"Ween's world"

Farming with Dean and Gene

"GRUNGE, ANGER, CULTURAL DISLOCAtion, a secret yearning to belong" was how a recent Business Week cover story summed up the cultural anthropology of "busters" a word I'd never heard before, used to describe me and the rest of the 18-to-29-year-old Generation X-ers. Reread the above quote substituting disco or acid rock or rockabilly or jazz for the word grunge and see if you can't pin this tag on any youth culture at any time. Not that Business Week didn't do a good job manufacturing its trend, it's just that there aren't enough marketable movements to keep pace with public demand. So readers learn that a rave is a "frenetic mob dance held in a ware-house, parking lot, or under a bridge: Big in California" and grunge is "a fashion that celebrates the ill-kempt, lumberjack look." There is nothing new under the sun: illicit parties and flannel shirts are older than the trees chopped down to bring you this newspaper.

Angry, culturally dislocated and yearning to belong just like anyone else after a bad day - Dean and Gene Ween are the flannel-backed, happily unemployed 22-year-olds who fit into everyone's buster model just as well as they fit into all other apocryphal archetypes of youthful ennui; Dean and Gene are Charlie Brown and Linus, Ralph Malph and Potsie, Bill and Ted, Wayne and Garth - the L.A. Times once called them Lennon & McCartney. Ween's world is a place unsullied by outside influences, where in-jokes are the only jokes and boys will be boys until they get caught. For the eight years Mickey Melchiondo and Aaron Freeman have been playing with their Portastudio, recording wacked-out odes to eggs, weasels, flies and feces together as "brothers" Dean and Gene, nothing has changed except their voices.

Ween's new Pure Guava (Elektra) - their follow-up to last year's The Pod (Shimmy Disc), an album made, according to the liner notes, after Ween "filled up 3,600 hours of tape, and inhaled 5 cans of Scotchgard" - is so good, yet so bizarre and uncompromising, it makes one wonder how any A&R scout heard the ringing of a cash register in it. He or she may have heard a burp, a cough and possibly a fart, but definitely not a hit. This isn't to say that Ween aren't great pop songwriters - they are; the problem is that to them, hit and filler are the same thing.

Though influences from Queen to Parliament pop up on Pure Guava, the only actual genre that describes the album is "homemade." Voices sing at various speeds, in various directions and through various effects; tape noise is as prevalent as any other instrument; and the drum machine sounds as if it costs as much as the guava fruits pictured on the front of the album. (Ween deny the Butthole Surfers as an inspiration.) Pure Guava sounds like a compilation at times, especially since the production ranges from Daniel Johnston basement recordings to Phil Spector studio sessions. Musically, too, the album is diverse despite the minimum of means at Ween's disposal; "Don't Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy)" falls somewhere between David Bowie and Marc Bolan; "Sarah," one of the few nice songs on the album, could be a lethargic Galaxie 500 mope; and "Push th' Little Daisies" sounds more like a third-grader who's snorted too many Pop Rocks than anything I've ever heard before.

The 19 songs on Pure Guava are all about what Ween know best - themselves, their private jokes and iconographies, their part-time jobs and communal diseases, their sexual fantasies and SubGenius-like visions, and their fly-infested farmhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania, nicknamed the Pod. "There was a woman who lived (and slept) about 10 feet above the room where we recorded this," they warn. "Just remember this as you listen." From the hurt "Little Birdy" (which could just as easily be a bong or a retired basketball player as it could an actual winged creature) to the album's closing "Poop Ship Destroyer," Ween take the listener on an uncensored tour of their world; without heeding even Dr. Seuss' wise dictum, "With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet, you're too smart to go down any not-so-good street," Ween include a tasteless "Reggaejunkiejew" and a genius minute-and-a-half of "Pumpin' 4 the Man," boiled down from Dean's five years behind the gas pumps. Consigned to a life where "No one wants a loser who... smells like gas, looks like shit, works in the rain," Dean urges himself to work by musing, “Get your fingers out your ass and pump some faggot's gas and think about how bad New Hope sucks." (If Ween's total disregard for anyone but themselves bothers you, then admire their honesty.) Business Week should check out "Flies on My Dick" or the last album's "Pollo Asado” (an endless order for Mexican fast food) and “Mononucleosis" if they want to find themes for a youth culture they're trying too hard to understand.

FRIEND OF MINE SAYS THAT NEXT TIME he throws a party, he's going to make each guest swallow a small numbered plastic disc. This way, when he finds vomit on the carpet, he'll know who it was. Ween seem like a pair of incorrigibles who should be force-fed these discs every time they enter your house. Before I trekked out to New Hope to interview the band, warnings came from all sides: "Bring them food or they won't talk"; "They'll tackle you as soon as they see you"; "Don't ask them about the demon Boognish"; "They'll drop acid in your drink." An interview with Ween sounded about as fun as baby-sitting for Macaulay Culkin; however, the Ween who greeted me was a stubble-faced, tour-weary, caffeine-craving zombie a far cry from the pumped-up adolescent beast they portray in concert.

Though the demand in the liner notes of God Ween Satan - "when Ween comes into your town, you are to bring us food" - implies desperate straits and a reckless attitude, Ween are cautious about accepting strange edibles (which in the past have been laced with everything from hash oil to male hormones). "We get a lot of guava at shows, and someone once gave us a full Cornish game hen," says Mickey, or Dean, the taller, more Keanu Reeves-like of the two, "but we're always very hesitant to eat the food we get. We usually try and get a psychological portrait of our chef." Mickey Melchiondo and Aaron Freeman aren't stupid; they're no more Dean and Gene than Mike Myers and Dana Carvey are Wayne and Garth. Dean and Gene would spend all their advance money from Elektra on drugs and junk food; Mickey and Aaron are putting some of the cash in the bank and using the rest to build a recording studio.

I could tell you more about my adventures with Ween the diners, the highways, the jelly rolls but you can meet a similar pair yourself by cruising outside any suburban community college, especially if you're selling drugs. What makes Ween so interesting is not just their talented idiocy ("I don't want our songs to be smart, ever," says Dean) and their home-studio pyrotechnics ("I hope all bands with 4-tracks get compared to Ween," says Gene), but their total commitment to living and chronicling a lifestyle so devoid of politics, ambition and common sense that the only other place you'll find it described is in Business Week.