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Wormwood Live

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Wormwood Live is a tour by The Residents, based on their 1998 concept album of the same name. It began life as a follow up to the Disfigured Night show of 1997, but evolved into a full touring show. The show featured dramatic retellings of gruesome biblical era stories.

History

The Residents performing Wormwood Live, 1999

In 1997, The Residents played at The Fillmore on Halloween. The concert was hugely successful, and so, the manager asked the group to play again, next Halloween. Between then and the show, The Residents had recorded and released the perfect album for this, Wormwood. Wormwood featured brutally honest retellings of biblical stories, and was more than perfect for a live show.

For this show The Residents sought the help of players on the album, Carla Fabrizio, Molly Harvey, Nolan Cook and Toby Dammit, to play on the tour. These would become the regular players with the group until the 2005 Way We Were tour.

The show was more of a spectacle than the group's previous shows, with large cardboard props, a full band, and the Gamelan Sekar Jaya during the second act was well as an extensive encore of classic 1974 - 1980 songs. The show was another huge success, causing the group to begin planning of a touring adaptation of the show.

Five months later the touring show was ready to go, starting in The Copley Theatre in Boston, Massachusetts. The US tour ran throughout April, and concluded at The Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana, California. The first Copley Theatre show opened with a seven minute instrumental overture titled "Nober", however, the audience's lack of reaction caused the track to be pulled from the set list from the remainder of the tour.

During the American tour the group began experimenting with live webcasting, and as such, the April 24th show at the House of Blues in Chicago was broadcast live on the internet.

The European tour began in June, with each show recorded being by The Residents. On the third stop of the European leg, at the Lycabettus Theater in Athens, Greece, guitarist Nolan Cook was hit in the head by a rock thrown by a member of the audience near the end of the show.[1] Cook was injured and forced to leave the stage; his life was likely saved by the eyeball mask he was wearing.[2] Often thought to have been an act of religious protest against the show's concept, Homer Flynn of The Cryptic Corporation later explained that the thrown rock was more likely a result of anti-American sentiment in the region at the time.[3]

The Residents wanted to preserve the sound of the tour in a way other than just through live recordings, and so, in July, they visited Haus Des Rundfunks on July 13th to record studio versions of the live arrangements. However, by the time the group left Germany, they did not have enough material recorded to make up an album, and had to return in February and March 2000 to finish it.

The July 16th show at Museumsmeile in Bonn, Germany was filmed and broadcast live on the internet by the Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, to an audience of approximately two thousand fans worldwide. The show was later released on DVD in 2005 as The Residents Play Wormwood.

Later in the year, a compilation of recordings from across the European tour was released by Ralph America as Wormwood Live 1999.

Set list

1999 tour

1998 performances

Dates

Fillmore '98 (October 1998)

First leg (US, April 1999)

Second leg (Europe, June-July 1999)

Cancelled dates

  • April 20th 1999 - Zellerbach Auditorium, UC Berkeley, California[4][5]
  • April 21st 1999 - The Crest Theatre, Sacramento, California[4][5]

See also

  1. ↑ "It is true that Nolan got hit in the head with a rock but it was not at the Mylos Club in Thessaloniki, it was in Athens at the Lycabettus open air theatre on June 16, 1999." Christopher Kellas, comment in The Residents unofficial Facebook group, June 15th 2024
  2. ↑ "They’re built on these sort of welder’s helmet frames. Best thing those things have been invented for!" Homer Flynn, quoted by Jeff Economy in a comment in The Residents unofficial Facebook group, May 18th 2018
  3. ↑ "There was a conflict between the Bosnian Serbs but I think it was more of an anti-American thing than an anti-Residents thing. The Resident reached inside and felt all this blood and thought a light had fallen on him or something." Homer Flynn, quoted by Jeff Economy in a comment in The Residents unofficial Facebook group, May 18th 2018
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 https://web.archive.org/web/19990218144209/http://www.residents.com:80/
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 https://web.archive.org/web/19990420135436/http://www.residents.com:80/
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