Ween
Quebec
Sanctuary Records Group

Dean Ween is drunk. It's late on a Thursday in July, and he's already spoken to a number of reporters. He doesn't want to do this, and my questions aren't changing his mind. He bristles when asked about Ween's rabid experimentation with musical styles ranging from country to ska to speed metal to prog. "To me there's a 'Ween Song,'" he says. "We have tendencies as songwriters and players and we come back to them." He doesn't care to assess Ween's past work. "I don't like any of the Ween records," he replies. "I hear 'em so many times." He pre-empts any questions about Ween's ill-fated attempt to provide a jingle for Pizza Hut's new pie, "The Insider," in early 2002. (Pizza Hut parted ways with Ween and hired someone else to do the song.) "I'm done with the Pizza Hut thing. Every-fucking-body keeps asking about it. It's the most publicity Ween has gotten in the last two, three years, and it has nothing to do with Ween or what the band is. Tuesday night, we're doing an all-request concert broadcast on weenradio.com and we let the fans vote online for the set list. And, as of last night, the fuckin' Pizza Hut song is number two on the list. It's like, oh, great. The fuckin' Pizza Hut song."

The last two years have been fairly dreary for 32-year-old Dean Ween, real name Mickey Melchiondo, and his musical sibling, 33-year-old Gene Ween, real name Aaron Freeman. The Pizza Hut disappointment is nothing compared to the horrific car accident their drummer, Claude Coleman, suffered last August. "He was on Interstate 78 around Newark," says Dean. "He was hit by a tractor-trailer from behind and thrown into the oncoming lanes, where he was hit three more times. It was a miracle he didn't get killed." Claude, one of indie rock's unfortunate uninsured, has healed quickly, though not without complications; but it took a couple of Ween benefit concerts at New York's Bowery Ballroom to help pay the hospital bills (both sold out).

Ween has also parted ways with Elektra, its label since 1992. It was an odd relationship from the outset, when Ween was championed by a number of Elektra staffers for what it was — quirky, lo-fi and defiantly uncommercial. Furthermore, Elektra, instead of seizing on the brothers Ween with the grip of a commercially minded Svengali, seemed content to let them continue on at the label as indie curiosities. Amazingly, Ween was allowed to release Pure Guava in the raw, four-track version completed before the band signed its major-label contract. "I sort of felt like we were the label mascots," says Dean, but they seem to have been too distant for even that. "We didn't walk into the office, we didn't give them demos," says Dean. "We'd call every year and a half and say, 'Hey, we have a record, can we have some money?'"

Over time, this relationship soured. Ween's early supporters were all let go in 1994, and the band made no effort to establish meaningful relationships with the new, "more hits-oriented staff." Then, not long ago, Elektra balked at advancing money for Ween to record a new album. "We asked to be let go," says Dean. "They didn't want to give us money, we didn't want to make the record for them. And it made no sense for them to give us that money, 'cause we don't sell. They did us a favor letting us go. It was like living with the wrong girl for too many years."

Dean won't discuss his personal problems of these last two dour years except to say that they existed. It's hard enough for him to concentrate on making an album when things are going well. "The trick is to find balance," he says, "and have a normal life, and get inspired. And then to make space for that time, find that time, to be inspired. The last few years, a lot of things were demanding, and heavy." Ween found another label, Sanctuary, whose artist roster includes the Rollins Band, Joey Ramone and similarly off-the-wall act Stephen Jones. And they found time for inspiration. They recorded the 15-track, psychedelic Quebec, their eighth studio album, the way they prefer: in a variety of living rooms, garages and rented houses all over the East Coast. "Quebec, to me," says Dean, "is just a shitty big replay of the last two miserable shitty years we had."

It's also Ween's darkest record, and it is tremendous.

"You bring your razor blade/ I'll bring the speed/ Take off your coat/ It's gonna be a long night," Dean sings on "It's Gonna Be a Long Night," the album's throat-shredding first track, a Motörhead-inspired rant whose lyrics forecast an album lacking much uplift.

"Long Night" gives way to "Zoloft," an airy plea for the title drug to "make me love me." The otherworldly backing chorus, chirping birds and serpentine guitar break establish the album's predominant sound: late '60s and early '70s psychedelia. The album's ninth track, "Captain," is a murky and ominous jam; chimes echo in the distance as the rhythm section plays with the lethargy of an opium den houseband, a Funkadelic-flavored guitar solo grinds into the mix as a voice, repeatedly begs a single request: "Captain, turn around and take me home." The joy of musical discovery, a hallmark of every Ween album since their unbelievable, virtuoso debut, God Ween Satan: The Oneness in 1990, is here muted.

Though it's not explicit, Quebec's darkness must have something to do with a 32-year-old musician with a 2-year-old son coming to terms with the limits of his profession. "The music industry blows," he says. "You really have to search, if you're a teenager, for real music, 'cause you're not gonna get it on the radio. Creed is not a real rock band. They're not the Stooges. It's shit. A lot of these rock acts are made over to be aggressive-looking, like Limp Bizkit with their tattoos, but it's no different from Christina Aguilera. Johnny Rotten wouldn't piss on these guys if they were on fire."

