The RESIDENTS at MoMA

The Residents are one of my all-time favorite bands. And yet, sometimes when I mentioned them to friends, I get a blank look until I say, you know the guys with the giant eyeball disguises with top hats and tuxedos… Then, oh yeah, yeah I know who you mean… more people know what they look like than what they sound like.  They have been around since the mid-seventies and have consistently released interesting, challenging, dark, bizarre, intriguing, warped music. They are a band, an art collective, rock and roll provocateurs, and could be considered both pre-punk & post-punk at the same time! They are always anonymous, and perform in various disguises.

If you don’t know where to start, try Third Reich and Roll, one of my all-time favorite albums, (a brilliant deconstruction, and distorted reimagining of 60’s pop) or better yet, a great documentary about them: “The Theory of Obscurity”. They continue to put out incredibly intriguing music, their latest release, called Metal, Meat and Bone (2020) it is a two disc set with one disc purported to be the long lost demos of legendary blues musician Dyin’ Dog (almost certainly fictitious) the second disc is the Residents’ reinterpretation of those same songs, it is excellent!!!  Their album before that was Ghost of Hope (2017), a concept album about late 19th & early 20th century train wrecks… Always interesting! 

Back to the point, in 1988 they released as superb concept album called God in Three Persons. On the surface, it was about a Svengali-like character who discovers, exploits, love/hates (and ultimately tries to destroy) Siamese twin, gender-fluid, Faith Healers… it explores concepts of dichotomy, trust and betrayal, love and hate, greed and altruism, etc. It is a extraordinary album, but one of the few that the Residents never toured for, or had a stage show of, because they didn’t feel that they could do it justice… Until now. Teaming up with brilliant concept artist John Sanborn, the Residents presented their master work in a very limited performance at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on Jan. 25th 2020… it was a very small theater (only about 250 seats) the tickets were extremely tough to aquire, and it was general admission so we got there very early. We were in the second group on the line, the group in front of us included someone from Hawaii and one from Florida, the group behind us included several people from Europe… It was a very enthusiastic crowd !  This was a big event, one that we had waited for a long time, and it was totally worth it!  It was a brilliant multimedia performance with multi-level projections, costumes, performers, props, staging, etc.  The band wore wolf masks, the singer wore the costume of the disgraced svengali-like “Mr. X”… a dancer in the same costume shadowed and mirrored him, expressing his inner thoughts and emotions. 

The whole performance was utterly brilliant, and performed flawlessly. The show starts off with a blank stage framed with a row of lights and side curtains and a large projection screen to the rear. The musicians of the band are in front and to the side of the stage dressed in black suits with bright red ties and the wolf (or dog) masks. Background singers are also with the band, they are all lit in glowing red lights. As the music starts, an ominous overture, the screen comes alive with crowded images of TV sets, news broadcasts, newspaper headlines, etc.  Many multiple images detailing the story of the anti-hero Mr. X’s fall From grace… Now a disgraced evangelist… He enters the stage dressed in a black suit, white shirt, black tie & vest, grotesque bald old man mask with a long nose and black sunglasses.  He is shadowed by his doppelganger, dressed in the same outfit, who expresses his inner emotions. As the first song (Hard & Tenderly) starts, the screen is filled with images of the psychic faith-healing, gender-fluid, Siamese twins, but also odd marching puppet-like stick figures and foreboding graphics.  The lyrics are about his meeting of the Twins, and narrate in an interesting phonetic style, similar to the rhyme and meter patterns used in Poe’s The Raven.  The music remains ominous but bouncy, frequently including little snippets of the catchy sixties pop song Double Shot of My Baby’s Love.  The show continues with increasingly bizarre graphics and image projections on the screens and tells the story of Mr. X’s involvement with the twins. He discovers & then exploits their talents.  His love/hate relationship with them continues to develop.  The artistic interplay between the on-stage performers and the increasingly complex and disturbing images projected onto and around them was brilliant.  I was enthralled, as was the entire audience.  Themes of dichotomies continue throughout the show. The artistry was detailed, intricate and brilliantly performed.  Mr. X continues to selfishly use the twins, (during the song The Service) he involves the audience by anointing them & then throwing bloody money at us.  
As the story continues, passion, love, lust & trust grow, but so do hate, jealousy, corruption, control, power & greed… they develop and combine… Pleasure & pain… Depravity,  duplicity, betrayal and murderous intent emerge… Leading to an eventual strange, explosive, twisted and dramatic climax.  What a show!!!! Incredible music, brilliant images, spectacular theater!!! I can’t do it justice in describing it so, Google it, there are many clips online, and John Sanborn even posted the entire show, professionally shot, online for free!  After the incredible performance, there was a complimentary snack and wine reception upstairs at the Museum, the band (now out of costume) mingled anonymously with fans, it was incredible, and shows why Residents fans are so rabidly loyal to this band. 

Another great thing that happened was that the band printed up really cool multi-page programs that unfolded into lyric sheets and unfolded again into a big full-color poster. They had intended to give them out prior to the show, but due to a technical dispute with MoMA they were not allowed to do so. They could have just forgotten about it, put the programs on their website for sale, but that’s not what they did… they went down the entire ticket holders line with a clipboard, collected everybody’s name and address and (at their own expense), mailed us those incredible programs, they arrived about a week or so later, oh, so cool!  A tremendously great evening!
“The Residents celebrate 45 years of Obscurity” was the slogan of their previous tour (also excellent!).  If you don’t know them, or haven’t heard them lately, dive back in & enjoy… there’s nothing else like them!