Wormwood

Wormwood: Curious Stories From The Bible is the twenty-third studio album by The Residents, released September 27th 1998 by Bomba Records in Japan, and October 13th 1998 by Euro Ralph and East Side Digital in Europe and the US. On Wormwood, The Residents interpret a number of violent and disturbing tales from the Bible (primarily the Old Testament). 
The project marked The Residents' return to the concept album format; whilst they had released albums of original material throughout the 1990s, Wormwood was the first album of entirely new material not composed as supplementary material for a CD-ROM or TV series since Freak Show, eight years earlier. 
The group supported the release of Wormwood with a live show elaborating upon the concept, featuring additional songs not heard on the original album, which the group toured across America and Europe in 1999. The show was captured on the live album Wormwood Live 1999, released later that year, and the DVD The Residents Play Wormwood, released in 2005. A live-in-the-studio recording of re-arranged Wormwood songs, Roadworms: The Berlin Sessions, followed the tour in August 2000. 
In January 2022, The Residents released a nine-disc box set, Wormwood Box, as part of their pREServed series of expanded and remastered reissues. The box set contains the original album, with almost two hours of previously unreleased demos and outtakes, as well as Wormwood Live 1999, the entire Fillmore '98 Halloween show, and other related material. 
== History and concept ==
"The third angel blew his trumpet; and a great star fell from the sky flaming like a torch; and it fell on a third of the rivers and springs. The name of the star was Wormwood."Revelation 8:10Wormwood: Curious Stories From The Bible was first announced on January 23rd 1998 as The Residents' first traditional concept album project since Freak Show in 1991 (with the group having spent the intervening years exploring the medium of CD-ROM)."New Stuff!", RZWeb, January 23rd 1998 (via archive.org) 
For Wormwood, The Residents decided to explore the dark side of the Christian Bible, with songs based on twenty of its most violent and disturbing tales. Accordingly, the album is focused primarily on the Old Testament, with a short-tempered and vindictive God visiting all sorts of unpleasantness on the Israelites and their neighbors. Only three tracks, "How to Get a Head", "Judas Saves" and "Revelation", represent stories from the New Testament. Another, "Jesus Saves", was demoed but ultimately left off the final release. 
In an interview in February 1998, Homer Flynn of The Cryptic Corporation announced that a new album was planned for the fall of that year, with Flynn claiming "at this point I have no idea what direction they are going, other than to incorporate a lot of new musicians".Ram Samudrala, "Demystifying the Residents", Music Ram-blings, February 6th 1998 In the subsequent press release announcing the project, former UWEB fan club president Uncle Willie explained that The Residents were not interested in criticizing or attacking the Bible, but rather in reminding listeners that the Bible is not all about uplifting morality. 
The album was largely recorded throughout the spring of 1998; in June it was announced that the album would be completed by July 14th."New Stuff!", RZWeb, June 11th 1998 (via archive.org) For Wormwood, The Residents were accompanied by frequent collaborators, vocalists Laurie Amat, Diana Alden and Molly Harvey, as well as Richard Marriott, who had previously played brass and woodwind on God In Three Persons, and guest musicians "Pavers" (who had appeared with The Residents live at the Disfigured Night show in 1997) and Wayne Doba (who had portrayed "Tex" for Freak Show Live in 1995). 
New members of the team included instrumentalist and "assistant to The Residents" Carla Fabrizio, and additional vocalist Linda Goldstein. Production was credited to The Cryptic Corporation, with David R. Fulmer credited as executive producer. The artwork was created by Poor Know Graphics, with the disc's graphic designed by Leigh Barbier, and package design by Karin Wittich and 4=1.
== Release ==
In a first for The Residents, special preview copies of Wormwood were sent to twelve fans in cities across the US, Canada and Europe. Each of these fans held a listening party in their city to celebrate the release. 
The album was also promoted with the release of a limited three track maxi-single, "I Hate Heaven", which included three tracks from the album. 
=== Reissues ===
Wormwood was reissued for the first time on CD in 2015 by MVD Audio, in a three-panel digipak sleeve with updated artwork. 
A two LP vinyl edition of the album was released by Cherry Red Records, MVD and New Ralph Too on May 27th 2022, following the release of the nine CD Wormwood Box in January. The vinyl edition of the album is prominently featured in a scene from The Residents' 2022 film Triple Trouble. 
