In 1981, The Residents were not content to continue creating a series of single, isolated music albums and wished to pursue more ambitious projects. Consequently, The Mole Trilogy was the first venture in this new direction. Initially the project was designed to be a collection of six albums: three of the LPs were intended to tell an epic story, connecting several generations of two fictitious races, while the three additional albums were designed to serve as musical "illustrations" for this story. It was to be a trilogy of pairs, with each contributing both to the narrative and cultural context of the ongoing saga. In addition, a live tour was planned.

Alternating between the two cultures, the plot line used a form of lyrical storytelling to follow the races through their inevitable ideological clash. In contrast to this narrative form, the pseudo documentary "music" albums demonstrated the musicology of the two cultures, then followed its evolution as the societies began to merge.

As only parts 1, 2, and 4 have appeared, it seems in retrospect that the project was perhaps overly ambitious. In addition to the three albums, the highly anticipated Mole Show world tour was unleashed upon unsuspecting audiences, along with an album of pre-show, intermission, and post-show music.

As part of the pREServed reissue series, all of the Mole Trilogy albums were collected in a six-disc set called Mole Box. The full track listing is below. Asterisks indicate previously unreleased material.

DISC ONE
MARK OF THE MOLE

1. VOICES OF THE AIR
2. THE ULTIMATE DISASTER
3. MIGRATION
4. ANOTHER LAND
5. THE NEW MACHINE
6. FINAL CONFRONTATION

BONUS MOLES

7. VOICES OF THE AIR (LIVE IN THE STUDIO) *
8. THE ULTIMATE DISASTER (LIVE IN THE STUDIO) *
9. MIGRATION (LIVE IN THE STUDIO) *
10. ANOTHER LAND (LIVE IN THE STUDIO) *
11. THE NEW MACHINE (LIVE IN THE STUDIO) *
12. FINAL CONFRONTATION (LIVE IN THE STUDIO) *

DISC TWO
THE TUNES OF TWO CITIES

1. SERENADE FOR MISSY
2. A MAZE OF JIGSAWS
3. MOUSETRAP
4. GOD OF DARKNESS
5. SMACK YOUR LIPS (CLAP YOUR TEETH)
6. PRAISE FOR THE CURSE
7. THE SECRET SEED
8. SMOKEBEAMS
9. MOURNING THE UNDEAD
10. SONG OF THE WILD
11. THE EVIL DISPOSER
12. HAPPY HOME

BONUS TUNES

13. OPEN UP
14. ANVIL FOREST
15. SCENT OF MINT
16. SMACK YOUR LIPS (1982 REHEARSAL)
17. SONG OF THE WILD (1982 REHEARSAL)
18. HAPPY HOME (1982 REHEARSAL)
19. GOD OF DARKNESS (LIVE IN THE STUDIO) *
20. SMACK YOUR LIPS (LIVE IN THE STUDIO) *
21. THE SECRET SEED (LIVE IN THE STUDIO) *
22. HAPPY HOME (LIVE IN THE STUDIO) *

DISC THREE
THE BIG BUBBLE

1. SORRY
2. HOP A LITTLE
3. GO WHERE YA WANNA GO
4. GOTTA GOTTA GET
5. CRY FOR THE FIRE
6. DIE-STAY-GO
7. VINEGAR
8. FIREFLY
9. THE BIG BUBBLE
10. FEAR FOR THE FUTURE
11. KULA BOCCA SAYS SO

BONUS BUBBLES

12. JINGLE BELLS
13. UNTITLED *
14. KULA BOCCA (2-TRACK DEMO) *
15. DIE-STAY-GO (2-TRACK DEMO) *
16. CRY FOR THE FIRE SKETCH *
17. THE BIG BUBBLE (LIVE, 1986)
18. HOP A LITTLE (LIVE, 1986)
19. CRY FOR THE FIRE (LIVE ON NORGE TV NRK) *
20. DIE-STAY-GO (LIVE IN SAN FRANCISCO, 2011)

