The Residents began around 1974 in San Francisco, an art project presenting itself as a rock band. They had a few distinctions.
For one, they were completely anonymous to the public. They never revealed their faces or names in interviews, records, or concerts. They were underground and never emerged. They were a self-contained enterprise and primary asset of the Cryptic Corporation©, which still exists, as the band is going on tour to perform its album Eskimo, which developed between 1975 and its official release in 1979.
Eskimo emphasized indigenous Inuit folk tales: some real, some not, now augmented by the new five song “Eskimo Folk Tales,” based on recent research. Becoming more capable as musicians but remaining art theorists, they put out numerous “concept” albums, mostly for the Cryptic Corp.’s Ralph Records over the decades. Most were satirical or incendiary, mocking the pieties of pop music and its industry. Because at first they could hardly play, they could play anything. Their debut, Meet the Residents, now features crawdads in matching green plaid suits (my vinyl copy is said to be a reissue), performed by John, Paul, George, and Ringo Crawfish. The original cover featured recognizable yet grotesque representations of the Fab Four. Beatlemaniacs did not approve.
Other albums included The King and I, a bizarro but listenable record of Elvis Presley covers; Commercial Album, which consisted of 40-one-minute ads for products no one would ever buy, movies never made (Die in Terror; The Talk of the Creatures); a three part Mole series, one of which was autographed by the band, signed in pencil “Resident” or “The Residents” or “Residents.” They were more anonymous than the guy I heard about in a 12-Step program who would not tell his sponsor his last name.
The Residents made good use of an early synthesizer, which I believe was an EMS Synthi E (Google AI’s description of the 1975 model). Since EMS (Electronic Music Studios) also manufactured a vocoder, which the Residents appear to use to distort vocals, avoid identity, and disorient listeners, this has a 90-10 (my human estimate) chance of being correct.
My favorite art haus Residents’ album was George & James: American Composers Series Volume 1, (1981). One side was George Gershwin songs; the other, the Residents’ cover James Brown’s Live at the Apollo, from “I’ll Go Crazy” to “Night Train,” complete with audience from a Residents’ “Mole Show” concert in Utrecht, Holland.
Their controversial tour de force was The Third Reich ‘n Roll, which has a smiling Dick Clark on the cover as an SS officer, complete with swastika armband. Flynn says he has heard that Clark was amused enough to have the cover framed in his office. Who knows? Third Reich ‘n Roll consists of the suites “Swastikas on Parade” and “Hitler Was a Vegetarian.” The suites are continuous mashups of popular oldies. The disclaimer:
“The Residents Uninc. and Ralph Records freely admit that the riffs, words, and even sometimes the arrangements...were lifted shamelessly from the Residents’ memory of the top 40 radio of the 1960s... (Ralph Records) supports the Residents in their tribute to the little power mad minds of the music industry who have helped make us what we are today, with an open eye on what we can make them tomorrow.”
With that, I think it’s time to introduce Homer Flynn, the public voice of The Residents.
Wayne Robins: Hi Homer. What is your role with the Residents? Do you have a title?
Homer Flynn: Well, I’m their art director. That’s probably my most useful job on an everyday basis. I’m also now the president of the Cryptic Corporation, Cryptic Corporation being the business and PR interface for the Residents.
WR: Well, the Cryptic Corporation I've known from the first album. And so obviously, so you must be raking in the huge bucks now.
HF: Yeah. It’s just pouring in. It’s hard to keep up with it.
WR: I know. I guess you're probably living in Atherton, California, with all the other billionaires of the internet era, right?
HF: Yeah, yeah yeah. We have a small club. Actually, it’s getting to be a big club.
WR: Were you there from the beginning with them?
HF: Well, the Cryptic Corporation was formed officially in 1976, and I was with them kind of on a consulting basis. They were kind of doing their own graphics in the beginning, and their stuff was interesting, but there were problems with it here and there technically, if nothing else. And so I was consulting with them at that time, and then officially came on board in 1976.
WR: Were you involved with the creation of the iconic visual image of the eyeball and the top hat as they symbol of the Residents?
HF: I was definitely involved in that. That happened in, I think, 1978 maybe. And at that time, the Residents wanted a completely new and different faceless identity for each new project. And if you see back in those early days, there’s a whole string of them. And then the Eskimo album was coming along. This was something that we all felt was going to be really special, so we wanted a special look for that. And what they came up with was a silver globe, like a giant Christmas ornament or something with a top hat on it. So I went down to LA and spoke with a lot of costume manufacturers or creators, and they all said, “No, no, no, that’ll never work. That’ll never work. It’ll fog up on the inside. It’s too hard to hear in there and breathe, whatever.” So I went, “Yeah, yeah, okay.” So I went back and we had another meeting, and what came out of that meeting was the eyeball.
