Fighting The Rising Tide Of Rock And Roll Fascism
OR:
Destroying Rock Music In Two Easy Steps

Mute Records releases (another) one of The Residents masterpieces.

by Andrew Lau

When management approached me to review this particular compact digital disc, I jumped at the chance thinking that it would be easy. Why not, I'd been following group since 1984 after discovering them during a video retrospective on USA's late night TV program, "Night Flight". Afterwards, I snapped up their Eskimo LP because it had the best cover (the four Residents standing in their now famous eyeballs 'n tuxedoes costumes). The next day my ninth grade locker mate, Franz, asked me about it and I told him, rather disappointedly, that it was all "whale sounds" (which isn't really true, there is a lot more going on than just animal noises and the Residents pretending to be indigenous people). Franz laughed with his trademark shriek and ran off. Soon word spread through our small suburban Minneapolis high school about my purchase. For the rest of the day everyone wanted to know how I liked my new whale sounds record. Months later, I landed their Duck Stab/Buster & Glen LP which was a much easier collection to get my teenage brain around.

Despite the fact that everything the Residents had done and were doing completely baffled me, they were my new friends and sharing was not an option. Every once in a while, however, I'd show a few pals some of their "One Minute Movies" (taped from that same "Night Flight" program onto my trusty Sony Betamax) just to test their level of absurdity. No one knew what to make of it. My older sister Julie walked out of the room during one minute movie for "Simple Song" which was understandable since it dealt with the four of them in a dark room marching in a tight circle around a hog's head that had flares sticking out of its ears. Grotesque, absurd and like nothing I had ever seen previously. You couldn't help but watch.

So yes, my appreciation of the Residents goes back some twenty years which is all fine and dandy, but writing about these folks is much harder than I thought, especially when it comes to dealing with one of their first masterpieces, The Third Reich & Roll, a difficult and controversial record. They are almost too weird, too creative and far-reaching to pin down. Since the actual history of the group is unknown, they constantly elude you. Even the books out there on these guys admit that much of the "facts" are based on rumors, and hearsay. Matt Groening's 1979 dissertation, "True Story Of…" is subtitled: "A brief summary of known facts, top secrets, hazy details, veiled hints and blatant lies." They have been legend since day one and there is nothing like them anywhere. As the high and mighty Village Voice once wrote, "Should the Residents cease to create art, then art ceases to exist". To hell with The Blue Man Group.

For starters, the Residents have never really been a "band" in the classic sense. Having migrated to the Bay Area from - legend has it - Shreveport, Louisiana, they started creative life making an epic underground video project entitled Vileness Fats. Music making (and, as legend also has it, their ambitious collection of "interesting and unusual" tapes) was a byproduct of their filmmaking. Vileness Fats proved to be too much of an undertaking and, after four years and fourteen hours of videotape, it was abandoned. A highly edited version was finally released under the title What Ever Happened To Vileness Fats in 1984.
In the meantime they recorded two LP's, one of which, Meet The Residents, was released in April of 1974. By the time they had recorded their second full length, a mysterious fellow by the name of N. Senada (a German avant-gardist or an anthropologist/composer depending what story you're going with) appeared at their Sycamore Street studio one day and introduced them to the "Theory Of Obscurity". This was the process in which completed projects were not to be heard by anyone except the creators. Or, as one Resident researcher put it, "the artist can only produce pure art when the expectations and influences of the outside world are not taken into consideration." Under this same concept their second record, eventually titled Not Available, "could only be released when the creators themselves had completely forgotten about its existence." Sticking to their guns, Not Available wasn't released until 1978.

