Art-rock enigmas The Residents may have been in hiding for some seven years now, but that doesn't mean the eyeball-clad oddballs ever lost sight, if you will, of their potential as a live act.

As the 20th century fast approaches, band spokesman Homer Flynn said the quarter-century-old group of oddballs has its eyes fixed on a series of "very theatrical" comeback shows in their hometown of San Francisco later this month.

Maybe their shoulders were getting chafed from wearing those over-sized eyeball masks. Or maybe being high-concept all day, everyday, was just too much of a strain on their fruitful brains. Regardless, The Residents stopped performing live back in 1990, a drought that's due to end on Oct. 28, when they play the first of five consecutive shows at the Fillmore in San Francisco.

"Mainly, they've been working on their CD-ROM projects," said Flynn, spokesperson for both the Residents, and the Cryptic Corporation, an art and entertainment conglomerate that works with the group, who played their last U.S. shows during Thanksgiving of 1990.

Calling from an undisclosed location, Flynn pointed to such highly-lauded Residents' CD-ROMs as Gingerbread Man, Freak Show and their most recent, Bad Day on the Midway, as proof that the group -- a shadowy collective of musical artists/pranksters/avant garde fringe dwellers who have managed to conceal their identities during their 25-year career -- hasn't been sitting on its gloved hands.

Flynn said that, aside from a theater performance of Freak Show in Prague two years ago (in which they didn't actually perform, but only directed), the band had stayed out of the public eye, as it were, but once the CD-ROM market began to go south, they decided to get back to performing. "They've moved more and more theatrically in terms of what they do live and so, in some ways, this new show will be a very theatrical presentation," said Flynn about the San Francisco shows.

The first set will concentrate on material from the CD-ROM's, which has never been performed live before. It will also feature a screening of a German TV special the band created for the annual PopKomm festival. The 35-40 minute short was broadcast on Viva, the German equivalent of MTV, and is "not the kind of thing MTV would ever broadcast here," according to Flynn, reluctant to divulge details.

Like the recently-released two-CD retrospective, Our Tired, Our Poor, Our Huddled Masses (they put out four CD's in Europe and Japan), Flynn said the shows will be focused on celebrating the band's 25th anniversary. Included will be selections from the two dozen-plus conceptual albums they've released since 1974, cinematic works filled with off-kilter synthesizer odes to everyday objects seen through fun house mirrors, cut-up monologues only a dadaist could decipher and funny/creepy characters with which David Lynch might have a thing or two in common.

Flynn said it's difficult to tell how long the Residents could possibly maintain their tireless creativity. "They amazingly keep their interest up," he said, revealing that the band treated itself to new eyeballs a few years ago when its previous head pieces began to get a bit rank.

But not to worry, somewhere in the bowels of the Cryptic Corporation likely lies a room where eyeballs go to die, housing the older models, ones that didn't quite fit, the cube-shaped orbs from their last tour and perhaps new models yet to be unveiled.

"There will be plenty of costume changes in the show," said Flynn, promising cameos from several of the CD-ROM characters, such as Benny the Bump, Herman the Human Mole, the Old Woman and the Sold-Out Artist. "They feel like the whole thing of eyeballs is so identified with them as a trademark thing, it's hard to get away from it," he half-lamented.

The Residents will be joined by an additional and, of course, unidentified fifth member for the two-hour shows.

He'll be the one in the eyeball. [Thurs., Oct. 9, 1997, 6:00 p.m. PDT]