A conversation with Gene Ween from 1999
On the occasion his band's first double-live album, Aaron "Gener" Freeman reflected on how Ween went from getting beaten up by skinheads to becoming the weirdo heroes of the internet
Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the ‘90s and ‘00s and present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars. This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).
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THE OPENERS
Some notes on the latest arrivals to the stübermania 2024 playlist, available on Spotify below (and here on Apple Music):
All hail the return of Brighton’s Porridge Radio, who I will forever think of as the band that was screwed over the worst by the pandemic, but who remain undeterred masters of the beaten-down/rise-above indie-rock anthem, like the new “Sick of the Blues.”
We’ve got my favourite track from the surprise new Jack White album, No Name, which doesn’t quite sound like an old White Stripes record, however, it does sound a lot like The Raconteurs making an old White Stripes record, and that’s good enough for me.
Shout-out to Evan Minsker and his essential garage/punk newsletter, See Saw, for turning me onto the gutter-glam thrills of the latest Peace De Résistance record, Lullaby for the Debris, which filters all manner of Lou Reed/New York Dolls/T. Rex signifers through a DIY-damaged filter that reminds me of the late-2000s punkabilly experiments of Toronto’s own Slim Twig.
Goth-soul phenom Ladan Hussein—a.k.a. Cold Specks—recently resurfaced with her first new music in seven years, “How It Feels,” a dramatic piano ballad co-written with Chantal Kreviazuk, and I’m pretty sure this makes Hussein the first artist to ever collaborate with both the Canadian adult-contemporary hitmaker and Swans. (For some background on why Hussein was out of the spotlight for so long, read this interview I did with her back in 2019.)
Brigitte Calls Me Baby are a band I recently discovered the extremely old-fashioned way: by randomly stumbling upon them completely unawares on late-night television (Jimmy Kimmel, in this case). If this were 20 years ago, they likely would’ve already been on the cover of the NME three times before their debut album, The Future Is Our Way Out, dropped last Friday, because, like a Class of 2004 buzz band, BCMB have a natural knack for translating obvious old-school influences and aloof attitude into student-disco delights. Think: Roy Orbison fronting The Strokes. Or maybe Orville Peck leading The Killers. I might also opt for “imagine Morrissey playing casinos,” but as we learned this week, that future is already on its way in.
This Friday, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard release their 4,587th album, Flight b741, a record that leans hard into their hippy-dippy boogie-woogie side—which, admittedly, has never been my favourite look for these dudes, but this one exudes just enough authentic ‘70s biker-bar grease to ward off the goofy side effects of their previous foray into this territory. In related news: King Gizzard’s harmonica-toting wild man/occasional resident rapper Ambrose Kenny-Smith recently hooked up with GUM (a.k.a. Jay Watson of Tame Impala) for a spirited full-length collaboration, Ill Times, that functions as a mutual-support group for unsung Aussie psych-rock MVPs.
Not be outdone, fellow human vinyl-pressing-plant Ty Segall is about to release his second album of 2024 on Aug. 30, Love Rudiments, an all-instrumental, highly percussive affair that reminds us the guitar-thrashing garage-rocker is also a monster drummer.
Congratulations to Fucked Up, who, this past Wednesday, made good on their promise to create an entire new album from scratch during a 24-hour studio livestream that was sort of like the hardcore answer to The Beatles’ Get Back movie crossed with a raw Olympics telecast feed. Mere minutes after band logged off, the resulting album—Who’s Got the Time & A Half—was made available on their Bandcamp for just 24 hours, so if you’re reading this before 1pm EST on Thursday (Aug. 8), you’ve still got time to grab it before it’s gone. None of the tracks have been uploaded to the usual streaming services yet, however, my playlist does include “Divining Gods,” the latest single from the other album they’re putting out this week, Another Day.
