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#1414: Ween – Tried and True

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Just when Quebec was starting to get some love over here, it comes to a swift end. No more Quebec songs are to appear after this one. There is one on the album that begins with ‘Z’. I like it, but not to the extent that I do all the other tracks I’ve written about. So that’s how it is. Literally wrote about ‘Transdermal Celebration’ the other day, so I’ll spare the whole spiel about my feelings on the LP and its context. On that post, I did say there were five numbers on Quebec that would have had their own posts had the time been right. May as well list them out: ‘Among His Tribe’, ‘Happy Colored Marbles’, ‘Hey There Fancypants’, ‘Chocolate Town’ and ‘The Argus’. Always had a great time with those songs in particular. But as I feel I implied in the last post concerning Quebec, the album as a whole is very special. So we say farewell to it, and its last representative comes in the form of its sixth track, ‘Tried and True’.

At the time of writing this, ‘Tried and True’ is the most-played Quebec song on Spotify with 25+ million streams. A good 11 million more than the next. Not quite sure why that happened. Possibly through various playlist inclusions. I really like ‘Tried and True’ myself, but I wouldn’t say it’s the best song Quebec has to offer. But what I think it provides the people is some very easy listening. You just sit back in your most comfortable chair and let yourself sink into it while this song rides out. It’s helped by the fact that, and I’m pretty sure it’s the case, the band recorded it at a faster speed in its original key of C, before slowing it down to how it is on the album. Why would the band do that, you might ask. It just gives the track a certain character, I think. Makes the track sound a bit more spaced out. Hits some certain frequencies that wouldn’t be possible without the production tricks. And plus, it seems that whenever the band worked with producer Andrew Weiss, speed manipulation was the way to go a lot of the time.

In the live performance below, Gene Ween precedes the song by saying it’s one ‘about space and time’. I can’t really argue with that. I would put forward, there’s definitely something sexual about ‘Tried and True’ too. Is that fair to say? There’s certainly some double entendres that support that theory. “I woke, I was alone… rising”. “Rising” could refer to the physical act of getting out of bed or a classic case of morning wood. Then I’d say the song is about waking up with very strong blood flow and feeling untouchable, with a heavily cosmic spin put on it via the lyrics, reinforced by the electric sitar, the pulsating keyboards and floaty background vocals that come in nearing the song’s end. But I may also be completely wrong on that front. It also contains the cheekiest play on words with the “Could you smell my whole… life?” lyric. I tell you, I sung that out loud in front of my sister one time. She looked at me for a second during that pause between “whole” and “life” before I completed the lyric myself. And that was when I should maybe only reserve audible singing for times when there’s no one else in the room.

#1412: Ween – Transdermal Celebration

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Only the second song from Ween’s Quebec I’ll be writing about on here. I tell you, in another time, there’d be many more Ween songs covered on this blog in general. But when it comes to Quebec, there are about five others on that album that would have definitely had their own posts, had I been aware of the album’s existence before 2013. The band’s eighth album, released in August 2003, is my favourite of the band’s. For a while, it was firmly The Mollusk, which I think is a common feeling among the people. But as I’ve got older and had my moments of sadness and reflection, settling into the person I am, Quebec is at that point where it resonates with me a lot more than it initially did. The album deals with issues, so much so that the album was jokingly referred to as “Aaron Freeman’s Issues” during its making. One of those issues covered on the album is that of drugs, and that is all over its third track, ‘Transdermal Celebration’.

After the Motorhead-esque opener in ‘It’s Gonna Be a Long Night’ and elevator muzak take of ‘Zoloft’, ‘Transdermal…’ comes in as the big “alt-rock” number to push the album along further. I did think it was a rip on Foo Fighters in the first few months of knowing it. It probably isn’t. But I still think Gene Ween’s vocals sound like Dave Grohl’s in ‘Learn to Fly’. All that’s neither here nor there. Webster’s definition of ‘transdermal’ is as follows: “relating to, being, or supplying a medication in a form for absorption through the skin into the bloodstream”. A lot of other things, not so much ‘medication’, can be taken in the same way. But we’ll say it’s about medication just for this, with the verses depicting the various visions and metaphorical effects on the body the narrator experiences while on it. The storming verses then come down into the swaying, calmer choruses, which change the perspective, looking on at the narrator who lies comatose on their lawn while all these hallucinations are happening in their head. Not to reduce the song to “It’s just about drugs, man”, but knowing Ween… it’s very likely that it is.

