Dean and Gene Ween
White Pepper Time!
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Their rabid fanbase is second to none in its zest, their musicianship boggles the mind, and they get to release their wacky albums on a major label. Ween are a real music phenomenon, and on the duo's latest Elektra album, White Pepper, a whole new host of genres are sliced and diced in typically proficient fashion. From the narcotic-tinged tropical fantasy "Bananas And Blow" to the lumbering prog-rock of "The Grobe," the tart, jazzy "Pandy Fackler," and the lighter-waving anthem "Exactly Where I'm At," the new album is another welcome helping of Ween-ness. Dean and Gene Ween, or Mickey Melchiondo and Aaron Freeman to their families, recently chatted track-by-track about White Pepper with NATN Associate Editor Jonathan Cohen.
"Exactly Where I’m At":
GW Well, that song is kinda, I don’t know. That song is kind of incomplete. You’ll notice it just has the two verses, and the drum kit comes in, and that’s it.
NATN: It’s very anthemic when compared to other Ween tracks. Someone hearing it after something from The Pod might not know it was the same band!
GW We just go track by track. With that song, we thought it would sound really cool if it just really kicked in. We were going for like an E.L.O. thing, with a sweeping effect. We just built it up. I wrote the song on acoustic guitar and there’s nothing going on in it. We decided to do everything that was done to that song in the studio. We put a Leslie effect on my voice for the first line, [in] the second line it gets a little clearer, and the third line is crystal clear, and everything has kicked in. We just had fun wasting out at the end with like Robert Fripp stuff.
DW We chose it as the opener just because of the opening line pretty much. There was no other place on the album for it to go. It starts with the line “let’s begin with the past in front / and all the things that you really don’t care about now.” It just seemed obvious that it was the best place to put it. It’s real anthemic. Aaron came to the studio and didn’t really have anything for it. It’s not much of a “song” song, we broke it down into sections and went for a really psychedelic thing with it.
NATN: Is there any kind of statement being made in that first line?
DW I think it more sounds like one [laughs], which is kinda the way we usually do things. Sometimes we’ll hear something and it sounds like it’s really deep. This definitely feels like [a statement].
"Flutes Of Chi":
GW With that song, I was listening a lot to XTC, and you can kind of tell. I wrote that when I was totally into [XTC album] English Settlement and "Yacht Dance." That song just kinda came out of it.
NATN: Does it have a stylistic kinship to some songs on The Mollusk?
GW Yeah, definitely. You know, it’s absolutely connected to The Mollusk in that, it’s what we’re writing after The Mollusk. A lot of this stuff reminds me of things on The Mollusk.
DW It’s really old. Last time we tried to record it was probably right at the end of The Mollusk, I think. We’ve changed the arrangement every time. What actually happened to resurrect it was that it got out on the Internet, an older version. Everyone was saying it was their favorite song, and asking why we didn’t put it on a record, and that it was better than anything. It just kept coming up again and again. We’d get a lot of email about it. We heard it so much from people that we went and listened to it, and realized that the last time we did it, we got pretty close to where we wanted it. It was easy to finish it then.
"Even If You Don’t":
GW That song is inspired by my wife, I must say. I give her credit for that. Not all of the lyrics ring true, but it’s about when we first got married and were trying to assimilate our lives and get our shit together.
DW Aaron got a piano in his house recently, and he wrote a couple of songs on it. That was one of them. That’s kind of unusual for us.
"Bananas And Blow":
GW That was a concept that just came through, something we’ve been playing with for years. We were going to actually go to the Bahamas and charter a boat and take the whole thing way too far. The music was written, and we realized that it would be a great “Bananas And Blow” song.
NATN: Can’t you just imagine it being played unknowingly at a tropical resort?
GW Totally! Totally!
DW It started as a joke. A friend of ours was married to a woman from Ecuador. Her family owned a hotel down there. He had this fantasy of bringing us down to play at the hotel. We were sitting around talking, we were like, “we’ll just live on bananas and blow.” We started fucking cracking up. And I think the title, well, we always had this idea of going to Ecuador or somewhere really third world and making our “tropical” EP -- a five song EP called Bananas And Blow. Side two would be all that song, 20 minutes long. Aaron had the bad cheesy keyboard patch for the intro. We heard that and started laughing. I wrote the lyrics and the music, basically, once we had the bad steel drum sound.
"Stroker Ace":
GW It pretty much speaks for itself. It just happened to be a movie from the ‘70s. It absolutely has a bit of Moistboyz in there. It’s Mickey’s masterpiece. That’s his rhythm, you know.
DW "Stroker Ace." I don’t know. I wrote that one. I was just looking for an excuse to use the words Dick Trickle. Somebody had to. It’s got that stock car racing feel to it. It’s a guilty pleasure song, a really cheap, good, fast punk rock tune or something. It’s got the boogie groove.
"Ice Castles":
NATN: This song reminds me of the warped pitch of “Little Birdy.”
