Tag Archives: ween

#1373: Ween – Tick

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So, after being left gobsmacked in the wake of ‘You Fucked Up’ when I was listening to Ween’s debut GodWeenSatan album for the first time in September 2015 – Left such a mark I remember the exact month and year, you see. This was no Mollusk. – ‘Tick’ was the track that followed. “I feel a tick in my head and he’s sucking on my head / In the morning I’ll be dead if he doesn’t leave my head” are its opening lyrics. “Why can’t he go away / Why does he have to stay / Maybe he wants to play” it continues. There I was nodding along, but I was thinking, “Yeah, this is stupid. Ha-ha-ha.” They rhymed ‘head’ with itself three times. The simple, simple wordplay. I didn’t think it was going anywhere. But then it suddenly did. The intensity rose in the “Get you, burn you, crush you” pre-chorus, the wall-of-sound guitars came in for the chorus. I was sold there and then. I’m convinced the song’s start was written with the intention of tricking the listener to underestimate what they’re hearing. If that was the case, Ween succeeded when it came to me.

So, ‘Tick’. It’s about ticks, those external parasites that live by feeding on the blood of mammals, birds, and sometimes reptiles and amphibians, as said in Wikipedia. I always thought Gene Ween sung this on the album, he always does when the band do it live, but then I came across a demo tape of theirs where it was stated that Dean Ween sang it. So I don’t know. I’m more inclined to believe it’s Deaner nowadays. It could be both of them. Whether or not the track is based on a personal experience, I don’t think it’s ever be stated outright, but it’s a song about a narrator who one day feels the presence of a tick on their head. It annoys them. They swear to get their revenge on the thing. They unsuccessfully try to get rid of it and it grows back. The narrator stabs the tick and themselves in the process. The narrator will die soon. The tick wins. It goes on to annoy another person and so on and so forth.

This song, man… Really serves up the second punch after ‘You Fucked Up’ delivers the first. If ‘Tick’ is indeed sung by Dean Ween, then I think it’s cool that the album opens up with both bandmembers singing the respective two numbers. It’s not a very well-known fact that Dean Ween plays the drums almost entirely throughout too, so ‘Tick’ I feel is just a showcase of Deaner’s skills all over the spectrum. But if we’re going to focus on anything he does, it has to be his guitar playing. I don’t think I’ve said, he’s also the main guitar man in Ween. He switches between thrashing power chords and fiddly guitar lines in the chorus. He provides the itchy guitar riff underneath the verses. He blasts out those kind of jazzy chords in the instrumental break. He closes it all out with a solo. He’s all over this track. I think this really is Dean Ween’s song. ‘You Fucked Up’ got me interested in GodWeenSatan, ‘Tick’ solidified that it was indeed a good decision to start listening to it. And there was only… an hour and 12 minutes of the album left to go. Things could only get better.

#1360: Ween – Things You Already Know

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In the space of two weeks in October 2015, I went from having one full downloaded album by Ween on my laptop to having seven. That time, the Autumn/Winter of that year into 2016, was when I fell deep into the work of misters Gene and Dean Ween and found myself having a “new” band to fawn over. The stars were aligning too. It was during that period the band got back together after Gene had left the band in 2012 to focus on his sobriety. It was like someone out there wanted me to start listening to them to prepare me for good times ahead. Once I’d gone through their studio albums, I found myself wanting more. Very luckily, Ween are one of those bands who literally have hundreds and hundreds of songs recorded that never made it onto albums. A noteworthy compilation of some of these is The Caesar Demos, originally shared on Facebook by Dean Ween in August 2011, containing cutting-room-floor tunes and demos made around the time the band were working on their 2003 album Quebec. That compilation is the source of today’s subject.

