“They offer a stern challenge to newcomers… they are not a straightforward band, and their music remains almost impossible to describe”: the Residents’ prog credentials

When Meet The Residents arrived in 1974, the world met a band who have resist any form of definitive description to this day. In 2013 we examined the evidence to suggest The Residents should primarily be considered a prog group.

Even if you’ve never had the unique pleasure of listening to The Residents’ music, there’s every chance that you’ll be more than familiar with the band’s distinctly peculiar image. Mysterious figures dressed in top hats and tails, their (presumably) human heads disguised with giant eyeballs, the San Francisco-based art-rock collective have somehow sustained both their anonymity and creative profligacy for over 40 years.

They have always skilfully lurked on the fringes of progressive and alternative music like some benign but gently nightmarish welcoming committee, ushering willing listeners into the world of the avant-garde. With over 60 albums and countless bizarre and often wildly adventurous visual and multimedia projects under their collective belt, The Residents offer a stern challenge to newcomers: they are not, it hardly needs stating, a straightforward rock’n’roll band, and their music remains almost impossible to describe.

A devout admirer of The Residents since the mid-70s, Henry Cow’s Chris Cutler is one of the few people who knows the band on a personal level, having befriended them during a trip to America in 1978 and subsequently facilitating the importing of their albums into Europe.

His first experience of their music was their version of the Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction – a systematic dismantling and subverting of a revered rock classic that neatly encapsulates The Residents’ mischievous spirit. “What I liked about it was the mixture of satire and exaggeration, and the clear understanding of the way the song worked,” says Cutler.

“In a twisted way, their version was an improvement on the original and it indicated an unusually subtle approach to pop culture. Like Frank Zappa, but in a very different and, I think, rather more intelligent way, The Residents signalled the emergence into pop of critical analysis, rather than simple acceptance or rejection, or slavish imitation of it. And they did that, at least at first, through imitation, which I thought was deviously clever.”

It’s hard to imagine how startling and unnerving it must have been to hear the first Residents album, Meet The Residents, upon its release in 1974. Nearly 40 years on, it still sounds like nothing else on Earth. A bewildering splurge of abstruse musical ideas, eerie sleight of sonic hand and disembodied noises and voices, its 44 minutes eschew any notion of traditional rock’n’roll in favour of a perverse and surreal world of sound, wherein all the usual rules of engagement with an audience have been jettisoned.

Listeners may experience occasional flashes of recognition – during the warped funk reverie of Infant Tango, perhaps, or amid the cracked nursery rhyme of Smelly Tongues – but The Residents were not playing by the usual rules. The end result was either unlistenable or utterly enthralling.

As if to intensify listeners’ sense of disorientation, the series of albums that followed the band’s debut veered off into ever more weird and wonderful territory. 1976’s The Third Reich ’N’ Roll was a simultaneously hilarious and terrifying parody of 60s pop music and TV commercials.

Divided into two extended patchworks of viciously satirical experimentalism – entitled Swastikas On Parade and Hitler Was A Vegetarian respectively – the album came adorned with a sleeve depicting revered US TV presenter Dick Clark dressed in a Nazi uniform and brandishing a carrot. Its final minutes, wherein terrible things are done to Sunshine Of Your Love, Hey Jude and Sympathy For The Devil, must surely rank as one of the most jaw-dropping moments in musical history.

The Third Reich ’N’ Roll was followed in quick succession by Fingerprince (1977), Duck Stab!/Buster And Glen (1978) and extraordinary concept piece Eskimo (1979). While the rock scene stuttered and creaked under the weight of its own flabby excess, the men with the giant eyeballs for heads were flying the flag for true musical exploration and invention, with an immersive and holistic approach to art that crackled with bravery and a hint of madness.

“The first thing I heard was Duck Stab!,” says John Wright, drummer with Vancouver’s legendary progressive punks Nomeansno, a band whose own disregard for convention has led them to blur the lines between hardcore and prog. “That was in maybe 1979 or 1980. I wasn’t really a record collector at the time, but my brother Rob [Nomeansno bassist] was buying all the new punk rock records that were coming out. Once he put it on, we just sat there staring at each other. Oh my god! We just laughed like crazy for the whole record.

“It was just so good, so funny and strange, and progressive too, in the sense that I’d never heard anything like it before. The Residents really shone, as far as the idea of doing whatever the hell you want.”

Although it would be wildly inaccurate to say that The Residents ever truly fit in anywhere, there was a brief period in the late 70s when the band seemed to briefly click with some of the subtler revolutions that were going on in the punk and new wave movements. It was as if the absolute freedom of expression that they revelled in on their albums and other projects struck a chord with music fans seeking alternatives to mainstream rock’s old orthodoxies.

“I have to express a preference for the earlier albums, partly because they were made when the band had no technical equipment to speak of and had to be extraordinarily creative in their use of very simple means to realise very complex results,” says Chris Cutler.

