The Residents

Concert Performance

Co-presented by
World Music/CRASHarts
and ICA/Boston
at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art)
Boston, MA

The Residents have been around for over forty years and they are celebrating with a commemorative concert tour that features pieces emblematic of each of the many stages, and albums, through which they have traveled.

The result was an edgy, gritty, and sometimes surprisingly sentimental, journey.

Before the band appeared, the stage was adorned with an inflated set with a Christmas theme, candy canes abounding, with Santa on one side, and a snowman on the other, a nod to their 1978 album, Santa Dog. A high red swivel seat sat in front of the set, but, apart from getting in the way and providing a later cause for some spontaneous antics, it never got used.

The band, as it is now constituted, consists of two musicians, identified only as Chuck and Bob, and a singer-raconteur, Randy.

Chuck and Bob appeared in masks that conjured alien dreadlocks – calling to mind some interpretations of the feared Morlocks in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine – that covered their entire heads.

Randy came out in a kind of modified court jester’s Santa outfit, displaying a partial mask and a whipping back of wild white hair in a way that brought to mind a cross between Santa, Bozo the Clown, Julian Beck, the founder of The Living Theatre, and Mr. Mxyzptlk, the naughty prankster who hounded Superman from the fifth dimension.

The music was generated by a synthesizer controlled by Chuck, a guitar played by Bob, and vocals sung by Randy, all considerably modulated electronically.

Randy was exceptionally kinetic throughout the performance, making his way across the front of the stage like a hobbled variant of Mick Jagger, strutting, lurching and hunching over, frequently conducting the music as he went along. He conveyed an authority of movement and narrative, while, at the same time, expressing a wounded vulnerability, yielding a mashup of celebratory and confessional moods.

The evening began with Picnic in the Jungle, a repetitive chant that had an endearing simplicity while driving its message home. In their setting, lyrics like “every day they leave a tray and take an empty one away” called to mind a cross between the daring charms of Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe and the macabre dystopia of Lawrence Ferlingetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind.

Give It To Someone Else and The Confused Transsexual contained great guitar riffs, synthesizer passages that called to mind the yawns and moans of a theremin, and jarringly repetitive phrases with large swaths of industrial sounds.

Randy went offstage at various points during the uninterrupted performance to change T-shirts to correspond with each successive commemorated album of the group’s long career. He gave an entertaining running commentary about the history of the group, and whatever else came to mind, all with a spontaneous, hick-tinged bravado.

When he described the period in which the group wore what became their very popular and widely appreciated eyeball masks, he humorously noted that these masks brought with them just a few problems. As he cogently put it: we couldn’t see or hear or breathe.

Touch Me, described as a song about a demented midget in a codependent relationship with a giant and into rough sex, involved more involved gestural improvisations from Randy, this time calling to mind a cross between a sylph and a spinning Sufi.

A poignant passing note invoked the death, in 1987, of Snakefinger, an English musician who had collaborated with The Residents for many years.

Unexpectedly evocative lines rose up at odd points from the gravelly sound: the stars are interruptions to the darkness of the night.

Randy philosophized at one point about the nature of obsession – like a whirlpool in your brain, it just keeps going around and around – acknowledging, in some way, the insistently repetitive style of the sounds, lyrics and gestures.

Having spoken about the lonely nature of his life after the collapse of his eleven marriages, and then about his only current companion, a cat named Maurice, he took a (staged) phone call in which it was relayed that Maurice had been hit by a car. The audience gasped, but then Randy said Maurice was okay, relieving everyone.

After riffing about Geezer Squeezer, a site devoted to matches between old guys and “young chicks” (Randy’s term), he pulled out a long, floppy, rubber phallic prop and swung it around with abandon. Soon afterwards, the entire inflated set deflated and collapsed.

In the wake of this detumescent drama, with the collapse of the candy canes, the Santa and the snowman, magically a new, Christmas-tree like inflation with a single massive eyeball in place of a star rose up high on the stage while Bob played echoes of O, Tannenbaum.

After an informal bow and an encore, the band finally departed to a remarkably traditional Auld Lang Syne, a tribute to the underlying sentiment that surrounded the iconoclasm in this wonderfully oddball, but endearing, anniversary celebration.

– BADMan