Initially regarded as a novelty act that supposedly recorded under the influence of Scotchgard, Ween transcended its early jokey image by touring regularly and outlasting (and often outperforming) most of its '90s alt-rock peers. Still living and working out of their home base of New Hope, Pennsylvania, Aaron "Gene" Freeman and Mickey "Dean" Melchiondo rented a dumpy 200-year-old farmhouse to write and record Ween's latest, La Cucaracha, a characteristically sprawling record touching on a variety of musical styles. Several weeks before La Cucaracha was released, Dean Ween hooked up with The A.V. Club to discuss the new record, his relationship with Gene, what he hates about iPods and the Internet, and dealing with drunken idiots on the road.
The A.V. Club: Why did it take four years to make another Ween record?
Dean Ween: We kind of flamed out for a while there. [Laughs.] It's mostly personal shit. It wasn't like we worked on this record for four years, but it was about two years. We demoed like 50 songs.
AVC: What do you mean by "flamed out"? Can you elaborate?
DW: Not really. It's all mostly personal stuff. There was a rough patch that we had to go through. We've been in the band for 23 years now. We had a way of doing things that worked for us for a really long time because we weren't accountable to anybody. And then you get further and further away from it: You go on tour more, and when you come home, you don't feel like doing anything. I hate to sound fucking cheesy, but we were sort of spiritually wounded, and we needed to get back into a positive place where it was fun and enjoyable again. With Quebec, I like it as a record, but it's very negative. It's one of our darker records, I think. I don't listen to any of our records, but I have never listened to that one. Basically, I was all fucked-up, and Aaron was all fucked-up. [Laughs.] We had to un-fuck ourselves to make a new record and sustain this thing, Ween.
AVC: Friendship is one of the big subjects of La Cucaracha, and your friendship with Aaron has always been at Ween's core. Does being in Ween enhance your personal relationship, or is it a strain?
DW: The best I can say about that is, there are things in my life that no one can understand except Aaron. We kind of have a parallel life. We went through everything together: junior high school, high school, being broke, getting evicted, meeting our wives and ex-wives, having kids. We make, penny-for-penny, the same income, because we don't do anything other than the band. He's like my brother. And a lot of getting this record together was getting back to that. But there are other things where I can talk to anyone but Aaron. [Laughs.] And I'm sure it's the same for him. When it comes down to doing what we do in Ween, I don't have to say anything or second-guess. If Aaron gets a CD that he likes and he tells me to go get it, I know to just go get it. We come from the same thing, you know? But we see each other so damn much, and we're 37 now, so it's not like, "Hey, let's go to the movies now!" I don't do that with any of my friends.
AVC: When people talk about John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Lennon is often described as the angry rock 'n' roller and McCartney the nice pop tunesmith. Is there a similar yin-and-yang dynamic in Ween?
DW: I'm definitely more of a guitar player, whereas Aaron writes songs on a guitar, but it's a means to an end with him. He can write on a piano or a bass or whatever. I don't know if I've written a love song before, though there's one love song on this record, and I wrote it. But I tend to get inspired when I'm really pissed off. Aaron is the opposite—when he's filled with joy, he's inspired. But there's only a little bit of truth in every statement. I don't think I could generalize whose role is what in the band. We both do everything. All that matters is what the other guy thinks about it.
AVC: Why did you write 50 songs for La Cucaracha?
DW: That's just how we do it. It's quantity, not quality. [Laughs.] If you write 50 songs, you're bound to write at least a dozen good ones. The way that we do things has never changed, honestly, since I was 14 years old. It's me and Aaron, alone, sitting somewhere with a recorder of some kind, and that's it. There's no outside influence. I play the drums and we both play whatever—bass, keyboards, guitars, sing. It really can't happen any other way.
AVC: Do you stockpile a lot of song ideas before you start working on a record?
DW: We go in with nothing. The best is when you have a title of a song: "I've got a great idea for a song—it's called 'Let's Get Divorced.'" That was one of the songs we left off the record. We were really more focused on this record than we were on the last one about getting together on a regimented schedule—we both have kids, and it's not like when we lived together, where we were always working on something. A lot of times, I'll lay down a beat, and then I'll start fucking around with a guitar over it. Then Aaron will take out the notebook. That's how we end up with so many songs. I didn't say they were all good. [Laughs.]
AVC: How many songs have you and Aaron written over the years?
DW: I have no way to know. While we were on our little break between these two albums, I tried to transfer just our four-track tapes, which were from when we lived at The Pod for two years. And I couldn't do it. I quit after the third day. It was such a massive undertaking. I felt like they were weighing me down, having every Ween tape ever at my house. So we got a storage bin, and I took every single thing we've ever done and put it there.
AVC: Do you ever go back to an old tape for new song ideas?
DW: No. I'm not really interested in that. We put out [the unreleased-songs compilation] Shinola, and I had really mixed emotions about doing it. I don't like to do anything that feels reflective or retrospective when we're still making new records. It's not a healthy thing to do. We called it Volume 1, but I don't know if I want to go through that again anytime soon. The songs on that record are songs we regretted not putting on other records. There was no going through tapes trying to find stuff.
AVC: There's a lot of good stuff on Shinola. "Gabrielle" is one of Ween's great straight-ahead rock songs.
DW: There are a lot of stupid things we left off our records that are better than some of the songs that ended up on the records, but whatever.
AVC: There are 13 songs on La Cucaracha—are they the 13 best tracks out of the 50 you wrote, or did they just fit together the best?
DW: The thing about La Cucaracha is it's a lot more fun than the last record. It's like a party record. When we decide what's making the cut, we factor in how it works with the other songs. I don't think enough bands think in terms of records any more, but we definitely do. I get sick when I think about someone going to iTunes and downloading two songs off our album. It's not meant to be listened to that way. But you can't expect too much of people. That's how people listen to music and buy it. But we put a lot of time into sequencing the record, and making it flow. We put a lot into the artwork, the whole package. And we take a lot of time to make it sound good. We recorded this record to tape, which is expensive, and those big machines are cumbersome and require a lot of maintenance. But we try our best to make it sound as good as we can. And then I think of somebody with those little fucking ear buds stuck in their head—whenever I see someone with an iPod, I want to take it and smash it or steal it. I hate everything about it, especially since it says "Designed In California" on the back. It's fucking gay. It sounds like shit.
AVC: Do you prefer to buy music at a record store?
DW: No. I buy my albums from Amazon.com and have them mailed to me. I have no interest in downloading someone's record, whether I'm stealing it or paying for it. The Meat Puppets just made a new record, and they came on tour to Philly. I love the Meat Puppets. I probably could have downloaded the record if I wanted, but I ordered it, I got it in the mail, I listened to it, and then they came around on tour and I saw them. That's how it's supposed to work. Or it's not how it works—our record is all over the Internet right now, and it doesn't come out for another month. It's upsetting.
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