"fish & shits"

AT 6.30PM ON A THURSDAY NIGHT IN NEW ORLEANS IT'S A PRETTY SAFE BET MICKEY MELCHIONDO IS NOT THE ONLY PERSON GETTING DRUNK, BUT HE'S CERTAINLY THE ONLY PERSON IN THE AREA WHO COULD TRUTHFULLY ANSWER TO THE ALIAS DEAN WEEN, AND IS CONSEQUENTLY HAVING TO COMBINE HIS DRINKING WITH THE KIND OF INTERNATIONAL PRESS DUTIES WHICH TEND TO PRECEDE ONE'S OVERSEAS TOURING ENGAGEMENTS. HURRICANES ARE THE DRINK OF THE DAY 151 RUM WITH GIN, AND "REALLY NASTY", I'M TOLD, AND MICKEY SHOULD KNOW. DRINKING SEEMS TO BE A MAJOR PASTIME FOR THE WEENERS, OCCUPYING ROUGHLY THE SAME AMOUNT OF TIME AS FISHING AND RECORDING DID IN THE EARLY SEASIDE SESSIONS FOR THEIR LATEST ALBUM, THE MOLLUSK.

Work on the album began way back in September 1995, at a beachfront property in Holgate, Long Beach Island, New Jersey, which has since been dubbed The Flood Zone. It seems the lads were recording there in a bitterly cold winter, so as to avoid the tourist season, but on one of their trips there they found the house's water pipes had frozen and burst, flooding their studio set-up. They managed to salvage most of their equipment and tapes, but it was all over for The Flood Zone itself.

Touring with the Foo Fighters, moving to no less than six other recording spaces (the first of which had to be abandoned 30 seconds after the band plugged in when some neighbouring Hare Krishnas came down to peacefully protest against the noise), the advent of the 12 Country Greats album, and a mixture of laziness and lost momentum filled the gaps between the first notes being struck and The Mollusk's actual release July just past.

"I don't think we've ever made a record that went very smoothly," Mickey says. "It's always a real pain in the ass. It would have been a totally different record if we'd finished it the way we wanted to, which was down the beach, 'cause all the best parts of that record were done down the beach, and then we sorta had to just throw together a few more songs on top of it to fill it out, or we could've put the worse stuff from the beach [on it]. But, y'know, we didn't even make that many trips down there.

"It's kind of a shame 'cause we already did it, but I'd like to do it again more so just for the environment, 'cause it was good for us to record that way, that was the way we used to record when we lived together, we had a lot of time to just write, so that was what we got out of it. I mean, livin' at that place was like livin' at an Arctic outpost. It was on the end of this island, and it was in the dead of winter, it was freezin' cold. It wasn't like we could go anywhere you were either outside fishin' or takin' a walk, or inside watchin' TV or recordin'. So, for some of the parts it was good."

Mickey reckons he's the best or luckiest fisherman in Ween, but his best fishing story suggests drinking rather than is what he and his like best about a day at sea. It involves him and a bunch of friends on a girlfriend's father's boat in the Bahamas about two years back...

"I went on the boat with five or six guys, we slept on the boat every night. We'd go out every day deep sea fishing, and we'd never catch anything, but then after four or five hours of that we would come in closer and bottom fish, and we would catch all sorts of nice fish and eat them, but these were smaller fish obviously.

"We were there a week, and every day we'd go through this ritual where for the first half of the day we'd go out for the big fish, and nothin' ever happened, so at night I'd get drunk, and I started to sleep through the most of the big fishing every day because I figured we were never gonna catch anything. So, the last day we were there everybody was kinda hip to it, and I crawled out of the little bunk in the boat and went out on the deck, and all the lines were out and they were trawlin', and the guy was drivin' the boat, and I think it was about a 7-or-800-pound marlin attacked, grabbed, the bait. We got on deck and I was completely hungover, snot in my eyes, and there's, like, a 700-pound marlin on the line. So, I'm like yellin' to the guys, and I grab this thing, I don't even have a belt on and there's no chair or anything, and it's, like, my scrawny, hungover little ass, with this fuckin' fish! So, I'm standin' there holdin' it and I can't do anything I can't even make a fist yet, crawled out of bed, haven't had any coffee - and basically this fish just beat the shit out of us for about 20 minutes, and then it took off. I lost it, I wasn't about to reel it in.

"It was really funny because half the people woke up and the other half just missed it. They never believed us, so that's why it seems like a lie, but I lost it straight up. No one knew what they were doin' anyway."

Aside from a bunch of fishy tales on The Mollusk, there are a couple of sad sorta love songs. It seems Mickey's not our man on this subject, as he says, "Well, Aaron [Freeman, alias Gene Ween] writes songs for his woman more than I do. When I write songs about women it's like 'Piss Up a Rope' or somethin' really harsh like that. I get really inspired to write nasty songs."

So, it's back to theme talk, and boy, have Ween got a doozy up their sleeves to follow their country and nautical albums!

"We wanna go to Cuba and make a record called Bananas and Blow. The idea is that we're just gonna eat bananas and snort cocaine for two weeks, and it's gonna be two discs, and disc two is gonna just be the song 'Bananas and Blow', and it's gonna be 50 minutes long. It's gonna be our next album, with a Cuban producer. We wanna do it in a really crappy soundin' studio too."

Speaking of shit and shitty, Mickey has fond memories of the real stuff from his last visit to New Zealand. Following getting "plastered" and playing what he recalls as "a great show", it seems some friendly tour guide pointed the band in the direction of one of Auckland's dormant volcano-cum-parks.

"We slid down the hill all night, and usually in the day they let cows or sheep graze there, so we had, like, shit all over us. We went back to the hotel, like, the sun was up, and we had to go through customs, all covered in shit and hungover. It was hilarious. It was great 'cause they didn't even wanna search us. Everybody was either covered in shit or everything in their bags was covered in shit."

When asked if he recalls the particularly eager 'Mr, Will You Please Help My Pony?'/'l Think It's His Lung' dancers peddling their wares to the band at the aforementioned Auckland show he says, "Oh, I do remember that! I think somebody in the band slept with one of them."

To close on a more wholesome note, the subject is The Mollusk's opening track, 'Dancing in the Show Tonight', and the slant is the suggestion it would make a great opening number for The Muppet Show.

"Yeah, we start our shows with it now," says Mickey. So, if Kermit the Frog tried to book Ween for The Muppet Show, what would their answer be?

"Well, we wrote a song actually inspired by Kermit the Frog that song "I'm Holding You' on the country record. We were trying to get it to sound like Kermit the Frog, I wanted him to sing it. I was totally down with The Muppet Show and Sesame St. growin' up. Do your Muppets have, like, accents?"

You can set silly old Ween straight when they play Auckland's Powerstation on October 3.