WEEN ON DRUGS
From High Times, written by Neil Strauss.
A "really, really high" conversation with Gene and Dean Ween - the guys who made Scotchguard famous.
Since junior high school, Mickey Melchiondo and Aaron Freeman - as "brothers" Dean and Gene Ween - have been recording wacked-out odes to eggs, weasels, flies and bongs in relative obscurity. Then came The Pod, their second release on New York indie Shimmy Disc - made after the boys "filled up 3,600 hours of tape and inhaled five cans of Scotchguard" - national attention and a major-label deal with Elektra Records.
The newest album from these 22-year-old idiot savants, Pure Guava, features 19 songs that sound like hallucinations the Butthole Surfers might have had. And on the promotional single for "Push th' Little Daisies," there are bonus songs like "Smoke Some Grass (Really Really High)," an eight-minute tribute to a particularly potent bag of weed; and "Mango Woman," on which Ween mimics a lounge-club reggae act, singing about the joys of wake and bake and interviewing one another about spliff-smoking.
Living like slackers these last few years in New Hope, Pennsylvania forced Dean and Gene to resort to just about anything to get by and get high. They instructed fans to bring food "when Ween comes to your town" on their first record God Ween Satan: The Oneness, and they have. Ween doesn't ask for drugs, but they do take their fair share of them. What follows are their thoughts about a variety of mind-altering substances.
SCOTCHGUARD
Gene: I saw this kid hit the ground from Scotchguard at a show. He was up front under my monitors doing up some Scotch-guard. He'd been to a couple of our other shows doing bottles of Scotchguard before. A big circle formed around him and a bunch
of people picked him up. It's really sick. They get this glossy, glazed look in their eyes.
Dean: Pale.
Gene: You can pick them out that way.
Dean: There's nothing scarier than a Scotchguard madman.
Gene: We've seen them around the country. They think it's cool because we talk about Scotchguard on The Pod.
Dean: I don't think there's any music you should inhale Scotchguard to.
Gene: Someday, somebody's mom is going to come up to us and say, "I lost my first-born son to Scotchguard because of you." When that happens, it's all over for us. It won't be long.
ETHER AND RUSH
getting high-school kids fucked up on these drugs, blame him. To get ether all you have to do is go to an auto supplies store. It's the main ingredient in starter fluid. I worked at a gas station, and I'll confess that I made a lot of ether blowtorches.
Gene: I still have a bottle of Rush.
Dean: We have massive respect for Rush.
Gene: We fully endorse Rush.
POT
Gene: We made an entire cassette called The Weed Whore.Dean: We named it that because this woman who lived above us at The Pod [Ween's former farmhouse in New Hope] was such a weed whore. She'd knock on our door, sometimes three times a day, looking for pot. She'd smell smoke through the vents and come down, totally obnoxious about it.
Gene: No scruples about it.
Dean: Every time we had people over, she'd come down. So we wrote a song about it called "The Weed Whore."
Gene: "She's a weed whore/She'll hit you up for a spliff."
Dean: When we play Trenton, people call for it all the time. It was one of the songs that got left off Pure Guava. We mixed it for the record, but we trimmed the record down by four or five songs and that was one of the songs that didn't make it. It might be on our next album.
Gene: Or our next number-one single.
Dean: "Mango Woman" was entirely influenced by our trip to Negril [Jamaica]. Everyone was trying to get us to exchange our Reeboks for pot.
Gene: They would get us high, then try to trade buds for our white suburban Reeboks.
Dean: "Smoke Some Grass" was recorded under the influence of some really good weed.
Gene: It was probably the best bag we had all year.
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