DISC FOUR
THE MOLE SHOW LIVE AT THE ROXY

1. VOICES OF THE AIR
2. THE SECRET SEED
3. "WELCOME..."
4. THE ULTIMATE DISASTER
5. "RATHER FLASHY..."
6. GOD OF DARKNESS
7. "MOLE STYLE..."
8. MIGRATION
9. ANOTHER LAND
10. "THAT'S ALL WE NEED..."
11. THE NEW MACHINE
12. "A REAL COMPLICATED ENDING..."
13. THE SONG OF THE WILD
14. FINAL CONFRONTATION
15. "WE HAD TO BORROW MONEY FROM OUR PARENTS..."
16. SATISFACTION
17. HAPPY HOME

DISC FIVE
THE UNCLE SAM MOLE SHOW - LIVE IN WASHINGTON, DC

1. VOICES OF THE AIR *
2. THE SECRET SEED *
3. "GOOD EVENING..." *
4. THE ULTIMATE DISASTER *
5. "THOSE WERE FOUR SONGS..." *
6. GOD OF DARKNESS *
7. "MORE RELIGION..." *
8. MIGRATION *
9. SHORTY'S LAMENT (INTERMISSION) *
10. SMACK YOUR LIPS *
11. "WE'RE IN CHUB LAND..." *
12. ANOTHER LAND *
13. "THINGS ARE GOING FAIRLY WELL..." *
14. THE NEW MACHINE *
15. "A GIORGIO MORODER SCENE..." *
16. THE SONG OF THE WILD *
17. THE FINAL CONFRONTATION *
18. THE SINGING RESIDENT NEEDS SOMETHING *
19. SATISFACTION *
20. HAPPY HOME *
21. THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER *

DISC SIX
MISCELLANEOUS MOLE MATERIALS

1. MOTM MIX ONE CONCENTRATE *

INTERMISSION

2. LIGHTS OUT (PRELUDE)
3. SHORTY'S LAMENT
4. THE MOLES ARE COMING
5. WOULD WE BE ALIVE?
6. THE NEW HYMN

7. ANOTHER ANOTHER LAND *
8. NOW IT IS TOO LATE *
9. GOING NOWHERE *
10. FROM MOM1 *
11. SATISFACTION (LIVE IN THE STUDIO) *
12. MARCHING TO THE WE
13. WOULD WE BE ALIVE (LIVE 2005)
14. MARCHING TO THE SEA/INTERMISSION (LIVE 2013)

After the New Wave music press decided that The Residents weren't any fun anymore, the band began to feel angry, confused, and frustrated. Deciding that "a disaster was in order", they set about composing an album which told the story of a culture driven from their homes by a storm and forced into a confrontation with another people. This album was the first part of a planned Mole Trilogy.
The Mark of the Mole draws on various tales from the Great Depression, such as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. It opens with a radio broadcast (narrated by Penn Jilette) of a warning about a storm brewing over the lands which contain the tunnels of the Mohelmot. The Mohelmot are strange race of cloaked figures who prefer to live underground and who are known as "Moles" as a result. The storm arrives quickly and floods the Moles out of their homes, forcing them to migrate across the desert to the sea where the Chubs live.

The Chubs are a chubby, vacuous people who live for pleasure in a cozy pop culture. They embrace the arriving Moles, seeing them as a good source of cheap labour. The hard-working Moles soon alienate the Chubs, however. The latter start to complain about the Moles taking all the good work and marrying the Chubs' daughters -- all the usual redneck complaints about immigrants, of which The Residents had heard plenty when they were growing up in Louisiana. The tension between the two groups comes to a head, breaking out in a short war which resolves nothing. Afterwards, everything reverts to they way it was before the fighting, with the situation just as tense as ever.

The Tunes of Two Cities is Part Two of The Mole Trilogy. It collects and contrasts examples of the music of the Mole and Chub cultures. The tracks alternate between the fluffy, Art Deco music of the superficial Chubs and the dark, tribal music of the Moles.

