The Residents

"Santa Dog" and "Meet The Residents" (1972–1974)

"The Enigmatic Foe", 1974

In early 1972, the band left San Mateo and relocated to 20 Sycamore St, San Francisco; a studio they named "El Ralpho", which boasted a completely open ground floor (seemingly ideal for a sound stage), allowing the group to expand their operations and also begin preliminary work on their most ambitious project up to that point, a full-length film entitled Vileness Fats, which would consume most of their attention for the next four years. Intended to be the first-ever long form music video, The Residents saw this project as an opportunity to create the ultimate cult film. After four years of filming (from 1972 to 1976) the project was reluctantly cancelled because of time, space, and monetary constraints. Fifteen hours of footage was shot for the project, yet only approximately 35 minutes of that footage has ever been released.

The group also formed Ralph Records at this time, as a small, independent label to release and promote their own work. To inaugurate the new business, the group recorded and pressed the Santa Dog EP, their first recorded output to be released to the public. Designed to resemble a Christmas card from an insurance company, the EP consisted of two 7" singles, with four songs between them.

They sent copies of Santa Dog to west coast radio stations with no response until Bill Reinhardt, program director of KBOO-FM in Portland, Oregon received a copy and played it heavily on his show. Reinhardt met the Residents at their studio at 20 Sycamore St.^[4][5] in the summer of 1973 with the news of his broadcasts. The Residents gave Reinhardt exclusive access to all their recordings, including copies of the original masters of Stuffed Trigger, Baby Sex, and The Warner Bros. Album.

Throughout this point, the group had been manipulating old tapes they had collected and regularly recording jam sessions, and these recordings eventually became the group's debut full-length album, Meet The Residents, which was released in 1974 on Ralph. To aid in promoting the group, Reinhardt was given 50 of the first 1,000 copies of Meet the Residents. Some were sent to friends, listeners and critics, and two dozen were left for sale on consignment at the Music Millennium record store, where they sat unsold for months. KBOO DJ Barry Schwam (Schwump, who also recorded with the Residents) promoted them on his program as well. Eventually, KBOO airplay attracted a cult following.

Having just released an album, an EP and working on a difficult film project with limited resources, the group suffered some internal turmoil around this time, which eventually resulted in a large, "embarrassing" food fight; they decided to resolve this tension in 1974 by recording what would later become their "musical film noir masterpiece", Not Available. Deemed by the group as being too personal to release, the album was representative of N. Senada's Theory of Obscurity taken to its logical conclusion; the group placed it in storage, intending not to release it until they had forgotten it existed.

"The Third Reich 'n Roll" and "Fingerprince" (1974-1977)

The Residents, 1976

The Third Reich 'n Roll, the group's second album to be released, was recorded in concentrated sessions in 1974 and 1975. The album was a pastiche on 1960s rock and roll and a commentary on similarities between the music industry and the Third Reich, as perceived by the group. This theme was represented visually on the album cover, which featured Dick Clark in an SS uniform holding a carrot, with a number of Hitlers dancing in pairs on clouds behind him. On each side of the record was a single composition, approximately 17 minutes long, using recordings of classic rock and roll songs that were spliced, overdubbed, and edited with new vocals, instrumentation and tape noises. The original songs were finally removed leaving entirely new and bizarre performances. In 1976, the group created their first short music video to promote this album, using the sets for the recently abandoned Vileness Fats project, and performed for the first time as The Residents at a Rather Ripped promotional event. The Residents also released two further singles in 1976, The Beatles Play The Residents and The Residents Play The Beatles, and a cover of The Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction", which got the band some attention among the punk and new wave press, which had begun to appear in America and Britain.

Around this time, a group of enterprising friends and collaborators from their early days in San Mateo; Homer Flynn, Hardy Fox, Jay Clem and John Kennedy, would also join the group in San Francisco, forming what would become The Cryptic Corporation to manage and represent the band. Clem became the band's spokesman, Fox edited, produced and compiled the band's increasingly prolific output, Flynn was already handling the group's cover design and promotional art under the banner of Porno-Graphics, and Kennedy took the role of "President" (admittedly a fairly empty title, as overall responsibilities were handled more or less equally by the four). The Cryptic Corporation took over the day-to-day operations of Ralph Records, and provided the band with an improved public relations platform, capitalizing on the increasing attention they were receiving for their musical work.

