Ween - The Brown Band

Behind every great band there's invariably a great weapon, whether it's an insane voice, a special talent for mastering some instrument, or a gift for songwriting. Ween are certainly no exception, but in their case we're not talking about Gener's wide-ranging vocals, nor Deaner's gargantuan guitar work, but rather a simple fantastical talisman that has always accompanied them, in the studio and on stage: Boognish, the funny stylized demon that appeared to them on an acid trip when they were still pimply teenagers, and who went on to feature in their tour stage sets, on the header of one of their early demos and on the covers of almost all their live albums, as well as the breakthrough God Ween Satan, but above all in a delightful cameo on the unsettling Chocolate And Cheese. Boognish is almost like a third founding member of the band, the embodiment of its untamable spirit and its naïveté, an accessory but trusted presence, and also an excellent marketing gimmick for building loyalty.

Active for over thirty years, fake brothers Dean and Gene Ween are a genuine institution for America's alternative scene, as well as the acknowledged heirs to Zappa's philosophy. Anyone who knows them should be well aware that, as extremists who defy any label that could stick forever, they remain one of the few true cult bands still active today, one of those sprawling, elusive groups you either love or hate without reservation. Every Ween record can be read as a crash course in American musical culture, an exploration played out through ironic parodic deconstruction, as if mocking the shiny but fake orthodoxy of pop, first desecrated by an irrepressible taste for farce (and sonic terrorism), and then, in their mature years, by sublime genre forgeries, increasingly redundant and hyperrealist explorations, yet always masterful. As guileless as humorists like They Might Be Giants, as sensual as Prince, as foul-mouthed and abrasive as the most ragged punk band, but also genuine masters of eclecticism, they've described themselves as "the children of Bugs Bunny and the worst of American TV", as if to convince us there was nothing serious at all about their eccentric mission. The masterpieces born in the second half of the Nineties, however, tell a different story.

A Caress Wrapped in a Boognish

Schoolmates and partners in excess for some time in the suburb of New Hope, Pennsylvania, Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo founded Ween while still fourteen years old, in 1984, adopting the fictitious identities of brothers Gene and Dean Ween (or Gener and Deaner), much as the Ramones had done a decade earlier. The former grew up devouring his father's psychedelic rock records and shows a genuine passion for synth-pop-leaning new wave, while the latter has the soul of a punk rocker through and through.

Their tastes might seem irreconcilable, yet a shared devotion to Prince brought them together, pushing them to seek out a common musical language. Over the following five years they spend entire days locked up at home recording whatever comes into their heads, then gathering the least unpresentable junk onto seven self-produced demo tapes – "Mrs. Slack", "Erica Peterson's Flaming Crib Death", "The Crucial Squeegie Lip", "Kim Tulio", "Axis: Bold As Boognish", "Prime 5" and "Synthetic Socks" (this last one a Freeman solo effort) – nowadays hard to find even online, but, truth be told, pretty much unlistenable: music designed, by their own later admission, to sound deliberately hard to stomach, recorded on a four-track with nothing but the pre-recorded rhythm tracks of a Digital Audio Tape for accompaniment, destined to remain their faithful companion for a long time to come.

Although the band originally consisted of just Gene (vocals, rhythm guitar) and Dean (lead guitar and backing vocals), during its long embryonic phase it wasn't unusual for the lineup to expand to include other, more or less improvised, musicians: at their first official performance, a talent show organized by the typing school they attended in 1986, they were joined by friends Chris Williams (then known as Mean Ween) on bass and Karl Weimer on drums, while their first real shows as "The Ween" (a name the duo coined by combining the slang term "wuss" with the unambiguous "penis") featured the rhythm section of Regressive Aid as well as that of the then-emerging Rollins Band, Andrew Weiss and Sim Cain. During this period, toward the end of the Eighties, Freeman and Melchiondo made ends meet working as a gas station attendant and an employee at a Mexican fast-food joint respectively, while by night they became regulars at a local club, City Gardens in nearby Trenton, New Jersey, where they watched Minutemen, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Husker Du, Replacements, Sonic Youth, Pogues, Meat Puppets and many, many others play live.

Their friendship with the club owner, a DJ at a local alternative radio station, allowed the pair to meet many musicians, interview them for their school newspaper, or simply help out with set-up and lighting. The next step saw them perform on that very stage on no fewer than fifty occasions, opening for the big names passing through, from the Butthole Surfers to the Ramones, from Killing Joke to Fugazi, from They Might Be Giants to Gwar, as well as the aforementioned Henry Rollins and co.: a truly unusual apprenticeship for a couple of young freaks, but still small potatoes compared to what fate had in store for them. One of these shows was attended by a talent scout from Twin/Tone, the Minneapolis label that had recently launched, besides the already-mentioned Replacements, Soul Asylum, Jayhawks and Babes In Toyland. Dave Ayers – that was his name – was there to sign the headline act of the night, Skunk, but by the end of the evening the contract was signed not with them but with the opening band, Ween, and the guy's enthusiasm was such that he offered to become the lads' manager.

