WEEN @ Les Schwab Amphitheater [Photoset/Download/Set List]
July 20, 2011 in Music
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Amazing GENE WEEN New Orleans Prints by TODD SLATER
If you poke around on Monster Fresh long enough you should be able to discover a couple of things fairly easily. One is that we like art. Another is that we really like the band WEEN. Whether it comes from the guys being incredibly discriminate or just simply being incredibly fortunate, WEEN has -and continues to have- some of the most consistent artwork from any band around. Gig posters have proven themselves to be increasingly collectible over the years and the prints created to support and commemorate shows by the boys from New Hope have found themselves within the top tier of this phenomenon. The true secret seems to be that the band often pulls from a very elite group of regular artists, all of which seem to be legitimate fans of the group. Artists like Justin Hampton, Emek, Jermaine Rogers, and Gregg “Gigart” Gordon are not only loyal contributors to the WEEN poster art dynasty, but they are also some of the most respected poster artists in the game, altogether. Another such artist is TODD SLATER, whose latest work involves a pair of posters for the back to back GENE WEEN New Orleans shows during Jazz Fest, which are guaranteed to become instant classics.
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Watch the Footage from WEEN’s Vancouver Show “meltdown” & Get Over it.
January 31, 2011 in Music, Reviews, The Web, With Video
If you consider yourself an avid fan of the New Hope, Pennsylvania 5-piece known as WEEN, then chances are that you have already heard something about their recent, and now infamous, performance at Vancouver, BC’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Monday Jan. 24th. The moment the show let out, tales of Aaron “Gene Ween” Freeman being “too fucked up” and/or losing his shit began to weigh down the WEEN forum and flood their official Facebook page. It’s been described with such terms as “meltdown” and “collapse“. There are mixed feelings about what occurred that night. Some people were pissed off, while others have stated that they had a great time, but very few would disagree that some sort of spectacle took place. Claims came in about how the frontman had problems with tuning, or rather constantly re-tuning, his guitar throughout the evening. Random audience footage taken from the back of the crowd appeared to display Freeman laying on his back, at some point, and kicking his legs in the air. I read a lot of comments regarding the show taking a downhill plunge around the song “ReggaeJunkieJew“. One of the first things to be consistently confirmed was that, for the last half hour or so, Gener was on stage performing solo, after his frustrated cohorts eventually had enough and left him out there to fend for himself. The screwy part is that, if all of this was true, the band had still performed a full 20 songs before they began to walk off the stage and “ReggaeJunkieJew” was already the 17th track on the setlist. From then on, Gene took on 5 songs all by, or mostly all by, himself. I don’t hear of too many bands knocking out that much material, even on their best nights. So what the fuck is the problem, really? Are the WEEN “fans” that attended the Vancouver show too whiny? The band did leave him out there all alone; was it really that big of a irreparable disaster? Has this group grown so large over the past decade that too many of the folks that go to their shows these days don’t really even “get it”? It was just a fucking concert, so does it really even matter? One thing’s for sure, those of us who weren’t in attendance can’t very well rely on the opinions of those staining the internet with their opinions. Fortunately for us, someone had enough sense to record some up-close footage of the entire evening and afford us the ability to make our own assessments. Hopefully, after this, everyone can move on and finally leave all of the excessive complaints, reiterations, and drama behind them. Read the rest of this entry →
WIN A PAIR OF WEEN Tickets to any West Coast Tour Date!
January 13, 2011 in Music
CONTEST HAS ENDED!
First off, thanks to everyone who entered. We’re terrible people and wish that everyone could lose, but that’s not going to be possible, so let’s move forward. After a group deliberation, narrowing down the selection, WE’VE PICKED A WINNER!
The winning entry was left by… Read the rest of this entry →
Gently Smiling Jaws: Gene Ween at the Crocodile [Seattle]
June 29, 2009 in Music, Reviews, With Video
On the 19th, I was fortunate enough to catch a rare solo acoustic performances by Aaron “Gene Ween” Freeman. Over the last week or so, I’ve simply been going through the photographs that I took and digesting the whole experience. The Seattle show was the last of only 4 that Gener was doing for his June, mini-tour down the West Coast. Freeman is, of course, one of two founding members of the group WEEN; the other being Mickey “Dean Ween” Melchiondo. I’m not going to waste too much of my time by going into their extensive background all over again. If you’re not hip to WEEN yet, then your ass needs to get hip. We here at MonsterFresh love the WEEN, as evidenced by the multiple posts that we’ve all ready written about them, and we’re always eager to cover any new project that the guys are working on.
Melchiondo is well known for his side-work with the group Moistboyz and, bassist, Dave Dreiwitz is involved with multiple other projects. Freeman, on the other hand, has often seemed less eager to venture out beyond his work with the band. Toward the end of last year, however, Gener began to do just that, by playing various shows with his recently formed Gene Ween Band {You may have read the review by our writer A.Misalatti, who we sent to cover the new 4-piece‘s performance in Brooklyn back in February}. Since the group didn’t come out West for any of the dates, and since I haven’t been to a WEEN show since their last Seattle show in 2007, I was pretty psyched when the West Coast dates were announced. Read the rest of this entry →
Riding the Wrongs of Mankind: Interview w/Artist THEA WOLFE
April 24, 2009 in art, Global Destruction, Interviews, Music
I saw Onsen‘s Subaru from the balcony of my apartment, so I ran down the steps and hopped in to the passenger seat. We were running late to meet with the artist Thea Wolfe, creator of the WEEN coloring book.
A week earlier, I had received a Google instant message from a friend and staff member at Cornish School of the Arts here in Seattle. He informed me that there were some really great paintings of WEEN posted up at the institution and suggested that I come down and see them. In all honesty, I was a bit leery about the validity of the work. I knew that it was probably either going to be amazing or fucking terrible. For me, it’s hard to find any gray area with that sort of subject matter. I was sent a couple of iphone photo images and quickly realized that the artist was no joke; the paintings were, in fact, much more than I could have ever expected.
I wanted to help the student get their work to the source and I quickly had delusions of grandeur, in which I became like Maurice Starr when he discovered New Edition and NKOTB. I’ve been in semi-regular contact with WEEN‘s management since the site began and I knew that, if I forwarded the images of the painter to them, the work of the artist that I was “discovering” would be undeniable. “What’s her name and contact info?“ I asked my friend. He went to check and typed back the name “Thea Wolfe“. I recognized it immediately and knew that she didn’t need any help from me; I already owned a copy of the coloring book that she created for the group last year. She wasn’t a current student at all, her paintings were posted up on the alumni wall.
After checking out her site, I headed down to see the paintings in person. They were much more impressive than any still frame camera could represent. Colorful and full of motion, many of the paintings had reflective iridescent shapes and pentagons within them that shifted depending on the view, lighting, and angle. I had never seen a simulation of psychedelic experiences portrayed that way through paint, or any that more accurately conveyed them. The artist statement explained that the series was based on what Wolfe refers to as “The Year of the Wrong“, a period of time in which she traveled thousands of miles to attend a number of performances on WEEN‘s “La Cucaracha” tour with a primary focus of doing what she felt inside, regardless of how unreasonable, ridiculous, or “wrong” it may seem to the outside world. Based on her work and various statements and views that she’s expressed through interviews, her website, and elsewhere, I knew that there was the strong probability for a good conversation to come from meeting her in person. Read the rest of this entry →
