"Ween puts wacky spin on rock sound"

Gene Ween! Spin magazine has just named your band's last album one of the 20 best of the year! How do you feel?

"It's all right," says a drowsy-sounding Gene, half of the way-out rock duo Ween.

Gene Ween's partner and rock 'n' roll "brother," Dean Ween, is sitting nearby in their Florida ho-tel room. But "Gener" is doing all the talking by telephone today. "Deaner" lets it slide.

"He's got nothing to say to you, dude," Gene explains.

But it's all right. In fact, it's totally cool. Gene Ween, Dean Ween - put them together and you have the biggest thing to come out of tiny New Hope, Pa., since Bucks County maple syrup. Арpearing tomorrow at the 9:30 Club, Ween are bringing their strange brew to the masses courtesy of "Pure Guava," (Elektra Records) these guys' first major label release.

Ever since high school, Aaron Freeman (Gene) and Mickey Melchiondo (Dean), both 22, have been hanging out around New Hope and recording pretty much whatever they felt like, a lot of it on a four-track tape player in a dingy apartment space they shared called the Pod.

Inside the Pod, Gene 'n' Dean wrote and recorded cool tunes be-tween bouts of television and Rolling Rock.

The results were "God Ween Satan" (Twin Tone Records) and "The Pod" (Shimmy-Disc Records), the latter honored by alternative-minded Spin as one of the year's best discs.

Gene is grateful to a point. "The whole alternative (scene] doesn't get me excited," he says. "Ween puts psycho-acoustics back into classic rock," Spin pro-claimed, a meaningless statement unless you actually hear the songs.

Asked for a label, Gene says, "classic rock, personally." But Ween is not classic rock of the Van Morrison-Led Zeppelin variety you'd hear on WCXR-FM. It's wacked-out psychedelia with voices and guitars often tweaked, freaked, flanged or compressed for maximum strangeness.

The irony of Ween's landing a major-label deal gets clearer when you spin "Pure Guava," with songs like "Little Birdy," "Touch My Tooter" and "I Saw Gener Cryin' In His Sleep." This is heavy trash-can improvisation. Ween play like they couldn't care less who liked their stuff; they're too busy amusing themselves.

"We do it for our friends that we send our tapes to," Gene says drolly.

Touring is another cool activity, and pretty important for a band seeking what Gene calls "world domination, especially in Japan."

They already own Europe. "We're superstars in Holland," Gene says. "But playing in Eu-rope will never compare to playing in front of 25 people in Mobile, Ala."