"Here's The Poop On Ween"

In 1984, two mild-mannered eighth graders met in a typing class at New Hope-Solebury High School in Pennsylvania. Little did Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo know that a mighty deity had plans for them - plans that involved music. Music and drugs. Their self-created demon-god Boognish rose from the mist and bestowed upon the pair their alter-egos: "Gene Ween" and "Dean Ween."
Ween established itself as one of the wackiest, most subversive rock acts of the alternative rock era, one whose work traveled far beyond the constraints of taste, parody, novelty and satire.
Sixteen years later, Ween has released its seventh album White Pepper, and while the years of substance abuse may be catching up to them, the Boognish-powered, so-called Poopship that is Ween shows no signs of slowing down. Flagpole caught up to Dean (Melchiondo) in New Orleans. Unfortunately, two o'clock in the afternoon may have been a bit too early:

Flagpole: Hello, is Dean around?
Dean Ween (mumbling): Who's calling?

FP: This is the Flagpole in Athens.
DW: Shit... I'm asleep man; can you call me back?

FP: [An hour later] How are you feeling?
DW: Fuckin' horrible. It's New Orleans. I got to bed at like seven-thirty or eight this morning. We had a gig last night that went really well. You don't even need a reason in this town to go out and get really drunk. I was like... bad. Bad scene. I never had the same shot twice all night, I must of drank 15 shots. Somebody gave me their medication. I didn't know what the fuck it was...

FP: It says on your web site that you're looking forward to coming back to the 40 Watt.
DW: I booked us that gig. Well, I had a booking agent do it, but it was my doing. What happened was our tour was ending in Florida a couple of days from now, and we got booked to play on "Late Night With David Letterman." I told our manager, rather than sit around and get all settled back in, let's just keep going on tour. We'll work our way home from Florida. And the first place I said was the 40 Watt. We were really honored a couple of years ago. [The 40 Watt] offered us a bunch of money to play New Year's Eve. I was really flattered by that.

FP: Has anything particularly nasty happened on this leg of the tour?
DW: Yeah, nonstop, all the time, horrible... I mean, on a Ween tour everyone is generally in bad shape. We drink too much. Everyone likes to indulge... all the time. But our audience is fucked. It's a proven fact: the most fucked up people listen to Ween. I see the dark side of humanity. The lowest common denominator.

FP: What have been some shining moments for Ween?
DW: I take all of this stuff for granted now, how cool it actually is. We've had a lot of cool things happen to us. We played with Yoko Ono on her record. The "South Park" thing [the "Chef Aid" episode] was amazing, because we got our own little cutout characters. I've spent a lot of time hanging out with ["South Park" co-creator] Matt Stone at his house. Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets invited us to his house in Austin to go swimming and have a barbecue. They've always been one of my favorite bands ever. I've been saying for 10 years in interviews - people say, "Is there anyone you ever want to play with?" and I say, "Yeah, I'd like to play with Curt Kirkwood." He's probably as close to a guitar legend as punk rock or alternative rock has. That was really rewarding.

FP: You released a live album last year. Do you have any plans for a "b-side" or "rarities" collection?
DW: The live record happened because we wanted to sell it on-line, and Elektra ended up taking it from us and putting it out. We're still making good records as far as I'm concerned, and I don't want to do anything that's even slightly retrospective until I feel like it. I need a few years off. What I would like to do is take our second and third record, The Pod [1991] and Pure Guava [1992]... We did them on four-track in our apartment, and there were a million other tunes we did when we lived there that never got released. But they really are one record, and it's funny: people say, "Pure Guava is my least favorite, or The Pod is my favorite," but they're one record; they really are. So I'd like to take all the other stuff we didn't put on there. That would be a cool thing, with four discs with that shit.

FP: A few of the songs on White Pepper sound like they could have come off The Mollusk or 12 Golden Country Greats. Were any of them left over from those albums?
DW: I think "Back to Basom" and "The Flutes of Chi" would have totally fit on The Mollusk [1997]. "Flutes Of Chi" goes all the way back to Chocolate And Cheese [1994]. That's the most failed Ween song ever. We tried to record that song, I dunno, five times, six times even. That's no joke. We started it for Chocolate And Cheese [1996], and we did it for The Mollusk.

FP: Is there something in particular that made it work this time?
DW: Every time we did it, we kinda got closer. We put it up on the Chocodog [chocodog.com, Ween's web site] for people to download. And people love to say, "That should have been on your record; that's better than some of the songs on the record." I started hearing it so much that it was like, "You know what, we should just put this on our new record." It sounds really cool; there are no real standard instruments on it. It's all E-Bow, and mellotron, and Turkish bells and drums, electric sitar, tablas, there's a sample in there; it's just T-Rex going, "Owwww." Next time you listen to it, listen for this little guy going, "Owwww."

FP: What do you tend to drink the most on-stage?
DW: I drink a lot of Rolling Rock beer, because it's brewed right by where we live, so it's on tap everywhere. So I still drink, like, between 20 and 50 a day. Ween has been like a bottle of Jack a night for years and years. It's not cool... it's really unhealthy, I feel myself falling apart. So now we drink a bottle of vodka every night. It is a little better for you.

FP: How do you want Ween to be remembered in the long run?
DW: I've already gotten all the rewards out of Ween anyone could ever hope to. We get to make people happy at our gigs. I already get to meet people every night who say, "When I was growing up, all I ever did was listen to your record and get high," and that part of it is awesome. The bulk of the shit people write about us is inaccurate and wrong, and what most people think we do is inaccurate and wrong. Most people think we're a parody band, that we're trying to parody music. I think that time will time, and I don't think it's because we're a joke band. I think it's because we've written a lot of good songs. Which is all that really matters. I'd like to be judged by our entire body of work.

FP: Final question: The Poopship versus The Mothership, who would win?
DW: That might be the best question anybody's ever asked. Uh... The Mothership

FP: At least you're humble.

Fritz Gibson

WHO: Ween
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Wednesday, July 19, 9 p.m.
HOW MUCH: $15