The first real album by the then nineteen-year-old twin tricksters from New Hope came out in January 1990, with their friend Weiss (who had already released several of the old tapes on his own Birdo'Prey label) as producer. Titled God Ween Satan: The Oneness, it featured on its cover a portrait of their beloved little monster Boognish and amounted to a kind of revised and corrected Best Of the material already released in rough-and-ready form. Frothing, furious, punk and just filthy enough, Ween arrived with a collection of nearly thirty blistering sonic snapshots, a survey of all the music these troublemakers had grown up on over the previous raw but frantic five years, from Minutemen to Husker Du, by way of Zappa and the Mothers ("Tick").

In this melting pot there's an abundance of assorted weirdness, delightful over-the-top tex-mex detours (which we'd call Tarantino-esque today), rancid hard-rock impressions ("Fat Lenny"), hysterical duets, drunken bravado, lo-fi demented noise ("Licking The Palm For Guava"), bloated pocket-sized freakouts somewhere between psych and space-rock ("Mushroom Festival In Hell"), grotesque caricatures, curious interference straight out of the Sonic Youth playbook ("Nan"), rigorously vinegary excursions ("I Gots A Weasel"), even the broken lines of contemporaries Primus ("I'm In The Mood To Move") or noisy, almost grunge rampages ("Cold And Wet"), confirming a band perfectly in tune with its times.

Standouts include the over nine minutes of the blissful jam "Nicole", with its mockery of soft-rock romanticism filtered through an almost reggae register, and the equally shapeless funk interlude of "L.M.L.Y.P." (basically a mash-up of "Shockadelica" and "Alphabet St."), bastardized with swaggering rap posturing under a crude acronym. But the catalogue of eccentricities keeps expanding right to the end, with grim, boneless, even slightly tedious boogie ("Blackjack") or crystalline electroacoustic ballads, clearly placed there with parodic intent ("Squelch The Weasel").

The emphasis on the farcical, goofball register is more than pronounced, but it's also the quite aggressive attitude that makes an impact on an album that's utterly unhinged, to say the least. The duo's happily anarchic nature comes through best in more hysterical, scorched tracks like "Bumblebee" or "Common Bitch", while elsewhere – "Don't Laugh, I Love You", the sturdy visionary trip "Marble Tulip Juicy Tree" – the trash-pop with which Gene and Dean would wreak havoc in years to come starts to emerge. If their disposition is still scruffy and undermined by systematic disorder, their incredible shapeshifting streak is already visible and bodes well. It's precisely their deft handling of musical languages that strikes the listener. This holds true both when our heroes look back unreservedly to the past, as in the lovably irreverent goofing-around of "Up On The Hill", between doo-wop and delta blues, and when their revivalist recipe lends itself to further recycling by future generations: it's hard to imagine that the gloriously overexposed gem "Birthday Boy" or the filthy garage of "Old Queen Cole" didn't delight Jay Reatard and Ty Segall in relatively recent times.

If we really want to find a flaw, we could say that God Ween Satan: The Oneness pays the price for what is also one of its greatest strengths, its excessive fragmentation, although genuine weirdness, energy and enthusiasm remain considerable compensation on the other side of the scale. Even nearly three decades on, the result still holds up pretty impressively, especially considering the age of the two American troublemakers at the time.

1990 saw Ween performing far and wide across the States, and for the first time on this side of the Atlantic too. Kramer offered them a spot on his Shimmy-Disc roster, and it was with this very label that a new album saw the light of day the following September. Recorded once again by Andrew Weiss on a Tascam four-track, under the constant influence of tryptamines and other psychotropic substances (not least, it seems, Scotchgard, a spray product for treating carpets), The Pod owes its title to the nickname the two gave to the small apartment in Solebury, Pennsylvania, which they shared at the time along with their cat Mandee. The cover, which parodies that of "Best Of Leonard Cohen" from 1975 – featuring friend Mean Ween complete with a mask for inhaling nitrous oxide – says it all about the tone of this thoroughly unhinged collection.

In both form and substance, the sophomore effort would seem to want to retrace its predecessor's steps at the start, but the tipsy opener "Strap On That Jammy Pac", with Freeman slurring a sordid mantra, turns out in hindsight to be a misleading impression. The production remains deliberately coarse and flickering, in the vein of the earliest Beck ("She Fucks Me", "Dr. Rock"), put together with a spirit that's as bristly as it is unwilling to primp things up. The duo's prolonged dishevelment keeps churning out a forge of ideas often mixed together haphazardly, but this time the amateurish side of the model seems pushed even further, with results that are at times downright irritating. The absence of a rhythm section turns from a necessary virtue into an affectation, and the muddied (and still particularly acidic) sound certainly doesn't help in appreciating these compositions, buried perhaps beyond what's reasonable, lacking direction, where the satirical intent never rises above pure tomfoolery.

A sense of general confusion is not only pursued but sought after with self-destructive intent, as are certain psychotic poses à-la Flaming Lips, while the happy caricature-like quality of the debut is replaced by jokes that fall flat and drag on too long (emblematic is the dazed spoken word of "Pollo Asado", with Gener recounting a conversation he had with a customer back when he worked at El Taco Loco). If the pace seems slowed down, as if mimicking the torpor offered by improvised or cheap drugs, here and there you still catch glimpses of a worn-out, hallucinated epic quality, and the sickly tone of tracks like "Sorry Charlie" remains a fairly enjoyable expressive peculiarity.