Following The Third Reich 'n' Roll came Fingerprince, a particularly ambitious project not unlike the earlier Not Available recordings. The band's original intention with Fingerprince was to release it as the very first "three-sided" album, entitled Tourniquet of Roses – the group had calculated a way to simulate a "third side" on a vinyl album, by arranging the grooves on one side of the vinyl album to play a completely different program of tracks depending on where the needle was dropped on. However, this idea was dropped when the band discovered that the Monty Python comedy troupe had executed the very same idea three years earlier with their Matching Tie and Handkerchief album. The "third side" of the album was later released as an EP titled Babyfingers, and these tracks have since been re-integrated into the Fingerprince album on CD reissues.

"Duck Stab", "Eskimo" and "The Commercial Album" (1977-1980)

The Residents followed Fingerprince with their Duck Stab! EP – their most accessible release up to that point. This EP got the band some attention from the press (namely NME, Sounds and Melody Maker), and was followed in 1978 by the Duck Stab/Buster & Glen album, which paired the EP with a similar, concurrently recorded EP which had not been released separately. The group had also begun work on their most ambitious recording project yet - Eskimo, containing music composed largely of non-musical sounds, percussion, and wordless voices. Claiming inspiration from tapes of arctic wind sent to them by N. Senada, the band worked on this album between 1976 and 1979, a difficult production noted by many conflicts between management and band, which led to a number of delays in the release date.

Eskimo, 1979

The sudden attention afforded to them by the success of the Duck Stab! EP and "Satisfaction" single required an album release as soon as possible to help fund the band's spiralling recording costs. This forced the release in 1978 of the band's long-shelved "second album" Not Available. The Residents were not bothered by this deviation from the original plan not to release this album as the 1978 release ultimately did not affect the philosophical conditions under which it was originally recorded.

Eskimo was finally released in 1979 to much acclaim, even making it to the final list for nominations for a Grammy award in 1980. Though the album did not end up being nominated, the group were invited to the ceremony and shared a table with Donna Summer.^[6] Rather than being songs in the orthodox sense, the compositions on Eskimo sounded like "live-action stories" without dialogue. Fearing that they were now taking themselves too seriously, The Residents remixed the "songs" in disco style, the results of which appeared on the EP Diskomo. The cover art of Eskimo also presents the first instance of the group wearing eyeball masks and tuxedos, which would later be considered by many to be the signature costume of many worn by the group. The Residents had only intended to wear these costumes for the cover of Eskimo, but would adopt the costumes in the longer term as it provided them with a unique and recognizable image. Eskimo was reissued in surround sound in 2003 and released on DVD, featuring a slideshow of still images conveying the album's narratives.

The group followed Eskimo with Commercial Album in 1980. Commercial Album featured 40 songs, each one minute in length and consisting of a verse and a chorus.^[7] The songs were a pastiche of the composition of advertising jingles; the album's liner notes state that the songs should each be repeated three times in a row to form a complete "pop song". To promote the album, The Residents purchased 40 one-minute advertising slots on San Francisco's most popular Top-40 radio station at the time, KFRC, such that the station played each track of their album over three days. This prompted an editorial in Billboard magazine questioning whether the act was art or advertising.

Commercial Album also led to the creation of One Minute Movies, a short film by the group with collaborator Graeme Whifler consisting of music videos for four tracks from the album. Created at a time when MTV (and what would later become known as "music video" in general) was its infancy, the group's videos were in heavy rotation since they were among the few music videos available to broadcasters.