I think people who know ‘Transdermal…’ all have an aligned understanding that it’s pretty much amazing. If it is about drug visions and out-of-this-world hallucinations that sound great on the surface, I also appreciate the depiction of the scary point-of-no-return moment in the final line of the last verse, “But where is the mutation that once told me it was safe? / I can’t find him” – which also sounds like “Fucking find him”, and I don’t think that’s unintentional. While on the front acting as a celebration, there’s a warning inside too, which goes hand-in-hand with the “Everything’s okay on the outside, but inside there’s insecurity” theme (or something better-worded but along those lines) that shows up throughout the album. There’s a great story about how the fantastic guitar solo was recorded. It involves Dean Ween and the gear and equipment of the legendary guitarist Carlos Santana. It’s better to read it from Dean Ween’s point of view. And here’s Santana playing live the morning after.

#1401: Ween – Touch My Tooter

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Here’s the last song from Ween’s Pure Guava that I’ll be writing about. ‘Touch My Tooter’. ‘Don’t Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy)’ would have had a post of its own, for sure, but I wasn’t listening to Ween like that in 2014 or whenever I was covering songs on my phone that began with the letter ‘D’. So that leaves just three Pure Guava songs on this blog. It’s not my favourite Ween album. It and The Pod were more or less recorded at the same time, and really all of …Guava sounds like it’d fit on its predecessor. There’s a ‘Pod Part 2’ feeling I can’t help but associate with it. The drum-machine rhythms on …Guava are beefier and busier, I appreciate it for that at the least. I’ve just never been able to really get into it. And that’s okay, I don’t think I need to force these kinds of things. The four songs on there I like, I like a lot. When it comes to ‘…Tooter’, I dig the music, but I can’t help but smile when listening to it. Its delivery is funny as hell.

A lot of Ween fans will agree that the band’s three albums are top, top stuff. But whenever material from those albums are performed live, they’re usually taken to another level in terms of sound and performance. ‘Touch My Tooter’ was a number the band would do on the road quite regularly back in the day, the performance of it (below) in their iconic Live in Chicago 2003 shows being a notable exhibit of how it was done. And I’m sure I saw that before I got to the rawer studio version. Live, it’s got this rocking, stomping feel. A lot of edge. I think helped by the backing of an actual rhythm section. The initial album version is much different. It’s quicker in tempo. The drum machine couldn’t sound more synthetic. Dean Ween’s guitar’s got this crunch in tone, in a real lo-fi kind of way. Gene Ween is singing in a way that I find hard to describe, but you can tell he’s really feeling it. I like both live and studio versions just ’cause they’re so much on other ends of the spectrum.

I did use to think that this song was about Gener having an extreme crush on a lady. She walks into the room, he gets all giddy and wishes to have some kind of sexual relation with her. I think it’s dawned on me that it may be the complete opposite in sentiment. Gener addresses his ‘buggy’, a affectionate nickname for Deaner if you’re into your Ween lore, pretty much ‘buddy’, asking him why the arrival of this girl makes him feel like shit inside. Gener doesn’t like this girl, he doesn’t like the way she dances, he doesn’t like the way she thinks everything is cool between the two of them. So in telling her to ‘touch [his] tooter’, he’s really telling her to kiss his ass. More of a ‘fuck you’ song than a ‘want to fuck you’ song. A lot of Ween songs are based on personal experiences, I don’t think ‘Touch My Tooter’ is separate from that category. This realization’s got me thinking about the song a little differently now. There’s much more behind it than meets the eye. I’ll take it all day. A big album highlight for me.

#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 shoo-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.