The Residents: A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 2 (Excerpt)

Jefferson Starship, Huey Lewis, and other notable Bay Area musicians pose with the MTV Starship Cruise contest winner (June 2, 1984) | 19

My first experience with The Residents was being dressed up as a one-armed dwarf waiter with enormous clown shoes and a miner’s hat made from crepe paper and serving gigantic heads of foam-rubber broccoli to Irene Dogmatic in Vileness Fats. My second experience was hand-coloring carrots for the silkscreened covers of the first pressing of The Third Reich ’n Roll. On two of the two hundred covers, I impishly colored the carrots green and the leaves orange. My 20th-or-so experience was music directing the stage version of God in Three Persons for its four-city “world tour.”

Somewhere in between, I was asked to provide backing vocals for The Big Bubble, for which I enlisted fellow comedian-singers Rick Right (of the Rick and Ruby Show) and Ray Hanna.

IN ALL THAT TIME, I NEVER LEARNED THE RESIDENTS’ REAL IDENTITIES.

I have to tell you, it was strange sitting in that tiny Sycamore Street studio with somebody wearing one of those giant eyeball heads. I think maybe those were their real heads. In any event, it was kind of hard to make out what they were saying, so I was left pretty much to my own devices.

Joshua Raoul Brody

Stars & Hank Forever (October 1986, New Ralph)

In 1985, I had been out of The Residents’ stage band (from their Mole Show and Assorted Secrets era) for less than a year, so I was still somewhat a part of the greater Cryptic community. I knew about, but wasn’t involved in, their various projects at the time, among them the American Composer Series.

When they told me that they wanted to include their arrangements of some marches by John Philip Sousa, we got into a discussion of how their studio recordings of the music could be made to sound more like a real marching band as heard in a parade. The simple scheme we cooked up had us finding an abandoned parking lot and getting a power inverter to run a large audio amplifier off the batteries of my van and a wheelchair in which we could place a PA speaker. To “worldize” the music, Hardy slowly rolled the wheelchair with the speaker playing the music up to a set of microphones from a few hundred feet away, let the cue play for a bit, then slowly rolled the speaker away a few hundred feet while the music tailed out. The effect was not unlike that of a marching band approaching, stopping to play, and then marching off.

We recorded many takes of each cue with this technique, experimenting with how fast the speaker should move, which direction it should face, and so on. Hardy later enhanced the overall effect in his studio, and he used our “worldizing” as transitions between the cuts.

Philip Perkins

| Double Shot (May 1988, Rykodisc)

THE RESIDENTS ARE A TRULY INVENTIVE AND HUGELY UNDERRATED BAND.

Their eyeballs saw it first—they understood the collision between surrealism, art, and music way before everyone else woke up. Unique, creative, and fearless are the most admirable credentials to have. Combine that with parody and satire, and you will end up on their street, which is a great place to visit.

Nick Rhodes, Duran Duran

| Primus’ Tales from the Punchbowl release party at Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco, CA (January 9, 1996)