Ween

Any goofball with a few guitar lessons under his belt and a few more bong hits in his lungs can blather away into a four-track, but it’d be next to impossible to equal the fucked-up genius that is Ween.

With their twisted sense of humor (borderline offensive songs about AIDS, homosexuals, and the mentally ill are the norm) and ability to seemingly master any genre of music (hard rock, country & western, psychedelic pop), Aaron “Gene Ween” Freeman and Mickey “Dean Ween” Melchiondo have carved out a singularly amusing career over the past 15 years. Crude, narcotics-addled early albums such as 1990’s God Ween Satan and 1991’s The Pod set the table with songs that ranged from alternate-universe masterworks or listener-baiting mindfucks (the latter’s “Pollo Asado” is the band ordering a meal from a Mexican restaurant). Ween somehow got signed to Elektra in time for 1992’s Pure Guava, highlighted by the insanity inducing “Little Birdy” and the helium-voiced “Push Th' Little Daisies.”

From there, it was one triumph after another: 1994’s pop/soul plate of Chocolate And Cheese, 1996’s straight-up Nashville romp 12 Golden Country Greats, 1997’s nautical-themed, pomp rock powerhouse The Mollusk, and 2000’s mature but masterful White Pepper, the group’s final Elektra album. Ween is also a notoriously must-see live act, a fact documented by 1999’s double-disc Paintin’ The Town Brown and a series of self-released concert sets.

Album reviews

Quebec
Sanctuary (2003)
Nobody makes music quite like Ween. The duo's eighth studio album finds them returing to their wildly experiment roots. Hooray for Boognish!

Live In Toronto Canada
Chocodog (2001)
Reason #537 to love Ween: integrity.

White Pepper
Elektra (2000)
The beauty of the record is that even though listeners already expect Ween to be peculiar, the band's versatility and the strength of their songwriting keeps this one intriguing through dozens of spins.

Paintin' The Town Brown
Elektra (1999)
What can I say? It's loud, it's crazy, it's rock: It's Ween.

The Mollusk (Recommended)
Elektra (1997)
This album's music traverses conceptual territory the way Dracula crosses oceans of time to suck Winona Ryder's neck in Francis Ford Coppola's horrid adapaptation of Bram Stoker's classic re-invention of Eastern European history.

Chocolate And Cheese
Elektra (1994)
Wisely deciding they'd gone as far as they could as a tape-backed two-piece, Dean and Gene assemble a crack band and go to work exploring the range of new options their playing allowed.

The Pod (Recommended)
Shimmy Disc/Elektra (1991)
Describing Ween is difficult, kind of like trying to describe colors to a blind person. Never is this more of an issue than on The Pod.

Interviews

Ween Wonderland
August 25, 2003
Dean and Gene Ween chat up NATN about the making of Quebec and the post-Elektra phase of their gloriously fucked-up career.

White Pepper Time!
September 1, 2000
Dean and Gene Ween go track-by-track with NATN on the White Pepper album.

Concert reviews

May 12, 2000
The Riviera, Chicago, Ill.
The pure rock power of Ween's live show cannot be denied.