Music Arcades: The Residents: Stars and Hank Forever

Stage 1: Curiosity

Early or mid-1980s. The Residents were a band you could read about in the NME but would never hear on the radio. The reason people remembered them was the eyeball-and-top-hat costumes. In 45 describes being so obsessed with The Residents that he actually went to the address in San Francisco that appeared on the back of their records. I just wanted to get an idea what their records sounded like! And you couldn't get them in Woking or Guildford. Even in London — I never visited enough to get to know the specialist shops — you wouldn't see their whole catalogue in the racks, so you had to take what you could. Hence I started with, to give it its full title, Stars and Hank Forever: The American Composer's [sic] series - Volume II.

I hated it. Or at least I found it completely incomprehensible and alien.

Stage 2: Adjustment

Stars and Hank Forever was no Ice Cream for Crow: instead of listening to it repeatedly to try and get some value from my purchase, I just gave up and shelved it. Didn't listen to it for a decade or more.

Then when I did, it somehow didn't sound so alien any more. Somehow the world, or your impression of it, moves on when you're looking the other way. A similar thing happened for me with the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment: when I first read about it in 1984, the idea of causality at a distance seemed completely counter-intuitive. A decade later, without thinking about it at all in the interim, it seemed quite 'natural'.

Stage 3: Assimilation

Now it's possible to look back on Stars and Hank Forever with hindsight. I know the Hank Williams songs that much better now, and can appreciate the disarming sutures that The Residents have opened up in the apparently up-beat songs in Williams' repertoire, like Hey Good Lookin' and Jambalaya. I don't know any more about John Philip Sousa, but this side of the LP is perhaps more original in the way it makes the marches seem almost minimalist and ambient.

I can make much more of the sleeve notes, too, in particular:

The Residents is a musical group with a profound respect for music as content as well as form. If that is a difficult concept, think of a film director making a film about making a film. Happens all the time. Making music about music is nothing new either, but at least every stupid band in the civilized world isn't doing it, which gives The Residents some dubious claim to fame.

Not every stupid band, but Billy Jenkins is. Stephin Merritt is. Sometimes, I think, Neil Young is. And having been a little dismissive of Residents that I bought later on, here and here, this is the one that, in the end, I find most satisfying.

A further note from the sleeve about the American Composer Series:

America, in its relatively short history, has produced an astounding number of talented individuals in the field of music. The Residents are deeply indebted to the American composers for the spunk they have given the melting pot. This series is to be recorded during the final sixteen years of the 20th Century (1984-2000). While each record will be released upon completion, the work, as a whole, will not be available until 2001 and will contain the music of not less than twenty composers.

As a grand projet, this statement of intent resembles Sufjan Stevens Fifty States Project. (Stevens is another pedlar of music about music.) Perhaps he'll get further than The Residents did, for Stars and Hank Forever, released in 1986, turned out to be the last in the American Composer Series. (And before someone else points this out, it's not impossible that the mission statement for the series was all a kind of hoax — after all, The Residents also released Part Four of a trilogy.)

p.s. just caught up with last night's Gideon Coe show on the BBC iPlayer, and he played Krafty Cheese by The Residents. Times do indeed change.