Still funny after all these years
Ween has a serious side - but not so you'd notice.
Like you, I once thought of Ween as the Cheech & Chong of alt-rock, a semi-demonic duo hatched from a weird egg under a bad moon in New Hope, lo, some 23 years ago.
We all thought of them - if we thought of them at all - as the Scotchgard-huffing twin offspring of Frank Zappa, able to parrot just about any genre of music with Zelig-like aplomb, and then turn it inside out with
Mad
magazine puerility and rank absurdity. And all of that is true, of course. However, you would be mistaken if you assumed that just because they are funny the duo of Dean and Gene Ween - a.k.a. Mickey Melchiondo and Aaron Freeman - are somehow less than serious about their music.
"We took a very focused, workman-like approach to this record, which is the way it has to be because we both have kids now," says Melchiondo (he's Dean Ween), speaking of their latest,
La Cucaracha
. "We wrote and demoed 50 songs, whittled it down to 20, took those into the studio and then wound up picking 13 for the album. The goal was to put a lot of work and love into it."
After they recorded the bulk of their work for Elektra Records,
La Cucaracha
marks the beginning of a new partnership with the storied indie label Rounder Records, which suits Melchiondo just fine.
"In 2007, being on BMG or Interscope would be the kiss of death," Melchiondo says. "If I had to do over I wouldn't sign [with a major again] - and, to be fair, I don't think those labels would bother to pursue us if we were starting out now. For a band like Ween, we don't really need a label to do anything for us other than manufacture the CDs and put them in stores. Ten years ago, it was totally different. You spent $100,000 on a video for the big single and you build a marketing campaign around that. For [
La Cucaracha
] there was no single, no video, no promo, no marketing plan. We just got back from five weeks on tour and every single show was sold out."