Enter the name for this tabbed section: TOUR
USA, Europe 1982-1983
Enter the name for this tabbed section: credits
The Residents
with guests:
P. Jillette, T. Timony, P. Perkins, C. Lemaitre, S. McLennan, C. Van Raalte, K. French, E. Benskin
with guests:
P. Jillette, T. Timony, P. Perkins, C. Lemaitre, S. McLennan, C. Van Raalte, K. French, E. Benskin
Tour Manager: A Corrigan
Lights: D Gillham
Sound: A Corrigan
Lights: D Gillham
Sound: A Corrigan
Enter the name for this tabbed section: Dates
THE TRY OUT
10-Apr-82 Santa Monica USA The House
TOUR
26-Oct-82 San Francisco USA Kabuki
27-Oct-82 San Francisco USA Kabuki
29-Oct-82 (early) Los Angeles USA Roxy
29-Oct-82 (late) Los Angeles USA Roxy
30-Oct-82 (early) Los Angeles USA Roxy
30-Oct-82 (late) Los Angeles USA Roxy
31-Oct-82 Pasadena USA Perkins palace
23-May-83 Hannover Germany Rotation
25-May-83 Vienna Austria Secession
26-May-83 Vienna Austria Secession
27-May-83 Munich Germany Alabamahalle
28-May-83 Frankfurt Germany Volksbildungsheim
29-May-83 Dusseldorf Germany Schumannsaal
30-May-83 Berlin Germany Metropol
1-Jun-83 Copenhagen Denmark Falkoner Theatre
2-Jun-83 Hamburg Germany Markthalle
3-Jun-83 Bochum Germany Zeche
4-Jun-83 Utrecht Holland Muziekcentrum
5-Jun-83 Brussels Belgium Plan K
7-Jun-83 Paris France Olympia
8-Jun-83 Lyons France Palais D'Hiver
9-Jun-83 Zurich Switzerland Volkhaus
12-Jun-83 Bologna Italy TeatroTenda
13-Jun-83 Milan Italy The Rolling Stone
14-Jun-83 Firenze Italy Teatro Apollo
17-Jun-83 Barcelona Spain Salon Cibeles
18-Jun-83 Valencia Spain Sala Extases
19-Jun-83 Madrid Spain Rock Ola
20-Jun-83 Madrid Spain Rock Ola
21-Jun-83 Madrid Spain Le Edad de Oro
23-Jun-83 Bordeaux France Cinema le Femina
24-Jun-83 Poitiers France Theatre Municipal
27-Jun-83 Birmingham England Town Hall
28-Jun-83 London England Hammersmith Odeon
29-Jun-83 Liverpool England Royal Court
30-Jun-83 Edinburgh Scotland Queens Hall
1-Jul-83 Leicestershire England Leicester Polytechnic
NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL
7-Oct-83 Washington, DC USA New Music Festival
10-Apr-82 Santa Monica USA The House
TOUR
26-Oct-82 San Francisco USA Kabuki
27-Oct-82 San Francisco USA Kabuki
29-Oct-82 (early) Los Angeles USA Roxy
29-Oct-82 (late) Los Angeles USA Roxy
30-Oct-82 (early) Los Angeles USA Roxy
30-Oct-82 (late) Los Angeles USA Roxy
31-Oct-82 Pasadena USA Perkins palace
23-May-83 Hannover Germany Rotation
25-May-83 Vienna Austria Secession
26-May-83 Vienna Austria Secession
27-May-83 Munich Germany Alabamahalle
28-May-83 Frankfurt Germany Volksbildungsheim
29-May-83 Dusseldorf Germany Schumannsaal
30-May-83 Berlin Germany Metropol
1-Jun-83 Copenhagen Denmark Falkoner Theatre
2-Jun-83 Hamburg Germany Markthalle
3-Jun-83 Bochum Germany Zeche
4-Jun-83 Utrecht Holland Muziekcentrum
5-Jun-83 Brussels Belgium Plan K
7-Jun-83 Paris France Olympia
8-Jun-83 Lyons France Palais D'Hiver
9-Jun-83 Zurich Switzerland Volkhaus
12-Jun-83 Bologna Italy TeatroTenda
13-Jun-83 Milan Italy The Rolling Stone
14-Jun-83 Firenze Italy Teatro Apollo
17-Jun-83 Barcelona Spain Salon Cibeles
18-Jun-83 Valencia Spain Sala Extases
19-Jun-83 Madrid Spain Rock Ola
20-Jun-83 Madrid Spain Rock Ola
21-Jun-83 Madrid Spain Le Edad de Oro
23-Jun-83 Bordeaux France Cinema le Femina
24-Jun-83 Poitiers France Theatre Municipal
27-Jun-83 Birmingham England Town Hall
28-Jun-83 London England Hammersmith Odeon
29-Jun-83 Liverpool England Royal Court
30-Jun-83 Edinburgh Scotland Queens Hall
1-Jul-83 Leicestershire England Leicester Polytechnic
NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL
7-Oct-83 Washington, DC USA New Music Festival
Enter the name for this tabbed section: Notes
THE MOLE SHOW
The Mole Show is the stage version of The Mole Trilogy, a series of albums which tell the story of two societies, the Moles and the Chubs, and the conflicts between them.
