Residents

Tribune 2002

“Every heart that’s been broken / Is a heart with a hole / Every heart that’s still open / Is the seed of a soul.” It’s the kind of heart-on-your-sleeve sentiment you might expect on say, Peter Gabriel’s latest CD, but from The Residents? Those notoriously art-damaged merry pranksters of pop who, for the last 30 years, have hidden their identities behind giant eyeball and skull masks? What gives?

“They are as confused as everyone else,” says Homer Flynn of The Cryptic Corporation, longtime home of the ocular oddballs. In his capacity as the official mouthpiece for perpetually-anonymous Residents, the caramel-voiced Flynn responds to questions in a disarmingly articulate and soft-spoken Louisiana drawl that to any longtime listener sounds strangely… familiar.

The Residents’ new CD “Demons Dance Alone” (East Side Digital) has a similarly surprising directness, even vulnerability, that may seem out of character from the creators of such brain-bending musique concrete pop-music deconstructions as “Third Reich & Roll.” Official word is that the band composed most of “Demons” in the days following the Sept 11 terrorist attacks, but where in the past one might’ve reasonably expected an aural approximation of the carnage, “Demons” presents – dare we say it? – an almost kinder, gentler Residents.

But despite exploring questions of morality with uncharacteristic (if sometimes still obtuse) candor, don’t lump them in with Bruce Springsteen in the big sweeping gesture memorial sweepstakes. “The Residents are not interested in some sort of tribute,” says Flynn. “They don’t really work that way. They were on the road when that happened and like everyone else was confused about what was going on, so they wanted to address some of the fears and concerns that the general confusion brought up.”

On Sept 11 the band was touring with their stark and evocative “Wormwood” show, which used stripped-down rock instrumentation to reduce Bible stories to their often gruesome essence. The may have helped tilt the band towards other fundamental sorts of examination, but does this newfound openness jibe with their continued anonymity?

“The information that matters the most to humanity is not the information that the FBI collects,” says magician Penn Jillette, longtime collaborator and friend of The Residents. “You don’t need to know the Residents’ addresses and their phone numbers, get their fingerprints and know where they’ve been every second in order to have them speak to the heart.”

Jillette, the only recognizable face in the Residents notoriously antagonistic Mole Show, clearly believes the fixation on anonymity is beside the point. “Let’s look at the opposite, someone like Michael Jackson, whose whole life is completely open, Jillette says. “Everybody knows everything, from allegedly (sleeping with) little boys and his plastic surgery to sleeping in an oxygen tent, and yet there’s nothing about his art that is vulnerable or tells you anything about his heart. I don’t see why those go hand in hand.”

And indeed, despite their newfound public introspection, don’t expect The Residents to suddenly turn into Rod McKuen. “Demons”’ vignettes are populated with typically Residential freaks, outcasts, loners, and are arranged in an incomplete approximation of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ famous stages of grieving that stops curiously at the “Denial” stage. They’re cannily designed not to provide any sort of definitive answers about any of Life’s Big Questions, and when asked about this, Flynn replies with the sagacity of a Zen master: “The Residents have always felt that it’s more interesting to create the lines to read between than to have everything all spelled out for you.”