Chubs are only concerned with leisure and want nothing to do with real-world problems. To emphasize this, many of the Chub tracks are mutated covers of escapist big band songs from the 1920s and 1930s. For example, Mousetrap and Happy Home cover Stan Kenton's Eager Beaver and Machito respectively, and Smack Your Lips (Clap Your Teeth) is a version of In the Mood.

The Moles are a tribal, hard-working society who worship a dark god called "The Evil Disposer". The music of their songs features the Harry Partch-influenced use of invented instruments and languages, as did The Residents' other tribal culture album, Eskimo. In fact, one can look at the Mole music as being an extension of some of the ideas which The Residents examined at in that album, just as the Chubs' twisted versions of 1930s popular music harkens back to The Third Reich 'N' Roll's versions of '60s pop. The Mole tracks feature dark, primitive vocal lines made up of chants and prayers, while the Chubs' music is entirely instrumental. The only exception is the last track, Happy Home (sung by Nessie Lessons instead of the growling Residential lead singer found in the Mole tracks). The song is billed as an "excerpt from Act II of Innisfree", though no clue is given as to what that might mean. One theory is that Innisfree is a Chub musical about Moles roughly analogous to George Gershwin's Porgy & Bess (a musical by a white American about black slaves).

The Tunes of Two Cities was the first album The Residents made featuring their new toy, the EM-U Emulator. The Emulator was the first commercial sampler and The Residents were among the first to buy one (theirs was #00005 off the assembly line). That Emulator provides most of the instrumental sounds on the album, with the exception of the guest musician's contributions: Snakefinger's guitar work and Norman Salant's saxophone playing, both of which appear in Missy.

The Tunes of Two Cities is essentially a prequel to Mark of the Mole. It consists of a dozen cuts: cultural samples, six from the Moles and six from the Chubs. The Residents alternate the pieces, cinematically intercutting the societies to pin down their characters and aspirations. And they do their work with an originality, a painstaking sense of detail, and an emotional wallop which makes Tunes, for me, their finest album.

The Mole cuts on Tunes are comparable to Eskimo, in that The Residents are again inventing the ritual music of a "primitive" society. Mole music embodies all the Residents' reverence for tribal cultures, and to keep the soul from being eclipsed by the hardware, they use voices on all the Mole cuts. The voices are wordless and highly stylized. Sometimes the weirdness is melodic, but more often it is timbral: "Maze of Jigsaws" has a howling, animalistic chorus, and a low, rippling solo voice; at the end, that voice returns in a distant, ghostly reinvention that's genuinely chilling.
Not surprisingly, Chub music is every bit a apocalyptic as Mole music. Chub music is pop, but by intercutting the two idioms, The Residents describe a commonality beyond musical structures. Mole music and Chub music are about the same thing, they serve the same purpose: the ritual exorcism of suffering. Almost all of the Chub cuts are covers of Big Band standards. So just as Mole music is an outgrowth of Eskimo, Chub music harkens back to The Third Reich 'N' Roll: Again, The Residents are trying to discern what's hateful, dangerous, and fascistic in pop culture; what values it betrays about ourselves. But if Reich 'N' Roll seemed self-consciously methodical and pyrotechnic, Chub music has an almost documentary coherence, a found-object integrity, because of its detail and relative uniformity.

Tunes is quintessential Residents, opening new mine shafts into their humor, experimentation, allusiveness, elusiveness.... yet it's also without a doubt their most accessible work. The expressive freedom of Mark of the Mole takes a quantum leap with Tunes, where the music wordlessly articulates the convictions that generated it. Role-playing and pyrotechnics, ordinarily The Residents' defenses against emotion, here serve to realize emotion, and this music can speak to people as no other work of theirs has.

Tunes reminds me of Citizen Kane: an original, technically sophisticated achievement that's more than accessible - it's downright entertaining. No easy trick, for both works are obsessed with wealth, privilege, and power; nostalgia and loss; decadence and dissolution. And as long as I've gone this far, I'll confess that I find them comparable in quality; Tunes is one of the triumphs of American Music, regardless of genre or era.