After ten years of making music The Residents decided to go on tour as a way of dealing with anger, confusion, and frustration in the band. Between the sudden rejection of The Commercial Album by the once-friendly New Wave press and internal problems in the group, they felt that they needed something new with which to work off steam. They had never toured before because their music depended so much on the studio and they feared that it would not translate well to stage. However, the invention of EM-U's Emulator in 1981 was a big step forward in music creation. The Emulator was the first affordable sampler, and it allowed musicians to take all those sounds which can't be produced by conventional instruments and play them back with great precision and control. They were so impressed that, ever the technophiles, they ordered one immediately. Their first one was Emulator #0005. The band used it extensively on the second Mole Trilogy album, The Tunes of Two Cities, and started experimenting with using it to perform music from The Mark of the Mole live in their studio.
When The Residents decided that they wanted to tour, they knew that they didn't want to do the standard "rock concert" kind of show. They wanted something more theatrical, and considered reviving the Eskimo opera idea which they had been playing with. That project didn't provide the impending-doom mood the band was seeking, so they decided to go with the Mole stuff they were working on at the time.
The Mole Trilogy was inspired by various stories of the Great Depression, such as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The first album, The Mark of the Mole, tells of how the primitive but hard-working Moles were driven from their homes and forced to live with the sophisticated and superficial Chubs, who used them as cheap, lower-class labour until the friction between the groups exploded into war. The second part, The Tunes of Two Cities, doesn't tell a story, but rather juxtaposes music from the two cultures. These two albums were to become the material for the new show: Mark gave the show a story, and Tunes provided linking music between scenes.
The successes which they had been having with sales meant that their Cryptic Corporation was relatively well off. With the capital from the company and the expectation that the tour would pay for itself, the group went all out with the production. The set consisted of huge 21' x 18' backdrops flanking a burlap scrim, behind which the band played. Chubs and Moles were represented by cut-outs which were manipulated by stage hands in Groucho Marx glasses. The dancers, also in Groucho glasses, would act out the story in front of all this. The band hired their friend, Penn Jillette, to come on the tour as narrator, to help get the audience through the story and to give them someone to whom they could relate.
With a second Emulator and help from E-MU (who were so taken with the band's enthusiasm that they named their R&D room after them), The Residents started putting a show together. They hired Kathleen French to do the choreography and Dan Gillham to design the lighting. Gillham illuminated the stage from below and behind and used only one spotlight, trained on Penn, who would come on between numbers to explain what was happening as a sort of Greek Chorus.
The first performance was a warm-up at The House in Santa Monica on April 10th, 1982, in front of an audience of sixty. It was a music-only performance -- no dancers, narrator, or sets -- to make sure that the Emulators were up to the task. The official opening was on October 26th at the Kabuki Theatre in San Francisco. The band had two sold-out shows there, then moved on for four shows in Los Angeles and one in Pasadena.
The shows were well received, though the audiences didn't always know what to make of them. Everyone on stage wore Groucho Marx glasses -- except Penn Jillette, who would take pot-shots at the show during his narration, poking fun at the primitive special effects and the strange story. Towards the end of the show he would (apparently) lose his temper, yelling at the performers and storming off stage. After a brief pause, Penn would be brought back on stage gagged, tied to a wheelchair, and wearing Groucho glasses.
In spite of its confusing nature, The Mole Show was a success. The only technical problem which cropped up was overheating in the Emulator disc drives due to the eighty-five disc changes necessary in the show, but this was minor. Confident after the successful shows in California and reassured by their new business manager Bill Gerber (who also worked with DEVO), The Residents were set to take the show to Europe, and that's when the real problems started.
In July, Jay Clem (the The Cryptic Corporation's business manager) left the company. He was apparently dissatisfied with the independent music business and went on to establish his own management company. Then, after the Kabuki Theatre shows, the president of the Cryptic Corp., John Kennedy, announced that he, too, was leaving. He was tired of pumping money into the group without it going anywhere and the expense of staging the Mole Show was the last straw. To make things worse, he took The Residents' building, 444 Grove St., with him. The entire production ground to a halt, and it was only with the help of friends and family that things could be restarted.
Then there was the crossing to Europe. The sets were so huge that only a 747 container jet could carry them across the Atlantic, a huge expense. Then, with about twenty people to lodge and feed as they travelled, costs started climbing (they even reduced the number of dancers from four to three to try to cut costs). In order to raise funds ahead of time, the band had sold the merchandising rights. At the shows, the stuff sold amazingly well, making far more money than The Residents ever got. This poor decision cut deeply into the show's ability to pay for itself.
