Somethin' Devilish (Knipfel)

"Somethin' Devilish: The Untold (And Finally True) Pre-History of The Residents 1963-1971)" is a biographical essay about the early history of The Residents by Jim Knipfel.
It was published by the group on their official website as part of their ongoing Free! Weird! series of free releases. The article goes into considerably more detail about this time period than any previous biography, and corrects a number of inaccuracies presented by earlier biographies (such as "The True Story of The Residents" by Matt Groening).
== The essay ==
==== Part One ====
The Residents are a puzzle people have been trying to fit together since their arrival as a collective entity with 1972's double single/Christmas card, Santa Dog. Their ensuing public history has consisted of an evolving stew of myths, rumors, half-truths, wild speculations and outright fabrications, some concocted and disseminated by fans, others by the band itself. For all the loose and random pieces floating around out there, nobody seemed to be getting any closer to finding a solution.
Of all the pieces of the grand mystery that is The Residents, none seems to consume people more than the well-kept secret of their identities. For nearly half a century the band has worked and produced in anonymity, and for nearly half a century people have been guessing. During their 2010 Talking Light tour, the members of the band themselves (in elaborate disguises as always) even tried to help the audience out by finally revealing their names - Randy, Chuck, Bob, and Carlos. Somehow, though, this didn't seem to help things.
But at last the full and unvarnished truth can be told.
The simple fact is, every bit of speculation concerning the identities of The Residents has been wrong—including those claims made by The Residents themselves. "Who are The Residents, really?" isn't even the right question. What matters is not who The Residents are, but what they are, why they are, and how it is they are why they are.
To even begin trying to answer those questions, we need to go back to the mid-Sixties, to a point long before the top-hatted eyeball heads were introduced, to a point long before The Residents even existed, and we need to start following several storylines, many of which begin on or near the campus of Louisiana Tech, located in the small, conservative northern Louisiana town of Ruston.
While at college, a loose circle of smart, eccentric and artistically-inclined friends gravitated together. They didn't have much trouble finding each other, given Louisiana Tech, one of the few schools in the country at the time to host pro-Vietnam War rallies, wasn't exactly known for its weirdo population. At the core of the group there was what we'll call the Pre-Residents: Randy Rose, Charles "Chuck" Bobuck, and Roger "Bunny" Hartley, who sometimes insisted on being called Harvey. The group also included brothers Palmer and Barry Eiland, as well as John Kennedy, Homer Flynn, Jay Clem and Hardy Fox, the quartet who in later years would become The Residents' management team, The Cryptic Corporation.
"We were the anti-fraternity fraternity. We were the guys who hung out and created a clique that was against the cool stuff," Homer Flynn says in retrospect. It was within that group that the future attitude and philosophy of The Residents began to gestate. Various youthful exuberances and campus antics ensued. Then, around 1966, the members of the group began heading their separate ways. John Kennedy moved to California to look for work. The Pre-Residents, not knowing what else to do with themselves, likewise began considering the possibility of a Westward expansion. The prevailing sentiment at the time was that the South was someplace to escape, while the lure of the counterculture on the other side was growing more irresistible with each passing minute. Flynn, meanwhile, dropped out of school and returned home to Shreveport, and Fox began managing a teenage rock'n'roll band based in Dubach, a small town just north of Ruston.
In the spring of 1968, as much of the country seemed to be ablaze with the ongoing Civil Rights struggle, anti-Vietnam protests, riots, and general social upheaval, Rose, Bobuck, Bunny and Harvey Hartley loaded all their belongings into a small truck and headed for Northern California. They landed in San Francisco for several months before moving to San Mateo, a quiet, suburban town about twenty miles south of the city.
As the Pre-Residents began seriously exploring the musical and chemical aspects of the Bay Area's psychedelic culture, in 1969 Flynn and Fox likewise picked up and headed West, settling, as had become the norm by that point, in San Francisco. They were followed shortly thereafter by Jay Clem and Palmer Eiland.
By the time everyone else from the Louisiana Tech circle had resettled in San Francisco proper, the Pre-Residents had been living and working in near seclusion in famously uncool San Mateo for about a year.
"We were living in a weird kind of ramshackle building that was above a funky little car body shop," Randy Rose says. "And you could tell—literally—what color they were painting the cars that day by looking in a mirror to see what color your nose hairs were."
