FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
Dean Ween on Springsteen, Bugs Bunny, and the greatest Pink Floyd cover jam that never was
03.15.2018
11:11 am
Topics:
Tags:


Photo credit: Mark Adams

Ween and I go way back. I bought Pure Guava in 1992; that CD will always be a unique one in my collection, as it was the only CD I ever used to transport contraband across international lines. I was living in Europe, and I had a return flight from NYC sometime in early 1993. Before my departure a friend had given me a few tabs of acid that I wasn’t able to use before leaving. My solution was to place it behind the tray holding the CD. I’m pretty sure I chose Pure Guava because of the inherent weirdness of the music. Anyway, I didn’t end up in prison, so thank you Dean and Gene, I guess.

Ween broke up in 2012 (they returned to playing gigs together in 2016), and their activities in the wake of no longer being a unit showed some interesting divergences. Gene Ween (Aaron Freeman) released an album of Rod McKuen covers, whereas Melchiondo took up with his buddies from Moistboyz for a fifth album and also has now released two albums under the banner the Dean Ween Group, which comes off as a rollicking variant on the Ween formula—lots of ass-kicking songs and a good rock and roll time for sure. The Dean Ween Group released The Deaner Album in 2016, and tomorrow marks the release of album #2, fittingly called rock2.   

Melchiondo was good enough to talk to Dangerous Minds recently.

I was very excited to see your account of recording The Mollusk last year in Stereogum.
We fucked that up, man. We should have done something to commemorate it. We did do one thing. We played the album on stage this one time. It was really funny. We were in Bend, Oregon—believe it or not, that’s a huge market for us. It’s right on a river, beautiful, an outdoor ampitheater. It holds an endless amount of people, it’s just one of those places you go, it’s just limitless. We’ve been going there for years. So we hadn’t done anything to commemorate the record, we realized the night before that it was the anniversary [20 years]. We were walking to the stage, and I said, “Let’s do The Mollusk.” And everyone said “All right!” And we had this five-second huddle, like “What are the chords to ‘Cold Blows the Wind’?” Because that’s the only song off The Mollusk we don’t play. And we went on and played the whole thing. [The Mollusk show at the Les Schwab Amphitheater in Oregon took place on July 1, 2017. Audio files of that show are available.]

That’s a big thing nowadays, playing a full album live like that.
I saw the most interesting Springsteen show recently. He did a tour of just The River, which is an epic album. I love that record. But he got snowed out on one date like around Christmas a couple of years ago at Madison Square Garden, and he came back to play this one date. They hadn’t been playing The River for a year or two. I went to that show, and it’s amazing because it’s a really long album ... and then after that, I shit you not, they played like three more hours! And it wasn’t like an old guy embarrassing himself by running and jumping around like Mick Jagger or some shit—Mick Jagger is still great, don’t get me wrong—but I’d be gasping after 20 minutes if I did what he did! He ran around Madison Square Garden, crowdsurfed, played the guitar with his dick, everything short of setting Max Weinberg on fire.

That’s great! Another artist from the past you admire is Pink Floyd. We did a post a while back about an epic version of “Echoes” you did at a bar in New Jersey.
We’re sill doing that! We started doing that 25 years ago, and we still do it from time to time. I actually tried to get a thing together, I’m really bummed, everybody was into it but I guess everyone was too famous or something. Les Claypool at one point played all of Animals, and then the [Flaming] Lips played all of Dark Side, you know. And I know those guys, I know guys in both bands, I know all of ‘em. I called personally. ... And I was playing with Harry Waters, who was with the Deen Ween Group, he’s Roger Waters’ son. So I was like, “Let’s all go out to Red Rock and do a Pink Floyd thing!” It would have been me, and Les, and the Lips, and Harry, jamming together. And everyone was like, “FUCK YEAH!” And then it came time, and it was like, it got handed over to the managers, and all of a sudden my idea got all pissed on, it was like “Uhh, we could get Red Bull and GoPro to sponsor it!” I was like, “You know what, fuck it…..”

Your music has always had a lot of humor in it. Who are your influences from a comedy perspective?
My sense of humor is totally Bugs Bunny. Completely Looney Tunes. All of it. Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, 99 percent of it comes from that, my whole sense of cynicism and sarcasm. Oh—and I’ll fucking say it, I grew up listneing to Bill Cosby records. Oh, and Rodney Dangerfield. Monty Python is massive, still to this day. But straight up, the answer is Bugs Bunny. If you’re talking about my sense of humor, Bugs Bunny is 99.9999 percent of it.

