"Family Ties"

TETHERED TO A HIGH-PROFILE HISTORY OF LOWBROW JOKES, MIDDLE-SCHOOL WEIRDNESS AND, OF COURSE, TO EACH OTHER, DEAN AND GENE WEEN ARE FINALLY ON THE LEVEL. WELL, SORT OF.

I'm sleeping with Ween. Not actually "with," in the Biblical sense, but near and above them, in one of the band's tour bus bunks ("coffins," as they call them) as we speed through the night. This is after a marathon poker match, during which Team Ween manages to relieve me of the contents of my wallet - a cool $20 - which, near as I can tell, is the only reason they agreed to let me tag along on their tour in support of the thoroughly excellent White Pepper (Elektra).

Let me warn you that this will not, unfortunately, be one of those gonzo travelogues where the writer gets all drunk-up and high and lights farts with those wacky weed kings in Ween. Sorry, they just aren't in the mood. They don't even bother calling their tour bus the Poopship Destroyer anymore. Not that I don't try: During my three days on the road with them, we race go-karts, go to a funhouse and grab a few hours of R&R in Virginia Beach. But it all seems kind of, well, forced.

Like you, I once thought of Ween as the Cheech and Chong of alt-rock, a semi-demonic duo hatched from a bad egg in rural New Hope, Penn. We all thought of them, if we thought about them at all, as the Scotchguard-huffing, bastard twins of Frank Zappa, able to parrot just about any style of popular song and fuck its shit up with Mad-magazine puerility and rank absurdity. And even though they have, by their best estimate, ingested entire mountainsides of 'shrooms over the years, sarcasm has always been their real drug of choice - and Ween always got off. Well, not exactly. At least not anymore.

Dean and Gene Ween la.k.a. guitarist Mickey Melchiondo and vocalist Aaron Freeman) are both heading into their thirties, which, despite what their albums might have you believe, makes them all grown up and adult-like. Melchiondo plays golf three days a week, for chrissakes, and the two of them no longer think Steely Dan totally sucks (see "Pandy Fackler" from White Pepper). They have families and a modest, but no less impressive, empire of weirdness to run. When I first meet Freeman in the lobby of a Washington, D.C., hotel, he's pushing a stroller containing his daughter, Anna. Before leaving for tour, Melchiondo found out he's just a few months away from spawning. The notion of Freeman and Melchiondo as parents may strike some as the stoned blind leading the naked, but the party hearty days of the Brothers Ween are largely in the past tense. Life on tour with the band isn't the rolling riot of beer and bongs you might think it is.

"People think we party all the time," says Freeman. "Everybody wants to get me high - everybody. If I wanted to, I could be high for the rest of my life and never spend a dime."

"It's no longer a lifestyle, which is how it used to be," adds Melchiondo. "We would smoke from the moment we got up until we went to bed. Forever. I didn't make a big conscious decision to stop, it was gradual. I think it was because of Ween and touring that there was so much drugs around us. You can only eat so much candy."

True to their words, the only substance I witness Ween ingest is their pre-show vials of ginseng, a must-have item on their dressing-room rider. "We're just alcoholics now," says Freeman, probably mostly kidding.

As for their music, well, as Johnny Rotten used to say, they mean it, man. "We are thought of as a novelty band by the majority of people that write about us, and that's the price we pay for having humor in our music," says Melchiondo. "But fuck 'em. Ween has been around for 16 years. We just made our eighth album. We've outlasted every band - we will outlast every band that's around now - and it's not because we're a comedy band. People have been writing the same review about us since the first record, just switch out the song titles, evil twins of They Might Be Giants, Zappa-esque sense of humor, dead-on parodies, etc. We're not trying to imitate good music - we're trying to make good music."

