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Sam and I (and one of Sam’s friends) went to see The Residents in concert Friday night, March 17th. You’ll be forgiven if you have no idea who The Residents are, most people don’t, despite the fact they’ve been making music for 50 years. The age was evidenced by the keyboardist needing to be assisted in getting on and off the stage. As you can imagine not all the members are original. In fact, I believe only one founding member is left. If you are REALLY interested in learning more about the band then I suggest this video.
The Residents are not your normal rock band. If you know them it’s probably from pictures of them from the 70’s where they have huge eyeballs on their heads.
Part of their mystique is that they’ve always been anonymous. Any band members you might see in interviews and whatnot are “spokesmen” for the band. I suppose this puts them in the performance art category but frankly I’m surprised it hasn’t grown tiring for them to maintain the act for so long.
For this tour they’ve mixed up the outfits a bit.
The venue was The Fremont Abbey. It’s somewhere I’ve never been before and more than likely won’t again in the near future considering none of the upcoming shows were anyone I’d ever heard of. You can assume from the abbey reference that the building is an old church and you would be right. It’s not a large venue, I doubt there were more than a couple hundred people there, but it was sold out and the audience were all engaged in the music so everyone obviously knew who they were there to see.
I’m not sure what I expected but I guess based on the outfits they wear plus their history I thought it would be more “performance” with maybe something happening between songs to set them up. That wasn’t the case though, they played one song after the other for 90 minutes without stopping, and in fact without ever saying a word in between songs.
That wasn’t the whole show though. After the concert they played a movie The Residents just released. I don’t recall the name of the movie and I fell asleep for part of it, but if you’re curious I’m sure Sam could tell you… All I can say is that it was as weird as you would expect. I really can’t explain the plot so I won’t try.
All that to say that it was an interesting evening but probably not a show I’ll go to again if they come back around.
