We all know the Residents for being one of the most well-known and uncategorizable experimental music collectives in the history of popular music. With each era of their albums, they actually like to undertake stages of musical evolution going from tape loops and musique concrete-oriented Dada collage music to avant-garde minimal synth music all the way to futurisitic experimental electronic music. However, what would happen if there was a band that combined desolate electric blues with psychedelic fuzz rock, free jazz, and musique concrete and Dada weirdness?
That answer lies within one of the earliest stages of the Residents, on an unreleased demo tape from 1970 called The Ballad of Stuffed Trigger. This tape was recorded after their first demo tape, Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor, which sounded totally different from this tape. I listened to plenty of tracks from this tape, as clips of this were uploaded to YouTube recently. (One of them I remember listening to was on there along with others from the tape, but got taken down. It was a year back.)
The music itself has a very coarse, free-wheeling, and at times junky atmosphere. This doesn’t have the typical experimental electronic music that the Residents experimented with after 1976, and there were no synthesizers used. This is basically the Residents experimenting with what they have. This was all recorded with cheap equipment, which at times can max out into the red, like the track “Unknown Song”. Highlights include the desolate country blues that is the title track, the old-fashioned Dixieland jazz version of George Gershwin’s “Summertime” (the Residents would revisit Gershwin’s works 15 years later), and the experimental Dada-inspired freak out version of “House of the Rising Sun”.
Out of all of these tracks, the original title track was officially released by the Residents, first on their 2012 mp3 compilation ERA B474 (consisting of stuff recorded before the band’s 1974 debut album Meet the Residents), and second on their 2013 CD compilation Delta Nudes’ Greatest Hiss (Delta Nudes was the band’s name before the name “The Residents” was chosen).
The only way the full demo tape can be found is through bootleg CDr’s and mp3 downloads from file-sharing sites. However. Most bootleg CDr dealers want you to pay more than 30 dollars for their stuff, so I suggest you look up songs from the tape on YouTube, so you could do it more safely!
The Crazy Mind of Tré Roland 