So has fatherhood changed your sleeping habits?

Oh, absolutely.

Are there any lame fatherhood activities that you find yourself doing now that you wouldn’t have been caught dead doing before?

No, she’s about seven months old now, so I’m changing a lot of diapers, trying to keep her occupied. The fatherhood activities will come when she’s about two or three. 

So, you haven’t had to sit down and watch Barney with her?

No, Teletubbies a couple of times, but she’s a little too young to fully grasp it.

How active a role are you going to take in shaping your child’s musical tastes? Like, will you let her go through a Britney phase?

Dude, I have no idea. I’ll figure that out when I come to it. I don’t think there’s much you can do about that. They’ll get into what they get into.

So, in this age of major-label mergers and bands getting dropped everyday, how has Ween not only managed to keep their Elektra deal, but also get them to put out a double live album whose chief selling feature is a 26-minute version of "Poop Ship Destroyer"?

I don’t know! I was wondering that myself. Elektra keeps us going for some reason, they have some masterplan for us, obviously. We were going to put this record out on the internet only and they picked it up, and I don’t know why. I guess it was some marketing thing. Who knows. It’s fine with me, it gets better distribution.

I interviewed Dean around the time of the country record, and he said at that time your A&R guy was gone and there was a whole new staff in place and he wasn’t sure how they were going to take to you guys…

Yeah, they seem to be cool. I don’t know anybody at Elektra, though—they all switch over every five months.

You said you were going to put this out on the internet and make this a special fans-only deal, but now that Elektra is involved, does it feel less special?

Yeah, it’s just another record—Elektra’s just going to let it dribble out. All we were going to do was sell it to some people on the internet—we expected to sell maybe a couple thousand. So Elektra picking it up is fine. We didn’t want to treat it like a real record, and they’re not treating it like a record—they’re just putting it out there so our fans can get it, and that’s really what matters. But I was surprised that Elektra put out a double CD live record.

Would you have gone on tour if it was an internet-only release?

Yeah, we were planning on going on tour with Medeski Martin & Wood actually this summer, but it didn’t work out. We wouldn’t have drawn enough people to the places they wanted to play with just us and them, so I think they went out with a bigger band. It didn’t work out, so we decided we were going to tour anyway.

I sort of lost track of Ween over the past year, because you didn’t tour Toronto for The Mollusk and it’s only been in the past few months that I’ve discovered your immense online presence. How long have you been aware of that? And was that the impetus for starting [your own website] Chocodog and taking control of that space?

Yeah. It started off in a chat group actually—there was a big Ween chat group and there was always a ton of people in there, and Mickey and I hung out there a lot. And then people just started doing a lot of Ween websites—you do a search for Ween and there’d just be a ton of Ween websites. So we used some of of our space and started our website and just officialized it and it’s just been taking off.

Do you ever participate in the chat groups?

Yeah, we always post stuff if there’s news. Sometimes I’ll respond to something.

Does it freak you out at all, seeing all these people talk about you?

No, I think it’s cool. It just means our fans are more into the internet than fans of other bands. And we’re into the internet, too, so we’re just taking advantage of it. There’s a Ween fan who’s got a lot of space on his server—he works for some big company, so he basically hosts Chocodog. We don’t even pay for it.

[The baby starts crying in the background]

She’s having a temper tantrum.

She has quite a voice on her! 

Oh yeah, she sure does. It goes right through your skull. 

So is having your own site a move toward one day existing completely independent of labels?

Yeah, I think that’s in the back of our minds. We’re trying to compile a giant database of people and get people to know our website. If and when we get dropped by Elektra, we can just go out on the internet and sell records—putting something out every month, even. We’re on that whole train there.

Do you foresee the complete collapse of the major-label system?

Nah, I don’t. I always think there’s going to be major labels. The majority of people don’t even look on the internet for music, so there’s got to be labels to sell Britney Spears records.

Was that [web-only] Craters of the Sac release commissioned by you, or did a fan put that together?

No that was us, actually. Mickey posted that right after Elektra told us they were putting out the live record on their label. Craters of the Sac is just a bunch of outtakes and dumb-ass songs we never put on a record but are pretty awesome anyway. It’s totally brown. There’s some funny shit on there.

I’ve been trying to download it for two days, but my computer is too slow.

Yeah, it’s huge. It’s a record.

You guys always had aspirations beyond lo-fi, even though you got saddled with that tag. But now, do ever get nostalgic for the days when it was just the two of you and a drum machine?

