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A short history lesson that has only a little bit to do with Ween, our interview subject of the day:
Nirvana made a record and sold 4 million copies. So record companies started promoting other bands from Seattle, as if sharing a hometown was some sort of musical credential. It worked: Pearl Jam sold even more records. Alice in Chains sold more than a few, too.
Then record companies started signing Nirvana's friends' bands, like Eugenius. And then Nirvana's friends friends' bands, like Cell, who knew Sonic Youth, who knew Nirvana.
Then they decided to sign pretty much anybody who owned a guitar and had ever listened to college radio. The weirder the better. Hey, the thinking must have gone, if they'll listen to Ministry, they'll listen to any thing.
And so now Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo, two homemade music hackers from New Hope, Pa., better known as Gene and Dean Ween, collectively known as just Ween, have a single on the radio.
It's called "Push th' Little Daisies." If you heard the cheap-sounding piano, the high-pitched male voice and the all-around crappy production for the first time, you'd swear it was made by a pair of 12-year-olds.
Only in these post-Nirvana years could people think this was the future of rock 'n' roll and invest their shareholders' money in it.
"That's where we're gonna laugh last and longest," says Melchiondo between sneezes over the phone from his and Freeman's shared home. The early success of "Pure Guava," the band's third album and first for Elektra Records, has allowed precious little time for things like recovering from colds.
"It's, like, the worst phase of signings ever," Melchiondo says. "Right now, the labels are signing absolutely the most horrendous (stuff) in the whole world as the result of all these alternative acts that are making money. And people think we're a part of it.
"We are a part of it," he immediately decides, "in a way that, just that there's proof that it doesn't have to be Michael Bolton to sell. The Nirvana record was a really good record."
But at the same time Ween isn't a part of it. "We've gotten a lot of reviews," Melchiondo continues, "that say we're the most ridiculous of all the signings." Ween wears such criticism as a badge of honor. Ween agrees with it. "We," Melchiondo declares, "can write hits. That's the difference between us and I won't single any bands out. We like popular music. We're not preoccupied with any crappy sound. We don't even like alternative music. We don't listen to college radio.
"The music we like is soft commercial pop. The best new record I got in the last five years is the Michael Jackson 'Dangerous' record. Really.
"I'm always more excited about the new Madonna record and to see what she does than I am some up-and-coming band from wherever, Houston, that just got together last year and got picked up by MCA."
But there's no mistaking "Pure Guava" with, say, Madonna's "Erotica" and Jackson's "Dangerous."
Besides writing an incredible range of songs, from the cornpone country rant "Pumpin' 4 the Man," which describes working at a New Hope gas station, to the twisted folk blues of "Little Birdy" to the rap sendup "The Goin' Gets Tough from the Getgo" to the stunning, echo-laced pop ballad "Sarah," Ween is known for making its records at home on a cheap four-track tape recorder with even cheaper accessory equipment, and for experimenting with about any noise-making device it can find. If there's a unifying sound to the 19 songs on "Pure Guava," it's the tape hiss that buzzes over all of them.
"There are all these rumors that we took our Elektra advance, this six-figure advance, and recorded it all on four-track, and put one over (on Elektra)," says Melchiondo, who is Ween's chief live guitarist. Freeman does most of the singing, and the two 22-year-olds share all the other instruments in the studio. Live, they perform with tapes of the drum programs and bass lines.
"It wasn't like that at all," Melchiondo continues. "It's pretty simple: We made our first record, 'God Ween Satan,' for Twin/Tone, and by that point we had been together for five or six or seven years and we had a four-track since we were real little kids. So we just picked out, like, 50 songs or something out of 1,000 and we recorded them in a 16-track studio in Andrew Weiss' (best known as a member of Henry Rollins' band) living room.
"And then everything was slowing down for us, our label was going out of business, so for our second record we said we'll just put out a four-track record. That's what we sound like. We found a willing label and that's how we did it.
"For the hell of it, we mixed 'Pure Guava.' It wasn't even intended to be a record. That was the stuff after our second record, 'Pod,' so just for the hell of it we mixed all our new songs again on a four-track.
"They (Elektra) got a tape of it somehow. It was funny. And they were, like, 'This record is awesome.' Our logic is, if Elektra Records is willing to put out a record we did on a four-track in our apartment, this is an amazing label."
Ween stands proudly behind the distortion of a lot of the sounds - including many of the vocals, which were recorded with a $15 microphone and fed through a guitar distortion box - on its record. The New Yorker recently described the overall sound as not everything but the kitchen sink, but, rather, as simply the kitchen sink.
"We're not trying to destroy rock," Melchiondo says. "We're trying to make classic rock music. And if we fail and it falls short and it sounds like a joke and we're laughing in the middle of the song, that's just how it went down."
"Ween," Melchiondo later says, "is a real-life 'Wayne's World.' Just do me a favor and don't mention 'Wayne's World' or Bill and Ted in your article. Don't even mention that I said not to mention 'Wayne's World.'"
But if your reporter laughs and fails to keep that promise, don't blame him. That's just the way it went down.
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