The music business has never experienced a shortage of, shall we say, eccentric bands. Just a few examples from this category would be Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band and the Monks, a ‘60s garage rock outfit that shaved the tops of their heads and dressed in appropriate vestments. Not to mention GWAR, a heavy metal band that dresses up in costumes out of a horror movie and spews various bodily fluids during its performances.
But among the strangest of the strange has to be the Residents, a San Francisco group that has, since its establishment in the ‘60s, pushed and even violated all sorts of boundaries and classifications. Costumes of multiple varieties have always been featured in the band’s stage performances, but the enduring image that is most associated with the Residents is a large mask in the shape of a bloodshot eyeball with a top hat jauntily perched atop it. Yeah, those guys.
It is appropriate, then, that the Residents will be performing at the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art on Saturday, October 24, what with the Orange Show’s history as one of Houston’s more outré art environments. Fans of the band are stoked because the Residents will perform their landmark (some would say their best) 1976 album, Eskimo, in its entirety. And for those who are not really fans but merely curious, Eskimo is a wonderful entry point.
Another thing about the Residents that is unusual: the members of the group prefer to remain anonymous (and masked). Rather than doing typical press interviews, the Residents rely on their spokesman (and art director) Homer Flynn, a longtime associate, to deliver their message to the masses. Is Flynn actually a Residents member who operates undercover in these circumstances? Maybe so. But I didn’t ask him, because he probably wouldn’t have told me anyway. Gotta preserve the mystique and keep ’em guessing.
Speaking via Zoom, Flynn, is pleased to clarify a question of semantics. How exactly should the Residents be regarded? As a band? As a theatrical troupe? Or something else?
“I would describe the Residents as more of an art collective than a band,” the genial Flynn explains. “They have masqueraded as a band and have been marketed and promoted as a band, and in a lot of ways, this is the way things work here. You can refer to a group as a band, and that means something in the culture. You can refer to them as a hive-mind art collective, and that means zero. So, while the one may be more accurate than the other, we refer to them as a band.”
Band, maybe, but not exactly your typical rock and roll. Not even on the Residents’ 1976 release Third Reich and Roll. The collective was influenced by the Theory of Phonetic Organisation, a proposition put forth in the 1930s by one N. Senada, who said, “the musician should put the sounds first, building the music up from [them] rather than developing the music, then working down to the sounds that make it up.”
To that end, Eskimo does not contain what most would consider music per se, rather a collection of sounds (e.g. lots of wind noises and simulated seal whackings). Flynn observes, “It’s much more sound-based in terms of its aesthetic and values than most of their other material.”
For historical reference, the soundscape displayed on Eskimo has its roots not only in the philosophy espoused by N. Senada, but also in the musique concrète that was initially produced in France during the early ‘40s by Pierre Schaeffer, further developed by classical composers such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis. Initially, creators of musique concrète used everyday sounds to create their soundscapes. As technology advanced, manipulated tapes and synthesizers were utilized to broaden the sonic palette.
“The idea that they had when they started Eskimo was [that] they wanted to do an album that told stories but told stories with sounds.” Flynn says. “They felt that music was an important sound, but not necessarily the most important sound. In terms of Eskimo, they feel that the sound of wind is just as important as the sound of an Eskimo band. Which, of course, is in itself a fiction.”
And that brings up another point. In addition to its achievements in terms of telling a story with sounds, Eskimo represents a brutal satire / social critique having to do with the barbarous treatment of the Inuit people. It is no coincidence that a DVD release of Eskimo in 2002 included, as part of its visual component, scenes from the 1922 documentary Nanook of the North, a film purportedly depicting the Inuit way of life.
In point of fact, filmmaker Rogert J. Flaherty had his subjects use obsolete tools instead of contemporary implements, so as to accentuate the allegedly primitive nature of the Inuits’ existence at the time. Much of the film – while being presented as cinéma vérité (though the term had not yet been introduced into the lexicon – was as genuine and real as a Buster Keaton short. I recall a film professor posing the following question during my freshman year: “Don’t you think that the cameraman could have given that starving boy a sandwich?”
The Residents have always been drawn to the creation of multimedia experiences, and the stage presentation of Eskimo bears out this ethos. “Back when the album was released, they would have loved to have created more of a visual component for it, but there really weren’t the time or the resources or even the market for something like that at the time,” Flynn notes.
“Twenty years later, they still wanted to do that, so, working with them, we created a DVD that gave visuals to the Eskimo album. If you go to the show, that’s going to be the primary visual component. But as they started preparing the album for concert, they realized that it really wasn’t quite long enough for what they felt was an appropriate concert set.
”So ultimately, they started researching Inuit culture again, and what they discovered, to their great shock and surprise, was five or six books of Inuit folk tales that were gathered together back in the 19th century. They flipped out over these. So they then picked out five of those to create new music and new visuals. Those were then inserted into the original Eskimo material in order to expand it.”
When considering the Residents’ multi-decade output, a question arises. What kind of a person is a Residents’ fan? Certainly, there is a superficial appeal to those who enjoy the unusual, but how many fans really “get it” on multiple levels? Who is truly in on the joke?
“I meet people all the time who are Residents’ fans,” Flynn says, “but at the same time, it’s pretty [easy] to tell which ones actually get it and which ones are kind of going along with what seems cool in the moment.”
The Residents will perform on Saturday, October 24, 7 p.m., at the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, 2334 Gulf Terminal Drive. For more information, call 713-926-6368 or visit orangeshow.org.
