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It was June, 1970. Roland Sheehan, then nineteen, had been the organ player in The Alliance, the teenage band Fox had managed back in Louisiana. Having just completed his second year at Louisiana Tech, Sheehan had signed up for a summer course at San Francisco State College.
"I wanted to play music," Sheehan explains. "And the only organ I had—the only keyboard I had—was that B3. If I'd had a smaller organ I obviously would have brought that because those things weigh about 400 pounds. That was probably not the wisest move in my mind, but i was nineteen. I didn't know any better."
Although Sheehan had been expected, the organ was not. Living as he was in a studio apartment on the third floor, Fox simply didn't have the room for Sheehan's Hammond B3, which remained locked away in the trailer. At the time Fox was working at the post office's massive Air Mail Facility, or AMF, at the airport in San Bruno, located roughly halfway between San Francisco and San Mateo. As fate would have it, Randy Rose was working there as well, and the two reconnected. After Fox explained Sheehan's dilemma, Rose agreed to let him stash the organ at their place.
Sheehan, as he said, wanted to play music, so began spending more and more time in San Mateo. Eventually the rest of the instruments he'd brought along in the trailer joined the organ in the Pre-Residents' apartment, and Roland all but moved in for the summer.
Shortly before Sheehan's arrival with his U-Haul full of instruments, Charles Bobuck happened into what would turn out to be another fortuitous and necessary link in the eventual birth of The Residents. After befriending a recently-returned Vietnam vet who was having trouble readjusting, over time Bobuck helped him figure out the best way to get on with his life. The ex-soldier showed his gratitude by giving Bobuck a high-end tape recorder he'd picked up in Hong Kong. The two-track reel-to-reel recorder, very cutting edge at the time, allowed users to record two separate tracks, mix those together on a third, and continue adding layers of sound that way as you built up generations. With that machine in hand, The Pre-Residents could play around with a primitive form of multi-track recording.
"I received this machine at the same time Roland shows up with a trailer full of instruments," Bobuck says. "So you've got a trailer full of musical instruments on one side, and a tape recorder on the other. So what are you gonna do? You've got to make noise and record it. In fact you're going to record every single thing in the entire world. You're gonna do nothing but tape. Tape tape tape. And then you're gonna start cutting it together. That's when I really started learning how to edit noise. That's how it really got started on my side, as an engineer running the tape recorder, and then spending a lot of time with a razor blade, cutting it all up and putting it back together again."
Sheehan remembers sitting around with the Pre-Residents as they played with the instruments and together they all began experimenting. "We were knocking a few ideas around. I was the only one to have any kind of musical training or knowledge at all. In my naive mind at that point in time, I was not really arguing with them, but my point was that the more musical knowledge you have, the easier it makes things. Their point was just the opposite—that that knowledge actually blocks you from trying something. I was of course saying, 'No, that knowledge allows you to know what things to try,' and they were saying, 'That's the problem—you limit yourself.' So we went round and round."
So they had a fancy tape recorder, a bunch of musical instruments, and lots of drugs. As Roland played, The Pre-Residents banged on various things, and they recorded every second of it. The one thing The Pre-Residents did have at their disposal at the time was discerning taste. As the old saying goes, put a thousand monkeys in front of a thousand typewriters for a thousand years, and, well, one of them will eventually write Nixon's Checkers speech. Given how much they were recording, The Pre-Residents found they were able to pull enough valuable, interesting nuggets out of the pile to begin crafting something new out of them.
"It was true—it was a lot of noise making," Bobuck says. "And my sense was that it was the cutting it together and editing it that gave it organization. I always felt that I could turn just about anything into something."
The top-floor apartment where all of this was taking place was, needless to say, not air- conditioned. One particularly hot afternoon when everyone decided to take a break from the banging and the taping, Sheehan wandered over to one of the open windows to get some air.
"Down there on the street there was this old, dark green '52 or '53 model Chevrolet pickup," he recounts. "The paint on it was already faded and up on the roof there were some rusty areas. But what I noticed though was the bed of the pickup was packed full, over and above the height of the cab, with nothing but rusty coathangers. It's true! I don't know how many there were—hundreds if not thousands were in that truck. So I turned around and looked at them and said 'I got it—how about Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor?' They looked at me like, 'what are you talking about?' and I said y'all come over here and look out the window. That's how it started.
He'd brought a cheap Yamaha guitar along with him in the trailer, and quickly restrung it so he could play it left-handed. "I made up about three or four chords. I took their advice— don't use musical knowledge—so I just randomly made three or four chords. As I remember I think they wrote most of the words . I think they just took my line and went from there. They had a two-track reel to reel, and some cheap microphones, in fact they may have just had one microphone. And that was the way we made that. That was about as low-tech as you can get. The Residents basically started from there."
Shortly after finishing the four-minute "Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor," Sheehan and the Pre-Residents recorded another song, "When Roy Stuffed Trigger," which Sheehan describes as 'a lovely ballad."
Come the end of the summer, Sheehan packed up his instruments and returned to Louisiana. The Pre-Residents, however, having found some direction, something to do, immediately began scouring the local thrift stores and pawn shops in search of new instruments (or at least things that could be used as instruments) and continued to bang on them, recording every moment.
Having decided they now had something resembling a band, the next obvious step was choosing an appropriate name. They rejected dozens of possible names for one reason or another, but finally settled on The Delta Nudes, the one name that had hung around for awhile. Having unofficially and tentatively christened themselves, they compiled hours of songs, noise collages and poems, some of which would later be re- recorded and released as Residents songs. They also began sending occasional anonymous tapes off to friends both in the States and abroad, avant-garde composers like Harry Partch, and most notably to Hal Halverstadt at Warner Brothers Records, the man who'd signed Captain Beefheart, hoping to snag themselves one of those fat major label contracts.
