“All you can tell is it’s someone with short legs and a small penis,” Flynn offers. It depicted a woman fellating a young boy – or perhaps it was a midget? Or there’s the Baby Sex tape, the second of two reel-to-reels the band sent to Hal Halverstadt of Warner Brothers, which had as its cover a silkscreen blown up from an ad for mail-order pornography from Denmark. Early song titles include “Go Fuck Yourself on the Doorknob, Mom,” and “Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor.” Inspired by Captain Beefheart and Sun Ra, aspects of the proto-Residents’ music are startlingly in-your-face. He had been going to several of these clubs, and the Residents had gone with him on occasion, and after getting bored out of their mind with all these mediocre acoustic singer/songwriters” – Flynn describes them as “James Taylor imitators” – “they came to the decision that, ‘Okay, we can do that, but we’ll do it differently.’” He was really a blues guitar player, for the most part, but heavily influenced by Frank Zappa. Unmasked, the group – hairy hippies, the lot of them – cavorts about the stage, making an obnoxious, theatrical racket, a jazzy cacophony that bears little resemblance to the artful, deliberate weirdness of Meet the Residents.įlynn, who will only go so far as to admit having been “in the audience” that night, says, “this was during Snakefinger’s initial encounter with the Residents. Some of the most remarkable footage in the documentary is a black and white clip of the band, long before they’d taken a name, at an open mic night at a folk club in San Francisco, on October 18, 1971. Masks and anonymity were not built into the band from the outset, it seems. He also notes that Randy sometimes sweats a great deal under his present costume, ”an all-over body suit leotard with a little kind of tux jacket,” adding that, “in general, the costumes have gotten lighter and smaller and thinner” since the days of the eyeballs, or, say, the giant bunny suit Randy wore for the Bunny Boytour. “It’s hard to have them around and not put one on and just see what it’s like,” he explains. Reached by phone from his home base in California, he freely admits to Westenderto having worn their signature eyeball mask, created for the cover art of their 1979 release, Eskimo. Resident or not, he’s a font of insider knowledge.
The Residents – some four decades after the release of their 1974 debut, Meet the Residents remain so shrouded in secrecy that the people most frequently cited as the founding members – Homer Flynn, Hardy Fox, Jay Clem, and John Kennedy – even now describe themselves solely by their corporate position within the umbrella group, the Cryptic Corporation, referring to the band as “they” or “them” – never “we” or “us.”įlynn, theorized by some to be lead vocalist Randy Rose, credits himself officially as the manager of the Residents, as well as their graphic designer, under the alias of Poor Know (or sometimes Pore No) Graphics. Primus’s Les Claypool, on the other hand, tells the story of how much he hated the band at first – thinking their song “ Constantinople” was “the music they are probably playing in hell.” Simpsons creator Matt Groening, who curated the band’s appearance at All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2010, says he loved them from the moment he first heard them. Dean Ween, Jerry Harrison, and Devo’s Gerald Casale all offer testimonials. “Certainly everything I ever did was dwarfed by that huge flowing tidal wave of ideas that came out of the Residents,” he says in the film.īut he’s not their only noteworthy fan to speak on their behalf. Of the notables who appear in the documentary, testifying to the brilliance of infamously anonymous, long-lived San Francisco anti-band, Jillette has a privileged place, having appeared onstage with the Residents as the unreliable narrator for their first large-scale stage performances, The Mole Show, a highly ambitious, media-rich early theatrical production that toured Europe and the USA in the early 1980s. In Theory of Obscurity: A Film About the Residents, Penn Jillette – half of the comedy-magic duo Penn and Teller – describes the avant-garde band as exemplifying “the USA at its best,” and says without seeming particularly hyperbolic that they are, “by any sane measure, more successful and happier than the Beatles.”
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