The Residents are a puzzle people have been trying to fit together since their arrival as a collective entity with 1972's double single/Christmas card, Santa Dog. Their ensuing public history has consisted of an evolving stew of myths, rumors, half-truths, wild speculations and outright fabrications, some concocted and disseminated by fans, others by the band itself. For all the loose and random pieces floating around out there, nobody seemed to be getting any closer to finding a solution.
Of all the pieces of the grand mystery that is The Residents, none seems to consume people more than the well-kept secret of their identities. For nearly half a century the band has worked and produced in anonymity, and for nearly half a century people have been guessing. During their 2010 Talking Light tour, the members of the band themselves (in elaborate disguises as always) even tried to help the audience out by finally revealing their names—Randy, Chuck, Bob, and Carlos. Somehow, though, this didn't seem to help things.
But at last the full and unvarnished truth can be told.
The simple fact is, every bit of speculation concerning the identities of The Residents has been wrong—including those claims made by the Residents themselves. "Who are The Residents, really?" isn't even the right question. What matters is not who the Residents are, but what they are, why they are, and how it is they are why they are.
To even begin trying to answer those questions, we need to go back to the mid-Sixties, to a point long before the top-hatted eyeball heads were introduced, to a point long before The Residents even existed, and we need to start following several storylines, many of which begin on or near the campus of Louisiana Tech, located in the small, conservative northern Louisiana town of Ruston.
While at college, a loose circle of smart, eccentric and artistically-inclined friends gravitated together. They didn't have much trouble finding each other, given Louisiana Tech, one of the few schools in the country at the time to host pro-Vietnam War rallies, wasn't exactly known for its weirdo population. At the core of the group there was what we'll call the Pre-Residents: Randy Rose, Charles "Chuck" Bobuck, and Roger "Bunny" Hartley, who sometimes insisted on being called Harvey. The group also included brothers Palmer and Barry Eland, as well as John Kennedy, Homer Flynn, Jay Clem and Hardy Fox, the quartet who in later years would become The Residents' management team, The Cryptic Corporation.
"We were the anti-fraternity fraternity. We were the guys who hung out and created a clique that was against the cool stuff," Homer Flynn says in retrospect. It was within that group that the future attitude and philosophy of The Residents began to gestate. Various youthful exuberances and campus antics ensued. Then, around 1966, the members of the group began heading their separate ways. John Kennedy moved to California to look for work. The Pre-Residents, not knowing what else to do with themselves, likewise began considering the possibility of a Westward expansion. The prevailing sentiment at the time was that the South was someplace to escape, while the lure of the counterculture on the other side was growing more irresistible with each passing minute. Flynn, meanwhile, dropped out of school and returned home to Shreveport, and Fox began managing a teenage rock'n'roll band based in Dubach, a small town just north of Ruston.
In the spring of 1968, as much of the country seemed to be ablaze with the ongoing Civil Rights struggle, anti-Vietnam protests, riots, and general social upheaval, Rose, Bobuck, Bunny and Harvey Hartley loaded all their belongings into a small truck and headed for Northern California. They landed in San Francisco for several months before moving to San Mateo, a quiet, suburban town about twenty miles south of the city.
As the Pre-Residents began seriously exploring the musical and chemical aspects of the Bay Area's psychedelic culture, in 1969 Flynn and Fox likewise picked up and headed West, settling, as had become the norm by that point, in San Francisco. They were followed shortly thereafter by Jay Clem and Palmer Eland.
By the time everyone else from the Louisiana Tech circle had resettled in San Francisco proper, the Pre-Residents had been living and working in near seclusion in famously uncool San Mateo for about a year.
"We were living in a weird kind of ramshackle building that was above a funky little car body shop," Randy Rose says. "And you could tell—literally—what color they were painting the cars that day by looking in a mirror to see what color your nose hairs were."
Having—like so many others in their 20s—no real drive, interests, or sense of purpose, Rose, Bobuck and the Hartleys were beginning to experiment with more conventional art forms, like painting, photography and silkscreening. While they all loved music—especially the psychedelic bands coming out of the San Francisco scene—the idea of performing music themselves had not yet occurred to them.
That's when Roland showed up at Fox's studio apartment with a trailer full of musical instruments.