And lastly, happy 30th anniversary to Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese to those who celebrate—the 1994 bizarro-rock classic was just reissued with a bonus disc of outtakes, including “Warm Socks,” a slack-pop slow jam as comforting and cozy as its title implies. And to keep the Weenaversary festivities going, I hereby present you with…
THE HEADLINER
A conversation with Gene Ween from 1999
Date: July 16, 1999
Location: Phoner—Gene was at home in Lambertville, NJ; I was at my parents’ place in Toronto
Albums being promoted: The double live album Paintin' the Town Brown: Ween Live 1990–1998 and the web-only Craters of the Sac compilation
The context: This interview with Gener (a.k.a. Aaron Freeman) is sooooo 1999, from the time-stamped references to the South Park movie, Teletubbies, and Britney Spears, to the fact that much of the conversation centered around the then-radical idea that bands could use this new-fangled thing called the internet to sell music directly to their fans (even though we were still living in a time when downloading an album meant leaving your computer on and unattended for two days straight). As such, this conversation marks a crucial pivot point when Ween were transitioning from being some weirdo band clinging to its major-label patronage amid the late-‘90s alt-rock crash to becoming a self-sustaining ecosystem supported by their most dedicated fans.
This was my second time interviewing a member of Ween—I first spoke to Deaner (a.k.a. Mickey Melchiondo) in 1996 for my campus newspaper following the release of 12 Golden Country Greats. (I was hoping to post that converastion first, but, in true Ween fashion, the tape is kinda fucked and our voices sound disturbingly mutated.) This interview for Toronto’s Eye Weekly was scheduled for some ungodly early hour, like 10 a.m., which came as a bit of a shock, given that Ween definitely struck me as the kind of dudes who slept in until 4 p.m. But Gener had good reason to be up at the crack—he had recently become a dad, so I began the interview by asking him some naive questions about parenting that I wouldn’t fully comprehend until I joined him in the fatherhood club some 14 years later.
So has fatherhood changed your sleeping habits?
Oh, absolutely.
Are there any lame fatherhood activities that you find yourself doing now that you wouldn’t have been caught dead doing before?
No, she’s about seven months old now, so I’m changing a lot of diapers, trying to keep her occupied. The fatherhood activities will come when she’s about two or three.
So, you haven’t had to sit down and watch Barney with her?
No, Teletubbies a couple of times, but she’s a little too young to fully grasp it.
How active a role are you going to take in shaping your child’s musical tastes? Like, will you let her go through a Britney phase?
Dude, I have no idea. I’ll figure that out when I come to it. I don’t think there’s much you can do about that. They’ll get into what they get into.
So, in this age of major-label mergers and bands getting dropped everyday, how has Ween not only managed to keep their Elektra deal, but also get them to put out a double live album whose chief selling feature is a 26-minute version of “Poop Ship Destroyer”?
I don’t know! I was wondering that myself. Elektra keeps us going for some reason, they have some masterplan for us, obviously. We were going to put this record out on the internet only and they picked it up, and I don’t know why. I guess it was some marketing thing. Who knows. It’s fine with me, it gets better distribution.
I interviewed Dean around the time of the country record, and he said at that time your A&R guy was gone and there was a whole new staff in place and he wasn’t sure how they were going to take to you guys…
Yeah, they seem to be cool. I don’t know anybody at Elektra, though—they all switch over every five months.
You said you were going to put this out on the internet and make this a special fans-only deal, but now that Elektra is involved, does it feel less special?
Yeah, it’s just another record—Elektra’s just going to let it dribble out. All we were going to do was sell it to some people on the internet—we expected to sell maybe a couple thousand. So Elektra picking it up is fine. We didn’t want to treat it like a real record, and they’re not treating it like a record—they’re just putting it out there so our fans can get it, and that’s really what matters. But I was surprised that Elektra put out a double CD live record.
Would you have gone on tour if it was an internet-only release?
