Down With The Brown Sound

In the 1980s, in a town called New Hope, Pennsylvania, Dean "Deaner" Ween (a.k.a. Mickey Melchiondo) and his musical partner in crime Gene "Gener" Ween (a.k.a. Aaron Freeman) were sowing the musical seeds of Ween, a musical group like no other. Often credited by critics and fans as one of the most eclectic, diverse and schizophrenic rock bands ever put on wax (CD, these days), Ween began crafting music that knew no boundaries.

By the mid-1990s, the duo was enjoying an underground swell of fandom with now-classic albums God Ween Satan, The Pod and Pure Guava (all co-produced by former Rollins Band bass player Andrew Weiss). The sound was truly impossible to pin down and just as difficult to ignore. Possessing equal measures of talent and satirical quirkiness, Ween enjoyed a quiet but strong ascension with the release of Chocolate and Cheese, The Mollusk, an honest-to-goodness country album called 12 Golden Country Greats, a live album called Paintin’ the Town Brown, and the most recent release, White Pepper.

Though largely ignored by MTV and any mainstream music media, Ween — now recording and touring as a five-piece group with Claude Coleman (drums), Glenn McClelland (keyboards) and Dave Dreiwitz (bass) — find themselves playing to sellout crowds nationwide and enjoying a thriving Web presence (www.chocodog.com/ween). From in front of his computer in New Hope, PA, Dean "Mickey" Ween detailed the musical evolution of Ween, discussed the ups and downs of the band’s Web site and recording contract, and explained exactly what it means to be "brown."

White Pepper Seems to have a heavier pop influence than previous Ween albums.

I guess it does. I’m really the worst judge of our stuff because the whole cycle takes so long, to write all the stuff and record it, the mixing and mastering and art. And then immediately following that we always have to go into rehearsal and get ready to tour for a year. So I never, ever go back to the record. But yeah, I guess it is [pop-influenced]. I think it’s more melodic, more song-y than our other records. Usually, we intersperse a lot of jams and stuff like that. A lot of times when we’re recording, we have jams and the way we go about it is that we start recording without any song in mind and work on it as it goes along. So with this record, when we were eliminating songs that we weren’t going to put on it, we eliminated all the jams and chose just the songs. Like you can sit down and play the whole record on a piano, if you can come up with the sheet music.

That’s not something you guys had been used to doing in the past?

Well, the only way this record is different than our others, in our approach to it, is that we knew we were going to re-record everything in a studio. Ween isn’t a big demo band. Usually the one version that we record is the one version of the song that exists. But for this, we went over it and over it.

What prompted that change in approach?

Not wanting to repeat what we’d done before. From record to record, I think we’ve been changing our environment. The first record, God Ween Satan, was made in Andrew Weiss’ living room; it was like a greatest hits of the first five years of Ween on a debut album. For the second record, all we were doing was sitting in our apartment — we lived together at the time — just four-tracking everyday. We thought, ‘this is what we are right now, maybe we should just put this out.’ That’s what The Pod and Pure Guava came out of. And then for the fourth record, Chocolate and Cheese, the logic was, ‘well, we’ve done the four track thing, so let’s re-record our best four-track stuff with Andrew.’ It just kept changing like that, and then we did the country record [12 Golden Country Greats], which was obviously very much of a concept record, going to Nashville and all. Then with The Mollusk, we thought, ‘alright, we’ll record the stuff ourselves in a rented house and then have Andrew mix it…’ and we just kept adding on to it. And then with this record, we just kinda’ thought, fuck it. These songs needed to be served best in a real studio, and we went for the whole production thing.

So you record from what ever point you feel you’re at?

Yeah. I mean, Ween is a band of no planning. And I don’t necessarily mean that in the best way. We’re really not a very calculating band. We just kind a record and go on the road, and when we’re done touring, we take some time off and talk about what we’re going to do next.

White Pepper is a lot more centered musically than God Ween Satan and even The Mollusk.

