Molly Harvey is no stranger to costumes and identity ambiguity. As a long-time collaborator with The Residents, an avant-garde act known for performing with giant eyeball heads and other theatrics, she has spent most of her career providing theatrics for music (or is it the other way around?). After working with the Bicycle Eaters’ Jeffrey Bützer, a multi-instrumentalist who has been known to stage musical tributes to David Lynch, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Tom Waits and others, last year on the Black Mass pre-Halloween show, Harvey has found different ways to portray other people. Tonight, Bützer and Harvey return to 529 with the likes of T.T. Mahony, Johnny McGowan, Matt Steadman and others as Tender Prey, a tribute to Nick Cave that includes songs ranging from The Birthday Party to Grinderman. The show is free and also includes performances by Cave Women (playing covers of Nick Cave, PJ Harvey and the like), Ben Trickey performing a Tom Waits set, Andy DeLoach doing Leonard Cohen and puppet shows from Ninja Puppet Productions. As the unmasked Harvey prepares to sing a few Cave songs, she talks to Wrestling with Pop Culture about her theatrical background and future musical ideas.
Advertising for this show prominently credits you as being from The Residents. Since the identities of the members of that band have always been obscured, is it OK for you to be revealing yourself in this manner?
No, they’re going to kill me now. I was actually always named on the records and stuff, so I was always the one non-anonymous member. I was more of a collaborator. I wear costumes when we perform, so my identity is always obscured. When I was touring with them, there wasn’t any Facebook or anything. So I could play, then walk around the venue afterwards and nobody’d know who I was. But now it’d different because people can just look on Facebook and see me.
Do you still perform with The Residents?
I perform with them when they come to town. They’re on the West Coast, so it’s kind of hard for me to leave and tour with them. So I do little things with them when they come through.
How did you get involved with The Residents?
Just by weird happenstance. I moved to San Francisco when I was 21 and just happened to meet them. I worked in a cafe that they came into and, of course, I didn’t know it was them. But I developed a friendship with the singer and little by little we revealed things about each other and I realized he was involved with the band. I had studied theater in college and had just graduated. I think one day I was like, “Hey, can you use me to do anything?”
You’ve also worked with Gwar, an equally theatrical band, though not quite in the same vein as The Residents. How’d you get involved with Gwar and what did you do for that band?
I was living in Richmond in 1989 and I think almost all of Gwar is Virginia Commonwealth University art school dropouts. They’ve been doing Gwar for 28 years, which is crazy. They did a 35 millimeter film in the early ’90s called Skulhedface that Jello Biafra was the star of. So I did a scene in that. I never performed live with them, I just did the thing in the movie.
Richmond had an amazing music scene, and still does. Because of the art school, I think Richmond just attracts certain people. Now, with certain cult bands having come out of Richmond, a lot of people actually move there to start bands.
How did you start collaborating with Jeffrey Bützer?
I met Jeffrey through [guitarist] Matt Steadman. Jeffrey was a Residents fan and I knew Matt because we worked together. I was looking for something to do and Jeffrey is kind of a mover and a shaker and always has stuff going on. I guess Matt told Jeffrey about me and Jeffrey was familiar with what I do. So we talked and we still have a lot of ideas of stuff to do, but he’s a busy guy who’s in a million bands and is always making projects. We really want to do something original together, but so far we’ve just done these shows that are covers of people we like. They’re fun and people like to go see them. Last year we did Black Mass at 529. That was a lot of PJ Harvey, Leonard Cohen and stuff like that. He has faves.
What will your role be in the Nick Cave tribute tonight?
I’ll be splitting the songs. Michael Bradley is also singing some songs and he’s got the perfect Nick Cave voice. Then I’m singing six or seven songs, then Carrie Hodge from What Happened to Your Fire, Tiger? is going to sing backup on a couple and lead on one.
Bützer and I have had a few conversations about The Residents and he seems to be really excited about working with someone who has also worked with such a mysteriously avant-garde band. Was there any hesitation in letting him advertise you as a member of The Residents since the rest of the band does a great job of hiding its identities?
It’s nice to have people like Jeffrey because I never really tell people that. If I get up on stage with him at one of their shows, he’ll be like, “It’s Molly Harvey from The Residents!” Sometimes I’m like, “I don’t know if you should say that.” It’s always been a weird thing because my name was out there, but my face wasn’t. But at the same time, I’m not a prominent part of The Residents and they’re always changing and working with different people all the time. On a practical level, if I want to do more stuff, that’s a thing on my resume that differentiates me from everyone else. I’m never comfortable leading into a conversation with that, but having someone like Jeffrey doing it is kind of nice because he does make things happen and he is excited about it. Even though it is a little bit of a gray area, if it can lead toward me working with cool people that I may have never otherwise known, I’m all for it.
You mentioned that you’d like to do more original music with Bützer. Have you given much thought to what kind of project you’d like to work on with him?
My background is in theater. Even though I sang as a kid, I really approach singing as an actor or performer. I’m definitely not a trained musician, but I do write and in the past two or three years random people in my life have been like, “Have you ever thought about writing songs?” Working with The Residents, I certainly wasn’t writing their material, and doing theater I was interpreting other people’s words. But I’ve been asked enough that I finally gave it a try. I have a couple of characters I’ve come up with. Everything for me is very character driven, so it would be more of a narrative about a certain character. But there are some little things brewing.