"Captain Fantasy" marks something of a comeback, because it dresses Bowie-brand glam in garage clothing, with decent personality. "Demon Sweat" helps set a softer, funkier mood that winks at their beloved Prince but doesn't disavow the bloodless, sickly imprint of the rest. "Awesome Sound", on the other hand, will delight those semiologists of collage known as Mr. Hansen and Jon Spencer's Blues Explosion, stirring up the murk of old Black music clichés. On average the songs have gotten longer but come out, if anything, even more tattered and elusive. "Can U Taste The Waste?" is a telling title, and the filthy, slapdash demo-tape packaging is an unmistakable statement of intent, between damp innuendo and combat nonsense. Even in the rare cases where the song structures seem more conventional, the atmosphere remains dark and mockingly elusive, without denying shelter to the occasional alluring guitar flourish. Once you take in the bigger picture, you can make out the design and the poetry of an album that's less harebrained than it seems, certainly far more cohesive than its uncontainable predecessor, and one that manages – no small feat – to sound dense and visionary at the same time (see the paradoxical hypnagogic premonitions of "Mononucleosis").

Grotesquely deformed, the voices sketch genuine stoner elegies that, in the end, reveal a kind of addled beauty of their own, an ideal and perfect sonic translation of the Dickian paranoia of "A Scanner Darkly" (if that helps give you an idea). As exceptions, there's a leftover hard-rock swagger from old material ("Sketches Of Winkle"), a toxic country nursery rhyme that lets a pale sun filter into this closed, smoke-saturated room ("Oh My Dear"), a new sticky, irresistible-in-its-own-way easy-listening earworm ("Pork Roll, Eggs And Cheese"), and a fittingly autistic farewell, corroded by reverb and filth, that recalls early Mercury Rev.

A "brown Band" on Warner Bros

Against what would seem like a plausible prediction today, The Pod turns out to be quite well-received by critics and, even more incredibly, lands Ween a deal with Elektra. The following two years are spent largely touring the United States, although the week spent in the UK at the start of 1992 remains memorable, with former Skunk drummer Claude Coleman Jr. and friend Kramer on bass along for the ride. In those same days, Melchiondo and Freeman record a handful of tracks live for John Peel's show on the BBC.

Meanwhile the new record is nearly finished and sees the light of day in November of that same year. It's called Pure Guava and, despite a partial cleanup of the excesses, it can't be said to betray the Ween spirit or aesthetic – something the band likes to describe with the adjective "brown" – as they kick off their new major-label era. The opening tracks show continuity with the previous record, caught somewhere between submerged and narcotic, but with a greater melodic bent and a more obliquely pop imprint. The weirdness remains fairly galloping, the tone playful and endearingly childish, while the then-debuting Beck remains, alongside the obvious Zappa and Captain Beefheart, among the chief expressive touchstones, though he represents more of an unwitting kindred spirit than an actual point of reference.

The troublemakers keep lulling the game to sleep between Robert Smith-style à-la whispers ("Tender Situation") and minimal songwriting, undoubtedly unburdened of quite a few tangles and sharper than in the past, but they also allow themselves a few delicate extra flourishes, adding a touch of color to the mix. The slurred vocals stand as an unmistakable trademark, but the lively messing-around in the background (always stamped by the Digital Audio Tape) is also starting to become a defining trait, emblematic of pure, unadulterated nonchalance.

What takes shape, then, is a livelier, more fun album, still obviously devoid of anything resembling a hit (though "Push Th' Little Daisies", often played on MTV's "Beavis & Butt-Head", comes close) yet conceived far better than anything released before, enriched by the crooked decorations of Dean's guitar in a climate of placid relaxation. The record opportunistically dusts off a catalogue of typically-'80s eccentricities, from beloved Prince to the poppiest new wave, and puts it to very convincing use.

If "Reggaejunkiejew", for instance, captures very well the perspective of an exoticism pushed to the point of paradox by its own hybridizations, gone haywire like mayonnaise, omnivorous and endlessly mutating, the fake-tropicalist interlude of the already-mentioned single's charming estrogen-fuelled bossa comes off phenomenally, rediscovering scraps of the debut's joyous hysteria, while the banner of the demented is carried by flash-paper, utterly senseless episodes like "Pumpin' 4 The Man". Obviously the duo's crazy shape-shifting also devours plenty of other sonic material, from scrappy anarchic blues poetry ("Touch My Toother") to deliberately deviant country ("I Saw Gener Crying In His Sleep"), and from sophisticated detours built on languid romantic clichés (the gem "Sarah") to the bare minimum of frothy lo-fi junk ("Poop Ship Destroyer").