“Don’t Let the Moon Let Catch You Crying,” off the new album, is a deceptively dark song.
That song is a song that Aaron and I wrote for Quebec, I think.

Oh really?
Yeah. But the words were bad, the verses were awful. The chorus was good, but the verses were not. And I never revisited it, and it always bummed me out. Because I always thought it was probably the best song that we wrote for that album, it was a gorgeous song. So we went back, and my friend and I [Adam Weiner from Low Cut Connie] rewrote the lyrics to it.  It ended up being about like, all the personal relationships in my life, I’ll just leave it at that. I love that tune. It sounds like Bob Seger or something. It’s a song about self-loathing, I think, and it’s an “us against the world” jam. That’s really what it’s about.

You did an Oi! song. Are you into Oi!
No…. That was an instrumental that I wrote. I love it, it’s so rowdy. And Claude, our drummer [Claude Coleman Jr.], said, “This song makes me imagine a bunch of skinheads in a mosh pit kicking the shit out of somebody.” And then I remembered, back in the ‘70s there’d be a single, like “Love Theme From Airport.” So I called it “Love Theme from Skinheads Kicking Your Ass.” I think of it as a redneck, rebel yell song.

Can you name an album that sounds really awesome being blasted off of a front porch?
Oh man, I don’t have a front porch! My go-to thing, I have two or three “safety records” for when people come over, like my in-laws, my folks, older people, my friends, my wife’s friends. Diverse group of people, you know? And my two go-to things that I know everyone’s gonna like are Roy Orbison’s Greatest Hits—it’s a total safe record—and The Genius of Ray Charles. If you complain about either one of those records, you’re just an ass.

Here’s “Don’t Let the Moon Catch You Crying” off the new album, which you can buy here:
 

 
Thank you Ron Kretsch!
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Dean Ween reveals the two guitar solos he’s been ripping off for years
The artist formerly known as Dean Ween spearheads epic 37-minute cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’

Posted by Martin Schneider
|
03.15.2018
11:11 am
|
The artist formerly known as Dean Ween spearheads epic 37-minute cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’
11.19.2014
09:27 am
Topics:
Tags:


Photo credit: Beta Klein
 
The great and inventive band Ween broke up in 2012, but both parts of the group have remained musically active. Aaron Freeman (Gene Ween) put out Marvelous Clouds, an impressively catchy album of Rod McKuen covers as well as an album called FREEMAN. For his part, Mickey Melchiondo (Dean Ween) has been touring to support his side project Moistboyz’ fifth album, appropriately titled 5. (In that band, which also features Nick Oliveri of Queens of the Stone Age, Melchiondo goes by the name Mickey Moist.)

On February 21 of this year, Melchiondo “fulfilled a long-held wish,” according to Ultimate Classic Rock, when he took the stage at John and Peter’s in New Hope, Pennsylvania (long Ween’s base of operations) and cranked out a monster 37-minute version of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes,” which occupies side 2 of their 1971 album Meddle. That version lasted a paltry 23 minutes, so judging from that metric alone, Melchiondo’s version is obviously 61% better. On Live at Pompeii, the song is broken up into “Echoes, Part 1” and “Echoes, Part 2,” and the two tracks together clock in at about 25 minutes.
 

Photo credit: Beta Klein
 
Joining Melchiondo for the performance are Guy Heller (vocals), Bill Fowler (guitar and vocals), Ray Kubian (drums), Sean Faust (keyboards), and Chris Williams (bass). If you have any doubts about Melchiondo’s ability to write and execute a lengthy hard-rock guitar piece, I urge you to listen to “Woman and Man,” an epic 11-minute slab of ass-kicking rock that constitutes the penultimate track of Ween’s 2007 album La Cucaracha

As Melchiondo explained, “We grew up watching Live at Pompeii all the time and finally got to execute this song properly.” I’m no Pink Floyd authority, but I listened to the Pompeii version and the Deaner version back to back, and I think the 2014 version holds up pretty well.
 

 

Posted by Martin Schneider
|
11.19.2014
09:27 am
|
The time Dean Ween hijacked Carlos Santana’s gear on its way to ‘Good Morning America’
06.12.2014
02:35 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
Mickey “Dean Ween” Melchiondo’s Facebook presence is pretty typical working cult musician stuff, tour dates, concert photos, personal snapshots, yadda yadda. (I’m fond of his fishing pics.) But a couple of days ago, Melchiondo posted a confession long kept secret, about boosting an iconic guitarist hero’s equipment for a recording. So the name drops don’t lose anyone, Josh Freese is known for his drumming in Devo and A Perfect Circle, and Sim Cain and Andrew Weiss were in Rollins Band.
 