Having—like so many others in their 20s—no real drive, interests, or sense of purpose, Rose, Bobuck and the Hartleys were beginning to experiment with more conventional art forms, like painting, photography and silkscreening. While they all loved music—especially the psychedelic bands coming out of the San Francisco scene—the idea of performing music themselves had not yet occurred to them.
That's when Roland showed up at Fox's studio apartment with a trailer full of musical instruments.
==== Part Two ====
It was June, 1970. Roland Sheehan, then nineteen, had been the organ player in The Alliance, the teenage band Fox had managed back in Louisiana. Having just completed his second year at Louisiana Tech, Sheehan had signed up for a summer course at San Francisco State College.
"I wanted to play music," Sheehan explains. "And the only organ I had—the only keyboard I had—was that B3. If I'd had a smaller organ I obviously would have brought that because those things weigh about 400 pounds. That was probably not the wisest move in my mind, but i was nineteen. I didn't know any better."
Although Sheehan had been expected, the organ was not. Living as he was in a studio apartment on the third floor, Fox simply didn't have the room for Sheehan's Hammond B3, which remained locked away in the trailer. At the time Fox was working at the post office's massive Air Mail Facility, or AMF, at the airport in San Bruno, located roughly halfway between San Francisco and San Mateo. As fate would have it, Randy Rose was working there as well, and the two reconnected. After Fox explained Sheehan's dilemma, Rose agreed to let him stash the organ at their place.
Sheehan, as he said, wanted to play music, so began spending more and more time in San Mateo. Eventually the rest of the instruments he'd brought along in the trailer joined the organ in the Pre-Residents' apartment, and Roland all but moved in for the summer.
Shortly before Sheehan's arrival with his U-Haul full of instruments, Charles Bobuck happened into what would turn out to be another fortuitous and necessary link in the eventual birth of The Residents. After befriending a recently-returned Vietnam vet who was having trouble readjusting, over time Bobuck helped him figure out the best way to get on with his life. The ex-soldier showed his gratitude by giving Bobuck a high-end tape recorder he'd picked up in Hong Kong. The two-track reel-to-reel recorder, very cutting edge at the time, allowed users to record two separate tracks, mix those together on a third, and continue adding layers of sound that way as you built up generations. With that machine in hand, The Pre-Residents could play around with a primitive form of multi-track recording.
"I received this machine at the same time Roland shows up with a trailer full of instruments," Bobuck says. "So you've got a trailer full of musical instruments on one side, and a tape recorder on the other. So what are you gonna do? You've got to make noise and record it. In fact you're going to record every single thing in the entire world. You're gonna do nothing but tape. Tape tape tape. And then you're gonna start cutting it together. That's when I really started learning how to edit noise. That's how it really got started on my side, as an engineer running the tape recorder, and then spending a lot of time with a razor blade, cutting it all up and putting it back together again."
Sheehan remembers sitting around with the Pre-Residents as they played with the instruments and together they all began experimenting. "We were knocking a few ideas around. I was the only one to have any kind of musical training or knowledge at all. In my naive mind at that point in time, I was not really arguing with them, but my point was that the more musical knowledge you have, the easier it makes things. Their point was just the opposite - that that knowledge actually blocks you from trying something. I was of course saying, 'No, that knowledge allows you to know what things to try,' and they were saying, 'That's the problem - you limit yourself.' So we went round and round."
So they had a fancy tape recorder, a bunch of musical instruments, and lots of drugs. As Roland played, The Pre-Residents banged on various things, and they recorded every second of it. The one thing The Pre-Residents did have at their disposal at the time was discerning taste. As the old saying goes, put a thousand monkeys in front of a thousand typewriters for a thousand years, and, well, one of them will eventually write Nixon's Checkers speech. Given how much they were recording, The Pre-Residents found they were able to pull enough valuable, interesting nuggets out of the pile to begin crafting something new out of them.
"It was true—it was a lot of noise making," Bobuck says. "And my sense was that it was the cutting it together and editing it that gave it organization. I always felt that I could turn just about anything into something."
The top-floor apartment where all of this was taking place was, needless to say, not air- conditioned. One particularly hot afternoon when everyone decided to take a break from the banging and the taping, Sheehan wandered over to one of the open windows to get some air.