- Cole Gagne

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.

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

Mole Show: Live at the Roxy

The Roxy LP was originally a bootleg, one of two or three which were made of the Mole Show. The Residents bought up the tapes from the bootlegger and re-released it themselves as a picture disk. 1800 were printed with the Classic Eye on the A side and a close-up of the burlap scrim on the other.

Mole Show (VHS)

A half-hour edit of the show on a VHS tape that also included Whatever Happened To Vileness Fats?

Mole Show: Live in Holland

This recording was made at the show in Utrecht, Holland. There are no liner notes on the CD package except for the credits and a strange question: "Who is UWEB?"

Mole Show: Kabuki

Live DVD released by Ralph America in a special package that included art cards, a CD of a radio interview, and a tiny shovel in a burlap sack.

Uncle Sam Mole Show

Released as part of the pREServed series Mole Box.

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

Intermission collects the opening, closing, and intermission music from The Mole Show. This music was written especially for the touring performance, though it was played off of a tape rather than performed live. The three intermission numbers go between Migration and Another Land in the show. The other two tracks open and close the entire performance.

In 1982 and 83 The Residents took The Mole Show on the road. The highly acclaimed work was offset by opening, closing, and intermission music that had been recorded by The Residents especially for the presentation. The music was eventually released on vinyl as Intermission. In adding Intermission here to Mark of the Mole, a sense of reflective "commenting" follows the bleak Mole tragedy. For those of you with a sense of more integration between these two independent recordings, try programing your CD player with selection 7 first, followed by selection 1-3. Then stick in 8, 9, and 10, and follow those with 4, 5, and 6. Finally, cap it all of with selection 11.

Part Four of The Mole Trilogy expands musically on the events of the story in Part Three. After Ramsey, lead singer for The Big Bubble, was released from prison (thanks to of the outcry his arrest caused) the band was signed by Frankie DuVall of Black Shroud Records (named after the Mole's traditional form of dress). Their eponymous first album features the Mohelmot songs sung at the Zinkenite rally, including the new Zinkenite anthem Cry for the Fire.

The music on The Big Bubble is a synthesis of the Mole and Chub music found on The Tunes of Two Cities, performed using traditional Rock music instruments. These two albums make a set of three kinds of music in a way echoed later by the three parts of The Residents Cube-E tour, which featured white American music, black American music, and rock-n-roll -- the synthesis of the two.
The Residents wanted a just-about-live sound to the album so they recorded the vocalists lines first and lay down the other tracks over that. The results are -- well, people don't really agree what the results are. Some fans loved it, some hated it. Cole Gagne, author of Sonic Transports, calls the album "brilliant", while Ian Shirley, in Meet the Residents, says that it was evidence that The Residents were "treading water". A UWEB poll suggested that it was tied with Not Available as the weirdest Residential album, which makes some sense, since both albums were created in order to work out some problems and stress within the band.

One place where the album was an unquestioned success, however, was Japan, where it had been released on Wave Records (along with a rather inaccurate lyric sheet which Wave reversed engineered from the album). The popularity of The Big Bubble there inspired Wave to invite The Residents to Japan for their next tour.

Oh, and by the way... The four figures on The Big Bubble's The Big Bubble album cover (which is featured on The Residents' The Big Bubble album cover) are not The Residents without their disguises. The band advertised in local acting papers for people to pose for this cover. Coincidentally, a German fan who was visiting San Francisco happened to drop by the Cryptic Corporation that day, and they grabbed him and stuffed him in a tuxedo for the photo shoot as well (he's the one on the right of the three behind Ramsey on the cover, or the extreme right in the gatefold picture). The actor who posed as Ramsey (the one in the front on the cover or the back on the gatefold) went on to work for The Residents 13th Anniversary Show as the stage-lighting ninja.

