On August 16, 1997, The Residents did three performances of a 30-minute stage piece called Disfigured Night for the PopKomm music festival in Köln, Germany. The performance was sponsored by Malboro and filmed by VIVA TV (the German music TV station).

The performances themselves went quite well and were a success. Each opened with a Resident coming out and, much to the audiences' amazement, removing his Eyeball-head. Of course, the Resident had a a head-stocking (one of the ones from Cube-E) hiding his features. He was soon joined by a second Resident, and the two commanded the instruments and video boards. The performance took place in front of a bluescreen on which artwork by Steve Cerio, who did the "Shooting Gallery" artwork for Bad Day on the Midway, was mixed live by one of the Residents.

The story of Disfigured Night concerns a mute clown mute with a strange gift -- by touching a person or an object, he can "remember" the most painful events associated with him, her, or it. This makes Billy quite happy, since he feels that by touching these awful memories he is releasing them. As a result, he always has a sappy, smiling expression, which earned him the name "Silly Billy".

One day he finds a one-legged monkey who used to belong to a one-legged golden-haired girl, who's song fills Billy's mind. Billy vows to reunite the two, but he discovers that he is no longer immune to the pain he feels when he touches people -- it starts to affect him directly.

Billy's only consolation through the pain of his psychometric experiences is the monkey and when the monkey dies, Billy withdraws into himself. In his little hole, he finds a wrapped present which, on opening, turns out to contain the dead monkey's head. The head bites off Billy's leg, and in a mirror he discovers he has transformed into the golden-haired girl whose song had haunted him.

The story ends with Billy singing a frenetic version of We Are the World.

Disfigured Night

Silly Billy bought his breakfast from a fat old man,
who cooked his eggs and bacon in a big black frying pan;
The pan was made of metal that was once an army tank,
holding soldiers with their wounds that oozed until they stank;
And every time the breakfast man put eggs upon his plate,
the yellow yokes stared up as Billy cut them, then he ate;
He saw the eggs as bulging boils that burst when they are poked,
he tasted tears from someone's fear, and made a silly joke.

The rest of his day like all the others moved along a path,
Filled with visions of somebody's pain inflicted past;
He saw a woman raped by brothers who had left her in
the back seat of a Chevy that had honked its horn at him;
A chance encounter with a clown once made him scratch his hand
from a case of hives and then he met a mad milkman,
whose sister swallowed shards of glass inside a sugar rose,
and died with blood exploding from her mouth and from her nose.

He lived alone inside a world of other people's pain,
isolated from their joy and love his life retained
its innocence because he couldn't hear or speak a word,
releasing pain as easy as a tree releases birds;
It even made him happy in a strange and funny way,
reversing misery to joy and agony to play;
They called him Silly Billy when they saw his sappy face,
but no one knew it came from someone's less than happy fate.

Then one day he met a monkey sitting in the rain;
The ape, who somehow lost a leg, would soon make Billy change;
The vision that the monkey made, when Billy touched his paw,
was not too different from the ones he all too often saw:
a little girl with golden hair, who also had one leg,
was crying by a bowl that cripples sometimes use to beg;
But then another vision came, as Billy sat and stared,
he realized the monkey and the girl were once a pair;
With their two good legs the cripples made each other strong,
but what really blasted Billy was the young girl's song.
Isolated in his mind, his world had been complete,
until a simple song released his undiscovered need;
With that wistful melody repeating in his brain,
Billy hesitated, looking out into the rain;
For, despite the things he'd seen, a mystery remained
until the purpose of those other people was explained;
But in the ape and girl he saw a perfect usefulness,
so Billy vowed to reunite them in the present tense.

Soon the crippled chimp and Billy set out on their way,
but then another question came and with it was dismay;
If life was nothing more than just a vehicle for pain,
he could not see why he was free, but that was soon to change;
While Billy once had been immune to agony and sorrow,
he soon began to feel the dark emotions that he borrowed.

Billy and his new companion traveled everywhere
looking for the little girl with gold and curly hair;
No longer seeing other beings like he saw the wind,
For the first time in his life, the dummy had a friend;
Smiling, laughing, playing games and knowing that he cared,
while mumbling the melody into the empty air;
Yes, for Billy life was different than it was before
but change was not just knocking, it was breaking down the door.