Yeah. We still do that. We still hang out and play with the drum machine, that’s still how we write a lot of songs.

I’m also speaking about the live show—the last time I saw, you had the huge country band and played for three hours…

We’re definitely going to play with the drum machine again, it’s just a whole different thing, and it was a lot of fun. We just got to the point where we wanted to play with a band. And it’s cool. But there’ll be a time when we play with the drum machine again.

Back in the early days, you were more likely to get booed than cheered. Now that you play in front of thousands of adoring fans, do you miss the confrontational aspect of performance?

No, I appreciate that it’s not there. I mean, we had eight years of that, so it just cracks me up now [to see people liking us]. Because people fucking hated us so much when we would play City Gardens in Trenton, where we opened up for Fugazi and people were throwing gum in my hair and shit, and we were all high on mushrooms. People hated us. But that’s the way it always was: people just fucking hated us. I think it’s funny to see all these people really loving Ween when we’re playing now, it makes me laugh. It’s cool that people like us, we’ll see how it long it lasts.

Did Fugazi like you?

Yeah, the band Fugazi liked us, that’s why they let us play with them.

Is that the most violent crowd reaction you’ve gotten?

We always had violent crowd reactions. I remember Mickey getting punched in the face by a skinhead in Minneapolis in 1989. And then the tables turned one night and it was cool to be listening to Ween. We’re still totally scarred, though. It’s cool, we’re appreciative.

When did you notice the change in the crowds?

It was the "Push th’ Little Daises" thing, and then it was really Chocolate and Cheese where people started really getting into it.

So you owe it all to Beavis?

Of course. That was great—we were on that show, like, three times! That show fucking ruled. 

Do you think people were more uptight in 1990 or is it just as bad now?

I think it’s loosening up a little bit actually. They’re tense because it’s the end of the millennium, but I think people are chilling out, judging from the movies that are on and humour that’s going around.

Have you seen the South Park flick?

Yeah, it’s fucking awesome. It was amazing. 

Paintin’ the Town Brown features a number of tracks recorded in Holland. Do Dutch audiences really like you, or is there an ulterior motive for going there all the time?

We don’t go there as much. But Dutch audiences do like us—that was the first place we started touring. We spent literally two months in Holland the first time we ever went to Europe. The first time we ever toured in 1990, they brought us over there. It was actually Theo [Van Rock], who was the soundman of the Henry Rollins Band, he’s a good friend of ours, so we stayed in his little apartment and just toured Holland extensively, so we’ve got a good following there to this day. Although Germany is a big following too, which is kind of fucked up. So everytime we go over there, we have to tour Germany for a month.

So is there a reason there’s no Mollusk tracks on Paintin’ the Town Brown?

That was just coincidental. They just didn’t come up. We just fucking flaked out. There’s no Mollusk tracks, and there are three tracks from Holland—it’s just weird. We put this thing together in, like, two hours. It was all Kirk Miller—we went to his house and he’s got every tape we’ve ever done, every show recorded. And we just whipped it together—the ugliest-sounding shit we could find, and that was that. We didn’t really pay too much attention to what was going on.

The Mollusk was your most polished and cohesive record, but does having a child around get you back into that chaotic, childlike state?

A little bit. Honestly, I’m still just trying to get a grip on what’s going on. I can’t even form an opinion yet. 

Have you always been big with the Dead and Phish-heads or is that a byproduct of doing the H.O.R.D.E. tour?

That’s just starting—the mutual Phish/Ween fan thing. 

Are you comfortable with that?

I think it’s fine. Whatever! As long as they pay their admission price, who gives a shit?

Have you ever encountered any totally obsessed fans who you just want to tell to get a life?

Yeah, we get a lot of fans who use a Ween show as an excuse to do a fucking lot of drugs, and then because they’re on so many drugs, of course, they get backstage, just because they’re so high—not because they’re offering anything. They’re just tripping on eight hits of acid. Those are the people who always manage to squeeze by and get backstage and corner you. 

Security’s like "I’m not dealing with this shit."

Exactly. Then they corner you on eight hits of acid and start talking to you about "Mourning Glory" and then you’re fucked. But it’s cool. Our fans are pretty into it, so that’s nice.

But you yourself are not pulling out the Scotch Guard anymore. 

No, we never did Scotch Guard, that was just a big lie. We thought that sounded funny. And we didn’t realize people actually did that shit. We didn’t know what huffing was or anything.