The choice of a less claustrophobic, less tormented mood pays off for Ween, and even the rare episodes that might recall The Pod come out steeped in an irony that's almost cathartic ("Flies On My Dick", sung by friend Guy Heller) and a close relative of the equally filthy, libertine humor of the aforementioned Primus. But by now it's clear the usual setup has become too tight for the duo, and the most eloquent confirmation of this can only be, at the start of 1994, the arrival of Coleman Jr. and Weiss as official drummer and bassist, the turning point that transforms Ween from a two-man joke into a full-fledged band.

Dedicated to the memory of the famous actor John Candy (who passed away in those same months) and guitarist Eddie Hazel, Chocolate And Cheese is the band's second record to come out on Elektra and the first to be recorded, by the usual Weiss, in a studio worthy of the name. Not even two years have passed, but the leap forward from the still-enjoyable Pure Guava seems striking. Now swollen with progressive aspirations, now abstract and devoted to spacey rarefaction, now gloriously trashy and over-the-top, the guitars enchant with their eclecticism and effects work, while the contributions of the new recruits prove no less crucial, genuinely decisive in sparking the change of pace the band needed. There's a new confidence on display, and when called for, the band — finally extroverted — doesn't shy away from flexing its muscles with a somewhat cocky, macho rock sound, coming across surprisingly grown-up, even as the whole enterprise remains devoted to farce. This much is made clear by the unsettling cover art, a witty reworking of the Commodores' "All The Great Hits", while tracks like "Spinal Meningitis" and "The HIV Song" are downright chilling, perhaps among the grimmest, most disturbing songs ever recorded, sublime and deceitful low blows that perfectly frame their authors' sadistic idiocy behind a setup that's as pop (in the way only a kids' TV carousel can be) as it is macabre and, by design, bordering on bad taste.

In a record that is anyway anything but loud or messy, Ween loosen the reins on their chameleon-like nature and also prove exceptionally precise stylistically, with special praise for Aaron as a vocalist, truly excellent in his velvety falsettos. While the possessed, wicked boogie of "I Can't Put My Finger On It" confirms their credentials as top-tier freaks, completely at ease in a rougher, more venomous guise, delicacy and elegance brand the album just as deeply, from the soft '70s soul evocations of "Freedom Of '76", to unassuming, intimate ballads redolent of Latin America ("Buenas Tardes Amigo", inspired by "Sesame Street"!), to radiant, caressing quickies ("What Deaner Was Talking About"), the vintage crooning of "Drifter In The Dark", and above all the magnetic easy-listening of the irresistible "Roses Are Free".

Chocolate And Cheese thus comes across as a worldly, sparkling record, one that invites the listener to become complicit in its charming misdeeds as classy forgers, while also allowing for sharper, more acidic detours: the purple twilight in the decadent coda of "A Tear For Eddie", the Santana-style à-la earworm "Voodoo Lady", the almost philologically precise parody of circa-1967 Beatles in "Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony", or the subtle warping of the grain in "Baby Bitch", another killer melody ahead of the psychedelic revival still to come. The only concession to the past from the two jokers is the hallucinated gag "Joppa Road", which could easily pass for an outtake from Pure Guava.

Even a couple of the music videos made (one even by Spike Jonze) to accompany tracks from this first career masterpiece were featured in more than one episode of "Beavis & Butt-Head", helping fuel Ween's irreverent reputation and their (more or less) underground cult status, which also benefited somewhat from their delightful appearance in the "Saturday Night Live"-branded film "It's Pat", which was, incidentally, a resounding commercial flop.

During this same period, Gener and Deaner also put together a new side project with the acclaimed Japanese rock band Boredoms: the supergroup is called Z-Rock Hawaii and releases a self-titled album, which comes out on Nipp Guitar only two years later. As if that weren't enough, Melchiondo launches the brand-new outfit Moistboyz with Guy Heller of False Front, an (eminently enjoyable) guided tour through the most hackneyed clichés of metal and stoner music, offered up by true connoisseurs, once again under the guise of a fake pair of brothers (Mickey and Dickey Moist). The Ep and album of 1995-96 will be followed by three further records, rigorously titled with sequential numbers, in 2002, 2005 and 2013.

The aquatic adventures of Gener and Deaner

While preparing their next album, Freeman and Melchiondo realize they have set aside a good amount of material for a genre collection inspired by the golden age of the Nashville sound. Temporarily shelving their main project and putting their guitars back in their cases, the two decide to hire an experienced producer, Ben Vaughn, and to relocate to the Tennessee capital itself to record a concept album together with a sizeable ensemble of local musicians – The Shit Creek Boys – as well as the gospel quartet the Jordanaires, famous for having backed Elvis Presley live and in the studio for over fifteen years.

An exceedingly placid pace, crystal-clear production, meticulous arrangements, flawless choruses and harmonies, and a Freeman who is nothing short of impeccably courteous broadly sketch out Ween's country record, shaped according to aesthetic traits that could hardly be more traditionalist, from the instrumentation to the formula, from the control to the melodic approach.

The spin-off 12 Golden Country Greats foreshadows an operation that, running counter to the more recent trends in the alternative take on the genre, comes across as thoroughly reactionary. In truth, Ween couldn't care less about the good intentions of those bands that paved the way for an intense work of recoding, because they are clearly aiming for a wide-ranging, elegant, polished tribute, even quite pleasant at times (the fizzy “Japanese Country”), with Melchiondo setting aside his own solo virtuosity to give the spotlight, for once, to that delicately wielded by others – on, of all things, the pedal steel.

