Talk:The Old Woman

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Notes From Ralph

Growing up I never listened to the band, but I knew of the eyeball and top hat. [...] I moved to San Francisco on the fly because my dad died fairly suddenly, and he was living down in central California. I walked the city in search of work and landed a job at a coffee shop called Elsie’s. On my very first day of work the lead singer of the Residents came in and we started talking. Almost naturally, we just became good friends.

Over many conversations, it came out who the masked singing Resident was. He told me they were making a CD and having people do voice-overs. On this particular day I was seriously jacked up on too much coffee, and I asked if I could have a job helping with the voice-overs. He asked if I could do an old lady voice, which I nailed. [...]

So they brought me in to record, and I knew Fox from waiting on him at the coffee shop. In my mind I wasn’t a singer at all. I think we all just sort of developed a friendship, and I was there when they needed me. The more they saw of me, the more they saw I had a [good voice].

- Molly Harvey, Artsatl interview, 2018

[I met The Residents] completely randomly and by chance. I was 21, I had recently graduated from college, and I had studied theatre, I had studied acting, I went to a school for the arts in high school, then studied acting in college, so I was thinking that I was going to go into doing live theatre. My dad got sick and quickly died from cancer, and he lived out in California. So I ended up in San Francisco and got the first job that I could find, at this old school coffee shop where they still served terrible macaroni salad and like bad coffee in styrofoam cups. It was not hipster-y at all. It mainly served cops and people that worked for AT&T. It was south of market, which now is very different, but back then, it was kind of working-class, and my first day there, one of the guys from The Residents came in, and of course, I had no idea who he was. But little by little, we developed a friendship.

Because I was a thespian, I'd always talk in weird little voices and do characters, really to keep myself amused at this shitty coffee shop job. I think it was Leigh Barbier, an incredible artist in her own right, who's married to Homer of The Cryptic Corporation, and her background was in scenic painting. So I mentioned to her that I was an actor. I think she was the reason I ended up doing stuff with them cause she had said to one of them, 'Oh, you know Molly's an actor.' It just happened like that, it was super organic, where one day one of them came in, and I was super jacked up on bad coffee. I just said, 'Hey, I can do voices, you wanna give me a job?' and he was like 'Yeah, we're doing this CD-ROM, can you do an old lady voice?' and I was like 'Yeah definitely' and he goes 'Ok well make me a demo.' I was like, 'well, alright... and back then I had a boombox and a cassette tape, and I've never been a big drinker, but that night I drank like a 40 ounce of beer and tried to make some demo. I never gave them the demo cause it was just me going 'hey ya'll' [in an old lady voice] But basically, The Cryptic Corporation happened to be about three doors down from the coffee shop. So those guys would come in every day for their afternoon coffee, and that's how it happened. We just became friends. It probably helped that I was not a fan, I mean, I knew who they were, and I knew of their sort of place in music history. I knew that they were this important underground band, but because I wasn't personally a huge fan, I mean, if I were, I wouldn't have been able to be off-hand and silly and stuff. Finally, one of them said, 'Well, why don't you come in and we'll see, we'll try to record you.' It was sort of like an audition, where they just recorded me doing the voice of the old lady for Gingerbread Man, which was the CD-ROM they made in 1994. So I did that voice, and because I had theatre training, I understood how to do things quickly and not sort of hem and ha, and they liked that. I remember one of them said, 'You work fast, and I like that. I think it was as simple as that. I was good enough.

- Molly Harvey, Esoterica interview, 2021

Cosmichobo1 _(Admin) (talk) 16:23, February 18 2023