Boognish Transmissions

From The Toronto Sun , written by Kieran Grant.   If Ween is respected for anything, it's their everything-but-the-kitchen-sink mentality.   The duo, at the Phoenix tonight, has produced three albums by mixing pop, rock, hip-hop, funk, folk, and show tunes, with some very goofy lyrics.   So the big surprise with Ween's fourth album, 12 Golden Country Greats , isn't that the songs include things like Mister Richard Smoker, but that the music is straight-up country.   Indeed, fictional brothers Dean and Gene Ween had every intention of making a proper country album.   "It was just a good opportunity," says a sleepy Dean Ween from his home in New Hope, Pa. "We had some country songs lying around, and we wanted to put them on our new album no matter how it was going to sound. It seemed kind of weird to put five or six country songs on a record, so we did the whole thing country.   "I mean, you put a pedal steel on anything and it sounds like country music....

From The Varsity Review , written by Stuart Berman. There are essentially two kinds of people in this world: those who would sell their souls to Ween and those who just don't get it. For people in the latter group. the duo of Gene and Dean Ween (nee Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo) are a couple of chain-smoking, meat-eating, foul-mouthed freaks, making music for the sole purpose of annoying the fuck out of anyone who comes into contact with it. But in the other corner are those who consider Ween's pastiche of retarded voice effects and subversion of genre conventions to be a gift from the gods. For these loyal few. Ween's records - GodWeenSatan (1990), The Pod (1991), Pure Guava (1993), and Chocolate And Cheese (1994) - are holier than the books of the Bible and are a lot more fun, too. In total, the boys have released well over a hundred songs and have recorded literally hundreds more, taking stabs at screeching noise metal ("You Fucked Up"), overblown Bo...

From Westword , written by Michael Roberts. In 1994 Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo, better known to the world at large as Gene and Dean Ween, issued Chocolate and Cheese , an Elektra Records release that won critical praise, significant radio airplay (for the groovy cut "Voodoo Lady") and frequent exposure on that repository of cultural significance, Beavis and Butt-head. The success of the opus clearly primed the populace as a whole for another wry shot of rock, rhythm and blues and avant-garde-friendly experimentation from these spiritual brothers. So why, oh why, did Ween follow up its commercial breakthrough with this year's 12 Golden Country Greats , an album whose title is numerically inaccurate (it contains only ten cuts) but spiritually on the mark? "We were just going to do it for the experience," says Gene. "We didn't know if we were going to use it or not. But when it was finished, we decided to put it out. We thought, 'Wow, this cou...

From Snackcake  (exact publishing date unknown), written by Jennifer Havel. Never have so many of my friends asked me if they could come along and hold my recorder for an interview as they did for this one. I'm not sure if they expected Dean and Gene Ween to be freaking out like two kids with gift certificates in a Toys R Us, but they pleaded anyway. I kept it professional: in the end it was just me and our photographer. What I found out (besides their given names) is, as gifted as they are at writing songs Beavis and Butthead would grunt approvingly to, Ween is very serious about making great music and putting on a fantastic show. Their October show at the Fillmore was an entertainment bargain of no less than two and a half hours. Due to time constraints before the show, my interview was with Dean Ween only. Gene was being interviewed in another room, supplying adverbs and nouns for a Mad Lib. After giving Dean copies of the zine, an assortment of snack cakes purchased from the en...