I suppose the first concern with 13th Anniversary Show: Live In Japan is the same one that plagues any Replacement concert that isn’t tied to some kind of visual aid. How do you really get a feel for just how weird these tuxedo-wearing retinas are without actually seeing firsthand these tuxedo-wearing retinas in action.
And “action” is a very subjective word, as The Residents really don’t do anything normally associated with a rock and roll concert, so if you’re looking for majestic shredding or lengthy drum solos, you won’t find it here. The strangeness comes from the visuals and the unusual presence of four anonymous men making weird noises, something that must have been a sight to see judging by the lack of audience noise that’s eerily noticeable throughout 13th Anniversary Show.
The recording confirms this as longtime favorites like “Monkey and Bunny” and “Smelly Tongues” are especially haunting while touring guitarist Snakefinger dishes out some raw playing for “Walter Westinghouse” before unexpectedly being faded out. It is only at this point that you can audibly hear the Japanese audience applaud in approval.
13th Anniversary Show is a nice souvenir from a time when the band was in flux. The band’s previous tour-the notorious Mole shows-were a unmitigated failure and their infamous record label Ralph Records (“Buy Or Die!” was the slogan) had recently folded. Things were grim for the band and their financial stresses almost caused the band to break up.
It was their Japanese record label that pressured the band to return to the stage, this time scrapping the entire Mole project in favor of a greatest-hits set, one that proved to be successful enough to return for another run of the states while prompting a creative rebirth of their American Composers Series.
This live document captures the rebirth, but the selections do not surpass the studio counterparts and 13th Anniversary Show is best served for longtime fans searching for clues into the band’s well-being during a very quiet period in their career. As the music demonstrates, the Residents were just as strange as ever and sound like you had to be there to fully appreciate.
A time when you make sure you don’t paint the Easter eggs yellow, for fear that they'll get lost among the dandelions that have come up early this year.
We’re on a farm near the Mississippi River, visiting my wife’s parents. And although we’re literally off of Highway 61 (revisited), it’s a distance to any port of civilization and at least an hour from the nearest Starbucks.
I get comfort from attending service where the same prayers have been read for centuries, but the church I’m visiting today on this Easter Sunday is more contemporary. They sing contemporary Christian songs and tailor their service to run like a concert. The words to the songs are projected on to a screen so that we may sing along. But if you don’t have the sheet music to go with it, you’re hosed. And since I’m not versed in contemporary Christian music, I observe and stay silent.
Not that I’m familiar with many traditional Christian songs either, but my wife knows them and I like hearing her sing. The only one that’s familiar to me today is the two they always seem to perform when we visit here: “Lord I Lift Your Name On High” and another one called “My Redeemer Lives.”
I long for the old “O Lamb Of God” verse we have at my Episcopal church. First the leader. Then the choir. Then the congregation.
Then the recommendation that I left in last week’s offering plate.