The Mole Trilogy (1981–1985)

The Mole Show Live, 1983

Commercial Album received a relatively lukewarm reception from the new wave music press. Deciding that "a disaster was in order", The Residents set about composing an album which told the story of a culture driven from their homes by a storm and forced into a confrontation with another people. Mark of the Mole (released in 1981) was the first part of a projected trilogy of concept albums, which would later develop into a tetralogy, with another three albums focusing on the music of the Mole and Chub cultures. Only three parts of The Mole Trilogy were released; parts I, II (1982's The Tunes of Two Cities) and IV (1985's The Big Bubble: Part Four of the Mole Trilogy), in addition to releases of related material such as 1983's Intermission EP.

In 1983 The Residents began their first touring performance, The Mole Show, hosted by Penn Jillette. The performance featured The Residents performing behind a burlap screen, occasionally wearing disguises (such as their iconic eyeball masks), while dancers and actors appeared in front of painted backdrops used to help illustrate the story. Jillette would come out between songs telling long and intentionally pointless stories. The show was designed to appear to fall apart as it progressed; Jillette pretended to grow angrier with the crowd, and lighting effects and music would become increasingly chaotic, all building up to the point where Jillette was dragged off stage and returned, handcuffed to a wheelchair, to deliver his last monologue. During one performance, an audience member assaulted Jillette while he was handcuffed to the wheelchair.

The Mole Show would ultimately became the band's biggest financial disaster, almost caused the break-up of the band, and ultimately led to the cancellation of the Mole Trilogy altogether after the release of The Big Bubble in 1985. During this period, The Residents were conspicuously less prolific than they previously had been, with only an outtakes compilation, Residue of the Residents, a collaborative album with Ralph labelmates Renaldo and the Loaf and a brief edited version of Vileness Fats with a newly recorded soundtrack being their only major releases.

The American Composers Series and 13th Anniversary Show (1984-1986)

After the abandonment of the unfinished Mole Trilogy, the band turned their attention to a new series of albums, each consisting of a side-long suite of covers by American composers the band admired. The group had hoped to record at least ten volumes in this series (which was projected to continue until the year 2000), but only two albums from this period saw completion and release – 1984's George and James (dedicated to George Gershwin and James Brown) and 1986's Stars & Hank Forever: The American Composers Series (featuring tributes to Hank Williams and John Philip Sousa). Some tracks from abandoned volumes in this series dedicated to Sun Ra, Barry White and Ray Charles have also surfaced on various compilation albums in subsequent years.

After this, their Japanese distributor approached them for a two-week run in Japan. Admittedly reluctant at first to return to the stage after the underwhelming response to the Mole Show, The Residents created the 13th Anniversary Tour. While the musical performance was more mainstream, the stage show was another over-the-top spectacle, featuring inflatable giraffes, dancers in eyeball masks illuminating the darkened stage with work lights, and a lead vocalist who changed costumes throughout the show from wearing an eyeball mask to a Richard Nixon mask, and at one point wearing only a wig and fake ears. After the two-week run in Japan, the band took the show to the US. During the US leg of the tour the band encountered a few problems, including having the tour manager having to fan a member's keyboard because of overheating, being booked in a pool hall and having someone run on stage only to be thrown back into the audience.

The Residents also toured Australia and New Zealand in August 1986 – appearing across the two countries as a five piece ensemble including two female dancers, and with Snakefinger on guitar.^[8] The European leg also ran into logistics issues, resulting the band's equipment not arriving for a performance in Tromso, Norway. According to Homer Flynn, the band "had to borrow equipment from people there in the town" including instruments and costumes to make the performance.^[9]