‘Things You Already Know’ is a song about that good, old situation of unrequited love. Or to put it simply for today’s generation, it’s about a simp. The narrator in ‘Things…’ wishes to woo their subject of interest by diffusing a mob, sailing them around the world in a yacht and promising them the moon and stars. A set of seemingly impossible tasks. It’s not meant to be taken literally, these are all just ways of saying that they’ll do anything to win the heart of this other person. It’s an obsession, one where the narrator seems to think that the other party is aware of the narrator’s advances when it’s very likely that this isn’t the case at all. The narrator takes it personally when, in the final verse, they see their crush with another man, trying to deflect it as a “Your loss, you didn’t get with me” type of deal when inside they’re hurting bad. Thinking about it now, it’s really the “grown-up” version of ‘Nan’ from the band’s first album. Both songs follow an obsessed narrator, who detail their misguided fascinations on a lady before facing reality and feeling slighted as a result. Both very entertaining in their own respective ways.

Had the song been fleshed out, I’m sure it would have been a shoe-in for the final tracklist of Quebec. But it wasn’t. I guess you could say it’s a little repetitive. The melodies are the same from verse to verse, chorus to chorus. The dualling guitar solo mirrors them. It’s anchored by the bouncing drum machine pattern. But it all sounds so good. And Gene Ween sings it in earnest too. It goes down as one of the great Ween tunes left on the cutting room floor. Those Ween fans who know about ‘Things…’ love the track, and I think I had an instant attraction to it when I heard it that first time. I have a memory of sitting behind an iMac at work and listening through this video of The Caesar Demos while doing something else. I went and downloaded the second “disc” of the compilation on 24th October 2015, mainly ’cause of the trifecta of ‘Eulogy for David Anderson’, this track, and ‘Hello Johnny’ on there. Those three alone can make my day. There’s still so much more on that compilation that displays the range of Ween’s creativity in that relatively small two-year span it took to make one of their most popular albums.

#1294: Ween – Strap on that jammypac

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You know those times at a live show when a band comes out and, to get the crowd pumped up, the guitarists will start strumming one chord vigorously with the bass guitarist following suit with one note on a string and the drummer laying into the cymbals before signalling a count that suitably falls into the rhythm of the opening number of the night? I feel like Foo Fighters do that kind of thing a lot of the time. They just come to me as an example. Well, Ween’s ‘Strap on that jammypac’ is a song where the music is based on those specific moments, except the actual song that’s supposed to begin right after never starts. ‘…jammypac’ is the opening number to Ween’s almighty sophomore album The Pod, released in September 1991. And what better way to get this unusual album going than with a track just as unusual in nature?

The ‘jammypac’ in the song’s title refers to the apparatus donned by the figure on the album’s cover, widely known by Ween fans as ‘Mean Ween’, whose name is Chris Williams and a good friend of both Gene and Dean Ween. This was supposedly used to aid in the huffing of Scotchgard that went on during the making of the album. But of course it’s well-known now that this activity was a story made up by the two members of the band, who actually became ill with mononucleosis during the sessions. There were probably plenty of other types of hallucinogens involved, though. Dean Ween sings this tune, sounding like a Looney Tunes/Merry Melodies type of character that I can’t recall the name of, sometimes coming in a little too early or much, much later than the music backing him. Goes to show the vocal take was probably done after the music was recorded.

Overall, I guess you can say this is a song of invitation. There’s no better place to put it on the album than at the very beginning. Dean Ween wants you to put this jammypac on and promises that he and the listener will have a good time together, but sprinkled in among this is a tale of a man who doesn’t get the required amount of food he needs cooked by his woman and can’t take the situation anymore. It also marks the start of the dozens of internal references that occur throughout the album, with the mention of a ‘van Winkle’ who’s also mentioned in fellow album cuts ‘Boing’ and ‘Molly’, before getting their own dedicated song in ‘Sketches of Winkle’. Despite the track, I think, being influenced by those live rock concert situations, it wasn’t played in a live setting by Ween until they were on tour for Chocolate and Cheese a few years later. Whenever they’ve played it live in more recent times, it’s usually the show’s opening tune. It goes down very, very well with the crowd.

