watch and learn as Jennifer Havel gets weened away

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 endless selection at Safeway, and a photo of the band taken by Peter Ellenby at Rock For Choice, we began to get inside the making of Ween...

    [Dean] Thanks. I appreciate [the photo]. Nobody ever gives us pictures. I hate that. We let everybody videotape us, you're allowed to tape us, you're allowed to take pictures, do whatever.

But you never get anything back?

    [Dean] Yeah, we've got like an open policy on stuff like that, we always have. And nobody ever gives us anything.

Let's start off easy. What is the purpose of Ween?

    [Dean] Ah yeah, that's easy. I think the purpose of Ween is just to entertain ourselves. All we really want to do, is have fun making good music. It's pretty simple. Even whether that's at home or on a stage or something. And that's it. And there's a lot of things that we have to do now, that have nothing to do with either of those things and it really blows. Like going out on tour makes you realize it. Touring...some bands are really into the touring, tour nonstop or whatever. Making videos isn't much fun. Doing interviews really isn't much fun, I mean not to say that this isn't but when you make a record, then they'll stack ten of them every day for a few months. I mean every night we soundcheck, we eat dinner, and we do interviews. It's a lot of stuff...I don't like analyzing Ween, I don't like making videos. The whole principle and ethic of what we do is...we're trying to entertain ourselves. That's it. And we don't really care so much about other people. But the way it works is if you're having a good time and you're being honest, then it just transcends all that and people will dig it. And you play shows and they have a great time and you have a great time. The same with our records...we always said when it's not fun anymore then we'll quit.

I'm wondering if it's hard because the label is looking for a single and songs like "Mister Richard Smoker," "Piss Up a Rope," and "Don't Shit Where You Eat" are, lyrically, not so radio-friendly. Is it a problem with the label?

    [Dean] No, we have never had it happen yet; it might happen soon. We could write a single if we wanted to, I mean, we're good enough song writers, I think, that we could sit down and write a single. Not even necessarily one that we thought was going to be a hit, but just a single. But we've just never done it. I mean all it would take is to make a record and then go "All right, let's make the single." I think we got a little taste of it, when Pure Guava came out on Elektra. That was our first time around on a major label - we did one on Twin Tone and one on Shimmy Disc - and they were like "OK, 'Push The Little Daisies' is going to be the single" and we were like, "Whatever." The other records had, like, twenty-six songs on them a piece. [On Pure Guava] we had a lot of songs. It was our third record and we had seventy some songs just between the three albums and a thousand others that we'd written. And we just never played ["Push the Little Daisies"]. And people would get SO pissed off at us for not playing it. Now we just started playing it this year. We're playing it with the Nashville guys tonight. It was funny...it wasn't like we weren't doing it to be pricks, we just didn't do it because it wasn't as good live as some of of our other songs. There were a million other songs that were just better to play in concert that sounded better live than that one.

Since you're out there to entertain yourselves and have a good time, do you see other bands then as taking themselves too seriously?

    [Dean] Yes.

And what do you think of that?

    [Dean] I know what you're saying, but what works for us doesn't necessarily work for anybody else. Yeah, I think it's really funny when you see...[pause] I don't want to name any names, but some bands look like they have absolutely no sense of humor at all, you know what I mean? But we pay the price for being funny A LOT, you know. Everyone thinks we're a parody band, we're not a real band, because all of our records have something that's really funny...especially with the country record. We took so much shit, we had so many bad reviews on our album... But a lot of people, because we're funny, just assumed that we made like a comedy-country parody of Nashville, like it's a joke. Like we went down there to make fun of country music. Whereas actually, we were trying to make a good record.

You were recording in your living room way back when, and if you have a thousand other songs, are you still doing that now?

    [Dean] Yeah, our new record's done actually. We made it at home again. We have another record that we made. It'll be out in February. It's finished though. It's being mixed right now.

Will it tackle a new musical genre?

    [Dean] No, no. It's more of just your average fucked up Ween record. Back further than Chocolate and Cheese. It's different. With Chocolate and Cheese, we had written all those songs already and then we went into the studio and we re-recorded them. We played "Freedom [of '76]" ten thousand times at that point, and "Spinal Meningitis," so we kind of knew what tracks we wanted to lay down, whereas on the second and third albums those versions were the only versions of those songs that there are. Like "Jesus Wept" or "Captain Fantasy" - that was it. With our new record we wrote the songs in the studio like we did on the second and third album so a lot of the ideas got realized as we were working on the songs. So the new record is a bit more sloppy and loose - kind of vibed-out - than Chocolate and Cheese. I mean, we really knew what we were going for on that one. It was our first real record that we took a lot of time with.

It sounds that way.