The work on the atmospheres proves not only sublime (just listen to the nimble dialogue between mandolin and resonator guitar on “Help Me Scrape The Mucus Off My Brain”) but also sincere, confirming that this isn't just another freak-show joke, but rather an act of unconditional love for a world that, by its very nature, is impervious to revision and to the passing of time and trends. One thus finds oneself suddenly swept into a rustic country fair of frenzied fiddles and driving banjo, without ever lapsing into ritual caricature (“Pretty Girl”), or else into a more tormented, singer-songwriter-like mood (“Fluffy”), deeper in scope, as if embracing the everyday epic of the characters from an extraordinary western novel like “Lonesome Dove” (“You Were The Fool”), or playing the part of a seasoned country crooner (“Powder Blue”).

Then again, of course, Ween wouldn't be Ween if they didn't give at least a little rein to their eccentric streak, which explains the goofy twist smuggled into the single “Piss Up A Rope”, an almost power-pop number complete with a tart little solo, or the foray into ragtime territory of “Mister Richard Smoker”. The true farcical gem, however, remains the sly joke of the title itself, originally conceived for a bigger collection (the “12” of the title) but kept even after the tracklist was trimmed (the tribute “So Long, Jerry” to the late Jerry Garcia, and “Sweet Texas Fire”, were the cuts, later salvaged as B-sides).

After a tour featuring just Gene and Dean (plus the trusty Digital Audio Tape) supporting Foo Fighters, Ween's 1996 closes with a series of shows alongside the Shit Creek Boys. The following April, bassist Dave Dreiwitz and keyboardist Glenn McClelland join the band full-time, now a quintet, a line-up that will never change again. The same musicians, together with the usual Andrew Weiss, complete the recording of the American outfit's sixth official album, the fourth released by Elektra, which twenty years on remains the most acclaimed by both critics and fans. Opened by the farcical euphoria of the lopsided “I'm Dancing In The Show Tonight”, but also by the caressing warmth of a self-titled ballad specifically devised to mimic the hazy luminosity of the underwater world, The Mollusk is a kaleidoscopic anthology of psychedelic vignettes entrusted exclusively to the power of imagination. The result, a work that, metaphors aside, can genuinely be called submerged and brimming with pop inventions and oblique melodies worthy of a Stephin Merritt (just listen to the wistful carousel of “Polka Dot Tail”), comes across as lush, almost overgrown. Without hesitation, the band elects this bizarre musical territory as its own ideal comfort zone and splashes about in the vivid, multicoloured abyss with a remarkably fitting aquatic sound, made up of mother-of-pearl reverb, spongy rhythms and vocals filtered as if through masks and snorkels.

The grotesque, visionary incarnation thus tends to win out. If the boogie of the electric eel is exactly what it promises – a bleak animation rising from oceanic darkness, the trap of a predatory monster that owes everything to its own deceptive glimmers – then “The Blarney Stone” is a scurrilous sea shanty delivered in a fittingly deep baritone à la Tom Waits, reviving the wonders of a seafaring imagery that is clearly among the duo's favourite sources of inspiration in their mad novel-like saga, while “I'll Be Your Jonny On The Spot” is an alien punk track that sounds as though played by claws, stirring up the murky depths of the old The Pod, churning the seabed almost as if to disown the implicit repression carried out by the records that followed it.

The more purely playful streak is preserved by a wonderfully colourful, innocent instrumental that looks like a child's stylized themed drawing, “Pink Eye On My Leg”, just a step away from the Primus-style tomfoolery of “Waving My Dick In The Wind”, in keeping with the record's placidly jovial mood, with the lightness of a genuinely uncontaminated gaze, no longer provocation for provocation's sake as in the past: even minor episodes like these contribute to the grandeur of the fresco.

When they play the delicacy card (“Its Gonna Be Alright”, the fatalistic elegy “Cold Blows The Wind”, which has the charm of Nick Cave's “Murder Ballads”), Ween hit the mark just as effectively. Like book illustrators from a century ago, Gene and Dean paint reality in watercolour with the grace of a clear, gentle storytelling, bringing out a fine-grained decorativeness capable of sidestepping the pitfalls of the very sonic racket critics have always been inclined to associate them with.

“Buckingham Green”, by contrast, has the treacherous roughness of a cliff face, softened by seaweed and anemones but still sharp-edged, while “Ocean Man” instead reveals the candour of a playful, childlike easy-listening tune, the wonder of a childhood that is no longer a stoner's fever dream but a full dive into nostalgia. The Mollusk is a small alt-rock triumph, the record most cherished by its own creators but also by other admirers: the creator of the animated series “SpongeBob”, Steven Hillenburg, would call it a huge source of inspiration and insisted on including “Ocean Man” in the 2004 film adaptation, along with other tracks used in various episodes of the show.