Growing up in the Midwest, there were documents of extreme importance to young music lovers. One of these documents was Rolling Stone magazine, whose more recent noticeable irrelevance wasn’t in place during the late seventies/early eighties. Ironically, one of the most problematic issues of the magazine today (a collection of advertisements interrupted by brief snidbits of entertainment information) turned out to be a blessing to a few young Iowa music lovers. Towards the back of nearly every Rolling Stone publication, prominently featured in the magazine’s classified ad section, was a black and white advertisement for Ralph Records. It featured a leather-clad skull advising readers to “Buy or die!” What Ralph Records was selling exactly remained unclear after reading through the information. Instead, if you provided Ralph Records with a buck, you’d be provided with a 7” sampler of the artists on their label. A friend of my took a chance on a bill and we gathered in his bedroom to listen to what the San Francisco based company returned back. One of the artists on the sampler was The Residents. The had more tracks on the single than any other band, mainly because their songs were only a minute in length. These songs, as I later learned, were pulled from their landmark The Commercial Album that required all of the songs to be the same length as a traditional radio spot. The music was weird, but not enough for my friend to consider ordering another title from the Ralph Records’ catalog that was included with his sampler. Based on the glowing praise of one of the titles, he decided to go with Eskimo. What he received back was even more unsettling than the sampler, but no less intriguing. Eskimo may be a Western band’s first attempt at World Music, but the world that The Residents musically explores is not exactly a hotbed of rhythms, melodies, or instrumentation. And while the musical direction was an unusual choice, what drew us into it was the cover art: the album seemed to be performed by a quartet of tuxedo-clad eyeballs. Things were a lot less hectic then; as pre-teens, we didn’t have the amount of distractions that kids have today. Yet sitting still through Eskimo was a task of epic proportions. True to the culture they were representing, there is little on the album that resembles traditional Western song structures. The music of Eskimo centers around chilly atmospherics (courtesy of some very appropriate synth work), seemingly traditional indigenous chanting (more on that later) and an apparently honest recreation of the Eskimo’s ceremonial instrumentation. All of this is done on six tracks that are complimented by a story within the liner notes that the listener is encouraged to follow along with while listening to the album in its entirety. Those forty minutes then seemed like an eternity, particularly as we were expecting some of the same no wave shenanigans evidenced in the band’s offering on the “Buy or die!” sampler. Or were we just too young not to understand them? Revisiting Eskimo now seems to reveal that The Residents were actually making a pretty poignant statement on the state of crass consumerism and how Madison Avenue will eventually be able to influence cultures thousands of miles away, even those seemingly away from media outlets and commercial zones. Indeed, by the end of Eskimo, you can hear the natives chanting “Coca Cola adds life!” the tag line of the soda company’s ad campaign from the late 70’s. Started in April of 1976 and completed three years later, The Residents offer up a surprisingly accurate statement in both theory and music. I’m not sure if the Eskimo’s traditional five-note scale is followed entirely throughout this album, but one can definitely feel a legitimate transportation to the northern regions of the planet if you follow the back cover’s direction on relaxing with a pair of headphones while listening to the disc. Mute Records has done a fine job in the re-issue of perhaps The Residents’ most notorious offerings in their incredibly wide and diverse catalog. The album is presented in its entirety without bonus cuts, remastered with incredible sound restoration and packaged in a book-like case that reveals the original liner note story line and little else in divulging information about the notoriously shy Residents. Eskimo is devoid of any proper single track to recommend or focus on, so the curious may be better serve to explore one of the bands worthy compilations to determine if these art-rock legends are something you’d enjoy. After all, it took nearly thirty years before I finally understood the chill that these optic hooligans originally intended for me to understand.