The performances themselves went very well, selling out all over Europe. The Mole Show was a critical success, but the touring itself was incredibly stressful. The English road crew the band had hired was rather surly throughout the tour because The Residents didn't supply them with any of the sex & drugs they were used to getting on rock-n-roll tours. Furthermore, they didn't like having to wear the Groucho glasses, and they didn't get along at all with Penn, who is very strongly anti-smoking, anti-drink, and anti-drugs. In the end, the group had to segregate the busses, with the roadies in the Party Bus and Penn in the other (the Library Bus). There were also the usual accidents and thefts one suffers when touring, but the band had't allowed for these, and had no leeway in their plans to cope with them. Other problems included Penn being hospitalised just before a show in Spain with some sort of stomach problem (the group had to get their stage manager to cover the narration) and Penn's being attacked on stage by an irate member of the audience while he was tied to the wheelchair.
All in all, the tour was a nightmare. After the last show at Leicester Polytechnic, on July 1st, 1983, the band vowed never to tour again. They had lost so much money that Ralph Records was in danger of going under and the band was rescued at the last minute only by an invitation to perform one final Mole Show as the opening show of the November New Music America Festival in Washington D.C. At first they refused, but they couldn't afford to pass up the money offered.
Unfortunately, the nightmare wasn't over yet. Their tour manager had failed to pay the English shipping agent, who was holding all of their sets and instruments in England until they could pay $16,000 for their return. The band convinced the shipper to take $10,000 up front and the balance after the Festival, but even when they paid that cash to the shipper, he kept holding out for the balance without sending the gear. The Residents ended up arriving in Washington without anything and had to rebuild all of the backdrops and sets from scratch. They hired dancers from a local ballet school, begged an Emulator from EM-U, and had to convince their manager to do the narration because Penn couldn't make it -- all in the last two weeks before the show. They rehearsed at the local YMCA and the dress rehearsal went so badly that they couldn't complete it. Finally, to add insult to injury, the missing equipment showed up from England just hours before showtime after Bill Gerber had threatened to sue the shipper.
In spite of every indication that it would be as big a disaster as the tour had been, however, the Uncle Sam Mole Show was a spectacular show, possibly the best performance of the entire tour.
After the tour, The Residents left the Moles behind for a while. The project had been started to deal with frustrations the band had been feeling, and it ended up being far more frustrating than the original problems. The whole project had been an amazing critical success -- the Mole Show's costumes and sets became part of the permanent collection at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art after the tour -- but financially The Residents were nearly ruined. They eventually returned to the project after a couple of years with the fourth part of the Trilogy, announcing that there were now to be six parts in total -- the odd ones telling the story, and the even ones exploring the music, of the two cultures, but they never completed the set.
Enter the name for this tabbed section: Diary
THE MOLE SHOW DIARY
UNCLE WILLIE'S HIGHLY OPINIONATED GUIDE TO THE RESIDENTS
The Residents did not feel that their electronic techniques would translate well into live performance, so ten years elapsed before they would nervously attempt to bring their music and video ideas to a stage. The times were not good for the group. As a result of personal complications, their world became embroiled in anger, confusion and frustration. In a bold experiment, they decided to deal with their feelings by taking that “anger, confusion and frustration” on the road.The Mole Show was conceived to tell a fable about a culture that is forced to co-exist with a different culture, and, naturally, the inevitable “anger, confusion, and frustration” inherent to the situation. But, The Residents knew that just telling an audience about this would never do. They scripted the show so that a major character would “rebel” against the performance. In an illusion of ”breaking the proscenium,” he would express his “anger, confusion and frustration” over his role in the show thereby bringing the whole performance to an awkward and disturbing end. The audience would leave confused as to what was real and what was not. The Residents were successful. Audiences left the theaters in Europe and the USA feeling just as The Residents expected, “angry, confused and frustrated.” While perhaps an artistic thing to do, the wisdom of such a move is still pondered late at night in The Residents’ studio over glasses of wine. - Uncle Willie
THE MOLE SHOW DIARY
There is little within The Residents’ world that is so rich with emotion as The Mole Show tour of Europe. It is still discussed with relish, but tears flow easily when the memories become too “memorable.”
One of The Residents actually kept a diary of his travels on that tour and graciously offered a portion for this book. He explained to me that The Residents are often difficult to understand because their projects are so often defined by personal struggles. He hoped that the diary would shed some light on what The Mole Show was actually about.
-UW
5/26/83 - VIENNA.
Too beautiful a city for such a bad show, but the next one was much better. These were the second and third performances of the tour and neither was as good as the edgy opener in Hanover. I think there’s an idea called “home” somewhere but it’s exact location has managed to escape me.
5/30/83 - ON THE PLANE FROM DUSSELDORF TO BERLIN.
One city blurs into the next with Frankfurt being the haziest so far, but still a lot happened there: a van was wrecked, a backdrop stand crashed, L got sick and, to top it off, Penn was attacked on stage while handcuffed in the wheel chair. And we’ve only just begun! But the van wreck did result in a beautifully quiet train ride along the Rhine, its swollen overflowing currents framed by storm clouds that somehow oddly reflected the shifting moods of the tour so far. The theater in Dusseldorf, Robert Schumannsaall, was the best yet.