“The need to solve problems and overcome obstacles seemed to stimulate their imaginations. It wasn’t just the content but the luminosity of their thinking around corners that lit up those early records.”

What has seldom been adequately celebrated is that The Residents were fierce pioneers in the studio, developing and refining techniques and mastery of new technologies that would later become ubiquitous in the music world.

The fact that an album like Eskimo – a primarily ambient and instrumental record that seemed to aspire to evoke the sights and sounds of lives lived amid bleak Arctic wastelands – existed at all in 1979 is remarkable enough, but the sheer level of sonic experimentation on display still has the power to astonish today.

Then, in the autumn of 1980, The Residents released Commercial Album. It comprised 40 tracks, each clocking in at 60 seconds in length, and posited the idea that in order to create perfect “pop songs,” each track should be played three times in a row.

With guest appearances by Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, XTC’s Andy Partridge, Lene Lovich and long-time Residents alumnus Philip ‘Snakefinger’ Lithman, Commercial Album provided a deeply odd and almost antagonistic link between the big ideas and brazen extravagance of prog and the knowing subversion of post-punk modernism.

Mark Of The Mole (1981) and The Tunes Of Two Cities (1982) were different again. The first two parts of a planned tetralogy recounting the fictional conflicts between the subterranean society of the hard-working moles and the vacuous, idle and perpetually thrill-seeking hubs, the albums dazzled with their intricate but steadfastly alien arrangements and melodic curveballs, not to mention the then-unprecedented use of the E-mu Emulator, a digital sampling keyboard wherein sounds were stored on floppy disk and manipulated manually.

One of the very first bands to harness the potential of this soon- to-be revolutionary technology, The Residents were making music that was consistently breaking new ground, even if it was happening well away from the pop culture radar. “They were doing things that are now totally accepted,” says Rob Wright. “All the electronic music we know today, from techno to dubstep or hip hop, and the way people create songs now, it’s really how The Residents were creating songs long ago.

“Their arrangements were fantastic. These were obviously very talented musicians, not necessarily in the sense of how many notes they could squeeze into a bar, but how they pieced the music together to make their sound. They were obviously hugely talented. I’ve taken a lot from them over the years.”

The Residents’ music certainly acts as a mesmerising entry point into their demented world, but it is the visual side of the band that completes the picture. The sheer scale of their output makes it virtually impossible to accurately describe what they have achieved.

There were the pointedly theatrical stage productions that began with the Mole Show  they performed in support of the Mark Of The Mole album in the early 80s, and countless groundbreaking ventures into computer media. These began in earnest with the Freak Show CD-ROM in 1994, continuing through to the fervently unsettling series of YouTube mini-movies released around 2008’s The Bunny Boy album.

The Residents’ never-ending passion for creating art that exists outside music fans’ usual frames of reference continues to set them apart from everything and everyone else. In truth, the word ‘progressive’ – with its many established connotations – seems woefully inadequate to sum up the band’s artistic fervour.

“Things change and certainly The Residents were making things change, and doing so in a wholly original way, with complete disregard for musical norms, genre rules and conventional notions of virtuosity,” notes Chris Cutler. “They managed to raise questions about originality, plagiarism, plunderphonics [composer John Oswald’s term for creating new works from the manipulation of existing audio recordings] and art preternaturally early.”

“When you think of some prog rock, it’s not very progressive at all,” says John Wright. “It’s quite regressive, coming down to musical patterns and creations that have more to do with the Baroque period of music than anything new. But to me, The Residents were making a real progression.

“They brought a whole new sense of creativity to their music that no one else had done before or since. They’ve been doing it for over 40 years and they’ve never sounded like anybody else. They’ve done so many different things, not just music but the whole multimedia aspect of things. They’re more artists, in a sense, with a wider range of interests and means of expression. It’s hard to describe them just as musicians. They’ve really progressed.”

In typical Residents fashion, the band have recently punctured their own balloon of anonymity by announcing on their official Facebook page that the current line-up features three men known as Randy, Chuck and Bob. It seems unlikely that

this glimpse behind the eyeballs is anything other than another fiendish prank, but irrespective of their true identities, the band are currently on the road with their Wonder Of Weird 40th Anniversary show, confounding and delighting their diehard fans in much the same way as Meet The Residents confused the hell out of a generation of open-minded sound-seekers back in 1974.

While many modern prog acts do little more than indulge in some gentle tinkering with rock conventions, The Residents persist in setting fire to the rulebook over and over again, basking in their own self-created mystique and the limitless possibilities of artistic endeavour untamed.

“As [composer] Edgar Varese said, no one is ever ahead of their time; other people are just behind it,” Chris Cutler concludes. “But The Residents came close to being on the cusp of their time, which is some achievement.”