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’