The Residents

Meet The Residents 1974

In which are heroes The Residents arrive on the music scene with an iconoclastic surrealist cover that avoided litigation surely by the fact that it sold so little. The music was equally striking.

Martin Smith from Amazon: Straight away you know you’re in for something special by the cover alone. Any band brave enough to deface the Beatles and rename then (as John Crawfish, George Crawfish, Paul McCrawfish and Ringo Starfish) gets my vote as all-time-punk-icons. It wasn’t until later (Beyond the Valley of a Day in the Life of, Flying and their deliberately awful rendition of Hey Jude) that they got around to deconstructing the Beatles themselves.

On “Meet the Residents” they take a more general approach to deconstructing pop. We get a snatch of Nancy Sinatra’s “Boots”, with vocals sounding like they’ve been echoing forever through time, and punctuated by stabs of odd brass. We get tunes built around an old echoing piano, it could even have been recorded in someone’s living room. We get an apparent trio of female backing vocalists, and some dangerously surreal southern accents. (That the most off-the-wall of all rock bands could come from the South must embarass the more resolutely urban Ubu’s, Heads and Devos of the world). We get funny-and-frightening at the same time, but not without snatches of beauty. “Length and Breadth”‘s harmonious wordplay is one instance, the pastorally lovely “Rest Aria” a welcome break between the twin nightmares of “Smelly Tongues” and “Scratz”, the final ethereal chant – “Go home America, 55’ll do” sounding to all the world like a choir of thousands of dead Viet cong and GIs singing in unison.

But Willie Hines says It’s the Residents. It’s going to be weird. Interestingly though, time has shown the debut to be a sprawling unfocused affair, with nary a hint as to the brilliance that would soon follow. Art for arts’ sake? Start with Buster and Glen/Duck Stab or, better yet, Not Available.

Third Reich N Roll 1976

Now if defacing the holy Beatles visages wasn’t enough of a statement that somehow avoided litigation, The Residents’ next long player is arguably their most controversial featuring Dick Clark on the cover as a nazi fuhrer. Dick Clark, and his show American Bandstand, wielded vast entertainment power and influence in the fifties and sixties in America. He was viewed in modern-day parlance as a youth influencer with viewing figures of around 20 million.

Martin Gray, Amazon:Third Reich ‘n’ Roll – their third album [proper] released in 1976 – is an absolutely hilarious deconstruction of the pop song whereby our anti-heroes simply defecate from a great height onto the collective heads of the then rock’n’pop aristocracy. All manner of unwitting victims fall prey to the characteristic Residents [mal]treatment: detuned melodies, unhinged arrangements, goofy plunking piano, guitars that sound like angry wasps, nightmarish orchestral interludes, rumbling kettle drums, varispeeded nasal vocals …. all blended, shaken and stirred into an ungodly sonic stew.

The album is split into just two suites: side a (part one) is entitled Swastikas On Parade (which explains the controversial artwork on the cover), whilst side b (part two) rejoices under the delightful title Hitler Was A Vegetarian. There are NO other track listings, so this means the listener is forced to pick out the individual songs being lampooned as they work their way through 36 minutes of sheer aural mayhem. Disorientating it certainly is – and for the unititiated ear it is nothing more than an unlistenable, infuriating mess. But this is the album’s strength. One reviewer once called this ‘a work of quite astounding awfulness and atonality’, whilst another lauded it as ‘pure unbridled genius’. The truth actually lies somewhere in between.

Persevere with this record though, and you will then be able to pick out the following tunes amongst many more buried in the mix: Let’s Twist Again (which kicks off the album), It’s My Party, Yummy Yummy Yummy, Gloria, Wipe Out, Light My Fire, 96 Tears, Good Lovin’, Heroes and Villains, and ending with possibly the most hilariously skewed take on Hey Jude’s fade-out/coda you could ever clap your ears on…. the guitars so out of tune they could curdle milk!! In fact they cleverly combine this with the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy For The Devil so seamlessly that you wouldn’t realise this. 

Homer Flynn (Cryptic Corporation) You know, anytime somebody is starting out they’re looking to establish themselves and a lot of times they do things that are more outrageous as a way of getting attention. When the third rock’n’roll came along, they were really kind of naïve about the use of the swastikas and Nazi imagery.