"Down there on the street there was this old, dark green '52 or '53 model Chevrolet pickup," he recounts. "The paint on it was already faded and up on the roof there were some rusty areas. But what I noticed though was the bed of the pickup was packed full, over and above the height of the cab, with nothing but rusty coathangers. It's true! I don't know how many there were—hundreds if not thousands were in that truck. So I turned around and looked at them and said 'I got it—how about Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor?' They looked at me like, 'what are you talking about?' and I said y'all come over here and look out the window. That's how it started.
He'd brought a cheap Yamaha guitar along with him in the trailer, and quickly restrung it so he could play it left-handed. "I made up about three or four chords. I took their advice— don't use musical knowledge—so I just randomly made three or four chords. As I remember I think they wrote most of the words . I think they just took my line and went from there. They had a two-track reel to reel, and some cheap microphones, in fact they may have just had one microphone. And that was the way we made that. That was about as low-tech as you can get. The Residents basically started from there."
Shortly after finishing the four-minute "Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor", Sheehan and the Pre-Residents recorded another song, "When Roy Stuffed Trigger", which Sheehan describes as 'a lovely ballad."
Come the end of the summer, Sheehan packed up his instruments and returned to Louisiana. The Pre-Residents, however, having found some direction, something to do, immediately began scouring the local thrift stores and pawn shops in search of new instruments (or at least things that could be used as instruments) and continued to bang on them, recording every moment.
Having decided they now had something resembling a band, the next obvious step was choosing an appropriate name. They rejected dozens of possible names for one reason or another, but finally settled on The Delta Nudes, the one name that had hung around for awhile. Having unofficially and tentatively christened themselves, they compiled hours of songs, noise collages and poems, some of which would later be re- recorded and released as Residents songs. They also began sending occasional anonymous tapes off to friends both in the States and abroad, avant-garde composers like Harry Partch, and most notably to Hal Halverstadt at Warner Brothers Records, the man who'd signed Captain Beefheart, hoping to snag themselves one of those fat major label contracts.
==== Part Three ====
During that period of early experimentation, the Pre-Residents received any number of curious visitors. Old friends like Flynn, Fox, Kennedy, and Clem stopped by occasionally, along with neighbors, dealers, and passing acquaintances. There were also a lot of girls.
Among the visitors was Margaret Swaton (nee Smyk, commonly misspelled "Smik"), a lovely, auburn-haired 19-year-old who would often stop by with a few friends. Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, in the months to come she would play two pivotal roles in the future direction of what would become The Residents.
"When I was in high school I was a good kid. Never cut school. But I was always odd in my thinking," Swaton says. "Everyone would always talk to me because they knew that I didn't care if you got pregnant or whatever. I was pretty open minded, which is why I fit into the hippie thing so well. It just made sense to me."
Having grown up some ten miles from The Haight, she found herself in the right place at the right time. She met Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, Timothy Leary, and Owsley Stanley. And the Pre-Residents.
"I remember one night we had all just dropped some acid, and we were all just sitting around tripping and talking, and they brought out an old recording machine. And they had some instruments around, and everyone started banging and singing and being silly,. And they said 'You know, you could be a great character.' They put a microphone in front of my face and I just couldn't talk. It scared me. I couldn't sing or talk, so they had to work with me just to be able to talk. It wasn't because of the drugs. I was shy in a lot of ways."
But when it came to making fortuitous connections, Swaton was luckily not so shy. She had worked and saved all through high school, and upon graduation in 1970 took herself on a trip to Europe. "That was the time to go, with the hippies and everything. That was just a blast over there," she says.
While in London, she met up with a friend from high school, and they found themselves in Hyde Park. "My friend was a gorgeous, gorgeous girl, so the two of us were just sitting there digging it and probably getting stoned. And two guys were there watching us and waving, and before you know it they came over. We hung out the whole two weeks we were in London. And one of the guys was Philip."
Philip turned out to be virtuoso guitarist Philip Lithman, who in years to come would be better known as Snakefinger.
"So they showed us around London and we went camping and all this stuff," she continues. "Philip was a phenomenal musician. He was in a group at the time over there, but anything with strings he could play. When I left to go home I told him he could come visit, and I said, 'You've got to meet these friends of mine. You have to, you'll love them.'"
A few months later - near the end of 1970 or beginning of '71 - Lithman appeared on Swaton's doorstep. As promised, she brought him to San Mateo to meet the Pre-Residents and hear what they were up to. There was an instant rapport, so much so that within a few days, Lithman moved into their apartment.