Backstage at the Hollywood Palace show on December 26, 1985, one member's eyeball mask (Mr. Red Eye) was stolen so it was replaced with a giant skull mask. It was actually stolen by someone who found a backstage pass on the wall and threw into a dumpster outside the venue through an open window. A few weeks later an avid fan in Cerritos California who attended the palace show also went to a New Year's Eve party where he overheard someone bragging about having Mr. Red Eye. He called Ralph Records and spoke to representative Sheena Timony and asked if it was true about the eye being stolen. She was inquisitive with him and proceeded to tell him that there was a curse on the eye and that there was a police report out on it. He said he wanted to get it back because he loved the band so much and it was the right thing to do. She told him the Residents were going to Georgia in a few weeks and that it needed to be retrieved ASAP. With her help she called the thief to tell him they knew he had it and that reps for Ralph were on their way. The thief was so rattled that he gave it back to some friends of the fan who posed as Ralph employees. The three of them immediately traveled by car to SF and went to Ralph Records in Folsom st. at the time. The Eye was returned but was in bad condition from being thrown around and the Residents decided that it was a superfluous shell of its former self. This is when they decided to replace the eye with “Mr Skull”. They continued the 13th anniversary tour and handed out memorial black armbands with the missing eyeball on it. The Residents later were interviewed on MTV where they told the story of it being stolen.

The last show of this 13th anniversary tour was in January 1987 at The Warfield in San Francisco, as a special guest Penn & Teller.^[10]

"God In Three Persons" and Cube E (1987–1990)

In 1987, The Residents were in the initial stages of preparing their new concept piece God in Three Persons, when they received the news that their friend and long-time collaborator Philip "Snakefinger" Lithman had died of a sudden heart attack. The Residents performed at his wake, and this performance was later re-recorded in the studio and released in a limited edition as The Snakey Wake. Despite this unanticipated tragedy, the band continued to work on God in Three Persons, despite not having been able to record Snakefinger's guitar parts for the album as planned.

God in Three Persons, a lengthy poetic fable in a clear narrative format, tells the story of a colonel who visits a carnival and becomes entranced by a pair of mysterious and androgynous Siamese twins. Musically, it features a recurring motif based on "Double Shot (Of My Baby's Love)" by The Swinging Medallions (earlier included in The Third Reich 'n Roll). The album was finished and released in 1988 as their first album to be designed specifically for compact disc.

In 1989, The Residents premiered their third tour, Cube-E, a three-act performance covering the history of American music. It was a step up from previous shows, featuring more elaborate dance numbers and sets. It was also the first show composed exclusively of music written specifically for the show. The show was almost entirely backlit, with blacklights highlighting the fluorescent costumes and set design. The first part of this show would be recorded in the studio and released as the Buckaroo Blues EP, and the third part would become 1989's The King & Eye, a surreal biography of Elvis Presley consisting entirely of covers of classic Presley singles. In a first-time departure from usual procedure, The King & Eye was recorded externally from The Residents' private studio, with the band choosing instead to record at Different Ear Studios as an experiment.

"Freak Show" and "Our Finest Flowers" (1990-1993)

In 1990, The Residents turned their attention to emerging computer technology, beginning to make the majority of their music with MIDI devices, which would define their sound during this time. With these new instruments, they recorded and released Freak Show; a concept album in which each track offers an insight to the character of a circus freak.

The Freak Show CD-ROM was released in January 1994 by the Voyager Company, in his first of several collaborations with The Residents.

1992 saw The Residents celebrate their 20th anniversary, which they celebrated with the release of Our Finest Flowers, an album which consists of new tracks made from elements of tracks from their entire discography, intended as a novel alternative to a retrospective "greatest hits" style release.

"The Gingerbread Man", "Bad Day on the Midway" and the "missing year" (1994-1997)

In 1994, The Residents released Gingerbread Man (album), featuring their first foray into computer graphics. The Gingerbread Man CD was "enhanced" with additional CD-ROM content, marking the beginning of a series of experiments by the group with the potential of this new format, which also saw them revisit the Freak Show album for a CD-ROM by Voyager in the same year.^[11]

The Residents' CD-ROM works were primarily designed and animated by artist Jim Ludtke. In a review of the Freak Show CD-ROM by Ty Burr for Entertainment Weekly from the time of its release, he commented: "Designer Jim Ludtke (not a member of the band) is the star here: His renderings literally glow with colors you've never considered before. If Xplora 1 chases you off with dutiful enlightenment. Freak Show sucks you in with its hypnotic sympathy for the damned." ^[12]

In 1995, The Residents released what would be their final complete experiment with the CD-ROM format, the immersive game Bad Day on the Midway. This game was accompanied by a soundtrack album, Have A Bad Day, the following year. At this time, The Residents were also working on an album entitled That Slab Called Night, which would later be abandoned and reconstituted into the soundtrack to the Discovery Channel series Hunters: The World of Predators and Prey. In November 1995, Freak Show was also developed into a stage performance by a theater company at the Archa Theater in Prague. This performance differed from the band's previous tours and shows in that they did not actually perform - rather, the "Freak Show Orchestra" consisted primarily of the band Už Jsme Doma.