== Wormwood Live ==
In October 1998 Wormwood became the subject of The Residents' second series of Halloween concerts at The Fillmore in San Francisco, followed by a full-scale tour of the USA in April 1999, and Europe later that year. 
The live Wormwood show featured an expanded and re-arranged version of the album, with a number of new songs, such as "Welcome To Wormwood", "David's Dick", "Attitude Is Everything", "Abraham" and "Un-American Band", being composed specifically for the show. The show also saw the premiere of In Between Screams, a 20-minute suite of pre-recorded music by The Residents' lead composer which was played during the show's intermission, and sold as a CD-R at the merchandise stand.
Recordings from the European leg of the tour were collected in the two-disc live album Wormwood Live 1999, released in December of that year by Ralph America. The show in Bonn, Germany on July 16th 1999 was filmed and released as the DVD The Residents Play Wormwood on August 2nd 2005. A recording of the Halloween 1998 show at the Fillmore was released as the fourth and fifth discs of the Wormwood Box in January 2022.
=== Roadworms: The Berlin Sessions ===
Between the Munich and Mainz shows on the European leg of the Wormwood tour in July 1999, The Residents entered the SFB Sendesaal recording studio in Berlin to re-record the album live in the studio, capturing the arrangements of the songs which had developed over the course of the tour. 
In February and March 2000, the group returned to the Berlin studio to finish the recordings. The resulting reworked version of Wormwood was released as Roadworms: The Berlin Sessions by East Side Digital and Bomba Records on June 25th 2000. The album includes two songs from the tour which were not featured on the original studio recording of Wormwood, "Un-American Band" and "Abraham".
The key difference between Wormwood and Roadworms is that whereas much of the original album was composed and played back using MIDI software, Roadworms takes more of a band-in-a-studio approach and features acoustic drums, which had not been heard on a Residents release since Commercial Album in 1980.
== Legacy ==
Wormwood is notable for introducing core collaborator Carla Fabrizio to The Residents' team. Fabrizio is credited on the album as "assistant to The Residents", and also accompanied the group on the corresponding tour, which itself introduced a number of soon-to-be-essential figures, including guitarist Nolan Cook. 
Since its release, Wormwood material has been frequently revisited by The Residents, and has become a staple of the group's live performances. For their Icky Flix project in 2001, The Residents re-recorded one Wormwood track, "Burn Baby Burn", which was also performed on their 2001 tour of the same name. On the group's 33rd anniversary mini-tour in 2005, three songs from Wormwood were performed as part of the "Rocking In The '90's" suite; "They Are The Meat", "Mr. Misery", and "Burn Baby Burn".
Wormwood was heavily represented within the Randy, Chuck & Bob trilogy of tours between 2010 and 2016. The Talking Light tour featured "They Are The Meat"; The Wonder of Weird featured "Hanging By His Hair" and "Bathsheba Bathes", and on the original leg of Shadowland a whole segment was dedicated to Wormwood, featuring "They Are The Meat" and "Judas Saves".
Charles Bobuck's 2017 Residents tribute album Bobuck Plays The Residents included two Wormwood tunes, "Kill Him!" and "I Hate Heaven". On The Residents' In Between Dreams tour in the same year, "God's Magic Finger" was performed during the first handful of performances, before being cut from the set list.
=== Cancelled special edition ===
Some years after the release of Wormwood, The Residents announced they were developing a "special edition" of the album. This edition was a pet project of Hardy Fox, who had created a prototype which featured a number of demos replacing the final studio versions, as he felt the production on the finished version of Wormwood sounded "overworked" and inferior to the earlier demos. As a result, this "special edition" was to be shorter than the original release.Hardy Fox, "Ask Hardy shit", Hacienda Bridge no. 7, January 1st 2017 
The special edition of Wormwood was eventually cancelled on the basis that such a release would confuse people, and because the album was by this point "pretty old", and The Residents did not think it was worth resurrecting at that time.
=== pREServed box set ===
On January 28th 2022, Cherry Red Records, New Ralph Too and MVD Audio released a nine disc CD box set, Wormwood Box - Curious Stories From The Bible pREServed, as part of their ongoing pREServed series of reissues. 
The box set contains the original album, as well as four hours of previously unreleased material, including two discs of demos, four discs of contemporary live performances, Roadworms: The Berlin Sessions, In Between Screams, and a disc of later arrangements of songs from the album dating from 2001 to 2016.
