Bucking the System

Ween has always been an anomaly in the music business. A band that has never, ever followed convention in writing and playing music, the core of Ween is the collective mind of "brothers" Gene and Dean Ween - though they're not really brothers and their last names aren't really Ween. Vocalist Gene Ween (a.k.a. Aaron Freeman) and guitarist Dean Ween (a.k.a. Mickey Melchiondo) have been playing together since the eighth grade, 1984 to be exact. And, after nearly 20 years, Ween has managed to carve a niche for themselves without ever really having that brush with fame that launches so many artists toward comfortable retirement. But again, Ween has always been a music industry anomaly.
With an extensive catalog that includes 10 official full-length albums, Ween has managed to build their fervent world-wide following by touring non-stop, fostering a rabid fan base by making the band's Web site (www.chocodog.com/ween) the hub of the Ween community and allowing open taping at their shows, resulting in a massive underground of officially unreleased but generally sanctioned Ween music. The band's last release, White Pepper, was their final opus for major label Elektra Records, with which Ween had a long and fruitful relationship, producing seven albums since their major label debut, 1992's breakthrough 4-track masterpiece, Pure Guava.
Gene and Dean Ween are currently working on their new record as completely independent artists, though that's not something that they think too much about because, even on Elektra, they never handed in demos for approval and never kowtowed to the standard operating procedures of the major label game. Ween's own degree of fame has come to them almost solely as a result of their dedication to making music.
Dean Ween, at home in New Hope, Pennsylvania on a rare break from time on the road and in the studio, found some time to field a few questions about the group's current status and what it means now that Ween is independent again.

It's been a couple of years since the last release, White Pepper. What's been going on with Ween these days?
We've been doing a bunch of gigs. We just got home from a two-week tour of mostly colleges and we were supposed to be on the road this summer doing a few weeks in July and few more in August, but we cancelled them so we could try to finish this record that we've been working on. We were supposed to record our new album in January, but we had a bunch of scheduling problems and some shows popped up - it was just horrible procrastination, basically. But we just rented a house in the Pocono Mountains here in Pennsylvania where we're gonna write a little more and then record the album in July or August. So we decided to cancel our summer tours just to get this record out and move on.

Are you still with Elektra, or have you moved on from that as well?
We've been gone from Elektra since, um, not this past December, but the December before. The White Pepper album came out in April 2000, and we toured that whole year. In the end, we kind of forced their hand a little bit. The way it works when you're on a label is that, after you make a record and it comes out, there's a set time period before you can ask for your next album advance. We were so deep into our contract with Elektra - I think we made seven albums with them - and the way a deal like that is structured is that, if you survive through more than one or two records, they have to give you ridiculous amounts of money at the end of your deal. So after seven albums, we were due something like over a half million dollars to make our next record, and we knew they were never going to give it to us because we just don't sell that many records. So we asked them kinda in advance if they intended on keeping us on the label, and if not, could they let us go at that point so we could get ourselves together. They had a meeting to talk about it and when they got back to us they said no, they didn't want us anymore, and sent us on our way.
But we haven't been sitting around, we've actually been working the entire time. We do this television show for Fox - Grounded for Life - and all the music is by us, the theme, the closing theme and all the music within the show. We've done tons of movie soundtrack stuff lately and we put out a record through the Web site, a live record from the country tour. It's funny because, just as far as money and survival goes, we're doing better now than we ever have, just using what we've got, playing shows and keeping in touch directly with the fans through the Web site, instead of all the jive we went through at Elektra for years, with them trying to figure out how to sell millions of Ween records and get us on the radio, which will never happen in this or probably any lifetime.
But you know, Elektra is one of the best major labels that has ever been - at least it was when we signed with them. Bob Krasnow was the president at the time and he was kind of the last really legendary and eccentric old guy in charge of a major record company. He made so much money for that label with kinda out-there stuff that he took a shot on - bands like Metallica, for instance. And the guy's resume…I mean, he produced "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," he was the A&R guy for Funkadellic at Warner Bros. He was just an amazing person, and back when we were originally looking around at labels - we were signed to Elektra in '92 - things were much different and we were actually talking to a bunch of major labels. Right after we finished Chocolate & Cheese [1994], the big parent company, Time-Warner, fired the entire Elektra staff and brought in a hit-making staff. They inherited Ween, and I'm still surprised that we made as many records as we did under the new staff.
Still, I think that Elektra always liked us - if they hated us, I think they would have dropped us straight away - but Ween was always a very steady seller. I think our entire catalogue on Elektra has sold something like over a million copies. And our records still sell a thousand or two thousand a week, something really amazing like that, but we don't have any gold records. I think Elektra thought that maybe some day, there would be the possibility that we could have a record that did really well, but I think they just got tired of waiting around. And I think the thing that really frustrated them was the country record. But whatever. When it ended with Elektra, we were happy about it and we knew that it was going to happen and we wanted to expedite the process. We have no regrets or bitterness about being on Elektra. We grew up as music fans, we were honored to be on a big label, and we certainly never modified our music for them. We handed all of our records in to them, and they never really fucked with us.

Have you spoken to indie labels or are you going it alone?
After we got word from Elektra, there was this period there where we felt like we needed to settle our minds or something, know that we were going to have a company to release the new album on. But then the reality set in. The dumbest thing in the world would be for us to get involved with another label right now because it's not going to work. There's this huge chasm between the major labels and the idea of doing it yourself, and for a band like us that's already got everybody plugged in, if we were to release our own records and sell a hundred thousand of them on our own label, we'd be millionaires. If we got onto like, Sony, and only sold a hundred thousand records, we'd get dropped and called a failure. So what happened at first [after Elektra] was that we had a couple of major labels sniffing around, but it was basically the young kids who didn't have the juice to sign us, who were Ween fans when our earlier stuff came out. We got calls from almost every independent label there is, but that's like money out of our pocket. What a smaller label could do for Ween at this point is nothing that we couldn't do on our own, so we decided that, rather take a label's money to make a record - money we don't need 'cause we can just pay for it ourselves - and have to deal with their involvement, we're just gonna make the record ourselves and then shop it to labels, or explore the possibility of putting it ourselves and getting it distributed through a larger system.

How did the Internet-only release of the live country album sell?
It sold out in eight days. It never even really existed to us. We didn't have artwork for it, and it had already sold out. At first, we were going to do a limited run of just a few thousand, and one day, after about four or five days of online pre-ordering, we looked up the orders and they were well above the number we'd planned to press. So we had to up the number. That was just kind of a little test to see if anybody cared. I don't know if that's how we want to do our next proper Ween album. It's much more of a priority and much more important to us than just releasing it online. I'd like people to have the opportunity to buy it in the store in France or Mexico. That was the one thing about Elektra that was great. You just can't fuck with the distribution of a major label. If someone wants your record in like, Akron, Ohio, they can go down the street and get it at Best Buy or their local record store. You just can't beat that, and we're not willing to give that up just so we can have the album out on our own label. But we haven't figured out the balance of doing the way we want because we haven't had to think about that yet. We've just been working on the record itself, the music, and we have enough now for a couple of records, but I think maybe we're overthinking this record a bit and we're still writing some. It's sort of something that we have to prove to ourselves - that we can make our best record without anyone else's money or influence.

Bookmark: