The question 'Who are the Residents?' stirred much speculation. One persistent rumour maintained that they were the post-break-up Beatles rejoining in secret for neo-Dadaist mischief-making. This probably stems from the fact that early on the group toyed with calling themselves The New Beatles, while their 1974 debut, Meet the Residents, featured on its front cover defaced portraits of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr from Meet the Beatles.
To the Residents, the Fab Four symbolized everything bad and everything good about pop: its tyrannical mind-controlling ubiquity (Lennon's 'we're bigger than Jesus' comment) but also the experimental potential of psychedelia.
All these conflicted feelings came together on their 1977 single 'Beyond the Valley of a Day in the Life' - a piece also known as 'The Beatles play the Residents and the Residents play the Beatles' - which featured 'samples' of The Beatles' wilder moments woven into an eerie audio collage. At various points you hear Lennon singing, 'Don't believe in Beatles' (from his first solo album) and issuing this wan apology to their global audience: 'Please, everybody, if we haven't done what we could have done, we've tried'.
The Residents - Beyond the Valley of a Day in the Life 1977
The Residents had already released The Third Reich N Roll in 1976: a darkly comic satire of post-Beatles pop as totalitarianism, with American Bandstand presenter Dick Clark dressed as Hitler on the front.
The sidelong 'Swastikas on Parade' is a medley of defiled sixties hits overlaid with blitzkrieg sound effects - air-raid sirens, dive-bombing Stukas, machine-gun fire. In its sleevenotes the Cryptic Corporation (the organization that looked after the band's affairs) describes the record as a 'tribute to the thousands of little power-mad minds of the music industry who have helped to make us what we are'.
The Residents - Swastikas on Parade 1976
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