Between 1997 and 1998 Ween are often busy on the road, but still find the opportunity to lend a couple of unreleased tracks to the irreverent writing duo Trey Parker and Matt Stone, one for the soundtrack of the film “Orgazmo” and one for the second season of the hugely popular “South Park”.

The following year, clearly ahead of the curve, they are perhaps among the first artists to make an official bootleg (albeit made up of unreleased material) available on their own website: it's called Craters Of The Sac, its cover features a close-up photo of Melchiondo's scrotum, and it's freely downloadable in Mp3 format at no cost.

“Put The Coke On My Dick” dusts off the loud, demented histrionics of their early days, still managing to be plenty abrasive, while “Makin' Love In The Gravy” brings back The Pod's stoner drawl in a thoroughly rotten blues. What prevails almost everywhere is the ironic “brown” register the band has always used to label its most excessive or ramshackle musical productions, there to tickle the fans: among these are the lo-fi-to-the-extreme outburst of “All That's Gold Will Turn To Black”, the garage-punk filth, lousy beyond words and wrapped in a shoddy sleeve (worthy of grimy outsiders like Canada's Spaceshits), of “Suckin' Blood From The Devil's Dick”, the echoes of the first, grotesque, spineless Beck Hansen (“Big Fat Fuck”), the shapeless hard-rock transfiguration of “How High Can You Fly”, and even the Metallica parody “The Pawns Of War”, well executed but good mostly as a footnote for completists. While the new, implicit yet essential tribute to the genius of Prince on “Monique The Freak” is genuinely admirable, with its sublime taste for cross-pollination and its headlong energy, the fifth chapter of the “The Stallion” saga is among the less thrilling moments: this rummaging through the trash after having already released at least a couple of masterpiece albums amounts to an exercise in completism that's interesting in its own right, but inevitably diminishes the value of their art.

Masters of eclecticism

Craters Of The Sac is the last straw in the already shaky relationship with Elektra, a stung reaction to the major label's decision to release the retrospective live album "Paintin' The Town Brown", which, in the quintet's intentions, was meant to be the first release for their own label, Chocodog. Their seventh studio album, in any case, is essentially finished, and the partnership with the Warner subsidiary is confirmed one last time. Produced, surprisingly, by Chris Shaw, White Pepper comes out in May 2000 and, from its very title, presents itself as an affectionate tribute to the inventions of the Fab Four during 1967-68.

The leaden rhythms of the opener "Exactly Where I'm At" introduce a track with marked psychedelic and spatial overtones, bearing curious similarities to the magnificent Tripping Daisy, already on their last legs in those same months. The sound has grown rounder, deeper, and doesn't skimp on electric flourishes. Nineties alternative rock is chewed up and spat back out in an album that announces itself as, above all, a heartfelt tribute: to gentle, progressive college-rock with "Stay Forever", to Beatles-style power-pop with "Falling Out", and with the caress of "She's Your Baby" to a more seasoned soft-rock, confirming the gentler new direction of the band. For once there's no smirking mockery, but rather sincere, moved participation in an entire scene destined to close its doors in rather sad fashion. So the record sounds a bit like their own personal "The Last Picture Show", without this meaning Ween have chosen to shut themselves away in the self-contained contemplation of revivalism and have given up looking forward (even though the circle of their research is, in fact, already closed, and has been for a while).

The postcard Caribbean of "Bananas And Blow" raises the stakes with a carefree holiday facade that nonetheless doesn't silence bitterness and melancholy, while "Flutes Of Chi" co-signs a sound climate that leans lush, like a prog-rock forest that's nonetheless thoroughly agile. Aaron shows himself as persuasive and intimate as he rarely has been, and the exoticism guaranteed by details like the sitar remains, in any case, a fairly non-invasive option compared to the welcoming, friendly tone the American outfit has chosen to impose (one that Dean's roaring guitars help stoke further). The impression of an album that's robust and sweet at the same time is corroborated by a single like "Even If You Don't", built on more than solid foundations (with a video directed by the Parker & Stone duo): the band's usual mugging is kept on a leash, as are the overly scattered digressions, to shape a work that's polished and impeccable in its production, and undoubtedly less explosive but still intriguing, even in its colorful discipline.

Then, of course, on this occasion too the list of exceptions tends to grow boundless. In "Back To Basom" Aaron photocopies the million-dollar melodicism of Kiedis's "Californication", and his phony spell turns into a shapeless nightmare that malevolently lulls the unwary listener who's climbed aboard the carousel. "Stroker Ace" is an unexpected, almost metal hard-rock lash, as boorishly cocky as ever for the fake Ween brothers, while "The Grobe" has the traits of a thornier, more monolithic episode, emphatic yet commendable, that suggests ambitions somewhere between hardcore-noise and post-rock, only to deny them with the psych gigantism of Melchiondo's guitar work. The duo's weirdness comes knocking forcefully again in the unsettling acid interlude titled "Ice Castles", something the John Dwyer of the moment will surely take notes from, while galloping carefree abandon takes over with the refined, subtly jazzy divertissement (seasoned with a sly spoken-word bit) of "Pandy Fackler", an idle but clearly parodic speculation on the Steely Dan gospel.

