’t stars nor were meant to be – so who was going to stop them from making the next project a film (ill-fated 70s project Vileness Fats), or a point-and-click adventure game (Bad Day on the Midway with artist/designer Jim Ludtke, published in 1995 by Inscape), or, hell, a book based on that video game (2012’s Bad Day on the Midway Reconsidered).

[img=0x0]http://cdm.link/app/uploads/2018/10/the-residents-bad-day-on-the-midway_10.gif[/img]
Bad Day on the Midway.
[img=0x0]http://cdm.link/app/uploads/2018/10/the-residents-bad-day-on-the-midway_2.gif[/img]
Bad Day on the Midway.
While Randy might have spent the most time in the spotlight (and remains the sole original member in the current incarnation), until 2016 he was joined by co-founder Chuck aka Charles Bobuck aka Hardy Fox. Responsible for the majority of the compositions and musical direction of the Residents, Fox’s music was equal parts Vaudeville, nightmare, future and ancient past. Filled with uncomfortable dissonances and unsettling sounds, but almost always darkly humorous, it seems more than fitting to celebrate Fox (and the perpetually-masked Residents) on the eve of Halloween.
After retiring from The Residents in 2016, Fox published a book, This is for Readers, which details his life story. Certainly, it’s a creative interpretation of the truth, filled with legend but revealing some personal details from Fox’s life: his homosexuality, a strong link between orgasm and music composition, the cast of characters that entered his life as he and his husband settled on a rural chicken farm, stories of going on wild adventures with Randy. It’s ultimately a tender and very human read of an extremely avant garde life, complemented by an original soundtrack of solo material, and available for free on iBooks or via Fox’s website.

“My set-up was computer based. I had programmed what I imaginatively called my “space machine.” I had prerecorded hundreds of two-minute loops and had instantaneous access to them by punching buttons and twiddling knobs. I ran a local area network from an Apple Airport hidden under my table that gave me wireless access to a shitload of noise.”
(about the tour for the Talking Light album)
“The idea of working on music without being bothered by people was utopian. Even close friends and neighbors didn’t know what I did for a living. The brief explanation, that I scored gay porn films, usually kept people from wanting to know more.”

And this one is a good commentary on 21st century cities and the Bay Area in particular:

“I had decided some time ago that cities were no place to grow old and I could have orgasms anywhere. I did the civil thing. I bought a farm and became a chicken lord.
Beware of chickens.”

Fox’s 2016 release
There’s no easy way to wrap up an article about Hardy Fox. Between what is known about him (little), what can be inferred (a little more), and what may be creative stretching of the truth (likely lots), he wasn’t exactly transparent. But in the masks, and the animation, and the creative fictions, Fox probed some very unsettling, challenging, and ultimately very human aesthetic worlds.
The sheer overwhelming volume of Residents and Charles Bobuck releases makes it difficult to point to where to start in looking at Fox’s legacy, not to mention Fox’s work is far more often geared toward album rather than cherry-picked “best of” format. That said, I’ve taken a (duck) stab at compiling a friendly introduction to this mad, inspiring world:

http://www.hardyfox.com/home/

[url=http://www.hardyfox.com/home/][/url]

[Drunk Monk]

[Greg]

Very uplifting.

[Drunk Monk]

i poached it off tg's sitonmyfacebook.

[thatguy]

Speaking of The Residents, I came across this Snakefinger album a few months back. It's live, from a tour in Europe. Very well informed and played. I really enjoyed it...

Snakefinger's History of the Blues


Here's a Spotify link:
https://open.spotify.com/album/5cdbzQivW...qRRwf2n1Vw


--tg

[thatguy]

I saw on some event calendar that The Residents were going to rock The Chapel in SF this Thurs-Sat (5/27-5/29)...but the venue calendar shows those dates as "Postponed".

https://thechapelsf.com/calendar/

Delving into the band's own site, it says they are instead coming to The Rio on Sept. 18, 2021!

https://www.residents.com/tourdates/

The times they are a-changin' (again)

The Dog Stab tour dates are shifting once more (hopefully this is the last time). Some are still being finalized / confirmed but most are in place and venues are advertising the new dates, so we've listed them here. The links below will update as we get more information, but I want to call your attention to some IMPORTANT VENUE CHANGES:

The Triple Door in Seattle - NOW AT FREEMONT ABBEY
The Parish in Austin - NOW AT EMPIRE GARAGE
The Crescent Ballroon in Phoenix - NOW IN TUCSON AT 191 TOOLE
The Chapel in San Francisco (3 shows) - ONE SHOW NOW IN SANTA CRUZ AT THE RIO

--tg

[Drunk Monk]

Delving into the band's own site, it says they are instead coming to The Rio on Sept. 18, 2021!

Nice!

Sounds like a DOOM gathering if I've ever heard of one. ED and I met for a Rio show earlier on this thread and it was great fun. I remember one parent brought their little kid to it. They were sitting behind us and the kid was clearly not amused. We just shook our heads at the bad parenting choice.

Where the ResidentialDOOMers be? tg? KB? ED? I'm up for this, assuming I don't get tapped to do Life is Beautiful in Vegas (an invitation has been extended but Ill believe it when I've got airline tix and hotel provided - not holding my breath on that one).