MEET THE RESIDENTS
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 the band's first release, the
1972 single Santa Dog, this album was produced at home,
creating sounds with tape effects and instruments --
which the band still didn't really know how to play.
The Residents were not using synthesizers yet. Meet
the Residents is more organised than Santa Dog, 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 as
well as the music, though the defaced Beatles cover upset
Capitol Records greatly. John Lennon proudly displayed his
own copy at home. The cover also became the favourite piece
of evidence for the old "The Beatles are the Residents"
theory.
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 '74 issue of the Canadian art magazine,File, along
with a 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 a free sample, but even so The
Residents only sold 40 copies of Meet the Residents in the
first year of its 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 from the playtime,
and released a new version. This release had a new cover,
to keep Capitol happy, which depicted four figures with
non-human heads: three with prawn-heads, the fourth with a
starfish. These were identified as George, John, and Paul
Crawfish and Ringo Starfish.
The album currently sports the original cover.