MEET THE RESIDENTS @ 50

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.