"Falafels, Heart Attacks, OJ Simpson, Free Pot and WEEN"

(assisted by Creepy Girl and her official sketch artist Stephanie)

I've been just about Ween's biggest fan for about four or five years now, discovering them for the first time at New Brunswick, NJ's Court Tavern back when God Ween Satan - The Oneness first came out. Back then they were virtually unknown outside of New Brunswick and their hometown of New Hope, PA, and were still in their formative stage where all their shows featured Dean on guitar and Gene singing with pre-recorded tapes backing them up. Since then, they've gradually built up a worldwide fol lowing, culminating with a major label deal with Elektra that has helped them become the international superstars they are today. If you haven't heard Ween yet, all I can tell you is go out and hook yourself up with one of their four classic LPs and be prepared to piss yer pants. The common links through all their music (ranging from hardorish to gospel-tinged to prog rock jokes to X-rated funklike to Middle Eastern flavored to lounge singer...) have been an infectious sense of humor and a never-ending desire to create original and powerful music that inspires either undying devotion or unbridled venom from all that hear it.

This interview took place at some cushy hotel in New York City that I can't remember the name of, when Elektra put them up while they were doing a pair of shows in town. I saw Mitch Miller (of "Sing Along With ..." fame) in the lobby, though no one I mentioned this to seemed to have any idea who he was. Still, it made my day. When my contingent made it upstairs, we found Dean and Gene as well as drummer Claude Coleman lounging about watching the opening statements in the OJ Simpson trial, so throughout the tape of our conversation, Johnny Cochran and Marcia Clark are rambling on in the background. If you want the true atmosphere of this afternoon, pop on CNN when reading this, as I'm sure it'll still be going on by the time this gets published.

Fizz: What do you think about this Beck guy? A lot of his stuff sounds real familiar

Gene: I like Beck

Dean: I like him, too.

Creepy Girl: He dresses really good, too.

Dean: Yeah.

Fizz: Some of that sounds a lot like you guys though.

Dean: You'd have to ask him, if you want to find out what he's trying to do.

Fizz: You know the song "Motherfucker"? That sounds like a God Ween Satan thing.

Dean: Yeah, I know, I know that song.

Fizz: Do you know If he ever heard you?

Dean: Yeah. He heard us a lot of people ask us about Beck, but I never heard him say any thing about us until I went over to Europe for the promo tour. This guy who was interviewing me told me that he had talked to Beck a couple weeks before and he asked Beck what other bands he relates to the most, and he said this whole thing about Ween.

Fizz: Tell me about being on Conan O'Brian. I heard that you really didn't get to do everything you wanted. Someone told me you were supposed to get an albino snake with the belly dancer and a guy from a falafel stand throwing knives - all this wacky shit.

Gene: The falafel guy was supposed to come out. We had to pay him $200 to come out, and he didn't show up. He's the same guy that was in our video..

Dean: There's a good chance, I think, that he just chickened out.

Fizz: Speaking of falafels, do you guys really eat all the shit you sing about? And if so, aren't you worried about dropping dead from a heart attack some day?

Gene: It is all heart-attack food, pretty much, Isn't it?

Dean: No, we take it easy. Don't worry about that shit. I can't wait to go through my fat phase, actually.

Creepy Girl: I'm just going to cut to the chase: Which one of you was "the guy from Ween" they mentioned playing basketball with Anthony Mason [NY Knicks] and the Beastie Boys?

Dean: I was sitting there watching it, but I didn't play.

Creepy Girl: Because it said in the article that someone from Ween was there.

Dean: No, I got in on the picture, but I wasn't playing. I would never play against Anthony Mason. It was scary.

Fizz: Where was that?

Dean: That was at the Lollapalooza in Philadelphia. It was a photo shoot for Slam magazine or Jom or something.

Fizz: Yeah, it was Slam.

Dean: It was Anthony Mason and, like, three of his friends from the hood vs. the Beastie Boys. It was a joke. It was disgraceful.

Creepy Girl: How did you hook up with them [Beastie Boys/Grand Royal]?

Dean: Just through the incest of the music business.

Fizz: Was it with the Moistboys thing that you first met them?

Dean: No, we met them before that. We met them when the Rollins Band was on tour with them, and Andrew [Weiss, Ween producer] was still with him [Rollins].

