There are a number of people in my orbit who like to boast about having seen bands like Nirvana, Nick Cave, or Interpol long before such artists became well known by the pansies and serfs. It's a primitive means of one-upmanship that can be found in just about any ad-hoc community—especially the kind where there is either real or imagined social status to be gained by saying things such as: "I liked blah-de-blah before you did, asshole". I don't engage in this practice very often, probably because most of the things I ever liked were either too weird or too pedestrian to end up getting popular. But for whatever it's worth, the one slice of the credibility pie which I can absolutely lay claim to is that I probably liked Ween before you did.
Actually, I probably saw Ween about fifty times before you'd ever heard of them. (Important aside: I am not gaining any social status by revealing this in 2010. I'm just laying the necessary groundwork for the rest of this article. Cut a brother some slack, will ya?) Ween were the unofficial house band at the Jersey weirdo rock
club I hung out in as a teenager, which is why their more recent popularity with college kids, Phish/Deadheads, and guys in their 40s who have ponytails and work in guitar stores still strikes me as so peculiar. No one ever thought Ween was going to get famous—I remember me and my skateboard-wielding, Parliament-puffing pals cracking up when we heard they'd gotten a record deal... with Twin Tone.
Nevertheless, beginning with the first time I saw them (1988, I think), and lasting until their homebase of City Gardens shut its doors (which coincided with me moving to NYC), I considered myself something of a Ween fan. Yeah, I wore down the grooves on the God * Ween * Satan double LP... I even mailordered the seldom-heard 12" EP that came out before that, on Trenton's short-lived Bird O' Prey record label, along with a couple of Ween's cassette-only albums. (The only other Bird O' Prey vinyl release was the Scornflakes LP, which is a blog post for another day.)
But what is perhaps most impressive is that I just spent twenty minutes of my life (twenty minutes which I will never get back, mind you) digitizing a Ween interview from a cassette that's been slowly decaying in my closet for the last 20 years. This originally aired on WTSR on the excellent radio program hosted by Mr. Bob Conrad, who edited a similarly excellent Trenton-area fanzine called This Zine Sucks. The funny thing is, I lived about five miles outside of WTSR's coverage area, so I would sometimes drive around the backwoods of Mercer County on Saturday mornings in order to hear the show. Furthermore, the car I owned at the time (an '81 VW Rabbit) did not have a functioning radio, so I kept a boombox in the backseat to play tapes on. I call attention to this detail only because all of this sketchy data seems to suggest that this recording of an FM broadcast was apparently made inside of a moving vehicle.
I totally did that before you did, mang.
Dean Ween Interview on WTSR—Original airdate unknown, but I'm guessing early 1989. Host: Bob Conrad.
[Listen]
For a more musical review of Ween's activities during this time period, get your lighters aloft for "Birthday Boy" using the Flash player below.
UPDATE: Bob Conrad was kind enough to pass along a couple of ancient Ween photos, possibly from their first ever gig at City Gardens. (See below.) Thanks again, Bob!
Well that totally made my day, worth the twenty mins of your life for sure!
Posted by: Ellie | August 26, 2010 at 07:12 PM