Having closed the chapter with Elektra after self-releasing the subsequent "Live In Toronto", Gener and Deaner sign with the independent Sanctuary and indulge in a celebratory mini-tour "for the 25th anniversary" of the old God Ween Satan, which had actually come out just eleven years earlier. In the summer of 2002, a serious car accident sidelines Coleman for a while, forcing him to miss the recording sessions for the imminent Quebec, where he's replaced by John Freese of A Perfect Circle and by Sim Cain. The album hits stores in August of the following year, once again produced by Andrew Weiss.

This time their calling card is a powerful, rough-edged garage romp, but it's really just the latest false trail scattered along the path. It's immediately followed, in fact, by a track emblematically titled "Zoloft", which mimics the foggy happiness of chemical numbness and sets the album's focus on a rather gloomy, downbeat mood, nonetheless sketched with enviable clarity and the right expressive devices: thick, almost muffled sonorities, and a dopey intonation or artificial cheerfulness that the lyrics take care to underscore. Setting aside the triumph of pachydermic jam-band excess on the roaring "Transdermal Celebration", a further exception to the overall design, the troublemakers' gaze remains elusive, while the serenity on offer mostly resembles a broken promise. Shadows crowd the background of an album that's ostentatiously grave and adult, at least by their standards, and which, in Freeman's case, bears the aftermath of a recent divorce. The faint smile has vanished, though a few not-so-funny jokes still find room, see the pure urban-alienation interlude of "So Many People In The Neighborhood", complete with hair-raising metal distortions in its most convulsive moments, or the sublime Tin Pan Alley counterfeit of the frivolous nursery rhyme "Hey There Fancypants".

Glittering guitars in passages of clear traditionalist roots cast the mask of a normalcy, a bourgeois respectability that is about as far from Ween as it gets, and which a handful of unbalancing elements, in the words as much as in the arrangements, promptly expose as a lie. This is a pessimistic, at times desperate record, but Gene and Dean are quite skilled at disguising its emotional undertow behind a scaffolding of fake tranquility, memorable above all in the jewel-like refrain of the superb "Happy Colored Marbles" (in effect a one-way trip into the galaxy of mental distress).

In the second half, the plunge resurfaces into a scenario of ecstatic resignation ("Captain") or dim contemplation ("Alcan Road", with an indelible sense of defeat), as if finally surrendering to madness. Not since The Pod had Ween recorded an album this sick, in the sense of genuinely suffered, not as a formal affectation or a pose. Sadness also peeks through in the passages given over to calm and rigor, as in "Chocolate Town", a kind of bittersweet, enchanting road song, or in the guitar-led ballad "I Don't Want It", caressing and anguished at once, with its blazing dusk giving way to night. Restrained, introspective outings like these, or like "If You Could Save Yourself", expand a catalogue of boundless sonic wonders, no longer carrying the old satirical ulterior motives or swaggering attitude: this is music written with the heart, and it's a bleeding heart. Quebec's number 81 spot on the Billboard chart, the best placement ever for the New Hope outfit, makes clear, however, that theirs will never be a chart-topping heart.

Death and resurrection of a unique band

Between 2004 and 2005, Ween are forced to take a year off from their usual (hyper)active touring schedule so that Freeman can address his serious alcohol dependency. This phase closes with the release of a collection of leftovers written over a span of fifteen years and polished up for the occasion together with trusty Weiss. Shinola Vol. 1 is a small collection of jokes or pleasant stylistic exercises, necessarily uneven but emblematic of the fake brothers' top-shelf art-pop streak. Their soft, impeccably polished procession entertains with superb mastery, enchanting both on a technical level and in terms of sheer visceral pleasure, thanks to a run of caressing suggestions, at once oddball and engaging, that reveal in filigree the candid demon lurking beneath the skin of an outfit far less superficial than it seems ("Transitions", the dark gem "I Fell In Love Today").

If "Did You See Me?" is a magmatic, crepuscular, rarefied ballad à la Pink Floyd, with more than one prog ambition loaded in the chamber, the bare-bones spoken delivery of "Israel" plays between old-TV soul and subtle satirical scorn with the usual turgid elegance, while on "The Rift" the pair amuse themselves parodying some martial darkwave animation, at least in its Depeche Mode-like pose, though spoiled by the band's irrepressible pop nature, and with "Boys Club" they choose to send us an exotic postcard that showcases their most brazenly weird and imitative streak. A trio of titles returns from Craters Of The Sac, with special mention for the punchier version of "Monique The Freak", which here finds an ideal companion in the rough power-pop gem "Gabrielle".

Overall, inventiveness is given free rein and, even if not every idea is fully convincing, the whole comes across as a thoroughly remarkable and intriguing expressive pastiche.