For the bulk of White Pepper, a wonderful Beatlesque popsicle of an album, the yuks are in short supply, crowded out by exquisitely crafted pop tunes full of, like, real feelings and shit. As many have long suspected, Ween is capable of writing songs that people didn't even know they wanted to hear, didn't even know they could love. White Pepper isn't your older brother's Ween, for the most part, it's all clean, nummable pop music and muted psychedelia. There's no cock-rock burlesque or prog-wank buffoonery - well not much anyway - and definitely no dick-joke country ditties or strangely tentacled sea chanteys.

But they did deliver all that and more earlier tonight at the 9:30 Club in D.C., where Ween scraped clean their resin-choked bong of a back catalog and blew out the hits for three hours, topping the set with a full-on rawk stampede through Van Halen's "Hot For Teacher." "We started playing that long and became known for that, and now we can't go back," says Freeman. "But it's fucking killing me."

Live, Ween can take pretty much any genre of music-pop, psych, metal, country, jazz, show tunes - and make it their own for the space of a song. Melchiondo writes all the set lists and, onstage at least, he's definitely the boss, conducting with an index finger he points exultantly skyward from time to time, as if to say total heaviosity is being achieved. From the back of the club, Melchiondo looks a little like Paul Westerberg, pulling retarded faces with his guitar slung around his ankles. If you squint, Freeman kind of looks like an overinflated Lou Reed, singing through a shit-eating perma-grin, his head gently wobbling as if attached to his shoulders by a spring. The live show is no longer Freeman wearing a chef's hat and swim goggles with the lenses painted over and Melchiondo in a red, devilboy skullcap, backed by a DAT machine. These days, they front a crack live band - drummer Claude Coleman, bassist Dave Dreiwitz and keyboardist Glenn McClelland - that hits marks most groups aren't even aware of. The nutty stage attire is limited to Melchiondo's Brown University T-shirt, a subtle reminder the duo sees the world through a mud-colored filter.

"Brown is when something is fucked up in all the right places, stinks in all the right places," says Melchiondo "it's a glorious thing. We're totally brown."

After the 9:30 show, it's back on the bus for an all night drive. Life on a tour bus is a lot like living on a submarine: it's small and tight, and you always have to hang on for dear life. The Clash's London Calling and the Dead's Wake Of The Flood are stacked by the CD player. The DVD player is busted and the satellite TV doesn't pick up anything while on the highway, so we settle on poker, When the Ween guys look at me from across their lanned-out cards, they probably see a giant lollipop with the word "sucker" written on it. For a while, I'm up, but as the hours stretch on and the rules get harder to follow, I begin losing. Badly. Finally, around 4 am, temporarily bankrupt, I head for my coffin and fall into a deep sleep. Everyone dreams in black and white, but tonight I dream in brown. There's no imagery, just a deep-voiced narrator that sounds like Moses, I mean, Charlton Heston.

In the beginning, there was Boognish. And on the first day, Boognish created Ween. And Boognish saw they were brown and was pleased. On the second day, Boognish appeared to Ween in a burning bush, which they used to spark up a spilff the size of Oklahoma.

This was back in eighth grade, just outside Mrs Slack's typing class. Ween used to joke about II, making up this elaborate story about a god they worshipped called Boognish. "He's our team mascot, says Freeman. "All that is brown is Boognish." But this really was a heavy, life-changing moment, the day Aaron Freeman met Mickey Melchiondo and they entered unto a murky conspiracy of grass-stained strangeness that resulted in a lifelong friendship and artistic partnership.

Now 29, Melchiondo grew up in the loafy, gay-in-an-artsy-antique-dealer-kind-of-way New Hope. Perched on the muddy lip of the Delaware River, which divides Pennsylvania and New Jersey, New Hope isn't far from where George Washington made his famous crossing. Melchiondo's father was a used-car dealer; Big Jilm, whose name turned up as a song title on Pure Guava, was one of his salesmen. Melchiondo pored over his dad's record collection, which was heavy on the old school rebel country of Hank, Merle and Waylon, with a light sprinkling of the Beatles and the Bonzo Dog Band. By age 13, Melchiondo was teaching himself to play guitar and drums. The next year, he got his FCC license and hosted a show on the local college-radio station, which provided him with a steady stream of punk rock celebs to interview for his zine, Yuck. Just across the river, in Trenton, was City Gardens, a now defunct beer stained and duct-taped rock club that was a regular stop for any touring underground-rock band in the '80s; Melchiondo took a job at the soda bar just so he could see the shows.

