BOGcast Episode 1
On July 29th, 2005, the first episode of BOGcast, the official podcast of The Residents, was posted on the group's official website.
The episode was hosted by Sparky, and was centered around the group's 1998-1999 live tour Wormwood Live, answering fan questions and promoting the release of The Residents Play Wormwood DVD.
While the episode was removed from the group's website many years ago, it is available for streaming and download on the Internet Archive. We thank Residents fan Munimún for providing the wiki with a transcript of the episode.
Transcript
TTS Software:
July 29th 2005. Episode 1. WORMWOOD LIVE.
Sparky:
Hello everybody, and welcome to The Residents' first official BOGcast, brought to you by residents.com and me, your host, Sparky.
We'll start with what's new on the BOG. Coming up this Saturday, July 30th, is Whoopy Snorp, the Residents hour, featuring a set of recordings from the Wormwood tour, as well as recordings from [unclear] and This is Past. You can check them out this Saturday night, 9pm West Coast time at www.krvs.org.
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The newest word on the street in regards to these mysterious eye guys is the WORMWOOD DVD. The Wormwood DVD is brought to you by Euro Ralph - you can check them out at www.euroralph.de - it is only €20 for this beautiful piece of art. The DVD will be carried by Ralph America, but will be distributed and released by MVD (Music Video Distributors) instead of Euro Ralph. These are the same people who brought you the ESKIMO DVD, ICKY FLIX, KETTLES OF FISH, the COMMERCIAL ALBUM DVD, and the DEMONS DANCE ALONE wide-release DVD. Although MVD has no official release dates set for it, so be patient and it'll come.
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Now we get to the fun part of the show. As many of you noticed on the residents.com BOG, there is a link to send me an e-mail asking me any question you would like regarding the topic of the week. This week's topic, in case you didn't notice, is the WORMWOOD DVD, WORMWOOD LIVE, WORMWOOD album, or ROADWORMS album. So we got many questions from all you faithful listeners, and I will do my best to answer them to the best of my knowledge and the best of the knowldge of my resources.
We've quite a few questions regarding the Fillmore Wormwood shows, and many of you commented it was a very unique experience, for the San Francisco Wormwood shows included a Gamelan troupe. You also want to know if there's any chance if this Gamelan San Francisco Wormwood show will be available on CD or video at any time, because one of you noticed that there was a camera scene at the balcony on the San Francisco shows. And, according to my sources, there are recordings, but they're not professional multitrack ones, and there were mics in the audience, and maybe even recorders and a mixing board as well. And there's some excellent Gamelan recordings. And from what I understand, there is a good chance that these San Francisco shows will be released at some point, though they're not currently scheduled for any sort of release date. Nobody also seems to be aware of any professional video recording - it's probably just some home camera setup, illegally stealing The Residents' hard work and video footage. Also, the extra Gamelan players in the show were all part of the amazing GAMELAN SEKAR JAYA, so if you wanna check them out, you can check out their CDs and check out their website at www.gsj.org, or www, G (as in God), S (as in Satan), J (as in Jesus), dot org. GAMELAN SEKAR JAYA.
Many of you also noticed that the DVD is NOT the entire Wormwood show. It does have a few omissions, such as "King of Kings", "Un-American Band", and a slightly shorter version of "Old Time Religion", and you want to know why that was. Well, the DVD was a webcast done by the museum, and some of the show was not shot. It has nothing to do with copyright issues - the whole reason was just to make the DVD a little more tighter, flow better, and to make it fit on a single disc. From what I understand there's not any plans that the entire show will ever see the light of day, unless you dig far into the reaches of your memory and pull 'em all out.
Now another very interesting question is regarding the non-album songs which were performed live for the tour. They want to know if they're based on studio outtakes that didn't make the CD, or were they new songs written strictly for the tour, and why they were chosen to be included and other songs that were on the album not chosen to be included... and my sources tell me that some were tunes that did not make it onto the album, some were written strictly for the tour, and writing for a show is completely different than writing for an album, just as the experience of seeing a show is completely different than listening to an album. The Residents tried to develop a show about the same thing that the album was about, rather than to just play songs from the album... 'cause if you really wanted to go hear all these songs from the album you might as well just go set up your boombox inside of an amphitheater and turn it on real loud and sing along, 'cause that's about the same thing as it would be.
Somebody also asked if the Residents have a religion - not just specific people in the Residents, but the group itself, the entity of The Residents, do they have a religion. And all I have to say is that, everything, even groups, has a religion, but religions are personal and should not be discussed by third parties in podcasts, because that just reduces religion to idle gossip. Religion should be a little more special than that (if you would like it to be).
The final question for the week notices that some elements of the Wormwood show, the on-stage band, the introductory narrator, the masks, the mountain backdrop, simple props, hold much in common with the Japanese Noh theater, and they want to know if this was a conscious decision, and if so, what were the Residents trying to say about this form of theater in relation to the Bible. What I'm told is that there's not any connection with Noh theater, or as others have suggested, with Greek theater. What is happening is that these are powerful dramatic tools and they are just what humans tend to choose to portray events in [the confined space] of the stage. I don't think there is anything to be said about the Bible doing this with Japanese or Greek theater.
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Well, thank you very much for listening to the first official Residents BOGcast, and be sure to send in your questions next week for next week's show topic: the Residents' 33rd anniversary tour down under in Australia, THE WAY WE WERE. And I leave you this week with a little piece of music, "Smelly Tongues" from Fillmore Wormwood.
This is Sparky signing off... SPARKY GOODBYE!
[Song: "Smelly Tongues" from Wormwood Live at The Fillmore 1998]