Meet the Residents
(1973)

Subtitled The First Album by North Louisiana's Phenomenal Pop Combo, Meet the Residents was released on April 1st, 1974, with a striking cover -- a defaced version of the cover of Meet the Beatles, the Beatles first album from Capitol Records.

The album had been recorded as a break from the huge Vileness Fats project. Like their first release, the 1972 single Santa Dog, the album was produced at home, creating sounds with instruments (which the band still didn't really know how to play) and tape effects -- no synthesizers were involved. The album was more organised than Santa Dog had been, though, and demonstrated a little more skill with the instruments. The album was fairly close to the traditional album format: a series of songs, some seguéing into the next.

The Residents put a lot of attention into the packaging, though the defaced Beatles cover upset Capitol Records greatly (it's rumoured, however, that either George or Ringo thought it was so funny he bought his own copy). The cover became the favourite piece of evidence for the old "The Beatles are the Residents" theory (they aren't).

In addition to the infamous cover art, the record included liner notes on N. Senada's Theory of Phonetic Organization and a promotion for the Vileness Fats film. 1050 disks were made, though 200 had to be scrapped. These barely sold, so the band made 4000 seven-minute 7" flexy-disk samplers which were included in an issue of the February, 1974, issue of the Canadian art magazine File, along with an blurb advertising the album at $1.99 per copy. It still didn't sell -- people thought it was a joke. An ad in the May 17, 1974 issue of Friday, a college magazine from San Francisco, offered free sample, but, even so, The Residents only sold 40 copies in the first year of Meet the Residents' release.

Later, as the band became better known, sales of this first album started to pick up. In 1977, The Residents re-worked the tapes, cutting about seven minutes, and re-released the album as a picture disk in a limited run of 3500 copies. This version had a new cover to keep Capitol happy. It depicted four figures with non-human heads, three with prawn-heads, the fourth with a starfish, who are identified as George, John, and Paul Crawfish plus Ringo Starfish. The original cover was moved into the disk picture.

The Classics re-issue of Meet the Residents uses the original mix, bundling it with the original Santa Dog. The CD uses the original cover, with the crawfish cover on the back of the program book.

Meet the Residents (1973)

Meet the Residents

Meet the Residents
(1973)