FREAK SHOW
After the Cube E tour The Residents were feeling rather
despirited. The last leg of the tour had been plagued with
problems and they'd been feeling more and more like what
had started out as a piece of musical theatre had turned
into an exhibition of bizarre cultural deformities with
themselves as the star attraction. "Everyone comes to the
freak-show" became a back-stage catch-phrase for the tour.
It didn't help that after almost ten years of tours and
major projects (not to mention nearly twenty years of
albums), the musical press still spent far more time
talking about their Eyeball heads than their music.
Building on their fears and worries (a frequent source of
inspiration for them) and inspired by such sources as
Daniel P. Mannix's book Freaks: We Who Are Not Like Others
and the 1932 movie Freaks, they came up with a series of
short stories about a troupe of side-show freaks.
The songs which grew out of these don't necessarily tell
these stories (though some do) but instead concentrate on
the character of the people -- with the reminder that
these are people, in spite of their often disturbing
appearances. The group also turn the situation upside-down
for one song, Lillie. Lillie is a member of the audience
who, in spite of being a so-called "normal" person, is so
disturbing that she manages to freak the freaks out.
The Residents hired Tony Janssen, who had worked with them
on the sound on Cube-E, to help out with the MIDI work on
the album. The band had started experimenting with the
technology when they were hired to write soundtracks for
episodes of Pee-Wee's Playhouse but this was the most
extensive use of the synthesizer networking system they had
ever undertaken.
The album was fairly successful and The Residents decided
to expand on the ideas within it. They teamed up with
computer animator Jim Ludtke to produce a promotional
video, Harry the Head. As part of their 20th Anniversary
celebrations in 1992 they recruited a host of top-notch
alternative comix artists to produce a full-colour graphic
novel based on the characters' songs and stories, which was
published by Dark Horse Comics. A special limited-edition
hard-cover version also included a single called Blowoff, a
fifteen-minute instrumental piece based on musical ideas
from Freak Show.
The graphic novel was a hit and was followed by a first
for The Residents: a CD-ROM. The interactive program lets
the viewer not only explore the actual Freak Show under the
big top, but also go backstage to the Freaks' trailers and
poke around in their personal belongings and private lives
(and see videos for each character). The Residents
themselves appear as a freak act and have a trailer for you
to explore, which contains a history of the band.
EuroRalph has put out a Freak Show CD-ROM Soundtrack CD.
This is identical to the original album but includes a
bonus CD-ROM track based on Dave McKean's graphic-novel
story for the song Lillie (which had been left off of the
CD-ROM).
In 1995 the band turned Freak Show into a stage show,
which they premiered in November, 1995, in Prague. The band
themselves did not perform but instead they hired the
leader of a Czech band, Uz Jsme Doma, as music director for
an orchestra which performed the music, as well as a
handful of actors and singers who appear on stage.
Ralph America released a 2 CD set of an updated Freak Show
that incorporated the Blowoff pieces along with music from
the live performance in Prague.
Mute currently has a CD/DVD Freak Show set in release.