Talk:The Mole Show (tour)

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Notes From Ralph

"The Residents are looking for new challenges. They've confined themselves to the recording studio for ten years now, and they feel to a great extent that they've done what they want to do there, and their plan all along has been to get more involved in visual mediums as well as just the music. I mean, we feel like we run a fairly efficient operation, we don't give away pounds of cocaine to people, and we keep as much as we can in house. We don't really need such big numbers to survive. Unfortunately, recently, the numbers that we have been getting haven't been as big as they used to be, and those numbers were adequate for us to survive, and to a great extent, we're putting a lot on this Residents' tour to keep things going.

The Residents feel a very strong need to break with the traditional band, people standing up there and playing guitars, concert format and they feel it's about time that people were bored with watching people play their guitars and drums. They want to try to give them something more visual to look at; in terms of this, they're going to have a complete live show, more of a theatrical presentation. There'll be dancers involved in the show actors involved in the show. There will be backdrops, twenty completely painted backdrops for the show, and many props. Just the whole thing will make it more visual and more entertaining."

"[Penn Jillette and I have] gotten along well enough[...] that he [will] be involved in The Residents' live show. He's going to be playing a similar type position [as on the 10th Anniversary Radio Special] very much. However, instead of bringing him in totally naïve, he will know what the script is, but once again, he's still playing a foil, or an everyman kind of part, because the show will be very strange. We've decided that maybe somebody should be worked there that "normal people" can relate to."

- Homer Flynn, JJJ Radio Interview, 1982

"The main reason to do it is progress. I'm not certain what progress is, but we have decided to push forward, to change, to do something different because it seemed a little boring, and I don't even know if it was possible to continue doing things as we've been doing for the last ten years for the next 10. So we have chosen to be more aggressive and progressive and take on the world with the live performance and a more visually orientated production."

- John Kennedy, JJJ Radio Interview, 1982

"We're re-shifting emphasis to one group in hopes of making them a half million-selling group, and the only way we saw we could possibly do it was to get them on the road."

"You won't find out [The Residents' identities] if you're watching the show in the audience. They're not going to reveal their identity necessarily. But they're going to reveal their souls, and I think that's probably more important."

- Hardy Fox, JJJ Radio Interview, 1982

"I think they think it's time to show the people in the world that they actually have something valid to say, and they feel that the only way to cross over, because radio in America won't play their music, is to go out there to the people and perform for them in some way."

"They're part of a show, The Mole Show, which is the deal with the last two albums, which is a trilogy, and they're going to perform as the band and the music ensemble to create the show, which will have a narrator, dancers, it will have ten different stage settings. Most of the music will be from Mark of the Mole and Tunes of Two Cities. All of it will. There'll be dancers who will act out certain parts of the Moles' story. I think it will be more freeform by the time it gets together because it's not too well-rehearsed yet, but they've been rehearsing the music, which they played at a show in April in L.A as an unannounced thing that went over pretty good. As far as lighting and all goes, I think it'll be simple lighting because they don't need the light. After all, it doesn't matter. They can play in the dark I guess. There's a very nice sound system, I hope. What they're using is probably the most advanced stage set-up today. They'll be using Emulators, which are digital computers that can reproduce any sound. And two people use only Emulators. You can take anything that they've done in the studio that could never have been reproduced and now reproduce it while playing on the keyboard. In other words, it's, I hate to say, an advanced Mellotron, but you can speak into it, put anything into this machine. They're also using the most advanced analog synthesizers also. It blends the very interesting thing of the analog and digital world cause they play all these stupid instruments: these little cardboard boxes and things. You really can't do that live, but they can reproduce it without using any tapes. They'll actually be doing everything they play on stage with the four of them."

- Tom Timony, JJJ Radio Interview, 1982

"The Residents have been in San Francisco making records for about twelve years, but they've never performed until now. A couple of reasons behind that. There was a synthesizer invented called the Emulator, which was invented a couple of years ago and allowed The Residents to perform all of their music live. Until now, they had not been able to do that because the music is very difficult to do live. They had been very used to the studio. I also believe they were just ready for a little trip out of San Francisco to go to Europe to see things they'd never seen before."

"This show, The Residents' Mole Show, is about the two cultures, the Moles and the Chubs. [...] The Residents are the Moles. The Residents have lived in San Francisco for the past twenty years in their Happy Home, and now they're out into Another Land that they're not used to. But, as Moles, they're venturing out pretty far."

- Nessie Lessons, Mole Show interview, 1983

"I became a real fan of the music, and then when the live show was coming, I got a sort of mysterious letter in the mail asking if I wanted to do the live show. I said certainly because by then, I was a fan. They sent me a computer printout of all the lyrics, what the cut-outs would look like, and photos. Then in the script, it said, 'narrator Penn Jillette comes out and talks, one minute,' a little while later, 'minute and a half'. I would go on to rehearsals and say whatever I felt like saying, and I'd get little letters back that said 'Penn, real good, don't say this. Be a little meaner here.' [...] I am being used because I'm the kind of person who would have never discovered The Residents without them handpicking me. Even though I am pushed around and manipulated, it's also flattering, even if they want me because I'm so far outside what they do.

I was very taken by how diverse the audiences were in San Francisco, in LA. I'm afraid to say that it felt like people were only there on the opening night because it was the place to be. The nights when I believe the real fans come, it's very diverse. Some people look like your classic hippies and punks and people older than what you'd expect to see at what can loosely be called a pop rock show. I was pretty taken with how diverse it was. I was afraid that we would get who liked them this week. But there seem to be many people who seem to know what's going on with The Residents.

