Celebrating
its golden anniversary today, at 50 years old, is the debut LP from The
Residents, with Meet the Residents being released on April 1st, 1974.
While it was resoundingly ignored at the time of its release, struggling
to sell a mere 40 copies within its first year, the album would
eventually be recognized as the cornerstone product of one of America's
most influential and innovative experimental multi-media arts
collectives.
The residents had been fermenting in their home
state of Louisiana since the late 1960s, mostly inspired by the
avant-garde experimentation of artists like Captain Beefheart and his
Magic Band. The relative success of that particular group was
inspiration enough for the then unnamed group to send a demo of their
early experiments to Beefheart label, Warner Bros, executive Hal
Halverstadt, in the hopes of following in their wake. His rejection of
the group, returning the tape to "Residents, 20 Sycamore St.", famously
inspiring the band's name.
With that album being dismissed, the
now named collective spent most of 1973 alternating between working on
an ambitious film project, the never-to-be-finished "Vileness Fats", and
recording fresh material for a proper debut. With thoughts of
appealing to a major label now banished from their aspirations, they
realized that creating their own imprint was the best way to get their
work out there without having to be dependent on the whims of music
executives. Thus, the Cryptic Corporation and Ralph Records were
created, with the group members assuming anonymous identities within The
Residents, while simultaneously using their real names to stand in as
spokesmen for their freshly minted corporation. Thus, Hardy Fox, Homer
Flynn, Jay Clem & John Kennedy became the corporate faces while
claiming to have no relation to the mysterious, unidentified musicians
responsible for creating The Residents' music.
At the time of
their debut, the group had access to only the most basic instrumentation
and recording equipment, relying heavily on acoustic percussion, piano,
horns & reed instruments and guitar, along with a primitive form of
analogue sampling, to create their strange fusion of experimental pop,
jazz, blues and classical music. Layered with strange, heavily effected
cartoon-like voices, the surreal results were unlike anything anyone
else had concocted at that time. This was well before they would
embrace electronics, synthesizers and digital samplers as their
principal tools, yet they were still able to mutate their instruments
into arrangements that belied their primitive resources.
The
packaging for the album was a cleaver, hilarious bastardization of Meet
The Beatles, the US debut LP by the "fab four". This association
between the two groups would even lead to early rumours that The
Residents were secretly The Beatles, working clandestinely to vent their
more experimental ambitions. The initial version of the album,
released in a mono mix in an edition of just over 1000 copies, sold
extremely poorly, but was still reported to have drawn the ire of
Beatles label, Capitol Records, who allegedly issued a "cease and
desist" order on the use of the cover graphics, necessitating a redesign
for the subsequent stereo mix reissue of the album in 1977. Whether
this was actually true or just a promotional ploy by Ralph Records is up
for debate, especially given that the reissue still incorporated many
of the same design elements as the first pressing, and all subsequent
reissues and special editions since 1988 reverted to the original
design.
As mentioned, initial response to the album was
virtually nil, and it wasn't until 1977 that the group began to develop a
serious cult following, mostly riding on the wave of the burgeoning
"punk" and "new wave" scenes, especially with the more adventurous
artists of the era frequently citing The Residents as influencing their
own excursions into the bizarre. Prior to the DIY aesthetics of punk
taking hold, there simply wasn't any context for The Residents to be
interpreted or understood. That all changed in the latter half of the
decade as the group quickly became enigmatic underground darlings of
outsider music.
Since its initial release, the album has
received numerous reissues, including vastly expanded special editions,
securing it a status as a foundational document of the group's early
works, an era which remains the preference of most die-hard fans. No
true aficionado would claim to appreciate the group without having this
album in their collection. It's a visionary explosion of ideas that
would provide the fertile ground for a career that has sustained itself
for the past half century and, despite numerous personnel changes over
the years (Homer Flynn remains as the only original member), continues
to persist.
2024-04-01
MEET THE RESIDENTS @ 50
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