6/20/83 - MADRID. Madrid has a dirty river and I’m sitting on a bridge in the sun looking down at Madrid’s dirty river. I haven’t written in this book for three weeks and now it’s going to be impossible to catch up. Too much time has been spent wallowing in romantic fantasy about J. Romance! Wonderful Romance! But it seems that wonder is somehow first cousin to torture and the longer and finer your webs of romantic fantasy, the more vulnerable you are to the little boy throwing rocks. So who is this little boy, B.?, (or is it even him) and how big are the rocks he’s thrown and how many does he have left and how’s my poor little fly holding up under this merciless assault. And what about me—stuck on a bridge over a dirty river in Spain while my poor web is ripped apart, strand by sticky strand. Oh well, it’ll make a good story someday and I’m not even so sure my little fly is all that defenseless and even less sure exactly who’s the the spider and who’s the fly in this tawdry little tale anyway.
I guess that’s enough romantic drivel for now—back to the tour.
Berlin. 2000 screaming people packed in the Metropole, home of Marlene Dietrich, home of WW II bomb fragments and home of a paraplegic disco thumping surreal rhythms two hours before the Residents concert started at midnight. There’s a point in the prerecorded “prologue” music where the music peaks with an exquisitely shrill scream. I love that part because we’re always standing right behind the curtain and I can sense the tense anticipation of the audience only a few feet away. Sometimes I think I can even feel their fear, packed in shoulder to shoulder like cattle smelling an oncoming stampede, but this time it was different. We were the ones that were afraid. We heard the screaming in the music as usual, but suddenly it sank in a sea of howling. Howling from an audience that was too hot, too crowded, and too tense and all too ready to let that tension erupt in a swollen screech that left us nervously eying the exits as the curtain went up. Of course our fear was unfounded for the audience loved the show, but those screams will stay with me for a long time.
After Berlin was the overly long van ride through East Germany - a pleasant trip made overly long by the tedium of hours spent waiting at the East German border stations. My first look behind the “iron curtain” revealed a gas station that made me remember burning old tires with my grandfather back in the 50’s and a simple countryside surrounded by tension and paranoia at the borders. The trip ended in Copenhagen and our first nice weather and our first nice theater, the Falconer.
Copenhagen—a breath of fresh air where the cemeteries look like parks instead of green deserts with strange stones.
Anyway, on to Hamburg—only reached by train because of an airline strike that conveniently started just as we walked into the airport. No plane tickets meant no timely arrival in Hamburg and no friendly German audience—only a mob of thugs who seemed to take it personally that they had to wait outside in the rain for two hours while we set up the show. Never before had I been so ugly an American and never before had I been hooted off the stage during my own show. We played in a pit, Markthalle, and for the first time felt like losers, crawling out later like worms looking for land in a sea of slime.
No one had seen any of Hamburg, but the blur goes on, and on it went to Bochum and an almost equal pit, the club Zeche. A thousand or more people packed in a place that would comfortably hold a couple of hundred, but uncomfortable as it was, they stomped and screamed in delight and sent us away from Germany remembering ugly packed places and warm fast trains.
Utrecht—out of Germany and into Holland, land of pretty people, pretty flowers and good weather again. The theater, the Musicentre, was an elegantly modern monster, gray concrete on the outside and red soft in the center, and existing in complete contrast to the concept of quaint, an idea that could have originated in the charming shops and canals of the town itself. For a change even the hotel was nice and only 200-300 yards from the theater, but the blur goes on and now it’s on to Brussels and the last show to finish a run of nine performances in ten nights.
Did God dump dumpy people in Belgium or is it me? I ask myself this question as we discover that Brussels is in Belgium, a small and uninteresting country lost and forgotten somewhere between Holland and France. It’s a country we ignorant Americans would never remember except for chocolate and lace and a small boy that urinates everywhere with glee. It’s also the home of —, a band we once signed to our label, and S.B.., one of the musicians, who came to see us before the show; he made a convincing caricature of a gigolo except that his barber forgot to cut the hair on one side of his head. I’d never seen him so relaxed.
Now it’s back to the present, back to Madrid and back above the dirty river. We’re doing a TV taping of our entire show to go out live over Spanish National Television tomorrow tonight and I have to go rehearse.
6/21/83 - STILL MADRID. It’s 3:00AM and the show is over and, as unthinkable as it seems, it was done without Penn. He had been sick for several days, but it seemed like he could make it through the performance, even if he was a little shaky during the dress rehearsal. There was an hour and a half break between the runthrough and the broadcast and we were sitting around the lunch room trying to relax when we got the news that Penn had been sent to to hospital. He had high fever and what appeared to be a ruptured appendix. A few silent moments filled us with concern for Penn before numbing reality struck with the force of a freight train pulverizing puppies—we had no narrator for a show going on in 45 minutes! Everyone was considered as a possible replacement before we finally decided on L, the stage manager, who had some acting experience and had seen all of Penn’s performances. Armed with a script made for Spanish subtitles and a good attitude, he was able to pull off a credible performance and the group’s adrenalin rush was apparent for the whole show, but the image of Penn, alone and shaking with fever, in the waiting room of a Spanish charity hospital hung heavy over us all. As soon as the broadcast was over, we rushed to the hospital to find him on what seemed to be his deathbed. Pale and near delirium, Penn told us how he had sat in the waiting room for over three hours, and, when someone finally asked him a question it was not in his beloved Esperanto but, of course, in Spanish. Since no one speaks Esperanto but Penn, especially in Spanish hospitals, we saw that statement as a reflection of his quickly declining mental state, but then it hit us—it was a joke. And if he was telling jokes, he would be okay and he was, but they never did figure out what was wrong with him. Now he’s back at the hotel and, since the rest of us will be traveling in the vans for the next two days, it was decided to leave Penn with K, his girlfriend, here in Madrid to recover; then they can take an overnight train and meet us in Bordeaux.