By that point, The Pre-Residents were well on their way to forging their own wildly experimental musical identity, and Lithman had a solid appreciation for the aesthetics of what they were doing, if not their lack of skill. Their styles and outlooks meshed together remarkably well.
Swaton herself seems surprised at what that chance encounter in a London park had turned into. "I was just blown away at how well they got along. He ended up staying. At one point I was going to marry him to keep him legal. I forget what happened but it turns out we didn't have to do that. But they hit it off. He was the only one who could play an instrument."
Not long after Lithman moved in, another stranger materialized on the San Mateo doorstep, this one a small and shadowy figure in his early sixties, dressed in a trenchcoat, fedora, and sunglasses, and carrying a battered saxophone case. It turned out to be Nigel Sinatra, an avant-garde composer and music theorist from Bavaria. After some of those early anonymous recordings ended up in his hands, he decided it was necessary to make a pilgrimage to San Francisco to track down the artists.
(There is some evidence that Lithman and Sinatra may have had a passing connection back in Europe, leading some to believe Lithman himself may have been the source of the tapes.)
According to Rose, the new houseguest was apparently autistic, usually covering his awkward shyness with loud, guttural sounds that resembled a curious language understood by no one else. Strangely, it was Lithman alone who possessed the uncanny ability to communicate with him. Contrary to the rumor that would circulate in later years, the enigmatic Bavarian composer could indeed speak English, but when he did, his voice seldom rose above a whisper, making him extremely difficult to understand. It was during one of their earliest erratic conversations that Nigel first revealed his name to Lithman.
Misunderstanding him, Lithman loudly announced to the rest of the room the strange and puzzling visitor's name was "N. Senada." Rose himself added the prefix "The Mysterious," and the legendary Mysterious N. Senada was born. Sinatra was himself so enamored with the new moniker he would not only use it for the rest of his career, but also return to his earlier compositions and essays to amend the name. At the same time, Rose says, "Nigel neither confirmed nor denied the oft repeated rumor of his distant kinship with Frank."
While deeply impressed by what the young Pre-Residents/Delta Nudes were doing, Senada also began lecturing them, through Lithman, about his Theory of Obscurity and Theory of Phonetic Organization, both of which would become fundamental tenets of the philosophical approach taken by The Residents in the years to come. The Mysterious N. Senada was quickly adopted as the group's philosophical mentor, and the members came to regard him as a near demigod in their midst.
==== Part Four ====
Lithman, while clicking easily into the kind of experimental noise explorations the Pre-Residents were undertaking, still harbored dreams of becoming the next Eric Clapton, and while in the Bay Area was anxious to play out. In 1971, the easiest way to do this was to pack up an acoustic guitar and hit the local clubs on Monday, which was open mic night. With the Pre-Residents in tow, Lithman began making the rounds.
It was not a fun night for the Pre-Residents. After sitting through endless James Taylor and Crosby, Stills & Nash wannabes, they found themselves bored nearly comatose. Considering the kind of music they were making back at the San Mateo apartment, witnessing what the rest of the world was up to must have felt like a visit to Hell. Upon learning the next day what an "open mic night" was, The Mysterious N. Senada himself decided to debut a couple of his own recent compositions on one of those same stages. Needless to say, the Pre-Residents were once again all in attendance the following Monday.
After the standard eight or ten performers armed with acoustic guitars and bags full of earnest mainstream dreams, The Mysterious N. Senada took to the stage and performed about fifteen minutes worth of free-form jazz saxophone and poetry. It was, as might be expected, an attention-getter. Following his set, the Bavarian avant gardist was cornered by several audience members who wildly and sincerely praise his mastery of free-form jazz, at least one new fan comparing him with Charlie Parker. Little did these patrons know The Mysterious N. Senada had absolutely no idea how to play the saxophone.
Inspired by the audience reaction to Senada, the Pre-Residents quickly began developing plans for a more ambitious performance of their own. Part of those plans involved Margaret Swaton. The first step was convincing her to speak into a microphone. Once she was comfortable with that, the next step was finding a name for the character she'd be playing.
