Trying To Get Away From The Eyeballs

Veteran San Franciscan art collective The Residents are definitely a band — they have, after all, released some 60 albums plus too many audiovisual and multimedia projects to mention — but at the same time they're defiantly so much more than a mere band. Their giddy mix of performance art and experimental music was from the outset abetted by a resolute refusal to follow the well beaten path, or, indeed, pay any heed at all to music industry convention, to the point where their entire career plays out like one incredible, decades-long art project, one where each individual piece works perfectly in isolation but takes on much more import when viewed as part of the astonishing bigger picture.

Ever since their first tentative forays in 1971 The Residents have favoured anonymity, always appearing costumed when in the public eye. For the longest time they favoured a distinctive costume featuring large eyeball helmets offset by top hats and tuxedos, a freaky-but-memorable look that became a calling card of sorts. Of late, however, they've been appearing under a different guise, a stripped-back trio incarnation featuring a ghoulish frontman in a demented-old-man mask (Randy) and two flanking instrumentalists wearing indescribable, dreadlocked ensembles (Chuck and Bob). 

"Shadowland is about birth, rebirth and reincarnation and near-death experiences..."

In 2010 Randy, Chuck and Bob unveiled their The Talking Light project — looking at ghosts and death in their own inimitable fashion (avoid the Mirror People at all costs) — which was followed by their Wonder Of Weird show, an equally twisted rumination on love and sex. Now they're progressing even further in reverse through the human condition with Shadowland, focusing upon the very start of life: birth. All three installations utilise The Residents' back catalogue of music in weird and wonderful ways, meaning that the trilogy has managed to balance simultaneously looking forwards and backwards with typical aplomb.

Homer Flynn has been spokesman for The Residents and their mysterious management group Cryptic Corporation since the early '70s (the whole time doggedly denying ongoing speculation that he's a founding member and vocalist for the group itself). As such he's perfectly poised to offer insight into the machinations and motivations of the iconic avant-garde ensemble, despite his steadfast refusal to divulge their personal details.  

"Shadowland is really sort of the wrap-up for the Randy, Chuck and Bob era," Flynn tells of the show that The Residents are on the verge of unveiling in Australia. "But in general it's gone well, it's been a successful series of shows and tours for The Residents. Shadowland is about birth, rebirth and reincarnation and near-death experiences, so there's a very nice series of monologues that are videos and [they're] done like little highlights that happen throughout the set in Shadowland, and those are really quite nice.

"As it has evolved, the Randy, Chuck and Bob trilogy has been really kind of showcasing The Residents' catalogue of music, with each one the songs were picked to highlight whichever theme was appropriate for that segment of the trilogy. So once again they picked out songs which they felt were appropriate for the rebirth-et cetera theme, but it is all old material which has been drastically rearranged."

Flynn explains that while this music has always been imperative in The Residents' pursuits, it's essentially just one part of a higher artistic pursuit.

"Honestly, in my mind, The Residents have supported themselves by selling music, historically. Now that no one can sell music anymore they support themselves primarily off of touring," he reflects. "But I don't think that they've ever seen themselves as limited to music, really, as their avenue of expression — I think they've always seen that what they did was broader than that. But music is the most dominant of the various ways that they express themselves. Personally I think they would see it as a broader artistic statement rather that just music."

"The Residents always wanted to have a sense of separation between their public personas and their private lives."

The band's ongoing identity concealment has long distracted attention from the magnitude of The Residents' work, despite the complex Theory Of Anonymity long being one of the band's main tenets, and Flynn agrees that over time its importance has probably been overstated by many.

"No, I don't think that [the anonymity was ever a main factor of the band] at all to tell you the truth," he offers. "The Residents always wanted to have a sense of separation between their public personas and their private lives, and ultimately that's more about what the anonymity was all about.

"As far as the Cryptic Corporation go — whose job was to take The Residents and market them and sell them — the idea of anonymity was a lot of novelty in terms of being able to get media attention, but I don't think there was ever any intention of that being all that important in the beginning. It was just a way of working that was unique to them and created that separation."

In their current incarnation as Randy, Chuck and Bob, the protagonists are still anonymous, just coming at their music from a whole different angle with an expanded sense of theatricality. It's quite a seismic shift in The Residents oeuvre to take the famous eyeballs from the equation altogether — although they were becoming peripheral on their last Australian visit in 2005 for The Way We Were tour — but Flynn explains that they their trademark look had long ago become something of a millstone for the band.

"If anything The Residents have been trying to get away from the eyeballs almost from the time that they were first created," he tells. "It's interesting because nobody expected the eyeballs to be as popular as they have been. The Residents' intention in the beginning was to have a different look or a different disguise for every project, and when [1979 album] Eskimo came along the eyeballs were just the next thing, but somehow or other those crazy eyeballs seemed to really strike a chord and people just loved them, and at that point it almost became impossible to get away from them.

"The Residents tried to get away from them with their [1989] Cube E show: they used like full-suit cubist eyeballs which were really worn by dancers, and that was really a step [in] trying to get away from them. But then when the CD-ROM era came along in the mid-'90s and The Residents did Freak Show [1991] and [1995 computer game] Bad Day On The Midway — some things that were fairly popular at that time — and all those companies wanted the eyeballs again. So actually the eyeballs were remanufactured in 1993 or 1994, mainly because the original ones were so beat-up at that point that brand new ones were made.

"So there's always been this sense of trying to get away from them, but never quite being able to get away from them. So Randy, Chuck and Bob really allowed for a clean break I think in a way that nothing else has."