== Track listing ==
# In The Beginning (2:54)
# Fire Fall (3:35)
#They Are The Meat (2:42)
# Melancholy Clumps (1:44)
# How to Get a Head (4:08)
# Cain and Abel (3:38)
# Mr. Misery (2:21)
# Tent Peg in the Temple (2:56)
# God's Magic Finger (2:50)
# Spilling the Seed (2:47)
# Dinah and the Unclean Skin (3:15)
# Bathsheba Bathes (2:53)
# Bridegroom of Blood (5:00)
#Hanging By His Hair (2:37)
# The Seven Ugly Cows (2:37)
# Burn Baby Burn (3:02)
# KILL HIM! (2:41)
# I Hate Heaven (2:52)
# Judas Saves (3:58)
# Revelation (5:37)
== Liner notes ==
=== The Bible ===
The word Bible means "book". In about 100 C.E. Christian scholars collected writings about the prophet, Jesus of Nazareth. Selecting certain texts, eliminating others, they canonized what is now the New Testament. This they combined with the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, to give a historical and philosophical context for their new teaching.
While the Old Testament introduces us to the Israelite God, YHWH, as a dark figure bringing death whenever he appears, Jesus revolutionized the concept of God as a father figure.
All Bibles are translations of translations of no longer existing original writings and, unavoidably, reflect the politics and religious prejudices of the organization paying the cost of the translation.
Today, many narrow-minded people wield the Bible as some sort of razor with which to slash their enemies. Allowing those people to decide what is important in the Bible is dangerous to the freedom of individual thought. Though some of the Bible is abysmal and boring, much of it is entertaining and important reading.
The Residents have tackled this book in all its complexity without the responsibility of the scholar. Though many months have gone into research, the intent of the music and lyrics remain within the realm of the inspired poet.
The stories and ideas represented here are definitely in the Bible. The desire is to neither vilify nor sanctify the book, but to allow it to be humanized. For the Bible to be looked upon as spiritually uplifting is good and useful, but that view overlooks the Bible's abundant images of plague, torture and cruelty. It is this dichotomy that gives balance and substance to the book. Without both, the dark and the light, there is no measure of either, only the bland reassurances that pass for organized religion today.
- Uncle WillieOn original pressings of the album, the liner notes are credited to Uncle Willie, former president of the official fan club UWEB. On the 2015 reissue, the notes are instead simply credited to The Cryptic Corporation. The 2022 Wormwood Box credits the notes to "New Ralph Too, with love to Uncle Willie".
== Credits ==
* Composed, Arranged & Performed By: The Residents
* Assistant to The Residents: Carla Fabrizio
* Producer: The Cryptic Corporation
* Executive Producer: David R. Fulmer
* Additional Instrumentalists: Carla Fabrizio, Richard Marriott and Pavers
* Additional Singers: Diana Alden, Laurie Amat, Wayne Doba, Carla Fabrizio, Linda Goldstein, Molly Harvey and The Mystery Dude.
* Cover Art / Photo of The Residents: Poor No Graphics
* Package Design: Karin Wittich and 4=1
* Illustrations: Leigh Barbier
== Release history ==
Year	Label 	Region 	Notes
1998	East Side Digital 	US 	
1998	Euro Ralph 	EU 	
1998	Bomba Records 	JP 	
2015	MVD Audio 	US 	
2022	Cherry Red, New Ralph Too	US & Europe	pREServed, 9xCD box set
== See also ==
* I Hate Heaven
* Roadworms: The Berlin Sessions
* Wormwood Live
*Wormwood Live 1999
* In Between Screams
* Wormwood Box
* Carla Fabrizio
== Buy Or Die! ==
* Wormwood at MVDShop (US)
* Wormwood Box at MVDshop (US)
* Wormwood Box at Cherry Red Records (UK)
* Wormwood LP at Cherry Red Records (UK)
==== Listen online ====
* Wormwood on Spotify
*Wormwood on Apple Music
*Wormwood Box on Spotify
*Wormwood Box on Apple Music
== Notes ==
== External links and references ==
* Wormwood at The Residents Historical
* Wormwood at RZWeb (archived via archive.org)
* Wormwood at Discogs
Category:Albums
Category:Wormwood