For much of the time, these four artists were isolated from the rest of the world and culture. The owner of a small Berkeley record shop, Rather Ripped Records, had befriended the group and exposed them to seminal German bands such as Can, Faust and Kraftwerk. Add those German deconstruction ideals to The Residents' love/hate relationship of pop music and, well, you have yerself another ambitious idea at hand. While still in the throes of the Vileness Fats project, the recording of what would become The Third Reich 'N Roll was scheduled for two shifts. The first in October of 1974, the other in October of 1975. In between those twelve months, The Residents looked at their own culture and discovered how creepy it had become. Rock music had been accepted as the one and only music genre. Boring, whitebread arena rock, some of which had somehow soaked up nasty element of smooth jazz, watered down blues and pretentious garbage involving childish Lord Of The Rings type imagery. It was everywhere and, for the most part, it was not good. The Residents smelled fascism and soon this new record had a central theme: fascism as music, music as fascism. Hell, it was Cultural Fascism that reeked to high hell and they intended to expose it.

The finished product, released in 1976, was maybe even beyond the Residents' expectations. The record consists of two side-long tracks, each given a wince inducing title: "Hitler Was A Vegetarian" and "Swastikas On Parade". Boundaries had been pushed, years of musical experimentations had given way to an elaborate swell of tape manipulations and pin point editing.
Here's a description of the first five minutes: As an intro, you hear a male German voice imitating the opening lines to Chubby Checker's "Let's Twist Again" which dissolves into an industrial/percussion version of "Land Of 1000 Dances" with nonsense lyrics that leads to a piano and percussion driven version of Tommy James And The Shondells' "Hanky Panky" with snarling, almost decipherable lyrics, the chorus of which is repeated over and over; each time the words blur further into angry baby talk, which then flows into a fraction of America's "Horse With No Name" where they "la-la-la" the song's chorus, which leads quickly into a amazingly cynical go at the Swinging Medallions’ genius 1966 hit "Double Shot (Of My Baby's Love)", complete with the sound of machine guns, bombs and the eerie sound of a World War II era fighter plane going down which then flows into a growled vocal version of…I have absolutely no idea but it melts into a childish take on "Wipeout" while primitive keyboard work beds everything together.

Out of tune guitars, car crashes, more gunfire, door buzzers, air raid sirens and an unbelievable clarinet solo. Archaic synthesizers, perhaps the very first sample of that distinctive horn blast to James Brown's "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag", home made drum machines, chirps, clatter and none of it computer generated. All we have here is manipulated tape and whatever they could do with their 8-track soundboard. A partial list of other songs put through the ringer include "96 Tears"; "It's My Party And I'll Cry If I Want To"; "Light My Fire"; "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy"; "Good Lovin'"; "Gloria"; and a grand finale of "Inna-Gada-Da-Vida" into a crippled "Hey Jude" into a broken "Sympathy For The Devil".

Nothing like this had been heard or made since the early 1920's when Italian Futurists Antonio and Luigi Russolo and Luigi Grandi were trying to replicate the sounds of a city with their own homemade instruments. Hints of early Frank Zappa and Lord Buckley here, traces of a free jazz and cartoon music influence there…but really, this is all pure Residents starting a new chapter in music history. Their own chapter. As the notes to the first CD version of this record so eloquently pointed out: "[Third Reich 'N Roll is a] scathingly satirical look at 60's bubble-gum rock somehow twisted into shocking '70's bubble-gum avant-garde. With a swift kick in the balls, The Residents leave rock and roll as fodder for tomorrow's dough brains."

This wasn't the first time they took a swing at covering other people's material. That debut LP, Meet The Residents, opens with a finger popping, scattered, a cappella version of "These Boots Are Made For Walking" (renamed "Boots"). Better yet, The Human Beinz glorious 1966 garage rock nugget "Nobody But Me" can be heard clearly playing in the background of the closing track, "N-er-gee (Crisis Blues)" while one of The Residents tried to sing along. This wasn't just the group covering the song -- this was the actual record blasting away. If that were to happen today, a swarm of high-powered lawyers would be descending. But this being 1976 and an extremely obscure debut record from four artists who refuse to show their faces in public, not too many people noticed. Those who did either didn't care or were too overwhelmed with the LP to notice. While Third Reich carried way more in the terms of perpetual copywrite infringements, nothing was acknowledged until the CD version was issued in the early 1990's, by which time sampling and copywrite law was quite an issue. The Residents had created a "parent company", The Cryptic Corporation, to field and dodge questions, legal matters and whatever else the four didn't want to deal with. The fact that Third Reich was filled to the brim with unacknowledged covers, a glib but terse "Important Message" was issued inside the cover of the CD:

"The Residents freely admit that the riffs, words, and even sometimes the arrangements found on The Third Reich 'N Roll were shamelessly lifted from their memory of top forty radio of the Sixties. We, as the parent company, support The Residents in their tribute to the thousands of little power-mad minds of the music industry who have helped make us what we are today, with an open eye on what we can make them tomorrow."

