"Staying Brown: Gene and Dean Ween in the 21st Century"

One way to New Hope, Pennsylvania, is to leave New York City and head west, past the shipping containers of middle New Jersey, the truck yards, the swamps and the bridges, until the country looks agreeable again, through button-cute towns like Lambertville, and – finally – over the burbling Delaware River and across the state line. Another way is to simply materialize there.

It was the latter method of conveyance chosen by a teeth-bearing demon-head who appeared in the hallways of New Hope's junior high school in 1984. Perhaps it was lured by the Chamber of Commerce's promises of a "sophisticated yet country-casual town [that] provides a much needed break from today's hectic lifestyle." Perhaps it was baked.

Whether by design or chance, the head – who called itself the Boognish – arrived in exactly the right time and place to find the perfect vessels: a pair of eighth graders named Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo Jr. who lingered outside Mrs. Slack's typing class. Whether Ween saw the Boognish or just mutually decided to start telling people about it, they started recording and didn't stop.

By the time the duo – who'd renamed themselves Gene and Dean Ween, respectively – hit the cult-success big-time, they may have been the most dangerous guys with guitars on the planet. Parents never really had to worry about their kids imitating Led Zeppelin, after all. Where would the impressionable youth have access to groupies and red snappers, anyway? Ween, on the other hand, practically distributed blueprints: album art depicting a gas mask labeled as a "Scotchgard bong."

In the age before Wikifiable hearsay, it was whispered – in dorm rooms and high school hallways – that every Ween album was a concept LP based on a given substance: 1999's White Pepper for cocaine, 1996's 12 Golden Country Greats for whiskey (or maybe beer), 1991's The Pod for (duh) Scotchgard. They sounded it, too. But what was really dangerous about Ween was how productive they were, those two stoners who just wanted to screw with poor Mrs. Slack.

But something funny happened to Ween in the course of being funny: they transformed into an enduring rock band. Turning the Boognish into a highly marketable logo, they earned one wave of fans when MTV embraced "Push th' Little Daisies" in 1992 (which got as high as #23 on the Modern Rock Chart) and another wave in 1997, when Phish began to cover "Roses Are Free." Their catalogue has embraced unlistenable noise, surprisingly soulful sessions with Nashville vets, and (most recently) lite jazz figurehead David Sanborn. Meanwhile, their public face developed into a durable road quintet.

It helps that their songs are pitch-perfect 20-something anthems, as immaculately written as they are fun to drunkalong with. Go to a Ween show and it'll be accompanied by two or three hours of monster guitar action. And there is every reason in the world to laugh with nu-canon classics like "Piss Up A Rope" and "Bananas and Blow," just as there is to giggle at Gene Ween's retarded kid voices, the screamed tape experiments of their teenage years, and everything else. But it is not novelty that makes them unique. After all, they've been around for 24 years.

Like Phish or Frank Zappa, Ween present a release valve for a very specific type of misfit. Drugs are frequently involved, and – subsequently – silliness. But the amount of naked emotion laid out in Ween songs can also be kind of startling. Collaborating infrequently, rarely touring with opening acts, recording with their own money and licensing to a label later, and managed in a low-key way by a former roadie/engineer, Ween are also fiercely independent from any type of scene, save what happens at John and Peter's, a New Hope bar.

Despite a host of influences and the colliding subcultures of hippies, frat boys, prog-dorks, and those who don't identify with anybody but Dean and Gene, Ween operate alone, serving a function they are – in some sense – semi-willing slaves to.

More popular than they've ever been, they're now regularly playing theaters for the first time. "I simply don't like it," Melchiondo wrote on his BrownieTroop666 blog of playing at seated venues. "It's not really right for Ween." The band played for 5,000 at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom, and two sold-out nights at New York's 3,000-capacity Terminal 5. La Cucaracha, released last year, also represents Ween's highest Billboard showing to date, peaking (appropriately, perhaps) at #69 on the Top 200.

Lotta strands in ol' Gener's head.

Mickey almost died recently. At the time, he was fishing.

