Long before there was “Love,” Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas spectacular set to a score of Beatles mash-ups, and even before there was Danger Mouse’s illegal Grey Album,—a meeting of the minds between The White Album and Jay-Z’s’s Black Album—an earlier and far more radical deconstruction of the Beatles’ oeuvre was done by the Residents.

This was not The Residents first stab at the skewering the Fab Four—their 1974 debut album, Meet The Residents, featured a demented pastiche of the first Beatles album cover that John Lennon was apparently quite fond of. Knowing of course, that they were foolishly risking an expensive lawsuit for copyright infringement this time out, The Residents released the song on a 7-inch record, in a limited edition of just 500 singles, as “The Beatles Play The Residents & The Residents Play The Beatles,” in 1977.

The A-side, “Beyond The Valley Of A Day In The Life,” contains about twenty Beatles samples, one from John Lennon and a line from one of their fan club only Christmas messages. The B-side was the Residents cover of “Flying” which they chose because it was one of the only Beatles songs (along with “Dig It”) attributed to all four members.

Folklore at the time imagined the Residents as the Beatles reformed undercover, making a mockery of their back catalog. The two songs were available at one point as CD extra tracks, but now it looks like they’ve been withdrawn.