GW Me too. It reminds me of that. We got an SPX90 that does a great warble of pitch that is totally evil. We just ran the entire mix through it -- it was a normal song once. We had our keyboard player Glen play that cool harpsichord in the background. You hear what we call the “anal beads” the second time around. On all of our records, we usually have an instrumental. It’s kind of a tradition.
NATN: My friends and I were driving in France with one of their fathers a few years back. It was kinda a rainy, dreary day, and we had “Little Birdy” playing in the car. My friend’s dad actually asked us to turn it off because it was giving him a headache.
GW That’s awesome. [Laughs] That actually happened with Oliver Stone when they were filming “Natural Born Killers.” There was a scene in there that they left out, where Woody Harrelson’s character attacks a judge with a pencil and carves his eye out. Oliver Stone was going to use “Little Birdy” for that scene. The story is that he kept playing it over and over while he was trying to draw out storyboards, and Harrelson apparently went insane and said “I’m going to leave the movie unless you turn off ‘Little Birdy’.” I believe that’s true, too!
DW “Ice Castles” was called “The Baroque Jam” for a long time. The songs for this record were written in three different sittings. Aaron and I rented a house up in Maine and wrote a lot of the tunes. Then we took off for like two months, and rented the house that we did The Mollusk in, and wrote a bunch there. The final batch was written at our manager’s studio in New Jersey. So anyway, “The Baroque Jam” was I think the first thing we did back at the Mollusk house. I wrote it on ukelele, if you can believe that. I kinda always envisioned it as warped.
"Back To Basom":
GW There’s a lot of gibberish on this record, but it all kind of ties together somehow. Basom is an element or a place.
DW It’s cool. I love that tune. I’m not really sure. We had to write a song for the “X-Files” soundtrack, and Aaron wrote one called “The Beacon Light” that was sorta reflecting on the idea of space and alien life. I don’t know if he was conscious of it. “Back To Basom” is just stream of consciousness lyrics, now that I think about it. As long as the lyrics sound good, it’s not so important what you’re saying.
"The Grobe":
GW It’s just a fuckin’ nightmare. It’s not anything in particular. It’s just a feeling.
DW I can’t even remember how we did that. All the singing is through a Leslie speaker. Aaron definitely wrote the lyrics for that, for sure.
"Pandy Fackler":
NATN: In earlier days, a song like this could have turned a lot more vulgar. But there’s some restraint there that’s kind of novel.
GW Right, well, “sucking dicks under the promenade..” -- that could be pretty offensive.
NATN: But it’s sung so tenderly!
GW I know, I know! We say that live. It’s about a slightly retarded girl who tends to get taken advantage of. She’s trying as hard as she can, but in this rough and tumble world, you know, the cards don’t play out quite right.
DW I think all of our records have a lot of characters like that. I got it in my head -- that song -- when, to break up the boredom in the year after The Mollusk tour, I started taking jazz guitar lessons to learn how to play standards. I got bored with it really quickly, but I think that song is kinda what I got out of it. It has a real Steely Dan feel to it. It’s so offensive I don’t even want to tell you what it’s really about, unless Aaron already did. It’s about falling in love with a girl who is kinda a mutated prostitute, who does tricks under the boardwalk [he sings the lyrics]. You won’t get the lyrics with this record. We’re not putting them in there. We’ll probably put them up on our website or something.
NATN: The last three tracks are a bit more straightforward. Any comments on “Stay Forever,” “Falling Out,” and “She’s Your Baby?”
GW They’re all just songs that we’re writing at this point. I don’t know what to say about them. They’re just songs.
DW “Stay Forever” was written.. well, when we were done with The Mollusk, we felt it was one song short, and it was sort of, “let’s write!” We kinda decided, “well fuck it. We’ll just leave it the way it is.” The whole record was done and mixed, but Aaron had the chorus to “Stay Forever.” We did it at my house on the four track. It kinda sucked, but I always liked it. We thought, “let’s just play it like its a Beatles song.” We went up to Maine, and I guess you could call it the first song written for this record. I’d always wanted to redo it, so I just played a straight 4/4 beat on top of it and said, “let’s just make it sound like George Harrison.” It sounds exactly like him. We changed some of the words and just did it. It’s just a good love song.
“Falling Out” is a really nasty one -- kinda mean. We brought back our friend from 12 Golden Country Greats, Stu Basore, who plays pedal steel on “Pandy Fackler,” “Stay Forever,” and “Falling Out.” It’s just a mean song about relationships falling apart.
“She’s Your Baby,” well, I don’t really know if Aaron is singing about his daughter or not. What did he say? I never really asked him what the fuck he was talking about. It’s in 3/4 time, like the whole Mollusk record. I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. I never bothered to ask him.
JONATHAN COHEN | Jonathan Cohen co-created Nude As The News with his Indiana University mates Troy Carpenter and Ben French. When not traversing the globe for business and pleasure, he holds down the fort as a senior editor for Billboard in New York. Stop him and he just may ask, "what for lunch?"