The press info for Ween indicates a sardonic understanding of their place in the musical food chain: "Ween doesn't necessarily think that this will be the record that breaks them through at radio. Actually they could care less [sic] anymore." The band doth protest too much, methinks, but Ween certainly is less interested in the trappings of fame than in just getting by. "We owe Elektra money; we owe them tons of money," says Dean. "We don't get paid money until our records recoup, and we never made any money on our records. We live off touring, merchandise, publishing, any other way we can get by."

Ween has never been in the business of making intimate albums, but Quebec's grayer hues set it apart from other efforts. They're recording in found locations again — 2000's White Pepper was a studio album. Dean, however, prefers not being on the studio clock, letting "the experimental vibe" take them where it will; in the case of Quebec, there is still a variety of musical styles on display, but the lingering hand of psychedelia lends the album an uncommon unity. "Among His Tribe" and "Tried & True" begin with lovely acoustic guitar melody lines Stephen Stills and Neil Young would be proud to have penned, until the former is made more portentous with overdubbed bass and the shadowy sound of marching. The latter is layered with mandolin and gentle background vocals whispering non sequiturs like "creation" and "I catch it."

Dean's assertion that there is a "Ween Song" is true. "Transdermal Celebration" has more than a passing resemblance to "Don't Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy)" from Pure Guava, and "It's Gonna Be a Long Night" is the kissing cousin of both "Stroker Ace" from White Pepper and the lounge-y "Take Me Away" from Chocolate & Cheese. But Ween's recasting of favorite chord progressions based on the mood of the day is one of the keys to its power; the band's music describes a state of being. The vast God Ween Satan, for example, is 26 tracks long and each song is stylistically different — as befits two young prodigies with a gift of appropriation, slight ADHD and guiltless substance abuse.

Quebec communicates the tumult in Ween's life without spelling it out in the lyrics. It helps that Dean Ween is one of rock's foremost guitarists, routinely crafting eight-bar solos both melodic and inventive. Gene Ween, meanwhile, is blessed with a voice like a musical instrument — endlessly flexible, even when obscured by studio manipulation. It doesn't matter a bit that the lyrics are often impenetrable, sometimes scatological, foolish, even misogynistic, because they mean nothing. The beautifully absurd lyrics of Pure Guava's "Don't Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy)" are the best evidence of Ween's sense of humor about rock music — essential, since all great rock music is, in some way, hilarious in its bombast, its audacity, its confrontational spirit.

"I don't want to be the guy talkin' about the 'old days' — I fuckin' hate that — but you listen to the music of the '60s and the production is different, like on a Sly Stone album, it's different from song to song," says Dean. Well, but that's true today, too. The production on Justin Timberlake's latest is as densely constructed as an act of a Verdi opera, and Timberlake draws from a variety of musical sources. But the finished product doesn't connect on a primal level. What is felt, as with Creed, Aguilera and Fred Durst, is the emptiness of style over substance. Ween are style chameleons, and their producer, Andrew Weiss, is not one for understatement, yet the music almost always connects on a gut level; it is immediate. It can lead them down paths that only they, and die-hard fans, will appreciate; Quebec's worst track, "The Fucked Jam," is a sound experiment for all you rockers who loved Metal Machine Music. It may be honestly felt, but it's just noodling. Still, Ween works from a place of pure inspiration, from the id. That, coupled with a restless examination of musical styles, makes each new album sound like the band's greatest.

It's confounding to see a group like Ween fail to secure a massive audience while lesser acts roll in clover. Perhaps Ween's winking sense of humor about the music they play limits their appeal. Consider: the New York Times Magazine reported that Jon Stewart lost ABC's late-night talk-show host job to Jimmy Kimmel because he wasn't sufficiently "blue collar" (read: Stewart smart, Kimmel boorish.) Ween and "The Daily Show" routinely improve on their source material. "The Daily Show" is a better news show than the news — its use of humor is a clever way of getting closer to the painful truths of newsworthy events — and the strain of parody in Ween's music no longer masks the fact that Ween's music is better than just about any of their influences.

Proof positive is Quebec's final trio of songs, "Alcan Road," "The Argus," and "If You Could Save Yourself, You'd Save Us All." None of these are "Ween Songs" by Dean's definition; Ween draws from early Genesis, Jethro Tull, the mysticism of Led Zeppelin and, in the zealous architecture of the final track, the last sweeping minutes of Dark Side of the Moon, including a reading by Gene Ween that pirates the hushed deliberation of Roger Waters' phrasing, to invent something entirely new. This is the first Ween album that builds to an inevitable conclusion. The bleak and atmospheric "Alcan Road," with its gothic organ, its medieval chant, its wind effects, gives way to the descending guitar lines and quavering vocals of "The Argus," a meeting of Jimmy Page and Donovan, accompanied by flutes and sprightly keyboards. This sets the table for "If You Could Save Yourself… " which begins simply, with organ and rhythm section and a plaintive vocal, and builds to a symphonic pitch, multi-tracked strings, pianos and drums and bass swirling furiously, as Gene Ween jumps an octave and tears into what may be, given Ween's history and the events that led to this moment, the most straightforward lyrics of their career:

The time I spent working myself to death
Thought that's what you wanted
I thought you needed my help
To make it good again
To make us strong
To make you happy
To push you along
And gain some respect
To be thrown a crumb
I was on my knees
When you knocked me down.

— Christopher Hickman (hickatz at mindspring dot com)