Freeman was born on St. Patrick's Day 30 years ago in Philadelphia. When he was two years old, his dad played him "Help, I'm A Rock" by the Mothers Of invention, and later, Freeman would sing along to his mom's Earth, Wind & Fire records. When his parents split in his early teens, Freeman moved in with his father, a psychiatrist practicing in New Hope. His dad bought him an electric guitar, but the tape recorder was the first instrument he would master. "One day, I figured out if you pushed the record button in halfway, it slowed the tape and your voice would be a lot higher," recalls Freeman. This discovery would have a big impact on the way Ween records sound.

Then Gene met Dean. "When Aaron and I met, we were absolutely fucking nothing alike at all," says Melchiondo. "We've actually become more alike than we were back then. I was into music, but I was a jock. Aaron was totally the opposite. He was totally more artistic - a very, very weird person. We used to actually fight, I remember punching Aaron in the face on a couple of occasions; this is when we were 14 or 15. I would pick on him and fuck with him even though we were friends. We were lousy students, we both had to go to summer school many times, I got into drugs heavily and got him into it. Each of us knew about one more band that the other one didn't."

"Mickey was the punk-rock guy, I was the new wave guy," says Freeman. "I was into Devo, Laurie Anderson and pop radio. He had this whole world to open up to me that I was totally unfamiliar with. But I was the one who turned Mickey onto Prince." The day Freeman played him Sign "0" The Times was the day Meichiondo stopped calling Prince a "fag."

When the two met, Freeman had been making a solo album called Synthetic Socks, which the Teenbeat label would eventually release on cassette in 1987. Melchiondio played guitar on a track called "I Hate Snuggles," and the two began writing and recording songs together. It was sort of like Beavis And Butt-head meets Wayne's World with pot. They called the first song "You Fucked Up." It would take them a few years to discover the beauty of subtlety, but this was a promising start. The duo immediately adopted the name Ween, a combination of "wuss" and "peen" (verbal shorthand for "penis"). They would mostly record at Melchiondio's house, because his parents turned a blind eye to the clouds of sweet, skunky smoke billowing out from under the bedroom door.

After five red-eyed years of beer bongs and home-recording sessions, Ween managed to capture the attention of Twin/Tone Records, and in 1990, the Minneapolis label released God Ween Satan - The Oneness, a veritable best-of culled from the hundreds of songs the two had recorded throughout their teenage years. If you play it backward - heck, if you play it forward - it sounds like the Tasmanian Devil hopped up on bathtub meth, screeching "Little Red Corvette" into the drive-thru-window microphone at Taco Bell while listening to the Butthole Surfers on a Walkman.

Twin/Tone was in the process of going out of business, but Ween did manage to snag a European tour, which sort of turned into a tour of just Holland. "You're 20 years old, it's like going to the golden kingdom of pot," says Freeman. "It was a blast. Slept wherever, didn't care, I got crabs from sleeping on some gross bed. Didn't even get to have the cheap sex to go with it."

When Ween came back, they moved into a carriage house on a farm just outside New Hope that they quickly dubbed The Pod. "We called it that because it was so small, hot and disgusting," says Melchiondo. "There were flies everywhere because it was a horse farm. All those files references, "Flies On My Dick," etc., it was all true. We had no money and we were stoned all the time. There was just a couch, a TV, a Ping-Pong table and our recording gear."

