Most of –ING’s activity in 1984 occurred in the studio. Schaer came up with an arrangement of The Residents’ song “Smelly Tongues” for live tape loop performance which involved having Goff play slide guitar and yell lyrics through his guitar pickup while Schaer provided a robotic backbeat. Perfecting “Smelly Tongues” provided some lighter moments to offset the hours of hard work that went into creating –ING’s Apocalyptic ballet entitled “Shoot”.

Between 1982 and 1983, Goff paid his bills with money he earned as a singing messenger with Eastern Onion Singing Telegrams. During many of his performances, he would work with male strippers and belly dancers. This all took place before the age of steroids and beefcake turned male strippers into the stereotypical “hunks” of today. Goff became friends with one, John McConville, who in addition to male stripping and doing singing telegrams himself, was a dancer with the Oakland Ballet. His stripping act was a choreographed gymnastics extravaganza that never failed to impress an audience.

In 1983, McConville told Goff that he was interested in choreographing a ballet dance with some of his associates that would somehow convey the story of two nations building up for, fighting in, and living in the aftermath of, a nuclear war. (In 1984, President Ronald Reagan was building up the USA’s nuclear arsenal, calling the USSR the “Evil Empire,” talking about “tactical nuclear weapons,” and scaring the hell out of a lot of people.) McConville asked Goff if he could create a piece of tape loop music about of about 7-8 minutes duration that could sound exactly the same way with each performance.

Goff accepted the challenge and spent months with Schaer notating, tweaking, and rehearsing a piece for guitar, synthesizer, and tape loop system entitled “Shoot”. A PDF of the eight page manuscript for the piece can be viewed at the link below:

http://www.geocities.com/padukem/ShootOriginalManuscriptWeb.pdf

“Shoot” was an extremely ambitious project for –ING, and making it all work took a lot out of Goff and Schaer. It was only performed once before an audience and never choreographed as intended. It could be that the intensity of developing it was the catalyst that eventually led to the breakup of –ING.

Here Taped Rugs presents recordings of “Smelly Tongues” and “Shoot” from rehearsal sessions conducted in mid-1984 at Taped Rugs Productions Studio on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, California (no overdubs on these recordings). This recording of “Smelly Tongues” was released by ECTO Tapes on its three-cassette Residents tribute, “The Residents Unmasked,” in 1990. This recording of “Shoot” was released by Taped Rugs in 1997 on a retrospective cassette entitled “Eternity Is Now.” I recommend trying to follow along with the score while listening to this piece to experience all of its sophisticated splendor. Keep in mind while listening that Goff and Schaer were once able to play this entire piece note-for-note from memory.