In the fall of 1981 The Residents released Mark of the Mole. This first record of the Mole Trilogy laid out the basic story line for the first two parts of the story. One, the Hole-Workers battle against the ravages of nature in the form of a storm that destroys their homes; and two, their resulting conflict with a neighboring culture that is very different from their own. The second part of the triogy was released in spring of 1982. It featured examples of the music of both the Chub and the Mole cultures so as to more clearly illustrate the difference between these two societal forces. The remainder of 1982 and all of 1983 was spent touring a large scale musical/visual presentation of these two albums that was known as The Mole Show. Upon returning from the European part of the tour, The Residents rested briefly and threw themselves into the job of completing the story. Part three of the trilogy picked up on the story several decades after the great war. The survivors of the two cultures lived side-by-side in uneasy peace. The war had not resulted in any clear winner, but time had promoted those who had the appropriate appetite for power, and the Chubs were famous for their various appetites.
Many Moles and Chubs had blended socially so mixed marriages were common. Their offspring were refered to as "Cross". In responce to this a "Zinkenite" movement by traditional Moles, or "Mohelmot", had surfaced to encourage the establishment of a new Mohelmot nation. Surprisingly, many of the officials of the Zinkenites were "Cross", as though the Chub genes had brought out a new aggression to the Mohelmot sense. One such official was a charismatic second generation cross named Kula Bocca.
Kula Bocca knew that if the Zinkenites were to succeed in reestablishing their society, they needed the energy, passion, and, above all, naivete of youth. He hired a local band to play for a rally at Elmwurst, and, although he did not think they were very good, the band immediately captured the heart of the crowd with a single song, "Cry for the Fire". The song even had a section that was sung in the original language of the Mohelmot which had been outlawed since the war. Few in the audience could understand what the singer was saying, but everyone immediately grasped that a deep link was being established with their past.
Kula Bocca could see the power that this band, "The Big Bubble", had on the public. At a later rally he arranged for the singer of the band to be "arrested" to stir up sympathy for the Zinkenites, and then he contacted Frinky DuVall of Black Shroud Records concerning The Bubble. Black Shroud supported the Zinkenites even though Mr. DuVall was a Chub, and agreed to release an album for the band.
So now The Residents proudly present Part Four of the Mole Trilogy... the Black Shroud album by the band that is shaking a nation... THE BIG BUBBLE.


The Liner Notes for the album on the album Rarely in the history of popular music has a meteoric rise been seen equal to that of the band whose first album you are currently holding in your hands. Less than two years ago Ramsey, Paul, Alex and Frank started getting together in their Leone family garage to "play around" with some tunes that Ramsey and Frank had been writing together. One of these songs was a catchy riff named "The Big Bubble". On their own the foursome raised enough money to release a single of "The Big Bubble" and the tune became an instant regional hit. However, since they had never taken a name for their band, and the lable of their single only read "Big Bubble", the name of the song was soon forced upon them as the name of the band as well. Not until the political rally of Elmwurst did the band gain national prominence. Following a speech by Zinkenite spokesman, Kula Bocca, the band premiered a new composition, "Cry for the Fire". Twenty thousand people came to their feet, interlocked arms, and listened in stunned silence as "The Big Bubble" sang to the people in the ancient tongue of the Mohelmot, forbidden since the war. "Cry for the Fire" became the anthem of the Zinkenites. In November at the Casema rally, Ramsey was arrested for singing in Mohelmot. The resulting riot and public outcry forced his release three days later. At that time, Frankie DuVall, president of Black Shroud Records, called on the "Bubble" and stated that he was ready to back the group on an album that would include the Mohelmot vocals, the first time that the Mohelmot language had ever been recorded. So here it is. The boys have re-recorded their first hit "The Big Bubble" (note the altered lyrics on this version), as well as ten other tunes, six of which use the Mohelmot speech including the controversial Zinkenite anthem "Cry for the Fire".
Hope you dig it. - Black Shroud Records