I think enough time has passed where I can finally tell my favorite Ween story of all-time.

The businesses and the people involved have long since closed their doors and moved on for good and hopefully the people involved (and Carlos himself, if it comes to that) will have a good sense of humor about this story.

In 2003 Ween released our album “quebec” on Sanctuary Records. We worked on the album for 2 years in our beach house in Holgate,NJ, a rented house in the Pocono Mountains of PA, the garage behind Aaron’s house in Pt. Pleasant, PA, my upstairs guest room, and finally Andrew Weiss’s living room in NJ. We also worked at Water Music in Hoboken, NJ and Graphic Sound Studios in Ringoes, NJ. It was not a great period in our personal lives, Aaron was going thru a divorce and I was partying way too hard myself—it was some dark shit. The record is one of my favorites, but it is a depressing album lyrically. It was not an easy record to make either, as evidenced by the amount of places we worked, trying to find the right environment. There are demos available online that I posted where you can hear the process at work, we racked up our normal batch of like 6 dozen songs or more before whittling it down to what was finally released, 15 tunes.

I am a huge fan of Carlos Santana. He is one of my favorite guitarists of all-time. He is playing better these days than ever before in my opinion. His music is more radio friendly, for sure, but as a guitarist he has aged like a fine wine. Only Neil Young, Prince, and a small handful of others can make that claim as they become members of the AARP.

We were working in Andrew’s living room on the song “Transdermal Celebration”, our drummer Claude Coleman had just gotten into a horrific car crash and left us w/o a drummer for the recording and ensuing tour. Eventually it worked itself out where the record took so long to complete that Claude made enough of a recovery to do the world tour with us supporting “quebec.” In the meantime though, even though Claude had played on some of the demos, drumming on the album was left up to me, Josh Freese, and Sim Cain. “Transdermal Celebration” had been recorded 3 times by this point, with a drum machine, with Claude playing drums, and the final take on the album which features Josh Freese. It was the eventual single from the album. So, we’re in the middle of this session and I get a phone call from my roadie (nameless) who also worked for a backline company (nameless) that supplied amps, drums, lights, etc. to bands touring in the Northeast. My roadie told me that Carlos Santana’s equipment (including his guitars) had arrived via a trucking company that night at their depot. Carlos was recording an appearance on “Good Morning America” the next morning and his equipment was to be delivered to the set in NYC in a few hours.

What needed to be done was immediately clear to me, I had an opportunity to play the solo on “Transdermal Celebration” through Carlos Santana’s amplifier and guitar. I had one shot at it, it meant taking a hard disk recorder to a storage space where all of Carlos’ stuff was sitting in transit. I arrived at 2am. We (very carefully) unpacked his equipment and set up his stage gear and in one take I recorded the guitar solo for “Transdermal Celebration” (the one that appears on the album, playing thru Carlos Santana’s guitar, pedalboard, and amplifier. The whole thing took 10 minutes and we were terrified we were going to get caught. A lot of people would have lost their jobs. We got the fuck outta there really fast after that. So the solo on “Transdermal Celebration” was played thru all of Santana’s shit in what resembled an early morning bank heist or something……….

Of course a story like this requires visual proof, so here it is. Don’t tell anyone about these please.

-Dean Ween 6/14

 
Gotta love the cheeky “Don’t tell anyone about these please,” on a public post to a fan page with thousands of followers. I’m guessing the solo in question is the one that starts at about 1:53.
 

 
And here are some photos as evidence of the caper:
 

 

 

 
Lest anyone assume Mr. Santana’s gear was treated disrespectfully (you know, apart from being handled without his knowledge), Melchiondo adds this postscript:
 

an afterthought: regarding the Carlos post, i’d like to add that we handled his equipment as if it were the Mona Lisa. We photographed the way his roadie had his cables wrapped and positioned and put everything back exactly as it was found. The whole process was over as quickly as it happened. Also, the respect that I have for Carlos and the depth, spirituality and stamina of his playing is held by me in the highest regard. I am not just a fan of Carlos, I am a believer and follower of everything he has done, and yes that includes the pop singles. I felt it was important to have this be known, there is no one I hold in a higher regard. Also, I have a lifetime of experience of handling equipment, as did the other person involved, it wasn’t two drunk buffoons manhandling a legend’s gear, the furthest thing from it. I think it’s important to clarify that. -DW

 

 
Melchiondo’s new band, The Dean Ween Group, debuted in Baltimore in March, and they will be touring this summer. Dates are listed at his web site.

Posted by Ron Kretsch
|
06.12.2014
02:35 pm
|