"Welcome to Tatoo-Ween"

When Mickey Melchiondo, otherwise known as guitarist Dean Ween of the mutant rock band Ween, first heard the epic dialog from Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker in A New Hope as a young boy, he knew he had discovered something rather special.

"My first memories are obviously of A New Hope," Ween says. "When it was released it had an impact on every young kid in America at the time. My parents owned a summer house at the beach in New Jersey and I went to see the movie at least three times when it was first released. I owned the book and the record album, which had all of the dialog from the movie. I had baseball cards, the whole nine yards. I remember hitting my younger sister with a Wiffle ball bat because I didn't have a proper lightsaber. That didn't go over too well with my parents."

"I love all of the movies," Ween says. "I consider them to be one long story, even the Clone Wars animated series, which I would highly recommend to anyone who hasn't seen them. They're fantastic -- having said that, there will always be a special place in my heart for A New Hope. It's hard to explain to someone who wasn't old enough how cool that movie was when it came along. There wasn't a kid in America back then that wasn't drawing X-wing fighters on his notebooks in school, or Vader's ship. It had a bigger impact on kids than any other movie before or since. I also think it's funny that with all of the technology available for special effects, my two favorite 'futuristic' movies ever made were made 30 or 40 years ago -- -Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Drawing Star Wars vehicles on his notebooks while stuck in a junior high school typing class in 1984, Ween met Aaron Freeman. The boys decided they should team up to form the band Ween, giving themselves the pseudonyms Dean Ween and Gene Ween. Influenced by Prince, The Residents and The Beatles, Ween self-released cassettes in the late '80s: The Crucial Squeegie Lip, Axis: Bold as Boognish, The Live Brain Wedgie/WAD, and Prime 5. The duo soon signed to Twin/Tone Records in 1989, releasing their first album GodWeenSatan: The Oneness in 1990, and The Pod in 1991. The band later signed with Elektra and hit the charts with the song and MTV video to "Push Th' Little Daisies" from their 1992 release Pure Guava.

As the band began to gain some fans in the alternative college radio market, they had fun experimenting with different music genres on each new release. In 1994, the band played homage to soulful '70s pop rock with Chocolate & Cheese earning them another college radio hit with "Voodoo Lady." The band exchanged their alt. tunes for cowboy twang with 12 Golden Country Greats in 1996. Next they took a stab at '60s Brit pop and odd sea shanties with their nautically-themed release The Mollusk (1997). Ween followed later in 2000 with the pop album White Pepper which included a music video for the album's single "Even If You Don't" directed by the creators of "South Park" -- Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Forming their own label, Chocodog Records, the band released an array of albums featuring live and rare tracks. In 2003, Ween returned to the studio to produce Quebec for Sanctuary Records, and a year later a DVD/CD set called Live in Chicago.

In addition to their numerous records, Ween's unusual musical stylings can be found on various soundtracks including The X-Files, Beautiful Girls, Road Trip, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, "Crank Yankers" and the "Grounded for Life" TV theme song, as well as the song "The Rainbow" on the "Chef Aid" episode from "South Park."

Now that Dean Ween is a parent, he finds himself seeing his beloved saga through his young son's eyes. "I was Darth Vader for Halloween one year when I was a kid," Ween says. "And it's funny now, because almost 30 years later I see my 5-year-old son affected by the Star Wars movies in the same way. Our house is loaded with Star Wars toys, although they are my son's now. The coolest item that we have is the lightsaber that makes the actual sounds of Anakin's lightsaber when you move it around. We also have two cheaper plastic ones -- one green and one red, of course, and a cool rancor figurine, which is actually pretty big. We play this imaginary game where Jabba feeds Luke to the rancor and Luke closes the gate on him, killing him. You know the story."

Now that the entire Star Wars saga is on DVD, Ween says that the scenes that get played the most often are influenced by what his son is most eager to watch over and over again. "I actually just pick them out at random for the most part, whichever one my son wants to see," Ween says. "My son likes to watch the bar scene in Episode IV over and over. And right now we are really into the Clone Wars cartoon serieas."

While watching the films, Ween says he can't help but appreciate the Jedi characters that fans rarely get to see, as well as the new villain that dominated Episode III. "My favorite characters are the lesser known Jedi Knights like Shaak Ti, Mace Windu and Kit Fisto," Ween says. "General Grievous is by far the coolest character in the series though. He's pretty much the last dude I would want to fight. He's the only villain that you ever actually see the Jedi afraid of."

Being the Star Wars fan that he is, Ween says that he enjoys playing a Jedi Knight even if it is in brick-like form. "I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I have finished Star Wars LEGO for PS2," Ween smiles. "I even went so far as to build all of the ships and attain true Jedi status on every level, unlocking the secret door for the bonus at the end. It took me about eight weeks."

His appreciation for the game shouldn't come as a surprise to his fans considering that Ween's video for "The Mollusk" was made entirely with LEGOs. Click here to see it.

To read more about Ween, check out the official band site here.

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