The Residents – Ralph Records – 1977

Boots / Numb Erone / Guylum Bardot / Breath And Length / Consuelo’s Departure / Smelly Tongues / Rest Aria / Skratz / Spotted Pinto Bean

Infant Tango / Seasoned Greetings / N-ER-GEE (Crisis Blues)

Originally recorded way back in 1973 on home equipment by the band, and released by Ralph Records (in a different sleeve below) in 1974.

The 1977 Ralph Records re-release had a different sleeve which continued to parody The Beatles. The original master tape was engineered and remixed in the studio, generally cleaned up and transferred into the stereo format.

Mad as a bag of frogs, this debut LP release by the San Francisco based Residents, has a certain amount of Zappa mischief ingrained into the grooves. The band were famous for hiding there actual ‘human’ personalities, no one except the group themselves knew who was behind the music. No interview undertaken would reveal the artists, all newsletters and promo sheets enclosed in records sent to radio stations in the U.S. would be written and vetted by The Cryptic Corporation.

The most infamous era of The Residents is when the group would perform in the large eyeball heads (The Mole Show), which unfortunately I never got to experience, wish I could have though when they toured England and performed at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1983.

Did anyone browsing this site witness these performances ?  

Text below ripped from the labyrinth that is theresidents.co.uk site

The Residents began collecting interesting and unusual tapes in the early 60’s in an effort to expand their awareness of the very nature of sound. The tapes came from everywhere… cassettes of soldiers in Vietnam singing songs with impromptu instrumentation… reels from second hand shops… sounds effects and bird call collections from garage sales… and, yes, even a few bootleg tapes of well known pop artists going avant-garde between takes which were purchased on the black market and stored in a local bank vault.
The Residents not only collected other peoples tapes, but gained widespread notoriety for their unusual recordings.

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.