"An Interview with Dean Ween"

The guitarist for the schizophrenic cult iconsWeen speaks out on the Internet, Napster, and WeenRadio.com.

Dean Ween, the psychedelic, sonically schizophrenic guitarist for cult icons Ween, admits he's a computer geek. From years of maintaining their website, as well as constant surfing (which he is unashamedly addicted to), he's completely comfortable discussing his views on Napster and how the Internet is changing the music industry.

His first encounter with the Internet was through his father. "He told me there was a Ween (fan) page on the Internet. I didn't know anything about what that meant. And then he showed me when I came over one night and I was amazed that someone out there could have something like that. I got online pretty quickly after that. I got in touch with the guy who was doing that page. At first I was giving him content, like I'd scan rare Ween record covers for him, do interviews, and then I just decided I should start doing this myself."

It's a busy Monday afternoon when I get a call from Dean (whose real name is Mickey Melchiondo) who apologizes for his grogginess. It's 3:30pm his time, but he's just woken up from a nap, no doubt still recovering from the band's European/Japan/North American tour in support of their most recent effort, White Pepper. Although relatively unnoticed by mainstream media, Dean Ween and music "brother" Gene Ween [aka Aaron Freeman] are no doubt two of today's hardest working and dedicated musicians. For the past ten years, the duo have been consistently making records, touring till exhaustion, personally maintaining their website, exploring side-projects, and still managing to reply to fan mail, even from the road. On any given night, the boys play an average of three hours, taking gigs anywhere and everywhere, from small clubs to the highly esteemed Reading and Leed's Festivals in England.

But while Melchiondo prides himself on his band's indie attitude of having an open relationship with their fans (he offers his personal email address on their website and has an open-taping policy at all their gigs) he is vehemently opposed to Napster. Part of his no-nonsense attitude can be attributed to the fact that he's been watching the Internet hysteria develop since long before every artist had his or her own website or record labels had any idea of the impact it would have on their business.

"Back then, record companies didn't give a shit at all. I guess because it wasn't threatening to them or there wasn't any money to be made," he says frankly. "Now it's standard practice that when you sign with a record company they want rights to your domain name. If you're Joe Blow they go and register JoeBlow.com. They don't want you stealing that business away from them.... We had an early jump on it, so our label realized that it was working for us. I mean, they tried a couple times to try and hook me up with their guy who maintained their site. Their idea was like, 'Well, give us an exclusive track.' And our attitude was like, 'Man, we've been doing this for free forever on our site.'"

Ween's 1999 two-CD live set, Paintin' The Town Brown, was initially to be made available only through their website, until Elektra decided to release it. Having recently split with Elektra, the band is taking the opportunity to capitalize on that avenue. "What we're gonna do is release a record of material we've already done, while we're allowed to, so we have something we can sell through our website that's music. We're not gonna make it a subscriber thing. I don't like all that shit. If you wanna come to our site, you can buy the CD and we'll send it to you. And we also give away downloadable music for free too. But this is more of a real record."

For Melchiondo, the Internet is a paradox. On one hand, he sees it as a mode of connecting to fans and helping them connect to each other. "For Ween, [the Internet] has been completely positive." "But," he adds, "we also completely run our website. I check our email five times a day. I have a guy who helps me with the design of it but I update the content all the time, from the road, we also sell merch on the site. And especially with a band like Ween where we have an open-taping policy, it's become a forum for all these people to pool together and get in touch with one another and trade with each other, find out who's going to what show and get rides." He adds proudly, "It's a very hippie type thing going on."

But he believes the Internet also gives false impressions. It isn't about ripping off the record companies or creating a more "democratic" Internet. "I think people's opinion on Napster is a little bit ignorant. I think people are under the impression that when they download stuff off Napster that they're ripping off 'the Man' somehow. Which might be true to an extent. But the fact of the matter is that when you sign with major labels, you're getting screwed to begin with, especially with all these mergers with AOL and Time Warner. And then people download your music for free? I mean, you gotta get paid somehow."

Melchiondo becomes increasingly irritated discussing Napster because he sees it as highlighting the volatility of an artist, which he understands too well. "When you're in a band you only have a couple of sources of income. And if you don't sell records, you're out of luck. You're gonna get dropped or end up in the poor house. I mean, it's not really fair to bands that are putting out records. Ween has one of the most free policies of any band out there. You can come to a Ween gig and tape it if you want and trade it online. You can videotape it, take pictures. You can do whatever you want. But we put a lot into our records. We put a lot of time, heart, and money into making our albums. And to think that they should just be available for free is just bullshit."

Besides their website Ween.com, Ween also plunged into streaming radio. WeenRadio.com is a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week, much hailed radio site. Their playlist never repeats itself and is a haven for any Ween fan. "That was started by a kid in Boston, Jeremy, who did it as an experiment. Ian Rogers, the guy who developed the technology at Winamp, also developed Shoutcast, which is what WeenRadio is broadcast through. It was done between the three of us: Jeremy had the idea, I got in touch with Jeremy, registered the domain name WeenRadio.com, gave him some material, and put him in touch with Ian, who developed the whole thing to begin with. It's something that we're really proud of."

Despite the success of WeenRadio, the site also highlights another pitfall of the Internet. "It's funny because our fans have more of a handle on these things than we do. They know what we played when. Every note of every gig we did this year, like 180 gigs, is available on the Internet for free, if you want it. People can also upload WeenRadio and put stuff in his incoming directory. Occasionally Jeremy will send me an email and say he just got these songs. And I'll be like 'God, how did they get these?' They'll be like outtakes from five years ago. That's the funniest thing about the Internet. There's tapes made about nine years ago after our first record came out by a friend of mine. Then two years later he made a copy for someone and all of a sudden every Ween fan online has a copy of this shit and ends up at WeenRadio eventually. We had a tape stolen of demos from our last record and it ended up online three weeks later. It's kind of disturbing actually. That's on the bad side of it. If we want people to hear it, we'll make it available. Like anybody, we make a lot of crappy music but we don't let everyone hear it."

After years of dutifully maintaining his site and keeping up with the development of the World Wide Web, Melchiondo remains relatively calm about the impact of the Internet on his career. "I've been sitting in front of my computer for the last five years and I don't think that it's going to replace the conventional structure where you make records for a company and they distribute them in stores. That's gonna be the primary way people get their music. I think if the Internet goes completely to broadband, if everyone gets cable modems, which everyone is bound to in time, then that'll change things a lot. I think there will come a time when you can go online and download an entire movie in minutes. It'll happen eventually. But it's not gonna affect the way people think."

So what would Melchiondo want the Internet to do for him in a perfect world? "I dunno, I use it as a drug. I'm on it all the time. It's gonna play itself out though, you'll see."

Kathleen Richards is a Music Research Associate with Gavin.