"Oh God, man!" gasps Aaron.
"I was in the river in a pair of chest-waders and I slipped and I fell and they filled up with water and I went to the bottom," Mickey says of his "rookie mistake."
"Dude, that's really freaky. Not cool." Aaron is smoking a cigarette. Slipped from his flip-flops, he is barefoot, wearing a camouflage mesh baseball cap. "You could go right down the rapids there, in New Hope! You'd definitely be dead."
"I only got a scrape on my elbow," says Mickey, the taller one who plays guitar. "I was standing on the little plot of rocks in my underwear, dumping my waders out."
"It's a river town," says Melchiondo. "That's the most defining thing about New Hope: it's right on the Delaware River. It's really key." Also an inexplicable stop on the hippie highway between Burlington and Boulder, neither Deaner nor his partner has strayed far. For most bands, the idea of recording in a farmhouse – as Ween did for La Cucaracha – comes with rustic serenity. For Ween, it was just a place with a collapsing porch, filled with black mold, "about 1000 yards" from Melchiondo's house. "I hope a tree falls on it so they have to bulldoze the building to its foundation," he wrote in a press release.
"I'd rather live with middle class white conservatives than 20-something white hipsters in Williamsburg or whatever," says Freeman. "I can't stand that kind of shit. I feel much more comfortable with soccer moms than I do with hipsters. Mickey's like that, too."
"I don't like clubs, I don't like parties," says Melchiondo. "It's not that I don't like people, but I don't like crowds. I don't go to concerts, even here, at home, or parties. My idea of a good bar is a bar that has one other person, and has a game on. That's what I want when I go out.
"Ween is definitely a product of the school that we went to," continues Mickey. "It was a weird school. Our graduating class had 50 or 60 people in it. There was no football team. There was no anything. It wasn't like the athletes were the popular kids. There was nothing like that. We probably couldn't have met in anywhere but New Hope and done this. Growing up here was an influence. Like, I dunno if I take it for granted. I never left."

As it happened, he only had to travel 16 miles to the southeast to get discovered – and, even then, Melchiondo somehow managed to bring the mountain to Mohammed. Lured from Trenton, Andrew Weiss had lately encountered the teenage Melchiondo distributing copies of his self-published Yuckzine outside hardcore shows at City Gardens, the center of the local scene.

"The first time I saw them was in their garage playing for, like, three neighborhood kids or whatever, literally," says Weiss, who has produced nearly every Ween album since, working in close collaboration with the pair. "I knew it from the get-go, absolutely," Weiss says. "It was totally obvious to me that those guys were wickedly talented."
"They kind of took Mickey under their wing," says Freeman of the Trenton musicians, which included Andrew Weiss's band, Scornflake. "I didn't have anything to do with it. I'd be home, like, clearing land as a punishment from my father for getting bad grades, and Mickey would call me and suddenly we'd be opening for The Ramones at City Gardens. It was really cool."

Suddenly, Ween had an audience for their music, which emerged at prodigious rate on cassette: The Crucial Squeegee Lip in 1986, Axis: Bold As Boognish, Erica Peterson's Flaming Crib Death, and Synthetic Socks (a Gener solo joint) in 1987. The Live Brain Wedgie/WAD followed on vinyl in 1988. No one has been able to accurately date the release of Mrs. Slack.

"Well, that's true to an extent," laughs Freeman about the drugs-as-concept concept. "You could definitely break down some Ween albums by the drugs we were taking, yeah. But, you know, Ween is just life. Whatever waist size we have or drug we happen to be doing at the time will have an influence, of course."

If track titles are any indication, fans might look to 2003's "Zoloft," for the mythology's most recent update. Or perhaps the inside-out psychobabble of La Cucaracha's "Shamemaker." And if Ween is just life, the phase which they recently concluded was primarily spent at their farmhouse bachelor pad.