Soon the manchild and chimp were walking down the street,
when they saw a taxi driver with a piece of meat;
As Billy bumped the driver's shoulder, visions formed inside
his mind of something slowly sliced to pieces 'til it died;
Instead of smiling as he would on any other day,
Billy hit the ground face first, weeping all the way;
Devastated by the shock of feeling death and pain,
Billy began to understand what he had lost and gained;

With increasing frequency, more incidents occurred:
Dead babies cried from safety pins and memories from birds
told of chicks that left their nests and fell beneath the feet
of cattle who were not concerned with tiny things that tweet;
He felt a mother's misery whose child had become blind,
and a cancer victim's will to live, as it declined.

Soon the pain became so great they only moved at night,
as Billy tried to blind his mind from everything in sight;
And the goofy grin that once resided on his face,
now reflected his infected fall into disgrace;
Where a sweetness once had radiated from his pores,
now his face was covered up with festers, welts and sores;
around the sores was scar tissue resembling a pox
that made his skin look like some thinly coated clumps of rocks;
Surrounding those were tiny blisters popping constantly;
Overall his face recalled a charbroiled Christmas tree;

But as his life descended into black and blacker pain,
two sympathetic little points of light remained unchanged;
The monkey and the song were always there regardless of
the pain he felt from someone else's loss or lack of love;
The song provided nourishment for Billy's beaten soul,
and the monkey made him smile, while they pursued their goal;
Then one day as Billy pulled the monkey from the mud,
it wheezed and sneezed and filled the air with tiny drops of blood;
with heat projecting from its skin and fluid from its eyes,
the monkey barely breathed for two more days and then it died;
Sorrow soaked in Billy's bones and numbness in his neck,
but nothing had prepared him for the impact that was next;
Exploding in a choking scream, his sadness was so strong,
it blotted out the memory of Billy's sacred song.

Devastated and alone he crawled beneath a bush,
coiled himself into a ball, and imitated mush;
Drifting deep into despair an opening appeared,
above and below, it opened up around him everywhere;
The hole was like a vacuum cleaner sucking him into
a dark and barren emptiness that clung to him like glue;
Losing containment like the raindrops in a hurricane,
Floating like a limpid flower in a sewer drain,
down and and down and down it sucked him
'til there was nothing left,
except a tiny hand held mirror and an unwrapped gift;
Desperately he ripped it open and found inside the box
the monkey's head which winked and grinned and bit his left leg off.

Horrified he screamed in painful agony and cried,
and then the mirror drifted up and stopped before his eyes
causing him to watch as teardrops healed his open sores
while noticing how long his golden hair had grown before
realizing that he looked just like the little girl,
and then he drifted back into a cold and lifeless world.

A huge white hand reached out above his head as he awoke;
"Perhaps it's God," he thought he saw, inside a long white coat;
As his eye moved down to where a right leg should have been,
he saw a wooden crutch that touched the floor right next to him;
The hand moved down to stroke his cheek and quickly he was filled
with memories of melodies that mocked his mind until
he saw the golden hair cascading down below her waist,
and realized what he had heard was nothing but a taste;
At once his mind was wild with words that he had never known
defining lines inside the song with light and liquid tones;
He sat up straight and radiated life from far within
the center of his soul where pain and darkness once had been;
Then, like the sunshine in the summer fills the air with birds,
Billy stood upon his bed and filled the air with words:
We Are the World

There comes a time when we heed a certain call
When the world must come together as one
There are people dying
And it's time to lend a hand to life
The greatest gift of all

We can't go on pretending day by day
That someone, somewhere will soon make a change
We are all a part of God's great big family
And the truth, you know,
Love is all we need

Chorus:

We are the world, we are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day
So let's start giving
There's a choice we're making
We're saving our own lives
It's true we'll make a better day
Just you and me

Send them your heart so they'll know that someone cares
And their lives will be stronger and free
As God has shown us by turning stones to bread
So we all must lend a helping hand

Repeat Chorus

When you're down and out, there seems no hope at all
But if you just believe there's no way we can fall
Let us realize that a change can only come
When we stand together as one

Repeat Chorus

The original Disfigured Night performance for the PopKomm Festival was filmed and broadcast by VIVA TV. This was later sold as a VHS tape by Ralph America. The Residents got their hands on the footage and with some artful manipulation released their version on DVD in 2004.