Then there was the record's cover. Just as amazing as the music inside, it created a little more heat than perhaps intended and continues to this day. Standing front and center amidst the red and black colors is the epitome of 50's and 60's pop radio/pop TV, Dick Clark. He is smiling, holding a carrot and dressed in compete Nazi attire. Around him is are a half dozen pint sized Hitlers dressed in various outfit and dancing on cloud-like formations. The border of the LP contain the words: "The Residents present Third Reich 'N Roll" and "See Vileness Fats - coming to a theater or drive-in near you."

It would seem odd that an unknown group of artists who refuse to show their faces in public would go the distance and shoot promotional photos for their second release, but it was all part of the process. Photographer Graeme Whifler shot a series of photos with the group in their studio and in, of all places, the Chancellor's Meeting Room on the Berkeley campus. Here the Residents are each dressed in black suits, with the traditional Hitler look of mustache 'n hair sweep. To top it off, their faces poke through giant, 4X4 foot swastikas. One of the Residents uses arm braces, they strike poses, salutes, some of the shots have them wearing two small swastikas over their eyes. In another, they're photographed while covered in a sheet of plastic.
Adhering to the Berkeley tradition of running against tradition, Rather Ripped Records (perhaps the only record store at the time to stock Residents product) made a window display for Third Reich at the time of its release. A giant poster (4X8) featuring an image from the Graeme Whifler sessions of a swastika-headed Resident holding a trumpet sitting next to a giant skull. Hanging in front of the poster on string were baby dolls wrapped in gauze to look like mummies and in back of the poster were copies of the album cover.

Distressing? You bet, and it only took a few days of constant phone calls, protests and a couple of bricks through the glass before they owner took down the display. Seems as if Berkeley had already lost both its sense of irony and free speech. The Residents weren't portraying Hitler and Nazis as the epitome of evil geniuses, but rather as kings of the losers and were propping them up for absolute mockery. All in all, this project was (and remains) a total and absolute assault on anyone within hearing or visual distance.

There is perhaps no better imprint suited for the tough but prestigious job of handling the Residents ("faceless anti-stars existing in the dim outskirts of mainstream awareness…") They have taken it upon themselves to releasing some of their most challenging work, including the groups latest head scratcher, Animal Lover. One look at the Mute Records roster of bands will tell you that they do not shy away from challenging artists: Can, Suicide, Goldfrapp, Diamanda Galas, The Warlocks, Throbbing Gristle.

As pointed out above, promoting The Third Reich 'N Roll has always been a bit of a high wire act, but the good folks at Mute don't worry. At the bottom of the CD's summery on their web site (Mute.com) they simply state: " The Residents don't support racism, Catholicism, fascism, Judaism, cynicism, realism or journalism."

Mute's re-release comes as a CD sized hardbound book edition with 32 pages of historical text and previously unpublished photos. The sound quality has been approved and now you can hear every little crazed and imaginative detail. No bonus tracks of demos or outtakes, just the music as it was intended to be heard originally. One of the most challenging records form one of the most challenging, uncompromising and original groups in the world today.

Today, culture and rock music is just as fascist seeming (maybe even more so) than it was in 1976. By the same token, the Residents' brand of music is just as relevant (maybe even more so) than it was in 1976. Can you hear clack-Clack-CLACK of culture's goose-stepping heals bearing down on your little soul? Feel like you're getting purged from your own society? Looking for an Allied Force? Well then, wrap your arms around The Third Reich 'N Roll and revel in the purity of the Residents vision. And then go make one of your own.