"My name being Margaret, Peggy was the nickname. Some people did call me Peg or Peggy. We were all going around and around about it, and I said something about Peggy, and they said 'Oh! Peggy Honeydew!' I don't know where they came up with that, but it stuck. I just put my fate in their hands—whatever you want me to be, I'll do it." With the addition of an evening gown, a blonde wig, and a fancy broad brimmed hat, Swaton was transformed into the Fabulous Miss Peggy Honeydew, the eternal and eternally classy nightclub singer who would make such an indelible impression on Residents fans.
On the evening of October 18, 1971, a mob including Lithman (now officially dubbed "Snakefinger" and wearing a tuxedo), The Mysterious N. Senada (in his traditional trenchcoat, fedora, and sunglasses), the Pre-Residents (in cheerleader outfits with the exception of Charles Bobuck who carried a bass drum and wore a marching band uniform), Peggy Honeydew, and a cellist in a wedding dress who just wandered in that night, commandeered the stage at The Boarding House. Flynn, Clem, and Fox were in the audience to show their support, and John Kennedy filmed the event for posterity.
After an innocent enough opening ("Hello everybody. How y'all a-doin' tonight? Well, here we are again, with a nice little show all worked up for ya."), they befuddled, amused and terrified an unsuspecting audience with an unholy (and decidedly un-mellow) mixture of music, chanting, hooting, hollering, poetry and noise. Peggy Honeydew was introduced about ten minutes into the performance, and sang a catchy little number that begins, "Go fuck yourself on the doorknob, mom / In a mouldy auditorium..." Then after some more wacky goings-on, The Mysterious N. Senada led everyone away, tooting on his saxophone. The entire absurd and baffling performance lasted about twenty minutes.
In the months following the Boarding House happening, Swaton would portray Peggy Honeydew at a couple more Pre-Residents performances and make an unforgettable cameo in their unfinished film Vileness Fats before drifting off into legend.
Snakefinger returned to England to pursue his own career, but moved back to the States again in the late Seventies, settling in Los Angeles. Although much of his time was focused on his solo career, he would work closely with The Residents on several projects until his untimely death in 1987. It would be nearly a decade before Bob, a friend of Bobuck's from Texas, would be brought in to play guitar.
With no one left with whom he could easily communicate, The Mysterious N. Senada likewise picked up and returned to Europe, though he too would remain an ongoing and profound influence on the band until his own death in 1993. Most notably, he would provide a vocal track for the song "Kamikaze Lady", and in 1978 sent the band field recordings he'd made in the Arctic of Inuit songs and rituals, which were adapted into the band's Grammy-nominated album Eskimo.
After compiling their best recordings into three unreleased albums, Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor, The Ballad of Stuffed Trigger and Baby Sex, The Delta Nudes decided to change their name. Two things at that time influenced the name change. First, Hal Halverstadt returned the anonymously submitted Warner Brothers Album demo tape to "Residents" at their address in San Mateo. At the same time, The Mysterious N. Senada had been preaching—in a very quiet voice of course—the merits of obscurity in a culture only beginning to sniff the acrid stench of celebrity. Reinforced by Halverstadt's appropriately labeled return of their tape, they took The Mysterious N. Senada's words to heart, realizing that the Warner Bros executive had inadvertently supplied them with the perfect name for an anonymous, anti-celebrity music group.
In 1972, the newly re-christened Residents left San Mateo and moved into a warehouse at 20 Sycamore Street in San Francisco. They set up a studio and continued recording music. They also began working on their epic film project Vileness Fats. Shortly thereafter their college friend Palmer Eiland moved in as well, and began hoarding newspapers. A drummer named Carlos became a semi-regular visitor, but that's another story. It was in that space that The Residents - now complete with a name and a solid direction - would get down to the work that would consume them for the next forty-plus years.
But if not for a series of chance encounters, unexpected gifts, coincidental geography, and assorted cultural forces intersecting with a rare synchronicity—together with maybe just the slightest whiff of Louisiana voodoo—it may never have happened at all. The rest, as they say, is mystery.
== See also ==
* Free! Weird!
* Jim Knipfel
* The True Story of The Residents
* The Delta Nudes
== External links and references ==
* "Somethin' Devilish: The Untold (And Finally True) Pre-History of The Residents 1963-1971" by Jim Knipfel at The Residents Facebook group
Category:Reference texts
Category:Jim Knipfel
Category:Free! Weird!
Category:The Delta Nudes