Ween Wonderland

 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: Let's start at the beginning and discuss the parting of ways with Elektra. What exactly happened?

Dean Ween: I'll explain it to you. White Pepper came out in the spring of 2000. When you make records for a major label, maybe you have a deal for six records. You can't just hand them in. You get advances for each one, but they put provisions in there so you can't just hand them in one after another. Otherwise, you could hand in seven records at once and try to collect all of your advances, and they'd be fucked. You can only request an advance about nine months after the release date of the last record. White Pepper came out, and it was getting close to that time. Even though we weren't ready to make a record, we knew they weren't going to take the option for our last record under our deal with them. They would have had to give us a lot of money. We said, "look, rather than making us wait the full term, can you just tell us if you're going to re-sign us, so we can get on with it and start looking for another label?" They got back to us and said "no."

I guess we got dropped, but we kind of asked if we could leave [laughs], because we knew they weren't going to give us all that money. From the time we got that news, we had just come off a Ween tour. We were nowhere near even beginning to write a record yet. It was just so we knew we could get a head start getting all of our shit together, but as it turned out, it still took us two or three years to sort it all out. That's why we did it and that is kind of how it went down.

Gene Ween: The whole relationship was so vague. We had an A&R; guy and I don't think we spoke one word to him, maybe a sentence. He was with us for two years and he couldn't give a rat's ass about Ween. We signed with a certain group of people back in the day, and by the time we left, the place had changed over like three times. All Elektra did was put out our records. There was one guy in the art department who we really liked and that was it. We didn't expect them to put out White Pepper. Oh, yeah. It wasn't like they said, "we don't like you." We sold a certain, steady amount of product for them and they could count on it. When it came time to ask for the money for this new record, they dropped us. It was fine with us. It was a dead fish.

NATN: Last time out, Elektra tried to take "Even If You Don't" to mainstream radio. I guess that didn't pan out too well.

GW: No, no. A few years ago, one of our singles got beaten out by Better Than Ezra. The label could only have one band at a time being taken to the right people at radio, and they opted for Better Than Ezra instead of us. Who knows.

NATN: So when did you actually begin working?

GW: We had been working. We had a bunch of songs written and it came time to make the record, so we had our lawyer make the call to Elektra and ask for our advance. Then, we got dropped. It was actually exciting. We pulled some money together and used some resources through our Chocodog site, like merchandise and selling our live records.

NATN: Did the fact that you had left Elektra influence the material or the process of recording it?

GW: No, I don't think so. This was a certain batch of songs, which are pretty issue-laden, I'd say. I was going through some heavy stuff when a lot of the songs were written. Elektra wasn't on our minds when we made anything. They always stayed out of our business. Andrew Weiss was definitely the right dude to present these songs.

DW: No, not at all. I've been doing interviews all night and I just brought that up to someone. I think a lot of people imagine that, but look at the records we made for Elektra [laughs]. Our relationship with them, there was never any interference, or involvement, for that matter. The first two were done on four-track. They have one we did in Nashville. Of the six or seven records they have of Ween, three of them are done on cassettes! Look at Pure Guava, The Pod and Paintin' The Town Brown. When it came time to do this record, we didn't really do anything any differently at all. There was nothing we hadn't done already, production or writing wise.

NATN: The fact that you guys were dealing with some rough times seems evident by the material on the record. Several songs are rather depressing!

DW: For sure. I think the whole record, vibe-wise, it's not uplifting at all. It's a drag. It's not torture or anything, but it's definitely like Animals or something by Pink Floyd. Even the couple of songs on here that aren't lyrically like that, it's just heavy and dark and soaked in drugs and alcohol.

I worked on this for a really long time. This record took a while to do and it was like pulling teeth at some points. A friend of mine from around here, I talked to him last week. He still hadn't heard the record. We went to our studio and we watched a Formula One race, played pool and listened to the record. Sometimes, you have to sit with somebody else and listen to your record to really take yourself out of it. When you sit with somebody, not even based on what they say or how they react, you naturally hear it through their ears just by them being there. Anyone in a band would tell you the same thing. It's a strange phenomenon. So, we're listening and smoking weed, and I just couldn't believe it. It was like, "Jesus Christ, man [laughs]. This is really a drag! Holy shit, what did we do here?" I mean that in a good way. I was laughing out loud at one point. This is brutal.

NATN: I imagine the first track, "It's Gonna Be A Long Night," as sort of a Ween mantra. Like, this is what is going to happen to you if you spend a night with Ween.

GW: Right. We're just trying to scare the hell out of someone and alienate them. That was originally sung by Dave, our bass player. It was kind of written around him because he had polyps in his throat. Now he's fine, but for like two years he talked like this [in gravel voice]. He was a big Motorhead fan so him and Mickey did this song together. When it came time to record, Dave got his polyps removed and his voice was like a little sparrow, so Mickey laid down the vocal. That is definitely following the "Stroker Ace" family tree.

NATN: You really do get elements of a lot of different types of Ween on this record.

DW: I'm glad about that. I'm satisfied with this. I'm not one to bullshit, because some people tell you every record is their greatest record. I have never felt that way with Ween, because I haven't liked any of them pretty much, except The Mollusk. That is the only record I really liked when it was done and it's still my favorite one [laughs]. On this one, I kind of feel like since you don't know anyway whether it is good or not, there are a few things I look for in a Ween record when it is done, to make me satisfied. Those are, the amount of time we put into it: I always feel like if we put a certain amount of time, love and energy into something, that is pretty much all you can do. If it sucks, then too bad. You go by your first instincts and you don't second-guess them.

