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For a band prone to unconventional career moves and offbeat sounds, what's the obvious next step after a bizarre country album? Well, for the brothers Ween - Dean and Gene that is - the follow-up to last year's 12 Golden Country Greats is something kind of fishy. Old salts, golden eels, expanding tentacles and ocean men swim around on their new disc, The Mollusk (Elektra). The sound is shaped by Ween's trademark effect-noodling: synth grooves that bubble, descend and surface; gnarled Sea Captain vocals and wooden plank creakings. Somewhere between Yellow Submarine and Sesame Street, Ween's latest is the New Hope duo's sixth album and sixth exploration into wacky territory. It may not be for every pair of ears, but if you're a diehard Ween fan, you already know that.
I called Dean (real name: Mickey Melchiondo) at his pad in New
Hope for a quick chat on seaworthy subjects and other assorted
barnacles. Were you at all disappointed as to how your last record did commercially? There's no a more suicidal career move you can do than to make a country and Western album. We did it because we wanted to. It pissed a lot of people off but we had a blast. Not to slight our country record, but it's not really a Ween record in the proper sense. I mean, God, Ween, Satan-The Oneness is the product of five years of songwriting; it was sort of a greatest hits. We've been around for 13 years, but our first national record didn't come out until 1990. That was sort of the first era of Ween. All of our records have been collections of the better songs that we wrote over a large time frame, whereas with the country record, we had a few songs laying around, wrote a few more. Would you consider this a concept album? It's sort of 75 percent a concept record. There isn't one running thread through the whole thing like The Tale of the Mollusk or anything. This album seems like a return to your old sound. After Chocolate and Cheese [recorded in the studio] we decided we wanted to get back to the old style of recording which was making our records at home. As much as I love Chocolate and Cheese, it didn't have as much energy as the other ones. We wanted the best of both worlds for this record: record the songs in a nice studio, but write them as we went along. We decided to rent a house down at Holgate, Long Beach Island [NJ], during the winter, knowing full well that there would be nobody around. That's where the nautical thing comes into play. It was a pretty inspiring environment actually, because it was a really harsh winter. Our place was like an outpost - we were at the end of this island and it was freezing cold. We didn't get this nice house stocked up with VCRs. It was just this house with some gear, beds and fishing poles. We didn't get to work down there as long as we could have because the pipes burst. The pipes burst? It was just a really, really harsh winter and the place wasn't very well-heated. A studio's worth of equipment can heat up a whole house. So we used that as our heat. When we left, I went down one weekend to get some of my equipment to play a show and when I pulled up I could see it from the driveway. Icicles had literally frozen on the front steps. It sucked. Our gear was semi-OK and the tapes were sort of all right. We ended up re-recording a bunch of stuff. It was very typical of something that would happen to us actually. Where did you finish it up? Everywhere. Our drummer's studio, [producer] Andrew Weiss' house, our own farm. If we had finished that record down there it would have been a motherfucker, man. It probably would have been a double album. But, like always, we ended up throwing out most of what we did. Did any other music inspire you for this album? It has that Yellow Submarine feel. Not really. There are a lot of things on this record that remind me of the early '70s. Very Floyd. We're Pink Floyd junkies. It also sounds like Donovan - he was down with the nautical thing. I think a lot of the old synthesizers give it that Floyd sound. You're using Storm Thorgerson who designed all the Pink Floyd covers right? Oh, you haven't seen it yet? Right. The promos shipped so early they didn't have any of the artwork. The artwork is one of the better parts of the album. We wanted it to look like the deepest, darkest part of the ocean floor. Like 10 bazillion miles below the sea, in the abyss. He did a great job. Do you scuba dive? No. I'm a crappy swimmer actually. When you were down at the shore did you fish at all? Yeah, we went swordfishing a lot. And we caught stripers, bluefish. Do you fish in New Hope? Yeah. But I haven't been fishing much lately. I got arrested in my boat like a year ago. For what? They started monitoring the water for Jet Skis, and this and that and whatever. Every time I went out there I was in violation of like eight laws just by being out there. It's like, come on man, I grew up here. I go out on a boat I want to relax, I don't want to be arrested. What's your favorite beach toy? I'm not really a warm-weather beach person. I like the beach, but you'll never catch me laying on a towel. So? none. A flare gun. |