6/22/83 - LEAVING MADRID. Once again we exit a hotel lobby accompanied by high pitched voices and waving fists; not only that, once we finally arrived at our vans, the tires had been slashed. It seems that we had parked in a taxi stand and the drivers were not content to merely stuff the locks with matches. The blur goes on but maybe Madrid was not blurry enough.
According to Philip K. Dick there are three planes of conscious reality: the NORMAL plane, HEAVEN, and HELL. For proper documentation it’s important that I at least try to write in each of the three states. It’s easy in the NORMAL state, but if you’re in HELL, the fear of actually confronting your own pain, an insanity on a page in front of you can be pretty intimidating - it’s much easier to stare out the window or go to sleep. And when you’re in HEAVEN, everything is so clear and life so filled with goodness and light—it’s “Why bother?” Right now I’m cruising along in normal with a leading edge toward HELL and HELL’s favorite words are “WHAT IF?”
It’s later and I’m back in HEAVEN. HEAVEN has no fear. HEAVEN needs no rhetoric. HEAVEN goes so fast that it must be impossible to put on paper. HELL hedges so much that it’s equally impossible to see—the HEDGES of HELL! Well we’ll see and I guess what we see is rain in Spain, but it’s too lumpy to be plain rain—like everywhere we go and everywhere we went is not home. Whatever that is.
So now let’s talk about the vans. The vans. The double demon that caught my mind in claustrophobic webbing lined with sticky coated kill time, pitching me around and around and around, hour after hour after hour—or something like that. There are two vans. One is a library and the other a rolling party and each one carried eight to ten people and feverish claustrophobia—I couldn’t let them beat me. They had to be met on their own terms and I guess I did it, but it took getting drunk on the twelve hour ride from Florence to Barcelona. And while it’s hard for me not to see the illusionary quality of a drunken victory, still I’m comfortable now and I wasn’t before. Eight more hours to Bordeaux.
So here I am sitting somewhere in France feeling good and wanting to write something about J. Something that will capture this feeling so I can go back and read it later and feel this way again. An impossible task, capturing emotions—the warm glow inside and slight, almost invisible smile and words like “what if she is sleeping with someone else, it doesn’t make her love me less” or I can say I miss her and want to hold her, but really it’s enough to sit and invisibly smile to myself. You can’t put it on paper (even in the dark).
6/23/83 - BORDEAUX. I’m sitting on the toilet right after a horrible meal and just before the show. Depressed. It’s hard to take seriously—I know I won’t feel this way after the show. I keep thinking that I shouldn’t see ANYONE after I get home. Right now I just want to see my little girl—someone that wants to see me.
It’s 9:15 and we’ve been told that the show doesn’t start until 9:30 because people are still coming in from the beach. I’m ready to go. My body and my mind like to smoke before the show —WE LIKE TO BURN. WE LIKE FIRE. WE LIKE SCREAM. WE LIKE GOD OF DARKNESS BECAUSE WE GET TO SCREAM! IT’S GOOD TO GET IN A GROOVE BUT GOD OF THE NIGHTFALL! GOD OF THE SHADE! RELEASES ALL THIS TENSION! FOR SOME REASON A GUY ASKED ME FOR AN AUTOGRAPH TODAY AND I SIGNED IT
Roy Rogers
IT WAS THE MOST FUN I HAD ALL DAY!
It’s 9:26 and I’m calming down - everyone else has left. I’M READY! BURN!
6/24/83—BETWEEN BORDEAUX AND POIRTIERS. HEAVEN talked to me this morning. It was brief and maybe only a message. It told me that there’s no such thing as true love but there are such things as relationships. I agree but relationships are much more fun (and ultimately painful) when they carry the illusion of love.
Forget love. Now we look at our lines. Our through line, currently residing in the library van demonically descending upon Poirtiers, and our loop line, arcing it’s way back to Paris. Perhaps we’ll complete the circle as both lines converge on the Arc de Triomphe, but then again maybe not.
Anyway, once upon a time we were in Paris. It was long ago and full of magic with a great high tower that spoke directly to another special spot called “HOME”. It only asked for a few funny coins that obviously weren’t real money anyway. Yes it was indeed a magic place, but it did have one serious flaw. The flaw of being so hugely overpoweringly magnificently romantic and me having no one to be romantic with—except my tortured soul and it was getting old. But still, it WAS magic.