Well, obviously the country record is very thematic because that’s what it is. With The Mollusk, being in that environment at the ocean with no music written and nothing else — just us and a bunch of alcohol and equipment — the environment definitely controlled the song-writing. The way it would happen was that we would go there on Sunday night and come home on, like, Wednesday night. I think that, in the first two trips we did, we wrote "The Mollusk," "Ocean Man," "Cold Blows the Wind" "She Wanted To Leave" and something else, and it was like, ‘alright, I see what’s happening here.’ All the songs were about pirates and the ocean, and we knew we were on to something and we decided to stay with it. We didn’t go down there with the intention of doing that. We were looking for inspiration and we were sitting there and the vibe was so thick, the ocean in the winter — it was just so awesome and we managed to tap into it. So then, from there on out when we would go there, we were conscious of where the music was going and were able to kind of ram the whole thing home. It works well. That’s my favorite Ween record, actually, hands down, and I really was disappointed in the way that it was received. Not that I felt like everybody hated it or anything, ‘cause none of our records have done that great so it wasn’t a letdown. We don’t sell millions of albums, but I felt that creatively it was our best record, I still do feel that, and it just kind of came out.

There wasn’t even a lot of fan response?

Yeah, there was, and it’s always a delayed thing with our records. Like when the country record came out, it obviously alienated a lot of Ween fans. But as it turns out, we now get a lot of points for releasing it — some kind of punk rock value or something.

There are a few rural cowboy bars around these parts that have some Ween country music in their juke boxes.

Right, and they probably play "Piss Up A Rope" a lot. Some label that puts out 45s and puts ‘em in juke boxes licensed that song from us ‘cause I think they saw it having a lot of potential to become like the "Asshole" song — they thought it had some value as one of those novelty country songs.

You guys are gearing up to get back on the road pretty soon.

The ball is already rolling, actually. We’ve been playing shows locally for the last couple of weeks. Have you ever seen us before?

Yeah, I’ve seen you at the Warfield in San Francisco, and it was insane. You guys played for over three hours. When I left, there were kids passed out in the lobby of the venue.

Yeah, so it’s the same thing now. In three-and-half hours, we just go out and do our thing. We do six or seven songs from the new record, and that accounts for, like, 20 minutes of the show.

The one thing I really noticed at the show was the wide range of people in attendance — from the kinds of people I remember getting stuffed into lockers in high school to jocks to punk rockers and general freaks. What it is about Ween that draws such a broad crowd?

Well, the definite common thread seems to be the stoner vibe, but it’s not all about that. We used to not tour as much, and now the Ween live thing is becoming its own separate entity; we used to try and do the most minimal amount of touring possible per record, and now we’ve come to embrace it more. The thing I’ve noticed the last few years as we’ve started touring more is that the audience has recycled itself, which is really good. We’re starting to see a lot of teenagers — I guess they’re getting turned on by their older brothers and sisters… [pause] I guess the common threat is a pot smoking thing.

But really, I get, like, 70 or 80 e-mails a day from kids, because you can write directly to us, and now I’ve gotten more of a sense of what they like in addition to Ween. I see what they listen to. My wife has a brother who’s 19 or 20 and I see what he listens to, but I don’t know where we fit in. It has always been a versatile audience, though, always mixed up between older hippie types and young kids and people our age. The funny thing is that Ween appeals to a lot of really little kids too. We hear that a lot: ‘Oh, my three-year-old loves The Mollusk.’

Maybe it owes to the versatility of the music. Even White Pepper has a few skewed numbers on it.

Yeah, but I don’t know if this record is going to appeal to 18-year-olds as much. We’ll see when it comes out.

How was the reception for Painting the Town Brown as opposed to The Mollusk?

It was really nothing. It didn’t really do anything, but it really wasn’t supposed to be anything. See, our Web site is doing really well and I’ve been really into computers and the Internet for the last five years and stay on top of everything Ween online: the Web site, newsgroups — I’m on them almost everyday. This last year we managed to get a merchandise site up so we’ve been able to sell T-shirts and hats and mouse pads, and we sell a ton of the stuff. It’s cool, but it doesn’t interest me. Like, there’s all this hype about how mp3 is going to change the way people get their music, but it’s all jive as far as I’m concerned. I like mp3s and all, but I personally don’t want to buy my music that way. I want to buy a CD, or even better, a vinyl record. I don’t even like the CD format, and God forbid it gets reduced to someone paying two dollars for a song. I think it sucks.

You guys have a strong online following, though, and there are a lot of live bootlegs on the Web. I don’t want to say it’s Grateful Dead-like, but…

No, man, that’s totally what it is. They follow us around and they tape every gig and post the set lists. We encourage [live mp3 posting] to a certain extent, but there’s an aesthetic to it that I just don’t like. First of all, I don’t like listening to music in front of my computer. When I listen to music, I’m like everybody else. I listen to it in my car, on my stereo. It’s like if you could make a baby in a test-tube and your wife didn’t have to carry it around — yeah, that would make it a lot easier, but it doesn’t seem naturally right. I want people to buy our records when they come out. So as long as [mp3] doesn’t interfere with that… There’s an art to making a good record, with what makes it a complete unit and a successful record, creatively satisfying and aesthetically pleasing to look at and listen to. That’s what mp3 is missing.