After renting a farm and converting it into a recording studio, the band and Andrew Weiss begin in 2006 to give a polished shape to the flood of demos haphazardly recorded over the previous two years. The result of this work will be the EP "Friends" and, above all, the ninth official chapter of their catalogue, released by Rounder in October 2007. La Cucaracha doesn't betray their by-now well-established formula of unbridled parody, pushing its logic instead to happily parodistic extremes. Like a Mexican feast, the album is not short on spice and bold flavors: excessive, overloaded, wildly colorful, it's a genre blender whose natural effect is to leave the listener dazed. Still, it grows a lot with repeated listens, revealing a precise and unexpected identity of its own. It really does contain everything and then some: Chicano rhythms ("Fiesta"), Phil Spector-style orchestrations ("Sweetheart"), 80s trash-dance ("Friends"), advanced country mimicry straight out of 12 Golden Country Greats ("Learning To Love") and hard-edged machismo ("With My Own Bare Hands"), on top of the usual representation of ethereal ballads, progressive-rock grafts, trademark psychedelia, and so on.

The opening rhythm, marked by trumpet and drums, is a real racket. The pace stays brisk (but never frantic) except in a few tracks in the middle section: "Fruit Man", a strange cross between a reggae mantra and narcotic darkness, and "Spirit Walker", a rip-off of certain kitsch-pop abominations set to a formidably plasticized hippie atmosphere.

Even as they shift registers and styles without missing a beat, the high quality of these new compositions never drops off in any noticeable way. Among the highlights are the funky "Your Party", the obliquely sophisticated pop of "Blue Balloon", the saccharine power-pop of "Shamemaker" — which indulges freely in citations of sixties bubblegum and surf — and above all "Object", a caricature of the typically ingratiating love song, sketched out with the most sadistic of inks. The album's added value lies in the serious intent hiding behind the joke: it's an act of love from these eclectic artists for the musical tradition of their own country (and beyond), a tribute that wouldn't work so well if the two Ween weren't such full-blooded, genuine talents. It's evident in "Lullaby", where Gene's voice comes through pure and touching without the usual filters. And it's just as clear in "Woman & Man", a long jam that starts off slow amid flutes and congas before taking flight thanks to the obligatory solo: it sounds like Santana in his heyday (and far outclasses the Mars Volta on this terrain), but it only works because Dean is, today more than ever, one of the best guitarists in the world.

Once the promotional tour for La Cucaracha wraps up, Melchiondo starts devoting himself more and more to his fishing hobby, while Freeman keeps performing live, either solo or fronting a group put together specifically for the purpose, The Gene Ween Band. To warm up before locking themselves in the studio to work on their tenth album, Ween announce a handful of West Coast dates for early 2011. The first show in Vancouver, however, turns out to be a disaster, with a wasted Freeman left to his own devices onstage by his bandmates in the middle of the performance. Still, the episode doesn't seem to leave any lasting scars, and a few months later Melchiondo makes available as Mp3s, directly on his Facebook page, a double collection of tracks dating back to the 2001-2003 period.

Caesar Demos, as it's titled, is an autumnal collection that gathers all the demo versions of the Quebec tracks alongside a series of excellent unreleased songs from the same sessions, offering a thoroughly complete picture of the American band's intense creative vitality some ten years earlier. Alongside new enchanting gems like "Things You Already Know", with the same simulated lightheartedness of that album, we once again find a myriad of expressive ideas that are rather distant from one another, even though the stylistic and technical babel of the early albums remains a distant memory: amid naive early-Bowie divertissements ("Hello Johnny", "Someday", "Pot Luck"), impromptu returns to the watery sound of The Mollusk (the tender paean of "Eulogy For David Anderson") and languid, whisper-based minimalism ("She Caught My Fancy"), there's also room for more eventful episodes, such as the shapeless rock of "Ohh Vah Lah", the chirping pocket apocalypse of "Love Come Down" (inspired by the events of September 11), the subtly unsettled, Pavement-esque indie-rock of "That Man From The Flatland", the narcotic noise-pop sketch "I'm Wide Open" and even another country doodle, "Oh My Little Country Cottage". While the vignette "Linda, The Sexy Dancer", which expands their gallery of female characters, comes off as charming, the same can't be said for the dedication to "Ambrosia Parsley" in the song of the same name, a tribute to the Shivaree singer that actually speaks the language of Prince.

Mickey's initiative doesn't sit well at all with Aaron, who, on the band's page, calls it "the straw that broke the camel's back", speaking of the breaking of a "sacred bond" and an offense to Boognish. A few months later, upon releasing his solo debut ("Marvelous Cloud", a collection of Rod McKuen covers), he announces that he has left the group, catching his bandmate off guard; Melchiondo will retort that "the idea of leaving is simply ridiculous. This isn't something you can leave, it's a life sentence" — only to then hastily thaw out the Moistboyz and launch a new project under his own name, The Dean Ween Group, with albums released in 2016 and 2018. The flagship band is, to all intents and purposes, disbanded.

During this period Aaron continues to follow addiction recovery programs and work on his own stability, and in 2014 he releases a second solo album, this time under the moniker Freeman, backed by a brand-new band. In late 2015, almost four years after the breakup, three Ween shows are suddenly announced for the following February, followed by numerous others, all exclusively in North America. Melchiondo and Freeman thus go back to playing together under their old aliases, and a mysterious "Shinola Vol. 2" is announced as imminent, though it still hasn't been released. Who knows whether the faithful will get to hear those new outtakes first, or the fateful tenth album under the Ween name...

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