“The sixties crowd is always trying to monopolize how good the music was,” says Leif Solem. “It’s just not the case. There’s a lot of shit going on all the time. It doesn’t stop.”

Michael Gira sat across the table at a quiet Brooklyn bar on a rainy Wednesday night. The conversation had settled on a mutual hero, Werner Herzog.

The Residents don’t do things like normal people. Normal people wouldn’t, say, form a band in order to remain anonymous, make a fourteen-hour movie about one-armed midgets, or stage a live show intentionally designed to upset and baffle the audience. It’s not that they’re trying to be weird—that’s just the way they are.

“Someone told me a while ago that I was a crank,” Ken Jacobs wrote. “It seemed a deft summation. I am disappointed, not with my personal situation —I’ve been very fortunate—but with the obscenity, that is the state of the world.