    [Dean] I love that record. I fuckin' hated that record when we made it. We had never done a record that way, where we went to the studio every day with this big notebook and it was like, "All right we're going to do...'Don't Shit Where You Eat,' and I want to put a Nylon classical guitar track on it." We just went and sort of hacked away at it. But it was totally like a work ethic where we'd get up and go down there and say things like "Tomorrow we're going to do the back-up vocals for this." And by the time it was finished I was just disgusted with it. I couldn't hear the music anymore. When I'd listen to it I'd hear where every note was and every track, and I wasn't hearing what the song was. So I never listened to it. We went from working on it for like eight months to touring for it for ten months. And then I heard it a few months back when I was making the Nashville guys tapes of songs to learn. And I sat down and I listened to it and I realized it's, like, probably our best record in a way.

You're used to touring with tracks already laid out...

    [Dean] Yeah, well, a number of ways. We did that for a long time, and then we did a four piece for a while with Andrew Weiss on bass and Claude [Coleman] on drums...

How is it working with this many players?

    [Dean] It's great. These guys are really bad ass. It's really exciting playing the new songs, the country songs, because in two weeks we're going to be done with this tour and I'm never going to think about this record again as far as playing the songs and playing concerts... [tour manager intervenes, I think, to check if Dean wants out of this interview to sign Fillmore posters, but he tells him everything's cool]. What was I saying?

You were saying how after this tour you're never going to think about this record again...

    [Dean] This is a lot different. This is like, a once-in-a-lifetime shot for us. People have been pretty cool about it so far. Some kids have given us a little shit but...I'm proud of the fact that they like us, but sometimes I really hate them so much I just want to kill them.

Anything you've learned from the Nashville guys?

    [Dean] We've learned a lot from them on a musical level. I think the main thing is: you don't have to play all of the time. Normally when I'm in Ween, I play ALL the time. And when there's eight guys on stage you switch off. I've always known that; it's not something I learned from these guys, but it's the first time I've ever seen it applied to our music. If I'm jamming with two people in a room, there's nothing worse than someone who overplays, and never stops playing, soloing, you know? But these guys, do it in the context of our music. That's kind of interesting, to watch them play out. You stop singing and they'll play a fill in between the words and they really listen to the songs. It's really funny when we do "Mister Won't You Please Help My Pony"...[major lame interviewer interruption here, because I dig that song, so we'll never know what he was going to say]. We don't do country versions of our songs, we do re-worked versions of our old shit. We don't do [insert southern/country accent here] "Please would ya' like.." I think that would be pretty dumb if we did that. There's a lot of our songs that we can play with [the Nashville guys] that work on their own, with the fiddle and the pedal steel.

One tour you did saw you stacking up all of your equipment into a pyramid after each show...

    [Dean] Yeah, we made big trash piles...

...and the audience would get into it and cheer you on. Why did you do that?

    [Dean] I think the first thing you do when you trash your gear is you trash the drum set because it's great when it just falls over. I don't know, it's just a natural thing. It's the first thing I go for, I take off my guitar and throw it at the drum set 'cause everything falls down and then if you get really over-excited you can pick up you amp and throw that on. That's how it happened, I think I threw my amp on Claude's and it knocked over everything on the floor and then I just started taking other people's stuff and throwing it in the pile. Then it came to the point where it became really cool, we'd have everything still plugged in and feeding back and had this mountainous trash heap of gear. It wasn't like every night, it wasn't a part of our show, but it happened a few times.

Do you guys live on a commune?

    [Dean] No. Not true. It's because of the photo on Pure Guava. That was just all of our friends. Most [rumors about Ween] are started by us, to tell you the truth. We're really into misinformation where Ween is concerned. We used to not even have photos with our records, we were really into that, until Pure Guava, then we had to and do tours. But people wanted to see what we look like and they had to come see us play. I was stoked-out about the Butthole Surfers, they never even put song titles on the albums, no pictures, no nothing. [manager interrupts about the posters again and Dean tells him everything's cool.]

This is kind of off the wall, but...do you fish?

    [Dean] Yeah.

What for?

    [Dean] Bass. We live right on the Delaware River, our houses are on the river. We've always lived on the Delaware, so, just whatever's in the river: bass, small-mouthed bass, striped bass, shads. Biggest fish I've ever caught? Like Marlin, not in the river obviously.

In Mexico...

    [Dean] Yeah, I actually go on some sort of fishing trip every year, like Costa Rico or something. All it takes is money. You can go and get a boat where there's a lot of fish and you'll have a guide, and deckhands, you'll be like the honky gringo and sit there with your suntan lotion on.

How about your favorite snack cake, do you have one?

    [Dean] Snack cake? Well, you don't have TastyCakes out here...

No, but I know what you're talking about. It's an East Coast thing.

    [Dean] Yeah. I like Jelly Crimpets. If I was going into 7-11 at like three in the morning completely drunk, I'd buy a bottle of water, a bag of chips, and the Jelly Crimpets.

I'm a Ho-ho person.

    [Dean] Yeah, that's a little hard-core, but they're good though.