Cadillac, Mich., 2016.

I had the pleasure of seeing The Residents on their final(?) tour last year, so in honor of that event, I thought I’d start a new segment on my blog as an excuse to talk about other stuff. In this case, great parody album covers.

Inspiring this is The Residents’ first full-length album “Meet The Residents” of nearly 60(!) releases over 47(!!!) years. Check out this badass take on the classic Beatles cover:

This record came out in 1974 and, of course, caused a big dust-up with EMI/Capitol, the labels that put out the original Beatles disk 10 years earlier. However, rumor has it that George and Ringo dug the parody and bought copies for themselves.

There, of course, have been hundreds of parodies of the Beatles iconic album covers over the years. Here’s another all-time fave: the Mothers of Invention’s “We’re Only in it for the Money:”

I love the story behind this spoof of the “Sgt. Pepper’s” cover. Frank Zappa declared this photo an exact negative of the Beatles original. “They had blue skies, we had a thunderstorm,” he said. Instead of flowers in the foreground, the band used fruits, veggies and assorted junk. And, among the “celebrity guests” pictured, is the actual Jimi Hendrix. The guitar great, a friend of Zappa’s, posted in real life on the right-hand side of the mural!

The original Beatles cover featured cutouts of a cornucopia of thinkers, artists and troublemakers, including Lenny Bruce, Carl Jung, Mae West and Aleister Crowley. Frank and the boys took it a few steps further, depicting Lyndon Johnson covering his ears, Captain Beefheart with a censor bar over his eyes and Lee Harvey Oswald at the moment he was shot by Jack Ruby.

Here’s another fun one: Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Abbey Road EP:”

The wild boys from L.A. turned the famous “crossing the street” image on it’s head with a stage look familiar to fans: socks-on-weens. It’s probably one of the more memorable of the dozens of parodies out there.

Moving on the a few other famous album homages…

Herb Alpert’s “Whipped Cream & Other Delights” is one of my all-time favorite covers (my mom had the album and we used to pull it out and giggle at it as kids–it now resides as artwork in my bathroom). There have been many send-ups over the years, but one of the best is Soul Asylum’s spoof for the “Clam Dip & Other Delights” album:

Pictured in the cream “dress” is the band’s late bassist Karl Mueller, who sat for hours in the grody, smelly mixture of sour cream, paint, whipped cream and seafood to get this final shot.

The Dead Milkmen also parodied a famous food-related album cover with their “Smokin’ Banana Peels” EP:

The rotting banana is, of course, a take on the iconic Andy Warhol-produced cover for Velvet Underground’s “Peel Slowly & See” album, which included a yellow banana sticker that peeled off to reveal a pink banana. The Milkmen’s take shows a banana that looks very similar to one I have in my kitchen right now. Fun fact for us squares who didn’t get the reference: smoking banana peels is rumored to elicit a hallucinogenic sensation.

I’ll leave you with perhaps the most famous parody album cover of all time:

This take on an Elvis cover shows Clash bassist Paul Simonon smashing his bass in one of the rockiest rock-n’-roll rock moments to ever happen. A little research (thanks, Wikipedia!) tells us that Paul was pissed at the bouncers at the show and that demolished guitar (a Fender Precision, for the record) is now on display at the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame in little ol’ Cleveland.

Have any other fun ones to add to the list?

P.S. I left out Weird Al on purpose. It’s just not fair to the others on this list, as we all know, no one does parody like Weird Al.