The residents: Cine TV Contest #27 - Favorite Medical Drama

What a wonderful topic given to us by C/cine TV to discuss. I believe it's a good topic, and it has made me remember a wonderful drama titled "The Residents." It's been a long time since I watched it, but I can still remember much of it. It was interesting and had a lot of impact

Let your mind drift back to simpler, more pathetic times... to an age when American teenagers jitterbugged in plastic hula hoops to the savage jungle rhythm of payola’d rock ‘n’ roll and spent their parents’ hard-earned pay on Kookie combs and Jughead comics... when Ozzie choked in the basement rumpus room on a piece of Harriet’s fudge, and Rick and Dave kicked at each other on the patio, pausing only for a healthy grape drink break... after which they would retreat to their rooms to masturbate with tales from the cryt while wearing cardboard 3-D glasses.

The residents themselves grew up in all this, but their early memories are clouded by small-town Louisiana swamp gas, where they spent their formative years like normal, average white American children on a diet of Jello, peanut butter, and Kool-Aid. They recall their youth only vaguely. One remembers listening to his parents’ ancient records, such as "Mississippi Mud," a 1927 recording by the Rhythm Boys (with Bing Crosby). The rest mumble indifferently about nameless, arteriosclerotic countries and western civilization.

The various crews didn't even discover each other until high school, where they giggled nervously about each other’s warped points of view. They told naughty jokes and made surreptitious fart noises to show their budding alienation, but somehow it wasn’t enough. They mostly managed to pull down barely respectable grades, and they shunned joining the few high school organizations that would accept them. They listened to the radio a lot, and said things like "Pass the drool cup" when attractive members of the opposite sex strolled by. As a true story and a warning to us all, after too many hours of Uncle Miltie on a circular black-and-white TV screen, they retreated to their secret clubhouse out on the bayou and played their crappy little 45’s over and over until they had memorized the scratches on all of them, They listened to the wheezes of the alligators floating languidly by the reeds and read and re-read their "bible": J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. "Holden Caulfield is a resident," one of them says. Salinger, interestingly enough, leads a reclusive, partially demented existence much like The Residents. It has even been rumored that J.D. Salinger performed on one of The Residents’ early records, but this cannot be verified.

At this point, the story breaks down. While living in sleepy San Mateo, some "trick of fate" — as they put it — gave them access to musical instruments and an impressive array of tape recording equipment at the same time, and they were on their way. "The tape recorders were more important than the instruments," says a resident. They did a lot of jamming, mainly to amuse themselves, and rumors began leaking to a small coterie of outsiders that something of possible interest was going on here.

In 1970, they began editing the tapes and playing them for skeptical friends at parties and fiestas. They sent one of these tapes to a dwindling group of pals in Louisiana, and got back four bubbling, enthusiastic replies, barely legible in their cacographic scrawls, but with enough exclamation points to let The Residents know that they had struck a nerve. "Let us manage you," one of the letters said–the first overture of the impending Cryptic Corporation had begun.

At this time, our boys still had no name for themselves. They considered calling themselves the New Beatles for a while, but prudence told them this was not a wise choice. In the meantime, they shrugged their shoulders a lot and plotted how to break into the business. They finally got their name, as the legend goes, from Hal Halverstadt, an exec at Warner Brothers Records. Halverstadt worked with Captain Beefheart, and the nameless quintet figured that anyone who could relate to Beefheart might possibly understand what they were up to. So off they mailed an album’s worth of material, replete with a title—The Werner—cover art, and wacko liner notes. They signed no name, just a return address. Halverstadt mailed the tape back weeks later, addressed to "Residents," and thus began the most significant pop music ensemble of the 20th century.

Let me stop here and have a break so I can rest also