The tower was called EYEFULL and it was—with massive arches rising up from the ground like a graceful lacelegged dinosaur with strangely slanting elevators to take you up. You couldn’t go all the way to the top, but it didn’t matter - halfway to the stars was enough. Also there was a big church with two towers that somehow managed to fluctuate between awe and creepy while still serving as hunchback inspiration and diligent definers of the word “GARGOYLE”. Paris had snails at a sidewalk cafe and shiny shops with switchblades and razors; ducks and pigeons for sale on the sidewalk and fountains and statues and - the Olympic Theater with a marquee that proudly said, “THE RESIDENTS - MOLESHOW OPERA”! On with the show.
It’s hard to feel it now, as I bump along in this crowded little van, but the end of that show in Paris was one of the genuinely sublime and perhaps defining moments of my life. Paris had totally overwhelmed me—so much more than I had expected, but there I was, sheepishly standing on the stage in baggy underwear and “Groucho” glasses with Paris cheering for me! They would NOT let us leave— screaming, cheering, whistling, and stomping their feet for over twenty minutes until we had to do our FIRST EVER ENCORE! In Paris, no less! I’m still impressed.
Well, anyway, we left Paris and now we’re going back to Paris, only maybe we’re not going back, maybe the circle doesn’t complete itself and romance dies. Maybe.
- a Resident
UNCLE WILLIE'S HIGHLY OPINIONATED GUIDE TO THE RESIDENTS
The Residents did not feel that their electronic techniques would translate well into live performance, so ten years elapsed before they would nervously attempt to bring their music and video ideas to a stage. The times were not good for the group. As a result of personal complications, their world became embroiled in anger, confusion and frustration. In a bold experiment, they decided to deal with their feelings by taking that “anger, confusion and frustration” on the road.The Mole Show was conceived to tell a fable about a culture that is forced to co-exist with a different culture, and, naturally, the inevitable “anger, confusion, and frustration” inherent to the situation. But, The Residents knew that just telling an audience about this would never do. They scripted the show so that a major character would “rebel” against the performance. In an illusion of ”breaking the proscenium,” he would express his “anger, confusion and frustration” over his role in the show thereby bringing the whole performance to an awkward and disturbing end. The audience would leave confused as to what was real and what was not. The Residents were successful. Audiences left the theaters in Europe and the USA feeling just as The Residents expected, “angry, confused and frustrated.” While perhaps an artistic thing to do, the wisdom of such a move is still pondered late at night in The Residents’ studio over glasses of wine. - Uncle Willie
THE MOLE SHOW DIARY
There is little within The Residents’ world that is so rich with emotion as The Mole Show tour of Europe. It is still discussed with relish, but tears flow easily when the memories become too “memorable.”
One of The Residents actually kept a diary of his travels on that tour and graciously offered a portion for this book. He explained to me that The Residents are often difficult to understand because their projects are so often defined by personal struggles. He hoped that the diary would shed some light on what The Mole Show was actually about.
-UW
5/26/83 - VIENNA.
Too beautiful a city for such a bad show, but the next one was much better. These were the second and third performances of the tour and neither was as good as the edgy opener in Hanover. I think there’s an idea called “home” somewhere but it’s exact location has managed to escape me.
5/30/83 - ON THE PLANE FROM DUSSELDORF TO BERLIN.
One city blurs into the next with Frankfurt being the haziest so far, but still a lot happened there: a van was wrecked, a backdrop stand crashed, L got sick and, to top it off, Penn was attacked on stage while handcuffed in the wheel chair. And we’ve only just begun! But the van wreck did result in a beautifully quiet train ride along the Rhine, its swollen overflowing currents framed by storm clouds that somehow oddly reflected the shifting moods of the tour so far. The theater in Dusseldorf, Robert Schumannsaall, was the best yet.
6/20/83 - MADRID. Madrid has a dirty river and I’m sitting on a bridge in the sun looking down at Madrid’s dirty river. I haven’t written in this book for three weeks and now it’s going to be impossible to catch up. Too much time has been spent wallowing in romantic fantasy about J. Romance! Wonderful Romance! But it seems that wonder is somehow first cousin to torture and the longer and finer your webs of romantic fantasy, the more vulnerable you are to the little boy throwing rocks. So who is this little boy, B.?, (or is it even him) and how big are the rocks he’s thrown and how many does he have left and how’s my poor little fly holding up under this merciless assault. And what about me—stuck on a bridge over a dirty river in Spain while my poor web is ripped apart, strand by sticky strand. Oh well, it’ll make a good story someday and I’m not even so sure my little fly is all that defenseless and even less sure exactly who’s the the spider and who’s the fly in this tawdry little tale anyway.
I guess that’s enough romantic drivel for now—back to the tour.
Berlin. 2000 screaming people packed in the Metropole, home of Marlene Dietrich, home of WW II bomb fragments and home of a paraplegic disco thumping surreal rhythms two hours before the Residents concert started at midnight. There’s a point in the prerecorded “prologue” music where the music peaks with an exquisitely shrill scream. I love that part because we’re always standing right behind the curtain and I can sense the tense anticipation of the audience only a few feet away. Sometimes I think I can even feel their fear, packed in shoulder to shoulder like cattle smelling an oncoming stampede, but this time it was different. We were the ones that were afraid. We heard the screaming in the music as usual, but suddenly it sank in a sea of howling. Howling from an audience that was too hot, too crowded, and too tense and all too ready to let that tension erupt in a swollen screech that left us nervously eying the exits as the curtain went up. Of course our fear was unfounded for the audience loved the show, but those screams will stay with me for a long time.
