Historical

Related Pages
ERA A Nickle If Your Dick's This Big
The Warner Bros Album(1971)
OverviewTracks


Before they started publishing their music in 1972 - even before they were "The Residents" - the group (working with Snakefinger and the mysterious N. Senada) are created a number of ΒΌ" reel-to-reel tapes. While some portions found their way to various collections over the years, the great-granddaddy of them all was the infamous Warner Bros Album.

The Warner Bros. Album was the group's first demo tape. They mailed it anonymously (they didn't have a name yet) to Harve Halverstadt at Warner Brothers. Halverstadt was chosen because he had worked with Captain Beefheart, one of the group's musical heroes. The tape was returned with a rejection addressed to "Residents, 20 Sycamore St., San Francisco". This, of course, gave the group their name, which first appeared as "The Residents Uninc.", a fictional musical organization. The Residents maintain that Halverstadt made the right decision, because the album "sucked," but its place in Residential history is assured because of the role it played in the naming of the band.

It wasn't until 2004 that there was an official release, albeit in the heavily altered form of WB:RMX. A few of the tracks appeared in unremixed form on the ERA B474 / Delta Nudes compilation, but finally, in 2018, the original recording was released as part of Record Store Day, bearing the redacted title of The W***** B**** Album. In 2019 it was included as part of the 2CD set entitled "A Nickle If Your Dick's This Big (1971-1972)."





WB:RMX(2003)
OverviewTracks


The Warner Bros album has long held the fascination of fans, though not necessarily that of The Residents. To them it was the best they could do at the time with available resources. After the demo was rejected for not being commercially viable, The Residents reworked the material several times. However they never got it to be what they thought it should be and set it aside, unfinished, to start on a new project.

As the years went by and the group's techniques and philosophy grew more sophisticated, that old demo tape became more of an embarrassing past episode. All the same, The Residents acknowledged the historical importance of the tape, it being tied closely to their emergence as a formalized group. The conflict between revisiting the old and ever moving forward was resolved when the group began experimenting with remix tools in 2002.

The result was WB:RMX, a new album that used the old tapes as source material. The original recordings were fed into modern software to allow for manipulation and overdubbing possibilities that were not possible thirty years earlier.

WB:RMX was released as a CD as well as a double LP with bonus tracks.