By day, Freeman was slinging guacamole at El Taco Loco and Melchiondo was pumping gas at the Mobil station. After they punched out, the two would race home to write and record all night long. Music was all that mattered. At this point, relations with Twin/Tone had decayed to the degree that Ween didn't even bother calling the label anymore. One of the band's earliest acolytes was Kramer, noted producer. musician and owner of Shimmy-Disc Records.

"By the time God Ween Satan came out, we had already recorded all the demos for The Pod," Melchiondo recalls. "We gave them to Kramer, and he was like, 'You're crazy if you re-record this. It's perfect as is.' He put it out (in 1991), and we never bothered to tell Twin/Tone. They didn't find out about The Pod until it came out. The kind of shit you can only get away with when you're 19. It's our most fucked record - maybe the most fucked record ever."

The Pod's cover art features a picture of Mean Ween (a.k.a. bassist Chris Williams) superimposed over the cover of The Best Of Leonard Cohen. (Cohen is aware of this and fine with it, by the way.) Williams is modeling the nitrous oxide-powered bong that Ween, uh, "experimented with" during the recording sessions, "it's this army-issue gas mask that Mean Ween fitted with a small nitrous cylinder and a pot bowl connected with a series of hoses," says Melchiondo. "You light the bowl and kick the valve on like in Blue Velvet, and the nitrous pushes the smoke into your lungs. All you're breathing in is smoke and nitrous. One hit would fuck you up for two days. But not in a good way. You would be just, like, blank."

Despite what they claimed on The Pod's back cover, Ween never huffed Scotchguard. Initially, they refuse to discuss the Scotchguard issue, but they finally cop to the truth when I show them a recent newspaper article announcing 3M has discontinued production of the aerosol stain repellent. It turns out the stuff is so toxic that traces of it have shown up in the cells of just about every life form the company tested. "At the time, we wanted to seem really scummy," says Freeman. "But we always tell fans, 'Don't do Scotchguard, it's not cool. We're not impressed with your Scotchguard use.' One time, when we were on tour, a guy was huffing it in the front row, and I saw his face turn this strangely colored checkered pattern."

One day, out of nowhere, the major labels came knocking on Ween's door. Literally. Melchiondo was sequestered in a local studio while dumping bass and drum tracks onto a DAT. Steve Ralbovsky, an A&R rep from Elektra, just happened to be taking a tour of the studio, poked his head in and liked what he heard. The songs Melchiondo was working on would later form the bulk of 1993's Pure Guava. Ralbovsky stood over Melchiondo's shoulder, listening intently for 45 minutes and laughing his ass off. Word soon spread around the A&R circuit. After a brief bidding war, Ween signed with Elektra. "We figured that Elektra was willing to put out a record that we recorded in our apartment, they probably wouldn't expect us to become this slick, hit-factory band," says Melchiondo.

Pure Guava, Ween's major-label debut (and an album that sounds like it was recorded in a helium tent), went on to sell almost 200,000 copies, largely on the strength of "Push Th' Little Daisies," a whip pet-voiced love song Freeman penned for the girl who would become his wife. The song got a lot of airplay in the US, and became a bona fide hit in Australia.

"All this cool stuff was happening, but we didn't really appreciate it at the time," says Melchiondo. "We just were always stoned and didn't think there was anything special shout it. But one day, a box of Pure Guava discs showed up from Elektra, and I think I started crying, because I was a music junkie and now we were on the same label as the Doors. Here was this record that we recorded in our apartment for not even two dollars - we didn't even buy new tape, just taped over demo tapes bands gave us on the road - and it's on Elektra."

I WAKE UP IN MY COFFIN. I'M THE LAST ONE UP, and the bus is empty, it's mid-afternoon and, according to the tour itinerary, we're in Virginia Beach. The bus is parked in front of the Abyss, one of these slick, black-walled alt-rock venues that looks like it's part of chain. I go searching for Ween. I find the band's tour manager, a heck of a nice guy named Paul Monahan who makes that cabin-boy job look like an exercise in Zen. He tells me Melchiondo has blown off the group's sound check to hit the links.

