"Weened on the history of rock 'n' roll, baby"

Ween could be the future of rock, genre-busting heroes subverting the system from within, Net-savvy geniuses on the lo-fi down-low.

Or maybe merely a joke taken to unsettling extremes, potty-mouthed juvenile delinquents, sonic onanists with a jones for noise.

Until last year's "White Pepper" album, no middle ground existed - listeners either smiled blissfully and laid their heads directly on the vibrating speaker or ripped up napkins, stuffed them in their ears and dived out the nearest window.

Despite a lack of radio and video airplay for Ween, devoted Grateful Dead-like legions who dig its lengthy jams, three- to four-hour sets and open taping policy follow the band from town to town and - inspired by a liner note inside the 1992 album "Pure Guava" - have been known to bring their idols hot meals.

Nearly 200 hardcore Lower 48 fans, in fact, will be trekking to Girdwood on Friday and Saturday for the act's first Alaska concerts.

Expletives deleted, unlike their live shows

Dean Ween kicks off the phone interview by dropping his beer, the bottle shattering on the hardwood floor of his Pennsylvania home just as the baby is being put to bed.

"I'm totally ... blowing it," Ween's guitarist says cheerfully, his giggles continuing for a long while.

He thinks out loud about cleaning up the mess but ends up throwing a towel over the foamy shards; baby isn't allowed in the smoking room anyway.

That's about the wildest occurence during our talk despite Ween's rep for weird.

"The things that people believe about us are way more interesting than the truth," says Dean, aka Mickey Melchiondo. "People think we shoot LSD into our eyes or something."

Savoring his last few days home with the kid, 31-year-old Dean looks forward to this month's West Coast jaunt, and it's not just because of Alaska's strong weed.

"I still love touring. I'm just not very into leaving my son behind. First steps, first words - you don't want to miss that.

Then again, I don't want to take a job working on a bridge crew."

Some nice things to say, some bad

The current All Music Guide take on the duo (oddly written in past tense even though Dean and Gene, aka Aaron Freeman, are still going strong after 17 years): "Despite a mastery for seemingly every mutation of the musical spectrum, the group refused to play it straight; in essence, Ween were bratty deconstructionists, kicking dirt on the pop world around them with demented glee. Along with the occasional frat-boy lapses into misogyny, racism and homophobia, the band's razor-sharp satire cut to the inherently silly heart of rock 'n' roll with hilariously acute savagery."

Ween played it straight - well, for Ween - with its latest album, the slick, '70s-pop "White Pepper." (It falls somewhere between the Beatles' "white album" and "Sgt. Pepper's.") The duo's "pretty British album," as Dean calls it, conjures up the ghosts of the fab four, XTC, Squeeze and Jethro Tull in a full-band format (Ween will play Girdwood as a quintet) while managing to deftly skewer punk, the jazz-rock of Steely Dan and the Caribbean pap of Jimmy Buffett.

"The nature of those songs, the whole way we did it, was different," Dean says. "We usually cobble our (albums) together from home recordings. We just write and write - which way it goes is where it goes. Then we pick the best we've done and make an album. But we played these songs live for a year before we hit the studio - we had (it) so together."

Rolling Stone agreed, calling "White Pepper" "the most peculiar yet simultaneously appealing music this side of Frank Zappa and the Butthole Surfers."

The album even contains a straightforward love song, "Stay Forever." (Dean's mom loves it.) And the f-word, for the first time in Ween's colorful career, is nowhere to be heard.

An acquired taste, to be sure

Like an eclectic current magnetizing the music world, Ween - not Weezer; you won't hear any "Buddy Holly" here - polarizes listeners.

Early releases self-recorded on the cheap sparked debate on whether Ween's output could be termed music at all. All agreed, however, that Dean, Gene and their songs definitely fell in the "seriously tweaked" category.

From eighth grade on, the boys' four-track efforts comprised the lowest forms of lo-fi, with tape hiss, feedback, cereal-like crackle-pops and sneaky ambient sounds from the next room overrunning the targeted audio, sometimes to the point of inaudibility.

Backed by cheesy synth, drum machine and plinking, three-chord guitar, their twisted tales often involved body parts, naughty words and other juvenalia. This was junior high, after all, and all they wanted to do was make each other laugh.

Then there were the vocals. Ween utilized the most primitive Radio Shack equipment to electronically manipulate their masterpieces, varying speed and pitch. 1992's "Push th' Little Daisies," often pointed to as what's so right or wrong with the duo, sounds as if a chipmunk huffed helium just before snapping and killing all the other forest critters.

Two simple statements about Dean and Gene can separate the fans from the pitchfork-wielding hordes:

1) They're buddies with the "South Park" guys; and 2) They've appeared on a Yoko Ono album.

Sick, sick boys. But getting better.

Pleasing themselves first

"We try to make our lyrics sound very deep and about something important," Dean says of Ween's loopy, stream-of-consciousness writing. "It's about having fun with words," about how it sounds rather than what it means. "John Lennon was the best at it."

Consider the new "The Grobe": "Put the pointed pencil in the pepper-po/ and take a little sniff of the things below/ bring it to a boil and simmer low/ put the noodle on the griddle as it climbs the Grobe."

Or "Stroker Ace": "Well it smells like poop and it sure looks crappy/ gotta get back to north pappy flappy."

Dean cops to being self-indulgent but not willfully inaccessible.

"I would rather have people like our records than not like them, but we don't do records for other people. I think our fans like it this way: They don't expect anything from our next record. It's kind of like we know what's better for them than they do - trust us."

That explains curveballs like 1996's 10-song "12 Golden Country Greats" and "White Pepper," when the Ween boys con-founded even their most ardent followers by - gasp! - becoming accessible.

For at least one album.

"The goal is to make 27 records, and someday maybe you'll like one of them," Dean says. "The artists I hold in the most special place in my heart - Neil Young, P-Funk, Bob Dylan, the Beatles - they've done a lot of different records. You can always go find a record with songs you've never heard. ... You can still have a discovery process with music that's old."

Serious about their love of music

Fans and critics are beginning to even come around on Ween's universally panned country record. Dean, who believes you can have a sense of humor and still be serious about music, bristles at the "novelty/affront" tag the album - and much of Ween's output - first received.

"That was what was upsetting about all the negative reviews – my father had, like, 500 records. He listened to George Jones, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard that's what I grew up with. So when I get 'What does he know about country?' from these alt-rock, snobby, journalist (jerks), I get (upset)."

But he won't let the slings and arrows deter him - Ween's still got another 20 albums to go.

"There's no reason to stop," Dean says. "(Gene and I are) still friends and hang out together. I call him 10 times a day. As long as the friendship is intact, it's cool."