Fans can't be weaned from this group's music

From The Daily Oklahoman, written by George Lang.

Last spring, a group of radio programmers gathered for an industry listening session, an opportunity to hear the latest tracks that could reach their ever-tightening playlists. Representatives from Elektra Records played a Beatle-esque pop gem titled "Even If You Don't," and the programmers began to salivate, thinking they had heard the elusive Next Big Thing.

Then the cell phone-grafted insiders found out it was Ween, the freakishly eccentric and willful New Hope, Penn., duo infamous for its potty-mouth humor and raucous forays into everything from Prince-style electro-funk to metallic polka to regal progressive rock - an unfairly short list of the styles they've mastered. Suddenly, the programmers lost interest and closed their Palm Pilots, hoping to hear the next 12-year-old pop princess instead of a couple of 30-year-olds who have been calling themselves Dean and Gene Ween since they met and started recording in the eighth grade.

Gene Ween, who is known to the Internal Revenue Service and, most likely, the FBI as Aaron Freeman, and his "brother," supreme guitarist Dean Ween (Mickey Melchiondo), are kings at college radio, which would play just about anything they cough up. But mainstream programmers are notoriously fearful of even the band's most accessible songs, afraid they are sneaking hidden messages into the songs. Consequently, it often falls to the band's rabid fan base to spread the delirious oddness of Ween.

"Exactly, and that's a big stink," Freeman said. "It often has to get around by word-of-mouth. I don't know what it is, if it's our image or something. We're pretty low-key, but radio people have a problem with us - they always have."

To be fair, it's perfectly understandable why a guy from Des Moines who just programmed Enrique Iglesias' new single on the 80 stations his company owns might fear Ween. Early band folklore maintains that the young Freeman and Melchiondo were ordered by a demon called the Boognish to adopt the Ween surname and form their band. Not only that, certain early tracks were filthy enough to grow hair on a naked mole-rat, and others, like "Pork Roll Egg and Cheese" and "Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony" were just too strange for ears softened by mainstream pop. Ween often was pigeonholed as a parody band, but the group's stylistic dexterity allowed them to rise above the status of an aural Beavis & Butt-Head, even though the crass animated duo gave the group its first notable exposure with an airing of 1993's "Push Th' Little Daisies."

On albums like 1995's "Chocolate and Cheese," Ween proved it could ably sing Philly soul on "Freedom of '76," ape the Talking Heads' "Remain in Light" period on "Voodoo Lady" and record a credible lonesome cowboy tune with "Drifter in the Dark." It's next album, "12 Golden Country Greats," was a collection of 10 traditional country songs featuring former members of Elvis Presley's touring band; the following release, 1997's "The Mollusk," was a waterlogged, nautical song cycle that bore an unmistakable resemblance to the progressive rock of Yes' "Fragile" and the Moody Blues.

With its new album, "White Pepper," Ween have not built any concepts into the disc, but have chosen to play it straight and clean, but still wildly eclectic. While "The Mollusk" was shaped by the band's decision to record on the Jersey shore and a subsequent storm that flooded their studio, "White Pepper" is diverse and oddly accessible. Although their musical references are largely oblique, notable similarities to XTC, Pink Floyd and Steely Dan are in abundance."We never really quarantine ourselves," Freeman said. "'The Mollusk' was just so inspired by our surroundings. This one is just all over the place."

Freeman and Melchiondo recently became fathers, and while they aren't quite ready to record a Peter, Paul & Mary-style children's album, a newfound maturity is evident on "White Pepper."

"I think we're just getting older," Freeman said. "We've been around so long that the story of Ween is like a novel. We're not getting screwed over as much and we're not as angry, but if we start becoming lame, then we're going to become the lamest band you've ever heard. If we want to write songs without obscenities, we're going to do that. If that's where we're at, that's where we're at."

Admiration for the British avant-pop masters XTC fuels the opening track, "Exactly Where I'm At." Coincidentally, "White Pepper" and XTC's new album, "Wasp Star," are often reviewed in the same column space by the British press. At one point, Freeman said they even looked into hiring Todd Rundgren, the talented but eccentric rock artist/producer responsible for XTC's landmark "Skylarking" album, to produce the disc.

"We actually talked to Todd Rundgren for a while," he said. "We decided not to use him, because he was asking too much. We would have had to pay him a certain amount of money up-front and fly to Hawaii. Even though he's brilliant, we just didn't trust the situation. So we just told our manager, 'Just get us a good engineer.'"

Leaving behind longtime producer Andrew Weiss, Dean and Gene brought in Chris Shaw, a former Public Enemy engineer, to helm the project after being pleased with his work on "The Rainbow," Ween's contribution to "Chef Aid: the South Park Album." Shaw gave Ween a polished sheen, particularly on the Steely Dan-ish pop-jazz workout, "Pandy Fackler."

Fans who attend Wednesday night's performance at the Will Rogers Theater should settle in for a full night of Ween, since they are now playing shows that reach Springsteen-like marathon length.

We're playing a lot of songs this tour, and we're playing for a long time - three-hour shows," Freeman said.

"We've actually got this one guy, Johnny, who's on tour with us - he went to nearly every show on the last tour and he has compiled a list of all the songs he's never heard before on tour. He just said, 'You're up to 78 songs, but I want to see you guys make 100 by the end of the tour.' "I see him every night up at the front with his notebook, so now we're on a mission."

Concert

When: 8 p.m.
Where: Will Rogers Theater, 4322 N Western
Tickets: $17 advance, $20 day of show
Information: 297-3000
Archive ID: 811761