Yeah, we were planning on going on tour with Medeski Martin & Wood actually this summer, but it didn’t work out. We wouldn’t have drawn enough people to the places they wanted to play with just us and them, so I think they went out with a bigger band. It didn’t work out, so we decided we were going to tour anyway.
I sort of lost track of Ween over the past year, because you didn’t tour Toronto for The Mollusk and it’s only been in the past few months that I’ve discovered your immense online presence. How long have you been aware of that? And was that the impetus for starting [your own website] Chocodog and taking control of that space?
Yeah. It started off in a chat group actually—there was a big Ween chat group and there was always a ton of people in there, and Mickey and I hung out there a lot. And then people just started doing a lot of Ween websites—you do a search for Ween and there’d just be a ton of Ween websites. So we used some of of our space and started our website and just officialized it and it’s just been taking off.
Do you ever participate in the chat groups?
Yeah, we always post stuff if there’s news. Sometimes I’ll respond to something.
Does it freak you out at all, seeing all these people talk about you?
No, I think it’s cool. It just means our fans are more into the internet than fans of other bands. And we’re into the internet, too, so we’re just taking advantage of it. There’s a Ween fan who’s got a lot of space on his server—he works for some big company, so he basically hosts Chocodog. We don’t even pay for it.
[The baby starts crying in the background]
She’s having a temper tantrum.
She has quite a voice on her!
Oh yeah, she sure does. It goes right through your skull.
So is having your own site a move toward one day existing completely independent of labels?
Yeah, I think that’s in the back of our minds. We’re tyring to compile a giant database of people and get people to know our website. If and when we get dropped by Elektra, we can just go out on the internet and sell records—putting something out every month, even. We’re on that whole train there.
Do you foresee the complete collapse of the major-label system?
Nah, I don’t. I always think there’s going to be major labels. The majority of people don’t even look on the interet for music, so there’s got to be labels to sell Britney Spears records.
Was that [web-only] Craters of the Sac release commissioned by you, or did a fan put that together?
No that was us, actually. Mickey posted that right after Elektra told us they were putting out the live record on their label. Craters of the Sac is just a bunch of outtakes and dumb-ass songs we never put on a record but are pretty awesome anyway. It’s totally brown. There’s some funny shit on there.
I’ve been trying to download it for two days, but my computer is too slow.
Yeah, it’s huge. It’s a record.
You guys always had aspirations beyond lo-fi, even though you got saddled with that tag. But now, do ever get nostalgic for the days when it was just the two of you and a drum machine?
Yeah. We still do that. We still hang out and play with the drum machine, that’s still how we write a lot of songs.
I’m also speaking about the live show—the last time I saw, you had the huge country band and played for three hours…
We’re definitely going to play with the drum machine again, it’s just a whole different thing, and it was a lot of fun. We just got to the point where we wanted to play with a band. And it’s cool. But there’ll be a time when we play with the drum machine again.
Back in the early days, you were more likely to get booed than cheered. Now that you play in front of thousands of adroing fans, do you miss the confrontational aspect of performance?
No, I appreciate that it’s not there. I mean, we had eight years of that, so it just cracks me up now [to see people liking us]. Because people fucking hated us so much when we would play City Gardens in Trenton, where we opened up for Fugazi and people were throwing gum in my hair and shit, and we were all high on mushrooms. People hated us. But that’s the way it always was: people just fucking hated us. I think it’s funny to see all these people really loving Ween when we’re playing now, it makes me laugh. It’s cool that people like us, we’ll see how it long it lasts.
Did Fugazi like you?
Yeah, the band Fugazi liked us, that’s why they let us play with them.
Is that the most violent crowd reaction you’ve gotten?
We always had violent crowd reactions. I remember Mickey getting punched in the face by a skinhead in Minneapolis in 1989. And then the tables turned one night and it was cool to be listening to Ween. We’re still totally scarred, though. It’s cool, we’re appreciative.
When did you notice the change in the crowds?