And they were able to create eyeballs. There was a guy who was a costume maker at that time on Battlestar Galactica, I think. And he made the eyeballs and did a fantastic job. But the reality is that they are almost hard to see out of. You have a little porthole, they don’t fog up, but they’re not the easiest thing in the world to hear and see. I mean, you could put headphones up inside there or something, but still, they’re not the easiest thing. The general thing is that eyeball with the top hat has been so successful as an image that most people that are not super fans, most people think that if you go to see the Residents, what you see is a band on stage wearing eyeballs and top hats playing guitars and basses, whatever. And for the most part, that has never existed. Occasionally, one will appear more symbolically or something in a show.
WR: What are they wearing on stage now for this tour?
HF: Do you know what a ghillie suit is?
WR: No.
HF: Most people don’t. A ghillie suit, it’s a kind of a camouflage suit. You should look it up. G-H-I-L-L-I-E, I think. It’s a kind of a camouflage made for hunters. The thing is, it’s completely covered in string and you have a headpiece that you put on; if you wear one, you kind of look like a bush. Well, it turns out that’s what most of them look like. Most of them are kind of brownish, brownish-grayish, but they make white ones for snow camouflage. And so these are white ghillie suits. The way this is set up stage-wise is that you have three keyboard players with ghillie suits on, and then the singer, more the front man, wears a kind of a suit with a Dalmatian pattern on it. I discovered a long time ago, in terms of creating photographs, is that compositionally you do one and three, that’s a whole lot more interesting than four.
And so I try to do that one way or another every chance I get. And with this, you get the one in front and the three in the back, and it looks good.
Homer Flynn’s theory of photographing the band, from their current “Eskimo” show. © Cryptic Corporation.
WR: There's been a lot of talk, there's a lot of bands from the '70s and '80s that are touring and people say, “well, is it legitimate if the original members of the bands aren't all in it?” So how do we know that all the original Residents are still in the band?
HF: Well, you don’t know. And Residents love their secrets, and that’s one of their secrets. And they’ll never tell, I’ll never tell.
WR: I'm wondering, though; I mean, I'm sure the was a point that writers were trying to find out who they were. Has the secret ever been broken or does is remain in a locked box?
HF: Well, I’ll put it this way, a lot of things have been speculated on. Nothing has been proven. No one has come out and said yes. It’s still pretty much of a secret. Once again, they have families and there are plenty of people that know, but one of the things that the Residents are good about is expanding their circle. And if you feel like, and this goes a lot with their collaborators, if you feel like you’re part of their circle, well, then if you come out and start saying, “This is so and this and so-and-so and this is so-and-so,” well, it’s like there’s a feeling of betrayal that goes along with that. And the Residents are interesting and good people. Who wants to feel like they’ve betrayed them?
WR: I have been told that in the beginning, the store Rather Ripped Records in Berkeley was “Residents Central.” What did that mean?
HF: Rather Ripped, they were major supporters. No questions about that. There were a couple of primary events. I mean, I don’t even know if there is still a Rather Ripped, I would assume probably not, but I really don’t know. But they had an event, I think it was their fifth anniversary, and they wanted a performance, and they asked the Residents to perform there, which they did, and it was quite a show. And then at one point, they asked The Residents to do a window display for them. I guess maybe they were doing The Third Reich ‘n Roll stuff, and for the Residents, the Nazi imagery was a joke. I mean, their point of view was that World War II been over for 20 or 30 years, let’s have some fun with this.
But Nazi imagery till carries a lot of power, still potent. And you look at Berkeley, Berkeley is the liberal center of the universe. So they ultimately had a lot of pushback, a lot of outcry, and that window was only up for a day or two or something like that. But those events, I suppose, would’ve somewhat given Rather Ripped a reputation for being Residents Central.
Marc Time, former salesperson and drummer for the Jars, tells Deborah Ostrov about it in her history of Rather Ripped: https://devorahostrov.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-story-of-rather-ripped-records.html
“The Residents window was really wild! That upset a lot of people. It was for The Third Reich ‘N’ Roll album, which had swastikas all over it. We had people coming in saying, “I’m really offended by your window.” And we would try to explain to them that this is what the Residents are doing, blah, blah, blah. But we offended a lot of people with that window.”