When he's swinging a golf club, Melchiondo dresses the part, looking disarmingly respectable in crisp khakis and a pair of beige-and-white, saddle-shoe golf cleats. He's a heavy-duty sports fan and a hopeless ESPN addict. So it was quite a pleasant surprise the night he tuned in and, totally out of the blue, heard SportsCenter anchor John Buccigross say, "What Aaron Freeman is to Ween, Andy Delmore is to the Philadelphia Flyers." The next day, Ween had their people get in touch with Buccigross people, the sportscaster is a big fan. A couple of nights later, on the air, Buccigross says, "Mickey Melchiondo is to Ween what Mike Modano is to the Dallas Stars." I'm told these are huge compliments.

Squinting in the afternoon sun, I notice several dudes - and make no mistake, these are "dudes" - milling around who were in the audience at the 9:30 Club last night. Ever since Ween did the H.O.R.D.E. tour in '97, fans following the band around in Deadhead-like fashion has become increasingly common. Dan Farroll, a tall drink of water in a black John Popper hat and mutton chops, is from Richmond, this is his fourth night on the tour. He's standing next to a big, hairy guy from Memphis named Johnny Williams, who, at age 32 and "old enough to know better," has been following Ween for two weeks. "After a while, you're like, I wanna eat somewhere that doesn't sell gasoline," says Williams. Ween puts them on the guest list every night.

When I find Freeman in the dressing room, I ask him about the superfans. Sometimes, they bring home-cooked meats, as per Ween's request on the sleeves of the band's early albums, or various illegal forms of vegetation. Sometimes, they want to trace Scotchguard-huffing stories, which always gets a "Sorry, dude, we never..." They all mean well, but some try a little too hard. Like the first time Ween went to Las Vegas. They were on 'shrooms, of course, and a local record store had organized a pre-show reception to celebrate the terrible twosome's arrival.

"It was really nice," recalls Freeman. "They prepared this leg of lamb, and they were all excited that we had come to Vegas. But we don't really know these people, and they're like, 'Check this out.' They pop a tape in the VCR and hit play, and you see this white arm on the screen, and this guy with an X-acto knife starts carving W-E-E-N into his arm. There's blood everywhere. We fucking screamed and made them take it off, and we got the fuck out of there. I think they thought we would be pleased or something."

And who could possibly forget the woman who jumped up onstage, lifted her blouse and squeezed a stream of breast milk at the band and, then, the audience? This has actually happened twice. "That's the beauty of Ween, right there," says Melchiondo.

AFTER TOURING IN SUPPORT OF PURE GUAVA, Ween took their Elektra advance for the next record, rented an office space in nearby Pennington, N.J., and set about working on 1994's Chocolate And Cheese. They bought enough gear to outfit a relatively state-of-the-art studio. Producer/ex-Rollins Band bassist Andrew Weiss - a long-time Ween collaborator - manned the recording console. "Andrew said he wanted to make a record that 16-year-old skateboarders would love and so would a woman working as a secretary," says Melchiondo. "It would still be fucked up. but very polished. But when we were done, compared to Pure Guava and The Pod, it seemed like a really boring record to us. I was thoroughly disgusted and felt we had failed and didn't want to play the tapes for anyone. Tums out, it was probably our best record."

Elektra sure thought so. The label excitedly came up with a two-year marketing plan and a detailed timetable for touring, making videos and releasing singles. "One week into our tour, we're in Toronto," says Melchiondo. "The tour manager tells me that a guy from a radio station is coming to pick us up for an interview. We're driving and he says, 'So, what do you think about what happened at Elektra today?' We were like, 'What are you talking about?' 'Oh, you haven't heard yet? Ninety percent of the Elektra staff was fired today by the Time-Warner chairman, and they brought in a whole new staff.' I get back to the club, and there's a call from our A&R guy, he had been fired. We got assurances from the new regime that they were 100 percent behind the new record, it was going to be a priority for them - all lies."

