The Residents Keep an Eye on Their Secret Identities : Pop music: San Francisco’s visionary underground musicians will surface tonight with a unique take on Elvis.

The Residents have trained their eyes on the myth of Elvis Presley. Big, unblinking eyes, with legs and arms, wearing tuxedos and top hats.

That’s the potent visual image that’s become a virtual logo for the San Francisco-based group, which has plied its visionary music in the deep underground for close to 20 years. The Residents have drifted a little closer to the surface, and tonight through Sunday they’ll present their show “Cube-E,” subtitled “The History of American Music in 3 E-Z Pieces,” at the Japan America Theatre.

What’s inside the eyeballs no one knows. The identities of the four Residents are secret. Their faces are unseen, their voices never heard in official conversation. Interviews are handled by associates like Hardy Fox, an officer of the Residents’ production company, the Cryptic Corp. Earlier this week, Fox explained the reason for the anonymity.

“They started this way a long time ago, and the point of view was that they wanted to be a group ,” he said during a phone interview from San Francisco. “They thought group thinking was where it was at. The individual as an artist had peaked out, and it was time for the group dynamics, the corporate thought, the think-tank attitude, to go beyond what an individual could do.

“The problem is that it’s a field that’s dominated by personalities rather than group personality. So the only way they could do it was to say, ‘OK, we’ll just have a group name, we’ll only have a group image and that’s it.’

“It’s continued, and now it’s tradition. Now it’s just the way it is. . . . It’s not a problem for them. Sometimes it’s a problem for other people.”

Meaning that a game of Unmask the Artiste has evolved in certain fanatical quarters.

“In France,” said Fox, who accompanied the Residents on their recent European tour, “these shady reporters were coming up knocking on doors at the hotel photographing everybody in sight. . . . It’s the kind of stuff they might do with Jacqueline Onassis or something. It’s all rather stupid. The Residents don’t really care. It doesn’t matter. Why it matters to someone is totally beyond them. It’s like, why won’t people let them do it the way they want to do it?”

Doing it the way they want has been the prime imperative for the Residents since they moved to the Bay Area from Shreveport, La., during the Summer of Love (1967). Since then, they’ve released nearly 20 albums and developed a loyal cult audience. Their company, Ralph Records, anticipated the punk era’s proliferation of independent labels, their eccentric minimalism inspired a whole wing of arty new-wave music, and they’ve managed to bridge the worlds of the fine arts and the rock underground. As Fox puts it: “The Residents are one of those bands that will be in a punk club one night and an opera house the next night.”

Fox, who has been involved with the group since its Louisiana days and retains a trace of his Southern accent, is their studio engineer and, some suspect, a Resident himself, which he has consistently denied. He is also their marketing link with the outside world.

“If it wasn’t for me, they’d be pretty invisible,” he said, citing the higher profile he’s given them through gigs like some “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” scores. He’ll be meeting with film and TV executives trying to drum up more of the same while he’s in Los Angeles this week.

The Residents themselves are as musically accessible as they’ve ever been on their new album “The King & Eye,” a collection of Elvis Presley songs that is also the culminating segment of the “Cube-E” concert--it’s the synthesis of the cowboy music and the slave songs that precede it. The singer’s sarcastic, exaggerated drawl and the disorienting dissonance of the arrangements lend it a tortured, menacing tone, and it presents a harsh, sad truth about the rock ‘n’ roll icon.

“I think the implication is that he’s almost like a Christ-like figure in a way,” said Fox, “from the point of view of Jesus as a person who performs this function that somebody has to take care of. . . . Rock ‘n’ roll had to happen and somebody had to personify it, and Elvis became victimized by this cultural need of the country and the world, and his own human needs and his own failures. . . . I think it’s sympathetic toward Elvis, but I think he’s presented as somewhat naive, and not necessarily particularly bright. But still a victim. It’s like you’re sympathetic toward a child.”

And yes, the show features a redesigned version of the eyeballs, a motif that began innocently enough as the cover of 1979’s “Eskimo” album. “It was just to be this very austere, removed observer,” said Fox. “Distant, not participating, watchers of the culture type thing.

“It caught on so well. They tried a different costume after that, but the eyeballs pictures kept getting published. So finally I said, ‘OK, if you’re gonna have this group identity it’d really be good if you settled down on some type of image. Because we’ve got marketing here to do, and this is a strong image and people remember it.’

“They’re not really into it, but they understand that if they don’t have a face then they have to have something. So they stuck with it.”