Boognish Transmissions

  From The Varsity , written by Stuart Berman. I hear it’s your birthday. Did you get anything good today? Yeah. Somebody just sent me a Kareem Abdul-Jabbar card in the mail, like a baseball card, or trading card from, like, 1972. Then I got a Bobby Orr trading card from the same person. And somebody got me a basketball and a Chicago Bulls t-shirt. So who’s in the live band now? My friend drove down to New York back in July to see you play with all the Nashville guys… Yeah, all those guys are with us. How did your friend dig the show? He said it was great. He actually taped it, just on a shitty handheld recorder, but it still sounded good. I like the part on “Japanese Cowboy” where you go into the Chariots of Fire theme. Did you originally write the song with that theme in mind? Sort of… we knew when we wrote the song that it sort of sounded like a total rip-off of Chariots of Fire . So I figured we might as well just play Chariots of Fire! Is it true you already have another albu...

From The Morning Call , written by ???. What is it that makes Bucks County duo Ween go from the spastic esoterica of their previous four albums to a thematic disc of '70s-style country music? "We had the opportunity to go to Nashville," said Gene Ween during an interview in his unassuming New Hope apartment. (His partner, Dean Ween, was missing in action.) "We only had a set amount of time to record the album, so we basically rounded up all our country songs that we could think of." The result: "12 Golden Country Greats" (Elektra), one of the year's more unexpected offerings. In true Ween fashion, Dean and Gene Ween (known to their moms as Mickey Melchiondo and Aaron Freeman, respectively) only slotted 10 cuts on the disc, despite the title. Producer and elemental rock 'n' roller Ben Vaughn had the responsibility of recruiting the seasoned Nashville session players, and among those he lassoed were Charlie McCoy, Elvis' Jordanaires and t...