#1267: Ween – Stacey

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When I decided to properly get into Ween by listening to their expansive, wacked-out debut GodWeenSatan: The Oneness back in the autumn of 2015, ‘Stacey’ was one of three tracks on the album that couldn’t be played on Spotify. Alongside ‘Bumblebee, Pt. 2’ and ‘Hippy Smell’, the song was added to the ’25th Anniversary Edition” of the album when it was reissued in 2001. And the funny thing is that it had only been out for 11 years at that point. But I guess there must have been some licensing issues going on with labels, hence ‘Stacey’ was unavailable to listen to. I found a solution by downloading a pretty high-quality rip of the album online – think it was the first result on Google, it was very easy to find – and once ‘Stacey’ got around, well, it was a pretty instant like, I want to say.

‘Stacey’ is one of the many Ween songs named after a girl. Just as entertaining as the rest, even if the story behind it may raise a couple eyebrows. The track’s inspired by a young lady both Gene and Dean Ween knew at their school who was, to put it politely, a little slow. The “Hello”‘s at the end are meant to be an impression of her. But the song expresses an admiration for the subject and acts as a sort of tribute. Though whether it’s sincere is another question. I like to think it is. Ween songs aren’t usually mean in their intentions, except for those instances when they very much are. There’s only one verse really. “I know a girl named Stacey/With a brain that’s kinda spacey/I like her more than Sue or Tracey/Do you know a girl like Stacey?” That’s repeated three times or so, and the rest the duration is filled with killer guitar licks, riffs and a face-scrunch-inducing solo courtesy of Dean Ween.

I don’t think the question of why ‘Stacey’ and the other two songs were left off the LP’s original release in 1990 has ever been asked. I’m sure people were used to GodWeenSatan as the 26-track record it initially was before 2001 anyway, so when the three ‘new’ songs came along, they were welcomed into the tracklist with open arms and time for questions was reserved for a later date. Twenty-four years on since that reissue, I don’t think anyone could imagine the album without them. Below’s a live performance of ‘Stacey’, done in September 1991 when the duo were promoting their new second album The Pod. Mushrooms may have been digested prior to it.

#1250: Ween – Sorry Charlie

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When you take on the task of listening to Ween’s The Pod, you’ll come across the first demented moment out of many on the album via its third track ‘Frank’. On it, with a sassy vocal, Gene Ween asks the titular character to supply him with a pork roll egg and cheese with some gravy fries on a couple of occasions. The sludgy guitar riff that closes it out gets louder and louder, becoming more distorted and incomprehensible before it completely cutting off abruptly and giving way to fourth track ‘Sorry Charlie’ – a much more subdued and quieter track in comparison. You might not even realize another track begins because of how low the audio levels are.

This Ween song right here is sung by Dean Ween. It’s always nice to hear a Dean Ween vocal. Gene Ween masters the ones he does with his versatility and range, that when Deaner takes over for once it’s nice to appreciate the kind of everyman, guy-at-the-bar vibe he brings to the table. A lot of Ween songs are based on real experiences lived out by the two, so I’ve always assumed ‘Sorry Charlie’ was the same. The track is Deaner’s observations of a guy named Charlie, someone he probably once knew in the past who shows up unexpectedly at his workplace one day. Deaner sings of the disappointment he feels for Charlie, who apparently has amounted to nothing since the last time he saw him. Charlie’s a man who left college but has a girlfriend in high school and sells pot to make ends meet. Dean wishes he could help him with whatever he needs, but regrettably has to decline ’cause he’s got his own shit to sort out. A very relatable situation.

A lot of the charm in The Pod comes in how its essentially an album of demos that were originally going to be properly recorded before the producer told the duo that what they had was sufficient. People might mistake it as a sign of not taking their craft seriously or trying to be funny just for the hell of it. I know I can’t help but laugh when I hear those programmed crash cymbals during ‘Sorry Charlie’, just because of how fake they sound in the context, or when Dean Ween yells out that faux-rockstar “Ow!” before busting out the plinky guitar solo. But one thing’s for sure, Gene and Dean Ween were always serious when it came to their compositions. They just weren’t all melodramatic about it. A lot of their songs are formed from an enormous fountain of sincerity. ‘Sorry Charlie’ fits neatly into that group. So take the time and dig the lo-fi production. And if you’re not into it, try out a live performance like the one below. Maybe that’ll reveal something.