After Berlin was the overly long van ride through East Germany - a pleasant trip made overly long by the tedium of hours spent waiting at the East German border stations. My first look behind the “iron curtain” revealed a gas station that made me remember burning old tires with my grandfather back in the 50’s and a simple countryside surrounded by tension and paranoia at the borders. The trip ended in Copenhagen and our first nice weather and our first nice theater, the Falconer.
Copenhagen—a breath of fresh air where the cemeteries look like parks instead of green deserts with strange stones.
Anyway, on to Hamburg—only reached by train because of an airline strike that conveniently started just as we walked into the airport. No plane tickets meant no timely arrival in Hamburg and no friendly German audience—only a mob of thugs who seemed to take it personally that they had to wait outside in the rain for two hours while we set up the show. Never before had I been so ugly an American and never before had I been hooted off the stage during my own show. We played in a pit, Markthalle, and for the first time felt like losers, crawling out later like worms looking for land in a sea of slime.
No one had seen any of Hamburg, but the blur goes on, and on it went to Bochum and an almost equal pit, the club Zeche. A thousand or more people packed in a place that would comfortably hold a couple of hundred, but uncomfortable as it was, they stomped and screamed in delight and sent us away from Germany remembering ugly packed places and warm fast trains.
Utrecht—out of Germany and into Holland, land of pretty people, pretty flowers and good weather again. The theater, the Musicentre, was an elegantly modern monster, gray concrete on the outside and red soft in the center, and existing in complete contrast to the concept of quaint, an idea that could have originated in the charming shops and canals of the town itself. For a change even the hotel was nice and only 200-300 yards from the theater, but the blur goes on and now it’s on to Brussels and the last show to finish a run of nine performances in ten nights.
Did God dump dumpy people in Belgium or is it me? I ask myself this question as we discover that Brussels is in Belgium, a small and uninteresting country lost and forgotten somewhere between Holland and France. It’s a country we ignorant Americans would never remember except for chocolate and lace and a small boy that urinates everywhere with glee. It’s also the home of —, a band we once signed to our label, and S.B.., one of the musicians, who came to see us before the show; he made a convincing caricature of a gigolo except that his barber forgot to cut the hair on one side of his head. I’d never seen him so relaxed.
Now it’s back to the present, back to Madrid and back above the dirty river. We’re doing a TV taping of our entire show to go out live over Spanish National Television tomorrow tonight and I have to go rehearse.
6/21/83 - STILL MADRID. It’s 3:00AM and the show is over and, as unthinkable as it seems, it was done without Penn. He had been sick for several days, but it seemed like he could make it through the performance, even if he was a little shaky during the dress rehearsal. There was an hour and a half break between the runthrough and the broadcast and we were sitting around the lunch room trying to relax when we got the news that Penn had been sent to to hospital. He had high fever and what appeared to be a ruptured appendix. A few silent moments filled us with concern for Penn before numbing reality struck with the force of a freight train pulverizing puppies—we had no narrator for a show going on in 45 minutes! Everyone was considered as a possible replacement before we finally decided on L, the stage manager, who had some acting experience and had seen all of Penn’s performances. Armed with a script made for Spanish subtitles and a good attitude, he was able to pull off a credible performance and the group’s adrenalin rush was apparent for the whole show, but the image of Penn, alone and shaking with fever, in the waiting room of a Spanish charity hospital hung heavy over us all. As soon as the broadcast was over, we rushed to the hospital to find him on what seemed to be his deathbed. Pale and near delirium, Penn told us how he had sat in the waiting room for over three hours, and, when someone finally asked him a question it was not in his beloved Esperanto but, of course, in Spanish. Since no one speaks Esperanto but Penn, especially in Spanish hospitals, we saw that statement as a reflection of his quickly declining mental state, but then it hit us—it was a joke. And if he was telling jokes, he would be okay and he was, but they never did figure out what was wrong with him. Now he’s back at the hotel and, since the rest of us will be traveling in the vans for the next two days, it was decided to leave Penn with K, his girlfriend, here in Madrid to recover; then they can take an overnight train and meet us in Bordeaux.
6/22/83 - LEAVING MADRID. Once again we exit a hotel lobby accompanied by high pitched voices and waving fists; not only that, once we finally arrived at our vans, the tires had been slashed. It seems that we had parked in a taxi stand and the drivers were not content to merely stuff the locks with matches. The blur goes on but maybe Madrid was not blurry enough.