The Residents provided me with one of my strangest relationships with any band, one that was shared by a few close friends and a few hallucinatory explorations. The story may sound a little sad, a handful of socially inept Midwesterners with nothing better to do than follow a directionless (and faceless) avant-garde band to the point where we actually scheduled listening sessions the same way other geeks may schedule Dr. Who listening parties. In our defense, we were not social retards but acknowledged weirdoes that perhaps dabbled a little too much with elicit drugs while managing to function at work, play and school. We viewed our gatherings as exclusive and we followed one common band, The Residents, with an almost religious fervor. While some of us may have had passions for other bands that ran nearly as deep, our collective respect for the visually decorated quartet became occasionally excessive. One more than a few weekends, we fueled ourselves with LSD and sat in front of a stereo, repeatedly spinning records by The Residents and transcribing what we interpreted as the lyrics. After one of these sessions, I actually used the transcription to the band’s “Loss Of Innocence” in an oral interpretation class and received praise from the professor. Another favorite was “Lizard Lady,” a reptilian story of impossible comprehension that seemed to make sense after a few hits of acid. Working from a compilation album that Ryko put on in the late 80’s (Hell!), our transcriptions proved to be remarkably accurate after I located the lyric sheet to the song from its original album, Duck Stab. My copy of Duck Stab was on stunning red vinyl, perhaps the best format for any Residents album, but if acquiring a turntable is not practical, Mute Records’ recent re-release of the band’s 1978 effort is a suitable alternative. Duck Stab finds the band trimming the fat from their prior material and constricting their art-damaged songs into concise, two and three minute long songs. It’s the album (actually a combination of two e.p.’s if you’re a fellow fanatic) that brought them some additional exposure outside of the bay area, selling enough copies to provide (then) record label Ralph Records enough cash to start advertising in the back of Rolling Stone magazine. This isn’t to suggest that The Residents created a mainstream offering with Duck Stab What they did instead was to enhance their weirdness, providing little in terms of actual pretention while accentuating the real possibility that this quartet had serious mental damage. Combining a strange blend of Trout Mask Replica absurdity with fellow San Fran native Harry Partch, The Residents place their synth exorcisms alongside guest guitarist Snakefinger’s brittle guitar workouts in what may be their most accessible album to date, which means nothing when you consider how inaccessible the rest of their catalog is. Duck Stab’s accessibility comes in the form of a few choice cuts that became the focus of college radio and the music press. One of those, “Hello Skinny,” remains as one of The Residents’ most fascinatingly eerie explorations ever, perhaps because it sounds like such an anomaly within the band’s artistic cannon. The song is propelled by a throbbing bassline and a creepy, double-tracked clarinet that occasionally breaks out in “Oh shit!” squeaks, giving the story line some added worry. That storyline, a freakishly small flea market salesperson, again makes the most sense under the influence of mind-enhancing substances, particularly when the Chipmunks-like refrain of “Hello Dolly” makes its way into the last few seconds of the song. To recommend Duck Stab comes with a disclaimer: the band would never visit this style and consistency again. While there would be other albums consistently good, they would never follow the same pattern as this, streamlined songs that housed a large amount of disturbia in such as small amount of time. If you’re prepared for such an exploration, and have a few like-minded friends that also like to mine the tightrope walk of brilliance and mental illness, then Duck Stab is a fine place to start. Best of all, the newly enhanced packaging comes with those original lyrics, so you don’t have to spend all of that time transcribing them. But if you’re so inclined to do so, I’ve been there and I completely understand your reasons why.
The first time I heard Snakefinger’s “Trashing All The Loves Of History” was from a friend’s Buy Or Die sampler that he got through Ralph Records. It was taken from his Greener Postures album from 1980.
I didn’t know what to make of it at first; it’s a very unusual sounding song. Snakefinger wasn’t blessed with the most talented of voices, and it was striking to hear an English accent coming from him, particularly since the most identifiable voice from The Residents came from the dude with the southern accent.
Snakefinger always had special billing on those Resident records, so you knew he a.) wasn’t one of the eyeballs and 2.) probably had his own career outside of Residents’ recordings.
There is a similarity between the two in terms of aural weirdness. It’s quite possible that Greener Postures was cut at the same studio as some of the Residents’ late 70’s material. The guitar tones…while fluctuating throughout the song…sound similar to the tones that Snakefinger creates with his masked friends.
“Trashing All The Loves Of History” literally snakes around with strange, off-kilter riffs that can only be memorable through repeated listening. His vocals are processed through heavy amounts of echo, occasionally giving way to squirrelly effects at the end of a verse. It’s as weird as anything the Residents have made with curios guitar chords, rhythms and sounds that are obviously indebted to Zoot Horn Rollo from Captain Beefheart fame. In other words, if you listen through the weirdness, there’s a lot of difficult shit going on.
Snakefinger died of a heart attack on stage in Austria. Shortly after that, I dropped a few tabs of acid and painted a picture in his memory.
Here's a live video of Snakefinger taken shortly before he passed. Yes, that's Eric Drew Feldman of Captain Beefheart fame on keyboards.