WR: This leads me to wonder about Dick Clark, the swastika armband, the obvious borrowings from dozens of songs from the 1960s and 1970s. Were the Residents ever sued, or get cease and desist orders? The Residents must have had an excellent lawyer or legal team.
HF: In terms of the lawyers, the reality is that The Third Reich and Roll, I think, came out before all these kind of copyright issues were a big deal. People weren’t really paying that much attention to it. And also too, a lot of it, and even more so back then, has to do with money. And if [The Residents] are not making any money off of something, who wants to hire lawyers to go create lawsuits? And that’s kind of been the case with the Residents to some extent too.
WR: But it was nothing like what you would have to have now, a long, long list of clearances, copyright clearances to put out a record like that. But I guess, yeah, even the sharks couldn't smell money on that record.
HF: Shockingly.
WR: Yeah. I've had just about every Residents album that was ever put out, I think, and whether I listened to them much or not or liked them much or not, I figured, this is an artistic statement. These people are serious about, or not serious, but they do art. They're artists. They're not in it for the big buck. They're not following trends.
HF: You’re absolutely right. And honestly, they don’t consider themselves to be musicians. They more consider themselves to be artists that use music a lot in terms of what they do.
WR: Were they part of the music scene in San Francisco in the '70s and '80s, which also included bands like the Dead Kennedys, the Tubs, and Flipper. Did they consider themselves part of that scene in any way?
HF: Well, I think they considered themselves maybe tangent to it. I mean, they’ve never really felt like they were part of any scene. The Residents got a lot of attention when New Wave was a big thing, and so we certainly used New Wave as a way to promote the group, but they’ve always considered themselves to be ultimate outsiders and not really that connected with anything.
WR: I was listening to a CD that I had never heard that has a poem by Robert Graves on the inner sleeve, a poem about the Creation, “The Cow Licks a Stone”...and Eskimo is also full of creation takes, and I'm wondering if this is a special interest that runs through the work of the band playing with mythology and folk tales.
HF: They definitely considered themselves to be storytellers. And one of the interesting things, to me, about the Eskimo show that they’re doing now, when they started putting this together, they realized that the album was not quite long enough. They needed some more material, so they started researching, and what should they discover? Something like five or six books of Inuit folk tales that were gathered up in the late 1800s, and they were like, “God, why didn’t we find these when we were doing the album?” But the good thing is they found them now, and so what they’ve done is they’ve pulled out five of these folk tales and created five new Eskimo pieces based on that. And that’s actually part of the show. I mean, I created, and couple of other people created videos for those because there are video projections throughout the show. And I think it fits into the live performance quite well, and I think it makes a nice little side piece to the original album.
They were fascinated by original Arctic Inuit culture, but by the time they were researching this and making the album, that had become completely corrupted. I mean, it no longer existed, which is why they blend Coca-Cola commercials into the so-called Inuit music for the finale of the album and also the live show.
WR: There have already been some shows. What are the Residents and their audience like after 50 years?
HF: Well, Residents fans usually, have a tendency to be a little older. As you noticed, the Residents are all over the place in terms of their output, but at the same time, there is an aesthetic sense of values at the core of it that it’s pretty much unchanged.
WR: And how do you describe those values?
HF: As you said earlier, they’re not really interested in celebrity and making tons of money. And for the most part, most of the people that are involved in American culture, show business, whatever, that’s all they want. And their fans love that, but there’s always a certain percentage, it’s a relatively small percentage, it’s a minority, but of people who like things that aren’t trying to get as much attention as they possibly can and be the biggest stars that they can. And like I say, there’s always a group of those people out there, and so there’s always new people. The internet is a great way to expose things, so there’s always new people coming along.
For want of a better term, I suppose, it’s art for art’s sake. I mean, it is pursuit of aesthetics for its own sake...Some people think, “Well, can I make any money off this or not?” Not everybody does, and the Residents certainly don’t. If they are really grabbed by an idea, I mean, you could say this about Eskimo. It took them four years to make that album, but it grabbed them back in the mid ‘70s and they pursued it to its ultimate end, at least in terms of an album, and they’re still pursuing it in terms of the live performance.
© Wayne Robins, 2026
Header image: The Residents, Eskimo, album cover. Courtesy of © Cryptic Corporation.
This article is reprinted from Wayne Robins’ Substack and is used here by permission. Wayne’s Words columnist Wayne Robins writes the Critical Conditions Substack:
https://waynerobins.substack.com/.
0 comments