Creepy Girl: Are they really nice? [NOTE: Superslick, professional journalist Creepy Girl always becomes gushing fangirl when the B-Boys come up.]

Dean: Yeah, they're strange guys. I only know Mike D. really. Well, I know them all, but Mike D is the only one who I could say is a friend of mine. He's a great dude actually, pretty cool guy.

Fizz: Did you ever see Roadside Prophets with Ad-Rock?

Dean: No. Did you ever see that other movie he's in? It's a really bad teen movie. It's pretty awesome, though.

Creepy Girl: Fallen Angels, I think. Right?

Dean: Uh, yeah... I don't know. He's done a bunch of those though.

Fizz: You should check out Roadside Prophets. He's in it with John Doe, who's riding his motorcycle to Nevada and Ad-Rock is just following him around annoying him on the whole trip. It's hilarious.

Dean: Really? Cool.

Fizz: I wanted to ask Gene about some of the lyrics. They're all pretty much about real people, right?

Gene: Uh-huh.

Fizz: First of all, who's the "Reggaejunkiejew"?

Gene: I didn't write that song, actually.

Dean: That was about this kid... uh, I don't even want to talk about it.

Fizz: OK, what about "Push th' Little Daisies?" Who was that about?

Gene: It was about this girl that I went out with for awhile.

Steph: How about "Don't Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy)"?

Dean: That was Ween's father-son song. A father talking to his son, about how the guy's not really his father, but the kid doesn't know. He gets a rise from little boys. He's a horrible child molester. It's our version of "Father and Son" by Cat Stevens. It's pretty bad, but that's pretty much the point I was trying to get across.

Fizz: Were you pretty much trying to sound like Lemmy on "I Can't Put My Finger On It"?

Gene: No. But I can hear that, sure.

Fizz: What's "The Dwarf Inside" [a line from "I Can't Put... "] mean?

Gene: (long pause) I don't know.

Fizz: I know that you wrote "You Fucked Up" when you were about 15. Is a lot of that stuff from the first album from when you were that young?

Gene: Oh, yeah. That's all the oldest stuff. That covers from, like, ages 14 through 18.

Fizz: A lot of that stuff is real angry and violent. You really don't write songs like that anymore.

Gene: I'm not that angry anymore. It's just not my thing anymore.

Fizz: Where'd you get the story for "Buenas Tardes Amigo"? Was there anything that inspired that?

Gene: That was from Sesame Street. It was inspired by Sesame Street.

Fizz: I was listening to "Spinal Meningitis" and thinking about all the songs you have that are about being sick. How does sickness inspire you so much?

Gene: Just that we've been sick so much; it's an easy topic to write about.

Fizz: Like the whole Pod album is just filled with sickness.

Gene: Yeah, well, Dean had mononucleosis the whole time we were recording The Pod, so ...

Creepy Girl: Mono! My favorite!

Dean: The Pod is definitely the sickness album.

Fizz: What about "Hey, Fat Boy"? That's one of Creepy Girl's favorites. She blasted it over the phone to someone who pissed her off once.

Creepy Girl: It was this fat bastard who really pissed me off. I wished something really bad on him and, like, two days later he got gall stones and was in the hospital for three days before they operated just laying there in pain. So I called his room and blasted it right up to the phone.

Dean: You know how I always envisioned that song? You know that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the guy has the sword in the street? That's what I always imagine when I hear that song. I don't know why. It's just an ode to fat, to fat boys everywhere.

Fizz: Do you get to check out your opening bands much?

Gene: Yeah, I always check them out.

Fizz: Who's been playing with you lately?

Gene: Actually, right now we're playing with some friends of ours called Instant Death ... We toured with the False Front a little bit.

Dean: Motocaster. You should check them out.

Gene: Kyuss

Fizz: What's the best bill you've ever been on? Other than maybe the False Front shows, which are pretty obviously among the best.

Gene: The best shows we've been on are ones where we opened for someone... probably the Butthole Surfers show.

Dean: Yeah, the Butthole Surfers were great, And the Ramones.

Gene: Yeah, we opened for the Ramones. That was real cool.

Dean: We never had anyone really big open for us, maybe Kyuss is, like, the biggest band.