The 1997 Fillmore performance of the piece was released on the CD Live At The Fillmore in 1998.

In 2009, The Residents released a series of downloads collectively known as "1997: The Missing Year" which documented the progress of Disfigured Night.

In 2016 Klanggalerie released a single-disc compilation of selections from The Missing Year.

The Original Disfigured Night Arrangement

Over the years, The Residents have been so prolific that it's easy to see that a year could have simply vanished and gone unnoticed. And one did - 1997, THE MISSING YEAR! In the early to mid 90s, The Residents were quite active in the creation of CD-ROMs, releasing Freak Show, The Gingerbread Man, and Bad Day on the Midway from 1992-95. With another CD-ROM, I Murdered Mommy, scheduled for 1996, the group expected to continue working in that direction for some time, but the CD-ROM market unexpectedly dried up and support for the project disappeared, leaving Mommy as yet another unfinished, semi-mythical masterpiece. So much time was devoted to writing and designing the CD-ROM that, other than some soundtrack music for the game and a short side project, Pollex Christi, no music was recorded in 1996. Having lost so much time on a dead concept, 1997 finally arrived, but the new year was not so happy. For the first time in decades, The Residents had absolutely nothing in the works. No CD-ROM, no album, no plans. 1997 was born dead. And truthfully, the year never got much better, but the group did begin moving in some interesting new directions. Creatively, The Residents saw Pollex Christi as a successful experiment, consequently they decided to follow it up with another highly experimental, classically styled piece. Moving quickly, in the spring of 1997, the group began work on a new 15 min work, Disfigured Night, and soon roughed out a MIDI arrangement.


Scattered Unfinished Music Sketches

A few weeks later, The Cryptic Corporation received a call from long time lighting collaborator, Chris McGregor. Chris had accepted a job as technical director for a benefit helping the Tech Museum in San Jose and asked if The Residents were interested in participating in the fund-raiser. While this was not the kind of project the group normally became involved in, The Residents were looking for both stimulation and new directions, so they immediately accepted the invitation. With little time to prepare, they grabbed what they had: the Disfigured Night work, some scattered unfinished music sketches, and an epic version of We Are the World - and took off for San Jose.


Adobe Disfigured Night

Inhabiting a position that normally would have been occupied by a string quartet, The Residents performed for a small, but wealthy crowd in San Jose. As the unsuspecting patrons entered the event, the group was seen perched 30 feet above the entrance to the cavernous lobby of software giant Adobe's world headquarters. Needless to say, The Residents hour long set was not quite what the rich nerds expected. Making sure no one missed it, the group performed the set, made up of a mix of prerecorded and live elements - some planned and some spontaneous - four times, and quickly left town.


The Marlboro Eyeball Experience [Disfigured Night]

Also volunteering at the fund raiser was the house manager for the Fillmore in San Francisco. After seeing The Residents' performance, the promoter was so excited, he immediately invited the group to perform five shows at The Fillmore the following Halloween. Having never played this historic venue before, The Residents immediately accepted and began preparations. Soon another request came in, this time from the unlikely source of Marlboro cigarettes - in Germany. Searching for an event on which to focus their advertising at the Popkomm music trade show in Cologne, the tobacco giant suggested a short performance, 20-30 minutes in length, that could be video taped for television; it was to be performed 3 or 4 times with a changing audience. The small crowd was limited to people who won tickets in response to cigarette ads. (Leaving no opportunity for addiction unanswered, Marlboro also showered the audience with free smokes while waiting to take their turn as an audience member.) Aided by MTV producer and friend, John Payson, The Residents adapted a piece from the Adobe performance, transforming it into a 30 minute performance vehicle, Disfigured Night. The Residents performed Disfigured Night four times that evening; several months later, the piece was later broadcast on national television in Germany.


The Fillmore Dress Rehearsal [Act One]

By the time Halloween arrived, The Residents had reworked the Marlboro event into a tighter performance that would become the second act of the Fillmore show. For the first act they assembled a new set comprised of selections primarily made up of music from the CD-ROM era.