The Residents

The Residents are an American art collective, music and visual arts group best known for their avant-garde and multimedia works. Since their first official release, Santa Dog (1972) they have released over 60 albums, numerous music videos and short films, three CD-ROM projects, and ten DVDs over the course of over half a century. They have undertaken seven major world tours and scored multiple films. Pioneers in exploring the potential of CD-ROM and similar technologies, the Residents have won several awards for their multimedia projects. They founded Ralph Records, a record label focusing on avant-garde music, in 1972.

Throughout the group's existence, the individual members have ostensibly attempted to work anonymously, preferring to have attention focused on their art. Much speculation and rumor has focused on this aspect of the group. In public, they appear silent and costumed, often wearing eyeball helmets, top hats and tails—a costume now recognized as their signature iconography. In 2017, Hardy Fox, long known to be associated with the Residents, identified himself as the band's co-founder and primary composer; he died in 2018.

The Residents have remained active and have been regarded as one of the longest running bands in popular music history.

The artists who became the Residents met in high school in Shreveport, Louisiana, in the early 1960s. Around 1965, they began making their first amateur home tape recordings and making art together with a number of friends. In 1966, intending to join the flourishing hippie movement, they headed west for San Francisco, but when their truck broke down in San Mateo, California, they decided to remain there.

While attempting to make a living, the group purchased crude recording equipment and began to refine their recording and editing skills, as well as photography, painting, and anything remotely to do with art that they could afford. The Residents have acknowledged the existence of at least two unreleased reel-to-reel items from this era, titled The Ballad of Stuffed Trigger and Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor. The Cryptic Corporation has confirmed that their archives contain many tapes dating back decades, but the band do not consider them part of its discography.

In 1971, the group sent a reel-to-reel demo tape to Hal Halverstadt at Warner Bros., as he had signed Captain Beefheart, one of the group's heroes, to the label. Halverstadt was not impressed with The Warner Bros. Album, but gave it an "A for Ariginality". Because the band had not included a name in the return address, the rejection slip was addressed to "Residents". The group decided to use this name, first becoming Residents Uninc., then shortening it to the current name.

Word of the unnamed group's experimentation spread, and in 1971 British guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Philip Lithman, later known as Snakefinger, began to participate with them. Around this time they also met the mysterious (and perhaps apocryphal) N. Senada, whom Lithman had picked up during an expedition in Bavaria. The two Europeans became great influences and life-long collaborators with the group.

The first known public performance of the Residents, Uninc. was at the Boarding House in San Francisco in 1971. The brief, guerrilla-style performance took the audience by surprise. A photo from it, showing Lithman playing violin with his pinky "about to strike the violin like a snake", originated the stage name he used for the rest of his life, Snakefinger. Later in 1971, a second tape was completed called Baby Sex, featuring a long collage partially consisting of recordings from the Boarding House performance. The cover art for the tape box was a silk-screened copy of an old photo depicting a woman fellating a small child, an example of the extremely confrontational and deliberately puerile visual and lyrical style the group adopted during this period.