Crazy bouts of nostalgia. First off, I get an email from a friend advising me that The Residents are playing in Chicago around my birthday. I’ve already seen them (the story some other time), but it got me thinking about them after many years of not keeping up to speed on their bizarre musical world. Then I receive a pair of Residents re-issue discs for consideration, Eskimo and Duck Stab!, which are two fine examples of the band’s brilliance and records that I haven’t listened to in some time. A few spins has me thinking about those times in my past where The Residents and hallucinogens seemed to go hand-in-hand and some of the activities involving them now seem curiously obsessive. I immediately documented a few of those incidents under the guise of reviews and they should be posted on the Glorious Noise website in the near future. To be honest, I had no idea that those two aforementioned albums had fallen out of print, and I’m thankful that I now have a pair of new copies to replace those still good vinyl versions. I’ve also taken a curious initiative to track down a few albums from my childhood years that I enjoyed and then outgrew. One of those artists is none other than Peter Frampton, who’s Frampton Comes Alive is most certainly a prerequisite album for anyone who grew up in the 70’s. There’s a reason why it was so well received: because it’s a really good album. I took the path to Frampton a little more seriously than perhaps I should. It started with Frampton’s previous band, Humble Pie, who’s Smokin’ was a strange childhood favorite for me. I think this was the first album the band had without Frampton, and so then I was required to check out what Peter was doing as a solo artist. Briefly, he decided to start his own band, Frampton’s Camel, which may qualify as one of the dumbest ideas ever put on paper. Not the music of Frampton’s Camel or the album…called Frampton’s Camel in case you’re wondering…but the notion that you’re going to start a band that’s named after you and then decide to incorporate a very decidedly un-rocking animal as your identifier. When I think of “Camel,” I think of my favorite cigarette when I was a smoker or I think of a filthy, gynormous tooth creature that has a tendency of spitting on you when provoked. So I locate a copy of Frampton’s Camel online and it’s follow up, the proper solo album Frampton. These are the two albums that led up to Frampton Comes Alive and they’re not bad documents of mid-70’s arena rock. Frampton had some chops and about four albums worth of material when making up the setlist for Comes Alive. Not only did he choose the right tunes for the show, his live abilities enhanced them and made the majority of the cuts definitive versions. The original studio cuts seem a bit tepid, with Frampton’s Camel being a bit more aggressive and, as a result, similar in feel to the live versions. And then my parents come up to visit with a fair warning that they’re cleaning out closets in preparation for what will be a move from my old hometown. That’s family speak for “If we come across some of your shit in the closet or attic, we’re bringing it up to you and letting you deal with it. So I get a box of albums, many of which I had no idea that I still possessed, and they did indeed contain those aforementioned Frampton albums as well as the Comes Alive follow-up: I’m In You. It should comes as no surprise that I stopped keeping track of Peter Frampton after that album, aided in large part by the utterly retarded decision to star in the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band movie with the Bee Gees and easy-to-knockout-nursing-home-mainstay, George Burns. With the exception of Burns, I hated every one of the artists that joined in this assfucking of Beatles favorites. I waited until Oh God, You Devil! before I started to hate George Burns. There were some other surprises in that box of albums, most notably dozens of record sleeves that I took out and replaced with non-scratch sleeves that I bought to prevent damaging my priceless vinyl. So now I have the inner sleeves to such wonderful titles like Sports and High Infidelity while not being in possession of the actual album itself. I wisely unloaded them for pennies on the dollar, and probably would have done the same had I maintained my vinyl collection like I now admit that I should have done. To be honest, I probably would have kept those Frampton albums too, but thanks to their strategic location (read: in the back of one of my parent’s closets) I was unable to unload them when I didn’t know any better.
The booty:
The Beatles Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (red Capitol label pressing) The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour (purple Capitol label pressing) The Beatles Let It Be (original red Apple pressing) John Lennon Imagine (purple Capitol label pressing) George Harrison Spirits In The Material World (original Apple pressing) George Harrison Somewhere In England (US pressing) The Yardbirds Yardbirds Favorites Cheap Trick At Budokan Elton John Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only The Piano Player Tom Waits Swordfishtrombones The Velvet Underground V.U. U2 October U2 Wide Awake In America Pete Townshend Who Came First The Moody Blues Days Of Future Passed Humble Pie Smokin’ Frampton’s Camel Frampton’s Camel Peter Frampton Frampton Peter Frampton Frampton Comes Alive Peter Frampton I’m In You