1997 is considered "the missing year" in Residents history, as the band worked on a number of new projects but saw no new releases. During this time, however, the band would create a new live performance piece entitled Disfigured Night, which would be performed a handful of times throughout the year, culminating in their performance at the Fillmore. The Residents would make one more attempt at a CD-ROM game, I Murdered Mommy!, in 1998, but would leave this effort unfinished and unreleased, instead moving onto another new concept.

"Wormwood" (1998–2000)

Wormwood was released in 1998. Wormwood saw the group telling (often violent or explicit) stories from the Bible through song. Regular collaborators Molly Harvey (vocals) and Nolan Cook (guitar) featured on the album and during its associated tour, Wormwood Live, which saw The Residents departing from pre-programmed music and once again using a live band. The Residents wore ecclesiastical robes and performed in a brightly lit fluorescent cave. Act one consisted of one-off stories about individual Bible characters. Act 2 focused on suites of songs about Bible figures such as Abraham, Moses, and King David. During a performance in Athens, Greece, Cook had to leave the stage after taking a rock to the head from an audience member.

"Demons Dance Alone" and "Animal Lover" (2001–2005)

In 2002, as a response to the September 11 attacks, The Residents recorded the album Demons Dance Alone and followed this with a tour of the same name. In an unusual move, the album handed almost half of the vocal duties to Harvey, who had begun as a Ralph Records employee but by this point had contributed to virtually all of the group's many projects for most of the preceding decade.

In February 2005, The Residents toured Australia as part of the What is Music? festival for their "33rd Anniversary", performing a two-hour retrospective set entitled The Way We Were. These shows saw a fairly minimal band; three eyeball-headed Residents (one on guitar and two laptop/sample operators), a "stage hand" performer, and a male and female vocalist in costumes reminiscent of the Wormwood tour. Video projections and unusual flexible screens were added to the stage set, creating an unsettling ambiance. The performances on The Way We Were tour were recorded and were released on CD and DVD in 2005, as well as the band's album Animal Lover, which tells a series of stories as seen from the perspective of animals.

"The River of Crime", "Tweedles!" and "The Bunny Boy" (2006–2009)

In 2006, The Residents released a hardboiled crime fiction podcast series, The River of Crime - their first project with Warner Music Group's Cordless label. Following the success of the podcast, The Residents launched a weekly video series on YouTube featuring Timmy, the lead character from the Bad Day On The Midway CD-ROM. Around this time, the group were invited by a friend to record in Romania - these sessions produced the album Tweedles!, which they released on Halloween 2006. Tweedles! is a concept album, telling the story of an "emotional vampire" from a first-person perspective.

In 2007 they created the soundtrack for the documentary Strange Culture and also released a double instrumental album, Night of the Hunters, derived from the That Slab Called Night recording sessions which eventually became the soundtrack for the 1995 documentary series Hunters. In October 2007, the new album The Voice of Midnight (inspired by E.T.A. Hoffmann's story "Der Sandmann"), was released on Mute Records.

In 2008, the group released The Bunny Boy, an album with a detailed meta-fictional concept which the group elaborated upon throughout their first North American tour since Demons Dance Alone, as well as a YouTube video series of the same name, which would later be compiled and released on DVD as Is Anybody Out There? in 2009.

2009 saw the release of The UGHS! - a mostly instrumental album made up of music composed earlier in the band's career, which had then again been completely reworked as background music for The Voice of Midnight; and also Ten Little Piggies - a "futurist compilation", featuring ten songs from projects which may or may not be released in the future.