I was sure that I and the show were done at the end of the Los Angeles performances because it had gone very well and we had fulfilled everything. I had spent all my time with the press being confused, which seemed to be what they wanted, and they went through a lot of trouble to work around my schedule to do Europe, so now I'm hesitant to say no.

The persona is pretty much what I've always done with my performing, except I'm much more used to being in control. I wrote, directed, produced, and starred in the show I ran in San Francisco. That's a much different experience from working with The Residents, where I have less incite than your average actor. I have nothing. I create all the words I say but have no idea what I'm going for. I'd feel much more manipulated and paranoid if I didn't have some awareness of the big picture. I find a certain amount of charm in picking someone out from a different walk of life and saying, 'You're in charge, you're going to talk to the press.' If I weren't aware of this, I would've had a mental breakdown."

- Penn Jillette, interview, 1983

"They felt that they were being forced out of the underground, just like the Moles. The trilogy can't be complete until they see how they get along in the land of the Chubs."

- Penn Jillette, interview, 1983

"H. and [The Singing Resident] have Emulators and I have a Moog and [another Resident had] a Roland Jupiter 8. I got one of the Emulators, the four-voice one. The thing ran on floppy disks; if you sent in a floppy disk and told it to take it while it was playing its sequencer, so it’s playing it by itself, it would struggle to combine the previous sound with the new one."

"The tour was in ’83. I remember going in one day to their place on Grove Street, and Hardy showing me a double page ad, a picture of the E-One keyboard — this clunky-looking keyboard that looks like sort of a stripped-down Fender Rhodes, and there’s a microphone plugged into it. And you don’t need to say anything else, we all went, 'Whoa, you mean you can play what you record?' So yeah, that was tremendously exciting. That’s what enabled them to think that they could actually play it live well enough that their fans wouldn’t hate them for touring it. They were profoundly unreliable on the road."

"[The Emulator] was like this sea of chips. Every day you open it up, you wiggle every one of the chips to make sure it was actually seated after it had been on the truck."

"[The Mole Show was] very [difficult]. We made it hard, because we didn’t know shit. I mean, we built a show to do one run at the old Kabuki in San Francisco when it was still an opera house, a huge venue with a big stage. Then someone said, 'OK now you have to tour it.' So we had to figure out a way to get it to England, and then from England to Europe, around Europe, and back to England. We never did quite get it all back to the United States — the true cost of air freight was grossly underestimated and it all got impounded for non-payment; much of the set and props were trashed in order to stop paying storage fees for them. And the people that got hired to help us tour it, the British roadies, did not understand what we were doing. To them it was just so wet, so arty and not rock ‘n’ roll, and you know, they were used to being provided with drugs and alcohol by the production company, and we weren’t drug users or even drinkers to any degree, especially compared to them — and on and on. But most of it was due to our extreme inexperience."

I talked to Homer and said, 'On my list of things that I wish I could do over again in my life, the Mole tour is near the top.' And he said, 'Me too.'"

- Philip Perkins, interviewed in 2021

Cosmichobo1 _(Admin) (talk) 15:43, February 18 2023

"The Residents kind of saw themselves as being extremely underground for the first, um... ten years of their existence, and then, ultimately, The Cryptic Corporation, um, found, uh... um... L.A. management for them, a company called Lookout Management. And Lookout Management was... was a really big, um, L.A. company, they were at that time managing... Devo, I think, and, uh... and then there... that was the younger guy, the older guy there was managing Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, ultimately I think they may have managed Bob Dylan for a while... um... and a lot of other groups of that era. And so... and they were the ones who put the Mole Show tour together for The Residents."

"And so they kind of felt like at that point they were going to be coming out of the underground, and kind of out into more... uh, you know, real life, whatever. Um, and in a way, they sort of saw themselves as the Moles... and, uh, you know, coming out from underground, and they kind of saw the Chubs as... everybody else. Um... and... so, that's kind of the way they... they saw it, and that was kind of in some ways the sort of... conceptual... conceptual basis for the album."

- Homer Flynn, Classic Gamer 74, Episode 61, February 23rd 2019

ImaginaryJacques _(Admin) 💀 (talk) 08:51, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

"I mean, they did some shows... and they put thought and effort into them, but... nothing that would be like this. Because the Emulator made it that, 'hey, you know, you can actually do this live'... it was just like, 'well, why don't you put a show together?' And they put a show together, you know, and it was The Mole Show... with all the backdrops, and this and that... and you know, it was a very big success even though they lost a ton of money... They played a sold-out tour of Europe and sold tons and tons of merchandise, but somehow, whoever was in charge of keeping things correct didn't do a very good job. So... came home very poor."

"I saw daily... things gone wrong... but I'm keeping my mouth shut, I'm the new guy... I was amazed that they got out there, first off, and I was happy, but it was just like... I just saw the end of the rainbow there, and it didn't look very good... You can see it coming, because like I said, I had road experience... The problem was, the show was every day, and there was hardly any breaks in the thing... and a logistical nightmare driving everything around, and then there were some accidents in vehicles and things, and then people had to fly and take trains, and this and that... and it was sort of, I guess very costly. But... things could have worked out correct with... the proper people in place."

"Well [the psychic toll on The Residents] happened before [The Mole Show], because The Cryptic Corporation sort of was dissolving, before it. Because certain people didn't want the kind of thing like this to happen, and certain people wanted to do other things, and so we lost one before the tour and one after the tour."

- Tom Timony, "Ep 137: Ralph Records with Tom Timony", The Vinyl Guide, September 10th 2018

ImaginaryJacques _(Admin) 💀 (talk) 17:25, 23 June 2023 (UTC)