Fizz: I saw you in New Brunswick once with Monster Magnet opening for you.

Gene: Really? I don't remember that.

Fizz: Yeah, it was at the Court Tavern, right when their first album came out.

Dean: Well, we've played so many shows there, I can't remember a lot of them.

Fizz: Is there any possibility that we might someday see a Ween/False Front/Moistboys show where you're all playing together in all those different forms?

Dean: We tried to do it this summer. It was Taking a Breather, which was Mean Ween and me and Andrew Weiss, plus False Front, Ween and the Santana Jam. Did you see that?

Fizz: No. I missed out.

Dean: We kind of got close there, but we've got to expound on it a little bit. We should get a couple more bands together.

Gene: There's nine or ten bands all together.

Fizz: Yeah, you could resurrect Echoes.

Dean: Yeah, Echoes. Echoes is kind of broken up now.

Gene: Our next band is going to be Paranoid.

Dean: And Crazy Diamond. Echoes is reforming as Crazy Diamond.

Fizz: I wanted to get straight the history of The Ween, where you play with the full band. I think it started out with Sim and Andrew?

Gene: Yeah, it was Sim and Andrew and then Kramer and Claude, and now it's Claude and Andrew. And it's going to change again actually, because Andrew is going to be leaving.

Fizz: Do you know who's replacing him yet?

Gene: Nah. Maybe Darryl Jones, the guy from Arsenio Hall.

Fizz: Well, at least we know he needs a job.

Dean: We need a guy with an eight-string bass, who wears it really high. We should be more concerned with how the guy's going to look than if he can really play. We really have to get our act together. Like, what we look like, you know? We're thinking of getting... we've had a number of concepts that haven't worked out.

Gene: Like the albino homo brothers.

Dean: Well, first of all, we wanted to get two fat kids, really young. like, sweaty, playing back there. Then we wanted to get the albino homo brothers, which there's a shortage of, I guess. We couldn't even find one albino homo, so we'll figure something out.

Fizz: Are you guys still as obsessive with recording as you used to be?

Gene: Yeah.

Fizz: How many songs do you think you've got on tape all together?

Gene: Probably about 3,000.

Dean: There's no way to... there's just an incredible amount of songs; we really have no idea.

Fizz: Now that you're a couple years removed from it, what do you think about your relationship with Kramer and Shimmy Disc?

Gene: It was interesting.

Dean: Looking back, I'm kind of happy we did it now, actually. I like Kramer a lot.

Fizz: People go up and down with him a lot; I know False Front's been bashing him lately.

Dean: I did, too. But now I realize that he's a classic a true original really one of a kind. There was a mutual respect there, on a musical level. He really liked our band.

Gene: Hey, OJ's laughing at something... what'd they say?

Creepy Girl: They said he has a "menacing stare." (still watching TV) Everybody looks sooo bored.

Fizz: What is your view on this [OJ] trial]? What do you think is going to happen?

Gene: I think OJ's going to get off, personally.

Dean: Yeah, we have an insider tip, too.

Fizz: Oh, yeah? What's that?

Dean: Well, it wouldn't be inside anymore if I revealed it now.

Fizz: You don't have to tell me the source, just what they told you.

Dean: I heard from somebody who's best friend works for the L.A. prosecutor's office the DA - and he says that they don't have anything. He's going to get off.

Gene: Whether he's guilty or not, he's going to get off.

Creepy Girl: Before you got signed, what were you doing?

Gene: I had, like, 25 different jobs. I'd work for two weeks somewhere and then I'd quit.

Creepy Girl: I have the same pattern.

Gene: I've worked just about every place in our area.

Creepy Girl: Do you still live there?

Gene: Yeah. I'm still in the New Hope [PA] area. He actually lives downtown.

Creepy Girl: That's cool. It's just so nice there.

Fizz: You were telling me that you get a lot of kids at your door all the time. Any weird stories?

Dean: It's mostly kids. We were there the other night, listening to ... something

Gene: Yeah, that was weird.

Dean: This girl came up to my door with this kid... oh yeah, I had got home before, and there was this long letter on my door from this girl about how her friend has this band and we should jam with them and all this stupid shit. So we were just sitting there, and she came back. I get all the kids from New Hope because, since I live downtown, they know that I live there and they show all their friends, so I get lots of kids knocking on my door.

