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 EM-U (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.