This album has about six or seven songs on it that, to me, really, really capture what I've wanted to get out of the whole damn thing. We started working with Andrew Weiss again, so I wanted it to be a return to the sound of the records we have made with Andrew, which is almost every single one. It has been since The Mollusk [since he produced a Ween album]. We pushed ourselves to write uglier tunes somehow, knowing he would push us more in that direction. Those six or seven songs are more of a return to the sound we got away from on White Pepper a little bit.

I like "So Many People," "Captain," "Tried And True" I love. I think that is one of the best tunes we have done in awhile. "Zoloft," "Happy Colored Marbles," "Fancy Pants."

NATN: What are the ages of some of these songs?

GW: A lot of the songs were written in the shed in my backyard in a two week period. Let me look. One song that isn't even on the record, "Ooh Va La," is probably the oldest one. All these songs are new and within the last year. There was nothing we left off.

DW: Usually every time we make a new record, there is a song we should have put on the last record that we made a bad judgment call on, and we get it on the next one. "Flutes Of The Chi" is one," "Buckingham Green" is another one. This one was pretty much done all post-White Pepper. Some of it was done in Aaron's garage, and a good deal of it was done in the same beach house where we did The Mollusk. It was written and recorded there, so that's why it has a little bit of a Mollusk feel. It is just Aaron and I sitting there. We did "Zoloft," "Tried And True," "Save Yourself" and "It's Gonna Be A Long Night," if not the actual versions on the record, then that is where the demos were done.

NATN: At the benefit show for [Ween drummer] Claude Coleman in New York last December, wasn't there another new song played?

DW: "Someday." There's a few we played live that didn't make the record. We recorded them but didn't finish them because we thought they weren't good enough. There's one track we actually mixed and mastered that we chopped. They'll come out.

NATN: So the Elektra deal is finished, and you guys have opted to sign with Sanctuary. What are some of the most appealing things about this new arrangement?

GW: At the end, it came down to ATO and Sanctuary. Sanctuary just seemed, for us, like a real stable company. It didn't seem like there was any screwing around. They have major distribution too, worldwide. We want to be in all the Coconuts stores [laughs]. They seem to understand the whole Ween trip. I wasn't interested in a major label again, at least not right now. No one at our level should be, the way the industry is going right now.

DW: Sanctuary has the things we want out of a major label. They're manufactured and distributed by BMG. The nicest thing about being on Elektra was their distribution. In coming from independent labels, we knew the frustration of shitty distribution. There is nothing worse than when people can't find your record and they want it. We had to have it. If it meant signing with Sony for 10 records, we wouldn't do it, but that wasn't going to happen anyway. Sanctuary is sort-of in-between a corporate thing and an indie thing. They were happy to have us. They can press a lot of records. You get the benefits without the bullshit end of it.

NATN: How is Claude doing? Is he strong enough to go out on long tours?

DW: He's great. He has already done one tour with us on drums. He has been playing with us for four months now. He is not on the record, though. We were scheduled to start recording the week he got into the accident, so we just kept going. He was still in traction then. Josh Freese plays some drums, I play some drums. Sim Cain plays on one track. This record wasn't done in a session setting. It was a little bit here, a little bit there. We just went song by song.

GW: He is a determined mofo. He is playing with us on this tour. His recovery is 100 times better than expected. Unless he says otherwise, he's on the team. He is not on the record. He wasn't able to drum when we were recording, so we had Josh Freese. There is a lot of us too and some drum machine.

NATN: It will be very interesting to see how you guys blend the new songs into the live set lists. A soft song like "Chocolate Town" might be jarring to hear right before something hard and fast and weird.

GW: Yeah. When we write out the set list, we try not to do that too much. After "I Don't Want It," there is "The Fucked Jam," which is the other end of the spectrum. In our sets, it goes from pretty to ugly to fucked up. We wouldn't do "Chocolate Town" and then launch into "You Fucked Up."

DW: Typically with Ween, it's like, we'll go on tour and play just a few of the new songs. By the time the next record comes out, we'll have figured out the other five or six songs from the previous album [laughs]. Now we play "She's Your Baby" all the time. When White Pepper was out, we never played it.

NATN: Will there ever be a Ween rarities album? There seems to be so much stuff that has slipped through the cracks but has surfaced online or on bootlegs.

DW: The problem is that we don't own all of those things. I am not really sure of the status. There are a lot of things [Elektra owns] that I'd like to put out. I'd like to do it someday but right now I'm not concerned about it. At some point, we should do it.

GW: We are going to put out a boxed set thing, but I don't want to do it yet. I want to wait until we're 45 and we're bitter and broke. Then, we'll put out the comprehensive Ween boxed set [laughs].

NATN: In closing, I would love to know exactly what went down when you guys were commissioned to write some music for "Pizza Hut" commercials.

GW: This ad agency had a couple of Ween fans, and when they got a contract from Pizza Hut, they signed us up. We made a few songs. As a joke, we did "Where'd The Motherfuckin' Cheese Go At." I'm a very big Notorious B.I.G. fan and I do an imitation of him that always cracks everybody up. That's what happened there. Basically, Pizza Hut just backed out on the ad agency at the last minute. They got fired and we got fired. It was a simple as that. We do stuff like that on and off. We love doing commercial and TV show work.

NATN: Did you at least get any free Pizza Hut items?

GW: No, we got nothing.

NATN: Would you have eaten them anyway?

GW: Probably not, but maybe. Like everyone, I'll eat Pizza Hut at least once a year.