Boognish Transmissions

  From Nude as the News , written by Jonathan Cohen. Their wildly disparate major-label catalog (albums full of demented voices singing disturbing tales, tender fuck-yous performed by a full Nashville session band, etc.) should probably have gotten them dropped years before they actually were. But the members of Ween managed to hang on to their Elektra deal for most of the '90s, creating one memorable sonic platter after another. It came time for a change after 2000's excellent White Pepper, the smoothest (and only profanity-free) album Ween had yet released. Without a deadline to work toward and with literally no strings attached, Aaron "Gene Ween" Freeman and Mickey "Dean Ween" Melchiondo began working on new material at a leisurely pace, with an eye on recapturing the extreme weirdness of early albums like The Pod and Pure Guava . What they came up with was Quebec , released in early August by Sanctuary. What follows is the story of its creation. NATN : ...

From Star Ledger , written by Lisa Rose. When Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo first teamed up to form Ween, they were middle-school classmates noodling around with a tape deck. Freeman had yet to learn how to sing, so he screamed. Melchiondo didn't know a single guitar riff, so he randomly thumbed the frets, generating a blood-curdling din. The New Hope, Pa., teens wrote hundreds of songs through their school years, including such gonzo compositions as "The Refrigerator That Wouldn't Close," "I Hate Snuggles," "Boobs (Parts I and II)," and scores of unprintable titles. After a series of house concerts, they landed shows at clubs like City Gardens in Trenton, places they were not old enough to frequent as patrons. Backed by just a tape recorder and guitar, they opened for such cult heroes as Fugazi, Killing Joke and the Butthole Surfers. Ween was an all-consuming project, but back then, they never imagined making a living of it. "It was som...