It was the “Push th’ Little Daises” thing, and then it was really Chocolate and Cheese where people started really getting into it.
So you owe it all to Beavis?
Of course. That was great—we were on that show, like, three times! That show fucking ruled.
Do you think people were more uptight in 1990 or is it just as bad now?
I think it’s loosening up a little bit actually. They’re tense because it’s the end of the millennium, but I think people are chilling out, judging from the movies that are on and humour that’s going around.
Have you seen the South Park flick?
Yeah, it’s fucking awesome. It was amazing.
Paintin’ the Town Brown features a number of tracks recorded in Holland. Do Dutch audiences really like you, or is there an ulterior motive for going there all the time?
We don’t go there as much. But Dutch audiences do like us—that was the first place we started touring. We spent literally two months in Holland the first time we ever went to Europe. The first time we ever toured in 1990, they brought us over there. It was actually Theo [Van Rock], who was the soundman of the Henry Rollins Band, he’s a good friend of ours, so we stayed in his little apartment and just toured Holland extensively, so we’ve got a good following there to this day. Although Germany is a big following too, which is kind of fucked up. So everytime we go over there, we have to tour Germany for a month.
So is there a reason there’s no Mollusk tracks on Paintin’ the Town Brown?
That was just coincidental. They just didn’t come up. We just fucking flaked out. There’s no Mollusk tracks, and there are three tracks from Holland—it’s just weird. We put this thing together in, like, two hours. It was all [name of friend I can’t quite decipher]—we went to his house and he’s got every tape we’ve ever done, every show recorded. And we just whipped it together—the ugliest-sounding shit we could find, and that was that. We didn’t really pay too much attention to what was going on.
The Mollusk was your most polished and cohesive record, but does having a child around get you back into that chaotic, childlike state?
A little bit. Honestly, I’m still just trying to get a grip on what’s going on. I can’t even form an opinion yet.
Have you always been big with the Dead and Phish-heads or is that a byproduct of doing the H.O.R.D.E. tour?
That’s just starting—the mutual Phish/Ween fan thing.
Are you comfortable with that?
I think it’s fine. Whatever! As long as they pay their admission price, who gives a shit?
Have you ever encountered any totally obsessed fans who you just want to tell to get a life?
Yeah, we get a lot of fans who use a Ween show as an excuse to do a fucking lot of drugs, and then because they’re on so many drugs, of course, they get backstage, just because they’re so high—not because they’re offering anything. They’re just tripping on eight hits of acid. Those are the people who always manage to squeeze by and get backstage and corner you.
Security’s like “I’m not dealing with this shit.”
Exactly. Then they corner you on eight hits of acid and start talking to you about “Mourning Glory” and then you’re fucked. But it’s cool. Our fans are pretty into it, so that’s nice.
But you yourself are not pulling out the Scotch Guard anymore.
No, we never did Scotch Guard, that was just a big lie. We thought that sounded funny. And we didn’t realize people actually did that shit. We didn’t know what huffing was or anything.
ENCORES
It goes without saying that Ween are a highly polarizing, acquired-taste kinda band that inspires allergic and obsessive reactions in equal measure. So I created this playlist of the band’s most endearing and accessible songs to trick unsuspecting newcomers into thinking they’re a sweet, innocent pop band. [Apple Music link.]
You can purchase a download of Fugazi’s set from the infamous aforementioned City Gardens show in ‘91 here.
Here is a particularly brown video recording of Ween’s May 1993 performance at Lee’s Palace in Toronto. Eagle-eyed Canadian viewers will note that, during the encore break at the 1:00:32 mark, the guy standing front-row centre is now the current host of CBC’s The Current. (Hi Matt!)
Next week’s headliner:
Damon Albarn[Update: I’m running into some audio issues with the Albarn tape, so you’ll be hearing from Neil Hagerty of Royal Trux next week instead]
This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please pay a visit to my PWYC tip jar!