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Meet The Residents: America's Most Eccentric Band! is a biographical book about The Residents by music journalist Ian Shirley, first published by SAF Publishing in 1994. The book is illustrated with artwork and photos from the group's history and includes a general discography. A revised and updated edition was published in 1996 by Interlink Publishing Group.
On November 9th 2015, a newly updated and expanded edition, retitled Never Known Questions: Five Decades of The Residents, was published by Cherry Red Books. This edition was published again the following year with updated cover art.
Synopsis[]
Meet The Residents: America's Most Eccentric Band![]
Based in San Francisco, The Residents initially unleashed their daring attempts at self-promotion on an unreceptive world, producing music that seemed doomed to the furthermost outpost of anonymity. With titles like Third Reich and Roll and Duck Stab, their records were some of the strangest ever made.
By the time full-scale notoriety arrived, their identities were still a closely guarded secret. Quick to maximize on their growing mystique, the band have expanded a home industry of weirdness into an audio-visual emporium of surreal delights.
Ian Shirley takes an outsider's view of their operations, exposing a world where nothing is quite as it seems.
Never Known Questions: Five Decades of The Residents[]
Since their inception in the early 1970s, The Residents have confused, confounded and delighted fans and critics for over forty years. Shrouded in anonymity, the band has charted a course with no beginning and no end that has taken them to the outer limits of entertainment and audience expectations. From their debut Santa Dog single, through warped sonic tributes ranging from the Beatles to Hank Williams, mysterious recordings made among the Inuit, iconic eyeball imagery and collections of one minute songs to jaw dropping live shows, innovations in audio visual technologies and social media, conceptual albums and tours, abandoned film projects and eventual semi de-masking to reveal the slightly unsettling Randy Rose, the band is unquestionably one of pop’s most innovative acts.
Never Known Questions delves deep into The Residents’ psyche, charting their rise from cottage industry imagineers to art pop figureheads and exploring forty plus years of chameleonic musical adventures, along with the lore and legend that has built up around the group.
- Were they really Talking Heads and Brian Eno, or even The Beatles, in disguise?
- What is a Cryptic Corporation? Who was Nigel Senada?
- Did they really forget about recording an album?
- How’s Randy doing now?
- And what kind of a band sells a fridge full of records for $100,000 anyway?
Packed with interviews and imagery, Never Known Questions tells a unique and original tale that music historians will thank the author for preserving.
Contents[]
Meet The Residents: America's Most Eccentric Band![]
- Author's Note
- Introducing The Residents
- The Early Years I
- The Early Years II
- Vileness Fats
- Meet the Residents
- Third Reich And Roll
- The Cryptic Corporation
- Duck Stab
- Eskimo
- Ralph Records -- Buy Or Die!
- The Commercial Album
- Mole Tour
- Post Mole Recovery
- 13th Anniversary
- Stars And Hank
- Cube E
- Welcome To The Freak Show
- The Obscurity Continues...
- Discography
See also[]
- Ian Shirley