They say living well is the best revenge, but sometimes a country record does a better job. Working on songs for their next album, Ween realized they had assembled a whole pile of country songs, picking up a creative thread that began with The Pod's "Sorry Charlie" and Chocolate And Cheese's "Drifter in The Dark." They mentioned this to producer/musician Ben Vaughn, an old buddy from the City Gardens days. Vaughn floated the idea of doing an all-country record down in Nashville.

"He knew Charlie McCoy and all these other legendary session guys who played on all those classic country recordings, and he said he could get it together," says Freeman "So we went down there, and they turned out to be guys you would meet at a steakhouse or see at the supermarket, you wouldn't know that they were some of the greatest musicians in the world. That's why it's called 12 Golden Country Greats, even though there's only 10 songs on there. The 'greats' are those Nashville session guys."

Ween never bothered to tell Elektra about their bold new direction until they turned in the master tapes in 1996. "I think they were pissed," says Freeman, "we went to this marketing meeting and there were some raised eyebrows. Like, 'Hmmm, a country record?'"

When Ween came home from Nashville, they got back to working on the "real" follow-up to Chocolate And Cheese. They rented a house at the jersey shore in the middle of winter - when the wind whipped beach towns are shuttered and empty and the ocean turns the color of slate - and loaded it up with instruments, recording gear and assorted party favors. With the storm-tossed Atlantic howling out their back door, they settled on a nautical theme. They called it The Mollusk, and would turn out to be something of a seafaring concept album about a boy and his pet clam. Elektra actually liked this album.

There would not be, however, any two-year marketing plan for Ween world domination. They would have to settle for the H.O.R.D.E. tour, which exposed the band's music to a new audience of white-socks-and-Birkenstocks Phish-heads. Actually, the members of Phish have been Ween fans since Pure Guava, and a cover of Ween's "Roses Are Free" turned up on the Vermont jam band's six-disc live record, Hampton Comes Alive. The two groups have become fast friends. Whenever Ween is in Vermont, they stay with the Phish guys, and there's talk of doing an album together.

"I could see us doing something with them, but it's such an angle, it's almost dangerous," says Melchiondo. "I would want to do that for all the right reasons. There is a Ween/Phish connection, but we are two totally different bands. Ween is so much about the bad vibe. It's one of our strong suits. There's an evil side to Ween that's one of the best things about us. There's a little bit of love there, but a lot of hate."

IT'S 3 AM, HOURS AFTER THE FINAL NOTES OF "Hot For Teacher" have rung out from the Abyss. It's just Melchiondo and me in my hotel room, and we're about to part company. Throughout most of the interview sessions, Melchiondo has seemed distracted, cynical and bored, weary of the same old questions about Boognish and Scotchguard and the country record he's answered a million times. But now, he's focused and effusive, and for a moment, he seems to open his heart to a stranger, his responses sound like open letters to people he clearly cares deeply about.

I ask him if he can imagine a creative life without Ween, without Freeman riding shotgun?

Melchiondo thinks about this for a minute, nipping at a lukewarm bottle of Bud and chasing it with a drag on his Marlboro "I've been with Aaron more than half of my life," he says, finally. "We've been through all the major life experiences together; deaths and marriages, getting dumped, meeting and falling in love with girls, being poor together, enjoying success together, touring around the world together. We've seen each other at our darkest hours millions of times. Now, there's certain situations where the only person in the world that I can trust or that know will have any understanding of my situation is Aaron. And then there are other situations where there are things that I can talk about to a total stranger on the street that I can't talk to Aaron about. So it's like being in a relationship. I don't think either of us would trade anything for the life we have enjoyed up until now. I can't foresee - and, hopefully, I won't ever be held to this - ever quitting Ween and joining another group. It's who I am, it's a part of my identity. And without Aaron, it's useless to me, totally worthless."