"Talking Light" and "Sam's Enchanted Evening" (2010-2012)

The Residents in 2013 on their Wonder of Weird 40th Anniversary Tour

In January 2010, The Residents began a tour entitled Talking Light, with dates in North America and Europe. During the tour, which lasted until April 2011, The Residents appeared as a trio, and adapted new identities and costumes - Randy Rose, Charles "Chuck" Bobuck and Bob, with reference to a fourth member named Carlos, who had decided prior to the tour that "the rock 'n' roll life style wasn't for him after all" and left the band for Mexico to care for his elderly mother. The singer, Randy, wore an old man mask, and the other two Residents, keyboardist Chuck and guitarist Bob, wore dreadlock wigs and illuminated optical gear over their faces. The songs were stories about various characters' obsessions with ghosts, imaginary people, and supernatural phenomena. One of these performances was featured as part of the edition of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival curated by Matt Groening in May 2010 in Minehead, England, UK. The band released several albums related to the Talking Light concept during this time, including the instrumental albums Dollar General and Chuck's Ghost Music, live album Bimbo's Talking Light, and studio album Lonely Teenager.

In October 2010, Randy performed a set of thirteen Residents tracks at the Olomouc Moravian Theatre with the band Už Jsme Doma and musical arrangements by Miroslav Wanek, who had previously been involved with the Freak Show Live performance in 1995. In late 2011, The Residents presented a new performance piece at The Marsh in Berkeley, California, entitled Sam's Enchanted Evening. A new version of Sam's Enchanted Evening was subsequently performed in March 2012 at Henry Street Settlement in at Henry Street Settlement in New York City in a production directed by Travis Chamberlain, co-starring Joshua Raoul Brody and Jibz Cameron (aka Dynasty Handbag).

"The Wonder of Weird" and "Theory of Obscurity" (2012-2015)

In January 2012, The Residents released the album Coochie Brake; it focused on an ambient, slightly ethnic sound, with lyrics in Spanish performned by, apparently, a new singer. Over the course of the year the band celebrated their 40th anniversary with a new tour (the second in the "Randy, Chuck and Bob" trilogy) entitled The Wonder of Weird. In December, the band began celebrating the upcoming 40th anniversary of their first release, the Santa Dog EP, and released an "infomercial" starring Randy Rose promoting the release of The Residents' Ultimate Box Set - a 28-cubic-foot refrigerator containing the first pressings of every Residents release to date, as well as other ephemera (such as an eyeball mask and top hat). The Cryptic Corporation advised in a press release that the intended audience for this project was the realm of fine art, and, accordingly, the price of the set was set at $100,000.^[13] Only one of these Ultimate Box Sets would be sold to a paying customer, the other was donated by the band to the Museum of Modern Art.

In 2014, The Residents began collaborating with director Don Hardy on a video series starring Randy, entitled In My Room, as well as a feature length documentary film covering the history of the group, entitled Theory of Obscurity: A Film About The Residents. The production of this film involved the digital transfer of the group's many years of archived video, film and tape, including the production materials shot for Vileness Fats between 1972 and 1976. Theory of Obscurity was completed in 2015 and premiered at SXSW Film Festival.^[14]

"Shadowland", the departure of Charles Bobuck, and "The Ghost of Hope" (2015-2016)

In May 2016, the end of the "Randy, Bob, and Chuck" trilogy was announced, with the final installment being their Shadowland tour. During the Shadowland tour, the member known as Charles Bobuck announced that he would no longer be performing live with the group due to increasingly poor health, and ultimately, retired from the band altogether to release a series of solo albums. Onstage and in the studio, Bobuck was replaced by a new addition to the band, "Rico". The band signed to Cherry Red Records, and in September announced their next studio album, The Ghost of Hope, and a related single, "Rushing Like A Banshee"^[15]. In November 2016, the group released a video featuring Randy, announcing a new film project in collaboration with Don Hardy entitled Double Trouble, which would incorporate the footage from the unfinished Vileness Fats into an entirely new story.