For them World War Two was 30 years ago, and something to make fun of. The Nazi imagery is very striking and they saw it as a way of being able to bring that back around and make fun of it in a lot of ways. They were kind of seeing what they considered the fascism of rock’n’roll. They saw that the way the media was embracing rock’n’roll was then kind of infecting or corrupting other musical forms. By the time it got to be the 70s, the media was, was totally dominant and controlled everything and it was creating a certain sense of fascism from their point of view around the idea of rock’n’roll. They saw Dick Clark as Hitler as a great orchestrator of this but once again in a very humorous way.

The thing that’s always so funny to me is I have a friend who is a musician and he had reason to be in Dick Clark’s office and what should he see on the wall but the cover of the album. The Residents love that. There was no backlash but I’m sure if we had been making a lot of money things would have been different for sure.

It’s funny because I think a later reprint of the album has the. Some of the symbols removed.

Yeah, I mean interestingly for the first German version of it the Cryptic Corporation created a version of it strictly for Germany. I did the artwork on this and put little censored labels and just stuck them all over anywhere there was a swastika and once again part of it was a joke just to turn the whole thing into something that would just be crazy. Punk77 January 2025 Interview

Satisfaction 1976

Arguably the greatest cover version ever. The Residents take the Rolling Stones’s song of teenage angst and deconstruct it to the point of near torture with Snakefinger on guitar. It was re-released in 1978 on yellow vinyl at the same time as Devo’s version (that was a hit) and was The Residents’ best seller.

Were The Residents aware of of punk rock or were they just kind of blissfully unware of it all?

Homer Flynn: They were aware of it. I mean, ironically, The Residents version of Satisfaction is credited by some people as the first punk rock song.

I do love the song, but I used to use it when I was having a party and it got to about 3am and people wouldn’t leave. So I’d put that on at excruciating volume. I find that would do the trick!

Homer Flynn: There was a bar in Berkeley that did the same thing. When it was time to close the bar and they had to empty it out, they would put on Satisfaction at a high volume. I mean the. Residents love that. Punk77 Interview January 2025

Duck Stab 1978

Michael Sean, Amazon: This terrific disc is comprised of two EPs (“Duck Stab” and “Buster & Glen”), and it represents one of the best albums from the group’s ‘classic’ period (1972-80). The songs are fairly linear and the lyrics are even sung clearly, but don’t take this to mean that they’ve become radio friendly. These catchy little numbers are 14 nightmarish excursions into the demented nursery of the Residents, and after you’ve weathered one sitting they’ll continue to poke at your brain for days.

This was their best selling release at the time, and helped push their mystique further into the attention of the American underground. Les Claypool has named this album as one of his favorites (Primus has covered “Sinister Exaggerator,” “Constantinople” and “Hello Skinny”) and much of the warped style on Ween’s “The Pod” and “Pure Guava” albums can be traced back to this record. It also features some excellent guitar work by the late Snakefinger (aka Philip Charles Lithman). This is required listening for fans of fringe artists and unusual music, and it’s easily an essential Residents title.

Eskimo 1979

And in what seems a blink of an eye The Residents take their myth-making up a serious notch and make their own ethnographic album purporting to be Eskimo music. To add to this they made the instruments used themselves and ran away to England with the master tapes because their record company Ralph thought the record unreleasable.

The record is exquisitely beautiful and works on two levels conjuring up both aurally and visually the harsh but beautiful landscape. There is nothing else like it. But the icing on the cake is the cover and that old Residents trick of juxtaposition. What better way to convey the sound within than …. the band dressed in the now iconic top-hatted eyeballed, dinner suits a la Fred Astaire against a Hollywood-style art deco set!

Chinacatalba, Aamazon I am not sure if I can successfully convey to you all just how I feel about this album. This is no ordinary album of tunes and songs and if that is what you are looking for then read no further.

Eskimo was inspired by the sounds recorded and photographs taken by the Residents friend the mysterious N. Senada while he was in the North Pole; you may buy into this mythology or not but the end result is an album of soundscapes, far far ahead of it’s time. A previous reviewer described the music as desolate and indeed it is desolate, but it is also inherently beautiful in the same way that desolate landscapes are or can be.

There are a collection of stories to read while listening to the strange sounds emitting from your speakers but after a while these are irrelevant as you are drawn into the Residents sound picture of Eskimo life and landscape. There are many unusual sounds on offer here and again a patient and adventurous listener will be rewarded. This is quite like no other album in modern popular music.