A projection screen pulls down from one wall, and DVDs are scattered everywhere: a pirated multi-disc documentary about Vietnam, Black Sabbath on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert circa 1975, a Daffy Duck best-of. A tattered Boognish drumhead is on the wall. A Philadelphia Flyer goalie doll guards the toilet paper atop the john, just below a framed picture of Joe DiMaggio. Ashtrays overflow.

Though La Cucaracha has been said to mimic the genre-drunk Rosetta stone of 1994's Chocolate and Cheese, it is an album of comfort, not experimentation, despite marking Ween's first forays into house music and in-studio jamming with their nimble live band.

"I don't listen to anything," says Melchiondo of his current musical tastes. "I listen to sports radio."
"I can agree on that one," Freeman chimes in. "I listen to conservative talk radio."
"I stopped listening to music completely. If I listen to music in my car, I put on smooth jazz stations or the oldies station."

Despite their current existence – which includes fatherhood for both men, as well as weddings and divorces – the life of Dean and Gene Ween also once encompassed a gas mask. It appeared on the cover of 1991's The Pod and was described as a "Scotchgard bong." The reality may have been far, far worse: injected with nitrous the mask would force the pot smoke into the user's lungs. "I felt I was permanently stoned for the rest of my life," Melchiondo told High Times.

"We didn't know how intense that was," says Aaron of the icon.
"No," Mickey counters. "We knew. Bad intentions on our part. Bad intentions."
"We definitely had this thing that we wanted to do," he says. "It was like a Residents-thing, where there were no pictures. The picture that came with GodWeenSatan was a morph of our two faces. We were very conscious. It wasn't until [we signed with] Elektra [in 1992], until we started touring, that it changed. It was intentionally ambiguous at first, to make people imagine something worse than it actually was.
"It was a very conscious thing, to leave that mystery, and make people think the absolute worst. I think they do still think the worst. I think they think we sit around and smoke pills and sniff grass and whatever."

"The only system I recognize is sheer quantity," says Melchiondo of the duo's songwriting process. The two demoed 50 songs for La Cucaracha, a process of mass production begun many years ago, and which has encompassed perhaps twice as many songs as have been officially released on their 10 albums.
"I think we went three years before we actually had something you could call a song, [something] that had a part that was repeated," Mickey says.
"Most of it was just that we wanted to hear ourselves on tape, and hang out, so we screamed and played," Freeman adds.
"It wasn't experimental, it was completely improvised from every track. There was no repeating theme or part or whatever. The title always didn't have anything to do with the song." And, save the occasional surf-punk number, a garage genre for decades, what Ween did had nothing to do with parody.

It is pretentious (and maybe inaccurate) to compare Ween to Rembrandt, but here's Frank Zappa: "Rembrandt got his 'look' by mixing just a little brown into every other color – he didn't do 'red' unless it had brown in it. The brown itself wasn't especially fascinating, but the result of its obsessive inclusion was that 'look.'"

In Ween world, "brown" is tongue-in-(ass)cheek shorthand for everything musically wrong with them. One can guess where the term originated. "Absolutely," says Andrew Weiss, when asked if Ween talk about brownness in the studio. "It's always there. It's firmly engraved in the genetic coding of Ween." ( "He has the brown gene," says Mickey of Weiss.)

"Brown could be the way it sounds," notes Freeman. "Brown could be the way it's interpreted. There are many shades of… brown."

Often, the color manifests itself in humor. Sometimes, it's noise or an out-of-tune guitar. Elsewhere, it's some heathen genre, like AM synth-pop. It doesn't always go any deeper than that, but – just as often – it is something to listen through: a juvenile defense mechanism guarding a vulnerable center.

On "Birthday Boy," circa 1990, Freeman slathers pure hurt in ugly metallic distortion, an answering machine message from his aunt, and the dim hum of Pink Floyd's "Echoes," which he was recording over. "Help me now, I'm going down," he sings, "and I don't know if I'll be okay."

"We call them Dudes," Freeman says of the funny voices he sometimes employs to sing. "Let's try it with this Dude or that Dude."
"Sometimes, it's abstract," adds Melchiondo. "Think of little mutants."
"Try the Mute Deaf Retard. Let's try him."
"Michael McDonald," says Mickey.
"Michael McDonald," laughs Aaron, who doesn't speak in funny voices as often as he used to.

