SIDE A -
Beyond the Valley of a Day in the Life
THE
BEATLES PLAY THE RESIDENTS AND
THE RESIDENTS PLAY THE BEATLES
45rpm Single
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| SIDE B - Flying | ||
"The Beatles Play the Residents" was the second single that was released to promote Third Reich 'N' Roll, featuring complementing photographs of four naked men wearing strategically-placed Beatle portraits. The first track, "Beyond the Valley of a Day in the Life" (aka THE BEATLES PLAY THE RESIDENTS), features a number of Beatles song fragments stitched together into a medley not unlike 3RNR. The B-Side was a cover of "Flying" an instrumental from the Magical Mystery Tour album (it was the only song the Residents could find that was credited to all four Beatles, though there is one other, "Dig It" from Let It Be) that the Residents perform mostly a capella, with a bit of wheezy organ.
This release, combined with the cover of Meet the Residents, created a backlash that resulted in subsequent printings of Third Reich 'N' Roll containing an essay called, "Why Do the Residents Hate the Beatles?"
RATING: 6
I'm going to have to plead bias on this one. The songs are both really fun to listen to—particularly "Beyond the Valley..."—if you know the Beatles discography. They're both hilarious and fascinating, because there really is a certain unity to the snippets, and there's something ominous about the absurdly out-of-context McCartney quote of "Please, everybody, if we haven't done what we could've done, we've tried" (from "The Beatles' 3rd Christmas Record"). More surprising, their interpretation of "Flying" (except maybe the end, the band singing in call-and-response, 'F-L-Y-I-N...' 'G!') somehow seems strangely appropriate.
But!
...But would it be so sucessful if you didn't know every note of every song the Beatles ever did? (Granted, most people know most of their songs, but "Flying" is bloody obscure, for them). I can't remove myself from that, and maybe you're not supposed to: the Residents DID choose the most famous band in the world for dissection, after all. I will say this—even as a Lennon/McCartney/Harrison/Starr composition, this version of "Flying" is 100% pure Residents, and it's pretty good!
So this one gets a 6: not great, but good, and definitely interesting.