Ween will use Sterling to warm up for a wider tour

From The Morning Call (page one, page two), written by John Terlesky.

After well over a decade of cult-band status, Ween seems to be opening the door of it's dark, smoke-filled room to admit a wider audience.

The avant-pop duo that started in New Hope, Bucks County, back in 1984 will offer up it's most accessible work yet, "White Pepper" (Elektra Records), in May, followed by a nationwide tour. They're playing Allentown's Sterling Hotel on Saturday night.

The show at the Sterling, a venue that mainly features cover bands and more main-stream local acts, is less an attempt to reach Valley music fans than a familial convenience, according to Aaron Freeman - aka Gene Ween - in a recent telephone interview from his home in Lamberton, N.J.

"My father-in-law works [at the Sterling]," explains Freeman, 30, "so I've been there a bunch of times and like the place. It's part of a kind of warm-up thing we're doing before the big tour that starts in May. We wanted to play some semi-local show, and the Sterling seemed like it'd probably be a good place to play."

But Freeman admits that "White Pepper," the band's eighth studio outing, may be the most conventional-sounding of Ween albums, at least with regard to the way it was recorded.

"It was a conscious effort," Freeman says. "We wanted to do something different, make a really good-sounding record. Usually we take it upon ourselves to record and we can be kind of lazy about that.

"This time we did demos and rerecorded them with a real engineer/producer [Chris Shaw, who has worked with the rap group Public Enemy). So it sounds more main-stream than most of our earlier stuff."

True enough, tracks like "Exactly Where I'm At," "Flutes Of Chi" and the first single, "Even If You Don't," have a radio-ready sheen about them, calling to mind British pop-archivists XTC or early Todd Rundgren albeit with Ween's trademark lyrical perversity thrown into the mix. This is, after all, the band that wrote a damaged ode to that Pennsylvania breakfast staple, "Pork Roll, Egg, and Cheese," and claimed to have formed at the be-hest of "the demon-god Boognish."

But despite plans to push the new single, Freeman remains somewhat resigned about Ween's limited market appeal, due in no small part to radio's perception of the group as something of an alternative novelty act.

"They did a blind listening test with a bunch of radio people, and they listened to about 25 songs they never heard before, without knowing who did them," explains Freeman. "They voted 'Even If You Don't' their second favorite song. Then they took off their blindfolds and asked who it was by, and were told it was Ween. And they were, like, 'Ween! We can't like Ween!'

"And that's the way it is. We're perceived by a lot of radio people as a kind of sarcastic, joke band. So we'll see."

The closest Ween has come to a bona fide hit was probably with 1993's creepy "Push th Little Daisies" (from the album "Pure Guava"), which cracked the top 10 in Australia. Much of the duo's earlier work was a home-recorded blend of pop sensibility and twisted humor redolent of various controlled substances. It's no stretch that Freeman characterizes average Ween fans as "generally smart people. But not collegiate-smart, or, like, witty-smart. They're 're more smart and scummy."

While that demographic might be somewhat narrow, Free-man seems content with Ween's lot in the scheme of things.

"I like the fact that we have a sort of grass roots following, and it puts me at ease to know that any given show we do there's not going to be mass amounts of people show up, but there's going to be a good amount that come and stick with us. I really prefer that," he says.

Still, the prospect of Ween hitting it big would have it's advantages.

"I think it would be great to have a hit single for financial reasons," Freeman concludes. "We would still be, you know, freaks, but we could buy a really nice house to be freaks in."

John Terlesky is a free-lance writer.

Ween will perform at 10 p.m. Saturday at the Sterling Hotel, 343 Hamilton St, Allentown. Tickets, $10, at the Sterling (610-433-3480) or Ticketmaster (610-481-9396).