According to Philip K. Dick there are three planes of conscious reality: the NORMAL plane, HEAVEN, and HELL. For proper documentation it’s important that I at least try to write in each of the three states. It’s easy in the NORMAL state, but if you’re in HELL, the fear of actually confronting your own pain, an insanity on a page in front of you can be pretty intimidating - it’s much easier to stare out the window or go to sleep. And when you’re in HEAVEN, everything is so clear and life so filled with goodness and light—it’s “Why bother?” Right now I’m cruising along in normal with a leading edge toward HELL and HELL’s favorite words are “WHAT IF?”
It’s later and I’m back in HEAVEN. HEAVEN has no fear. HEAVEN needs no rhetoric. HEAVEN goes so fast that it must be impossible to put on paper. HELL hedges so much that it’s equally impossible to see—the HEDGES of HELL! Well we’ll see and I guess what we see is rain in Spain, but it’s too lumpy to be plain rain—like everywhere we go and everywhere we went is not home. Whatever that is.
So now let’s talk about the vans. The vans. The double demon that caught my mind in claustrophobic webbing lined with sticky coated kill time, pitching me around and around and around, hour after hour after hour—or something like that. There are two vans. One is a library and the other a rolling party and each one carried eight to ten people and feverish claustrophobia—I couldn’t let them beat me. They had to be met on their own terms and I guess I did it, but it took getting drunk on the twelve hour ride from Florence to Barcelona. And while it’s hard for me not to see the illusionary quality of a drunken victory, still I’m comfortable now and I wasn’t before. Eight more hours to Bordeaux.
So here I am sitting somewhere in France feeling good and wanting to write something about J. Something that will capture this feeling so I can go back and read it later and feel this way again. An impossible task, capturing emotions—the warm glow inside and slight, almost invisible smile and words like “what if she is sleeping with someone else, it doesn’t make her love me less” or I can say I miss her and want to hold her, but really it’s enough to sit and invisibly smile to myself. You can’t put it on paper (even in the dark).
6/23/83 - BORDEAUX. I’m sitting on the toilet right after a horrible meal and just before the show. Depressed. It’s hard to take seriously—I know I won’t feel this way after the show. I keep thinking that I shouldn’t see ANYONE after I get home. Right now I just want to see my little girl—someone that wants to see me.
It’s 9:15 and we’ve been told that the show doesn’t start until 9:30 because people are still coming in from the beach. I’m ready to go. My body and my mind like to smoke before the show —WE LIKE TO BURN. WE LIKE FIRE. WE LIKE SCREAM. WE LIKE GOD OF DARKNESS BECAUSE WE GET TO SCREAM! IT’S GOOD TO GET IN A GROOVE BUT GOD OF THE NIGHTFALL! GOD OF THE SHADE! RELEASES ALL THIS TENSION! FOR SOME REASON A GUY ASKED ME FOR AN AUTOGRAPH TODAY AND I SIGNED IT
Roy Rogers
IT WAS THE MOST FUN I HAD ALL DAY!
It’s 9:26 and I’m calming down - everyone else has left. I’M READY! BURN!
6/24/83—BETWEEN BORDEAUX AND POIRTIERS. HEAVEN talked to me this morning. It was brief and maybe only a message. It told me that there’s no such thing as true love but there are such things as relationships. I agree but relationships are much more fun (and ultimately painful) when they carry the illusion of love.
Forget love. Now we look at our lines. Our through line, currently residing in the library van demonically descending upon Poirtiers, and our loop line, arcing it’s way back to Paris. Perhaps we’ll complete the circle as both lines converge on the Arc de Triomphe, but then again maybe not.
Anyway, once upon a time we were in Paris. It was long ago and full of magic with a great high tower that spoke directly to another special spot called “HOME”. It only asked for a few funny coins that obviously weren’t real money anyway. Yes it was indeed a magic place, but it did have one serious flaw. The flaw of being so hugely overpoweringly magnificently romantic and me having no one to be romantic with—except my tortured soul and it was getting old. But still, it WAS magic.
The tower was called EYEFULL and it was—with massive arches rising up from the ground like a graceful lacelegged dinosaur with strangely slanting elevators to take you up. You couldn’t go all the way to the top, but it didn’t matter - halfway to the stars was enough. Also there was a big church with two towers that somehow managed to fluctuate between awe and creepy while still serving as hunchback inspiration and diligent definers of the word “GARGOYLE”. Paris had snails at a sidewalk cafe and shiny shops with switchblades and razors; ducks and pigeons for sale on the sidewalk and fountains and statues and - the Olympic Theater with a marquee that proudly said, “THE RESIDENTS - MOLESHOW OPERA”! On with the show.
It’s hard to feel it now, as I bump along in this crowded little van, but the end of that show in Paris was one of the genuinely sublime and perhaps defining moments of my life. Paris had totally overwhelmed me—so much more than I had expected, but there I was, sheepishly standing on the stage in baggy underwear and “Groucho” glasses with Paris cheering for me! They would NOT let us leave— screaming, cheering, whistling, and stomping their feet for over twenty minutes until we had to do our FIRST EVER ENCORE! In Paris, no less! I’m still impressed.
Well, anyway, we left Paris and now we’re going back to Paris, only maybe we’re not going back, maybe the circle doesn’t complete itself and romance dies. Maybe.
- a Resident
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