Fizz: Kids into Ween are probably pretty weird.

Dean: Yeah, they're fucked up. Everybody wants to get us high - that's the general thing.

Fizz: It's ironic, because now you have a few bucks, you don't even have to buy it if you don't want to.

Dean: No, no we don't.

Fizz: And when you were poor and starving probably no one was giving you pot.

Gene: No, we always had pot.

Dean: That's one thing we always took care of.

(At this point, we kind of just chilled in front of the TV, made fun of Marcia Clark and looked at Steph's sketchbook. The tape ran for another 15 or 20 minutes, mainly catching us laughing and talking about OJ, none of which made sense without visuals. Creepy Girl got their autographs for some guy named Chicken and then almost got into a fight with the hotel maid on our way to the elevator. A hard afternoon's work in the can, we dispersed to Poly Esther's on 9th Street and got tanked watching the rest of the opening statements and dancing to "Shaft" and Donna Summer while Ween went to New York's big-time commercial rock station to do some live songs and get interviewed by stinky elderly DJ Scott Muni. The end.)

HOW TO PARTY JUST LIKE WEEN!!!

Just one listen to any of Ween's warped masterpieces will tell you that these guys know how to get bent. When people find out that I know them, the conversation invariably ends up with someone asking, "What are they on??" Unfortunately, I pretty much have to shatter their illusions by informing them that Dean and Gene are pretty much straight-arrow, drink and smoke guys - booze, beer and buds. I'm sure that there were some crazier experimentations with the real freaky stuff when they were younger, but Ween now in their geriatric mid-20s-have pretty much cut it down to the basic essentials. Still, even their newest material has that chemically induced air about it, begging the question, "If they're just puffin' and drinkin', where do they come up with that shit?"

Well, I took it upon myself to investigate the situation thoroughly and came out with this handy guide so you, privileged reader, can party just like Ween! Dr. Rock prescribes strict adherence to this wonder diet at least three times a week for six months. If you follow the instructions correctly, you'll be coming up with lines like, "Are you surprised when I touch the dwarf inside?" and "Who's yo poppa? Papa Zit, where's yo momma? Papa Zit, this is the shit!" in no time.

favorite beer

dean: Guinness® on tap, if they have it. Otherwise, Budweiser® bottles.

gene: Rolling Rock®.

favorite hard liquor

dean: Jack Daniels®.

gene: Jack Daniels®.

favorite mixed drink

dean: Bloody Mary.

gene: Long Island Iced Tea.

favorite wine/champagne

dean: Red Bordeaux.

gene: A good dry white.

sticking with the same drink all night vs. mixing it up

dean: Drink mixing = BAD

gene: I'll mix anything except the obvious, like wine or champagne. If you're going to drink wine, just drink wine, or you'll get reeaally fucked up! It's a known fact.

favorite junk food/drunk snack

dean: Pepperoni & cheddar cheese.

gene: Corned beef hash at a diner at 3 a.m.

getting high before you go on to the bar vs. after a few drinks.

dean: You kind of have to smoke first. If you get too fucked up and you go to smoke a joint at one in the morning when you're totalled - forget it.

gene: You've got to smoke all night - before, during and after.

favorite juke box single

dean: The short version of "Dream On" that skips the last round.

gene: This Fleetwood Mac song. I don't remember what it is. It's real popular though.

cd jukes vs. vinyl jukes

dean: CD. This one pool hall we went to had Wish You Were Here, and every song is, like, 20 minutes long. So for a dollar, you can ruin everybody's night.

gene: CD. More selection.

best way to score free drinks (other than just being Ween)

dean: Say, "Hey, let's get a pitcher!" And then send someone else up to the bar for it and don't kick in.

gene: Borrow money.

recommended tip

dean: I always tip well.

gene: I believe in over-tipping.

favorite breath enhancer for driving home

dean: Chocolate and cheese.

gene: Clorets®.

opening line to a cop looking in your window

dean: "Hello, sir." Just about anything with "sir."

gene: Nothing, just sit there and say, "thank you."

favorite hangover cure

dean: Shower.

gene: Aspirin.