But without rambling on, going back to the live record, to me, that was where the Web site was really going to come into its own. We encourage all this taping and trading and whatever, but we were going to get to put out an official live record through the Web site. People were trading all these crappy sounding records, so here’s some really ugly stuff that we’ve had laying around for years. We were going to sell it through the site, it would be in the spirit of all that trading shit but more official. Elektra, being smart I guess, stepped in after giving us permission [to Web-release it] and said, "We listened to it again and changed our minds. We want to put it out." Our reaction was bittersweet. In one way, we were kind of flattered — they liked us enough to out something that was so brown, basically. But on the other hand, it killed our plans. I have no idea what it sold, but if Elektra put it out and it only sold 20 thousand copies or whatever, then why not just let us do it? Once it came out on Elektra, it took on a whole different air. If they had asked us if we wanted to do a live record, we probably would have just done one gig, or something easy like that.

So it was kind of perceived weirdly, too. I read reviews, people’s takes on it, and everyone’s attitude was basically, what is this? I mean, I’m not putting down our record, but it’s funny how our attitude about it changed when it shouldn’t have been any different, whether it’s on Chocodog / Ween Records or Elektra. Nobody really knows the story behind it, though, it’s just a record — it’s an ugly record.

I’ve read that your relationship with Elektra is pretty hands-off, that you guys run your own course and they just release the final product.

There’s a lot of truth to that. It’s not bad, there’s never been animosity, and I don’t wanna say our relationship is dysfunctional, it’s just sorta strange. It’s weird that they haven’t dropped us, but I don’t want to sell ourselves short either. We’re a good band and we deserve to be on a label like that as much as anybody.

But basically, we contact them once every year or two and tell them that we’re ready to start on a new record and could we please have the first part of the advance? They say okay and that’s it. We work and work, then hand in our stuff when we’re done. They don’t really ask us for demos. They’re the company that releases the record and that’s it. And it’s not necessarily to our advantage, the way that we work with them. There’re a lot of benefits of being on a big company that Ween has never reaped because we’ve alienated ourselves. We live in Pennsylvania, in the town we grew up in, we’ve never moved from here. We’re not in New York everyday — I go to the label once every record, if that. I think that when you’ve got a band and a manager in there kissing ass all the time, you get a little more support.

But independence gives you so much more creative and business freedom.

Completely. It’s one of the ironic things about Ween: While I would like to reap the financial benefits of having a really high-selling record just so I can improve my personal lifestyle, we don’t have anything to follow up that kind of an album. I think the pressure on Ricky Martin is a lot more intense than it is on Ween because he has to deliver a hit every time. And I’m not saying that we would never like to have a hit, but we would never sit down and consciously try to make a commercial-sounding song. We just completely change our shit on every record.

Can you define the term "brown" in its relation to Ween?

The whole idea of brown, Ween being the most brown of all bands… The origins of brown go all the way back to this record store I used to work at in the ‘80s called The Princeton Record exchange. The whole thing was started by the owner of the place, this guy Barry, and it’s become this cult thing now. Even my wife uses the word "brown."

Brown is when something is, like, ass-backwards, but it’s not necessarily always a bad thing. I think brown is like Ween showing up to a festival where every band has their techs and their road managers or something, and we don’t even have any guitar strings. That’s what makes Ween what it is — a totally brown operation. And it’s not something you can hide from or pretend you’re not; that makes you even more brown. Brown is like Led Zeppelin bootlegs. You ever listen to Jimmy Page play guitar live, how sloppy it is in a great way? It’s what makes him a better guitar player than, like, Joe Satriani: one is technically better than the other, but Jimmy Page is just brown — sitting there on heroin, drooling on himself, playing so badly, but not. It’s the essence of everything that’s right about rock. Brown is when I’m leaving home on my way to rehearsal and I run out of gas a hundred yards out of my driveway. But it’s not necessarily when something is just fucked up, it’s actually a strength.

It all just seems to work out in the end?

Well no, it’s just one of our strong points. It’s what we have going for us most of all, but at the same time it’s what keeps us from getting anywhere.

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