Ween: Tonight at the Les Schwab Amphitheater, 6:30pm show.
You may have seen my feature in this week's paper previewing the Ween show tonight at the Les Schwab Amphitheater, but I thought the diehard fans out there might want to read the entire transcript of my interview with Mickey Melchiondo (Dean Ween) while gearing up for tonight's show. So here it is ...with the F bombs bleeped out, of course. See you at the show!
Dean Ween: I just briefly spoke with Aaron (Gene Ween) and he said he couldn't talk because he was heading to rehearsal. How have those been going?
tSW: Our practices are a travesty. I mean, we've been in Ween for like 25 years and have had the same band for like 13 or 14 years, so it's not like anyone forgets how "Fat Lenny" goes or anything like that. We just get together to make sure we haven't forgotten how to rock. I don't know, as the years go by we do less and less practices and they're shorter and shorter and shorter. I think we played for about 40 minutes today.
I had heard some rumors a few months ago that you guys might be working on a new record sometime soon, is there any validity to that?
No, I don't know where that comes from. I mean, you know, it could happen really fast. Generally, we don't chart things out very far in advance. We've got these shows coming up out on the West Coast, so once those are out of the way, maybe this winter, we'll start recording. I think Aaron's written a few song and he's recording by himself right now. In the winter there's nothing to do out here, it snows and it's cold through December through March or April, so we might do it then.
It seems that genres are kind of melting together a bit now, but you guys have always toyed with specific genres and just about covering all of them. Do you see a change in the way we classify music these days?
To be completely honest with you I don't listen to f***in' music at all anymore. I play the music trivia machine at the bar and any question after like 1991, I have no idea who the hell they're even talking about. There's bands that I've still haven't ever heard like the Pixies or the White Stripes.
You've never heard the Pixies or the White Stripes?
No, no.
So where do you get the influences to play all these different styles of music?
Well, it comes from when we were teenagers or when we were younger. You can discover something that you never knew before and just go out on a tangent and go on a phase, but your influences, I think, get plugged in when you're a teenager-for me at least-and then they never go away. As far as making music, the shit that was impressionable on us, that was a really long time ago and it becomes a part of your sound or your style and your writing tendencies.
When you guys make an album to you sit down and say, "OK, we need a reggae song here and a funk song there..."
No, not at all. We write a lot of songs when we do a record, like a hundred. Then me, Aaron and Andrew Weiss, the producer and make a definitely yes list, and then a maybe list and then we'll record maybe 16 songs. If there's a couple songs that have a reggae feel, one of those might have to go. That's how we actually came out with the country record. We were writing for The Mollusk and we had like "Piss Up a Rope" and "Leave You on the Farm" and those were great songs, but The Mollusk was kind of a focused record, so we decided to pull those off that album, write five or six more and make the country record. But no, it's not conscious. We don't say like, "Oh, country needs to be represented." That would be just f***ing lame, ya know? Whatever the best songs are make it.
You've been referred to as the most bizarre band in rock, but does this music seem bizarre to you?
I don't know. I don't think of it as bizarre. I just think of it as music I would want to listen to.
You said earlier that you don't really listen to music these days, yet you guys are playing the Outside Lands festival with some of the biggest names in rock next weekend. How does that work out?
We play three and a half hours if you come to one of our shows. But we play a festival and they put us on for an hour or 45 minutes and it's kind of a rip off. I mean, have you ever seen P-Funk? That's one of the greatest live bands in the world and they play for three or four hours. They played Lollapalooza one time in the early years and that's why I went, but P-Funk played for 45 minutes in broad daylight in the middle of summer and it was like, "This blows." With us, it's kind of the same thing. I never know what songs to pick to get us across in 45 minutes.
Not too long ago I saw a Ween logo spray painted on a rock wall here in Bend, which reminded me that you guys have a pretty strong following in these parts. Do you have other places in the country where you're surprisingly well received?
Bend is a really interesting town because we played there for the first and only time a couple years ago. Being in Ween since 1990, I thought I'd discovered all the little towns in America that nobody thinks of as cool and hip. I thought I'd seen them all. There's a lot of towns like this, like Bozeman or Burlington, Vermont where if you don't go there, you don't know. But Bend came as a total surprise because we've played Portland a thousand times and Eugene. So we got to Bend and it was like, wow, this town is beautiful and totally happening and then we played that amphitheater and a gizillion people came out. I hadn't had that discovery process for a really long time. Now I'm excited to come back because there were so many people the first time and we had a really good time.