Aaron Freeman isn't particularly psyched to be found in a 7-11 in Northampton at midnight on a Tuesday. He is perfectly friendly to the person who has spent the afternoon trying to get him on the phone for a scheduled follow-up interview, but that doesn't mean he's happy about the accidental post-show encounter. In fact, he looks mildly freaked out.

Freeman wears the same camouflage baseball hat, possibly dyed black hair sprouting from its sides. Under the harsh fluorescents of the convenience store, Freeman looks older than his 37 years. Carton of cigarettes and bottles of water tucked under his arm, the camouflage works surprisingly well.

"I just had to realize for myself that I'm pretty sensitive to people," he says of life in Ween. "I was trying to intermingle with all these fans, and it was great, but when it comes down to it, I'm pretty non-social. So I've just got my thing now where I just go back to my hotel room and watch CNN and that's just fine with me."

As a frontman, Freeman still stalks the stage like a bliss-ninny. Radiating warmth, his smile is beatific. Like nearly every career rock star — David Bowie, for example — Gener's persona has hardened into something a bit more like a regular guy. "We're Ween," he says to the crowd at Manhattan's Terminal 5, where he might've once expanded the contraction into a silly-voiced declaration.

"This is a song from our new record, it's called 'Your Party," Freeman announces in his own speaking voice at Terminal 5, disregarding the "BY WEEN!" tag he once added to every song introduction like graffiti.

Though they occasionally sing self-referential numbers like "Leave Deaner Alone," Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo are not Gene and Dean Ween. "I just wrote the [publicity] bio for our record and I wrote 'Aaron' in it every time," Melchiondo says, "and I saw it, and they changed it to 'Gener' every time."

"Oh, did they really?" Freeman asks.
"And it looks so gay. All the stuff. They did it somewhere else, too. Every time I said 'Aaron,' they said 'Gener.' And I was looking and it and was, like—"
"Wellllllll," Freeman interrupts, "you've gotta live up to that kinda. We are Dean and Gene," with the implied "after all." He stops himself. "No, it's just a name. Nobody…" He giggles. "Maybe girls that I sleep with call me 'Gener.' In bed. That's about it. I make them say 'Oh, Gener!'"

The reality though, is that it might not be so easy being brown. Aaron closes his eyes when talks about rehab, and doesn't say much. He has been alternating between cigarettes, a quietly played guitar, and a very tall iced coffee. "If something is NOT done now… the consequences could be even more dire than the cancellation of these dates," read the announcement from Ween's manager Greg Frey, posted in late October 2004.

"I am an alcoholic," Freeman posted to the Ween forums a few days later. "This problem must take precedence over any and all aspects of my life," he wrote. "Thank you for all of your concern and support. This is all I can really say at this time. All my love, Papa."
"I went through two rehabs," Freeman says. "They didn't work. Neither of them worked. But, I've been doing really well. I find that psychotherapy – psychotherapy's worked for me. I'm doing well.
"Every night on tour is a Friday night. Everybody who comes to your show, and they've all been ready to party and get down, and they expect you to, but you've been sitting on a bus for eight hours, driving, and you ate potato chips for dinner, and you're kind of tired. There's a lot of 'no, thank you,' and 'no, I don't wanna go out to your family's house and have barbecue and smoke PCP all night, but thanks anyway!'"

What is maybe important about Ween, for better or for worse, is that they are a band that people feel comfortable offering PCP and delicious red meat to – and not in a bad way.

Onstage, though, Freeman makes it look easy, which it is clearly not. But it is a reason to keep going: to somehow be brown for a few minutes, with his brother Deaner, and everybody else who has come to see them. On the last night of Ween's tour, the crowd sings along, and Freeman dances with his arms spread. During the encore, he uncharacteristically slaps five with the front row. And, at the end, he finally says it, Gener voice and all: "WE ARE WEEN!"