WEEN @ Les Schwab Amphitheater [Photoset/Download/Set List]
July 20, 2011 in Music
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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 →
EXCLUSIVE WEEN PHOTOS: The Sasquatch Music Festival [May 31, 2010]
Last weekend marked the 9th annual Sasquatch Music Festival at the Gorge Amphitheater in George, Wa. The lineup was pretty impressive this year and included MGMT, The XX, LCD Soundsystem, Nurses and even Pavement. Closing out the festivities was a performance by one of our favorite bands of all-time, WEEN. I was there all weekend so that I could report on everything that went down and regurgitate it back for you assholes, but I am still putting everything together, going through photos, and simply recovering. You may have noticed that we don’t typically just post updates here and there. It’s much more important for us to process everything and provide something that is more adequately thought out. Hopefully it’s something that will actually provide the reader with new information and, if we’re really lucky, something that can even moderately stand the test of time. With a situation like this year’s Sasquatch, however, there’s a lot to deal with, so I’m going to do things a little differently. I’m covering the entire 3-Day event all by myself, including photography, reviews, editing, etc, and so there’s a lot for me to organize. The reviews will be posted soon but, seeing as I have a ton of images and only a handful of them will be used in those reviews, I wanted to drop some photos from the WEEN set right here and right now. These aren’t all of the photos even obtained at the WEEN show, but it’s a lot of them (24 to be exact). This is a little update for everyone, while I process everything else, because I’m assuming that a lot of you probably still don’t know about our Flickr account. More images will be popping up on that account as we process them, so keep your eye on there if you want to see more. For now, please enjoy the images of Gene and Dean provided below.
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 →
Hella WEEN (Live / La Cucaracha)
December 1, 2007 in Global Destruction, Music, Reviews
I don’t think that I will ever forget the first time that I listened to the band WEEN. I was in the back of a white 1980 Datsun 210 sedan with soft light blue interior. I had recently ingested a plus-size hooker’s corpse-load of cubensis and, being inexperienced at the time, I was downing fistfuls of them like I was going head to head with Takeru Kobayashi at the Nathan’s on Coney Island. Someone popped in a cd of Pure Guava and I was mesmerized. Something about the sound spoke to me by emmiting 2 different, almost contradictory, vibes (sorry for lack of a better word but my mind had sizzling pop-rocks in it). Part of the feeling that album seemed to give off said, “We love what we are doing, we care about this music, this is how we make our art, and we are giving it every thing we have!” while the rest of it said to me, “Bloody cock! We don’t even shit a fuck! Lets steal your dad’s porn, drink his booze, tape ourselves rocking, and then set a golfcart on fire and push it into the country club lake” and ”Hey! Did you find my tape in my room?! Turn it off and give it back, dick!“ Like I said, it spoke volumes to my teenage ears and its message was delivered with the fury of a taco truck burrito.
The first time that I ever saw WEEN was in 2000 at the Showbox in Seattle. I was tired of people flaking out at the last minute so I took a 4 hr bus ride from Olympia to get to the show by myself. I was trying to “miracle” a free kick down ticket from someone outside but, at first, all that I got was a Big Gulp full of Bourbon and Pepsi and a “Good Luck” here and there. I finally got a ticket and, as I watched the show, I had to avoid slipping on the Heineken bottles strewn across the venue floor. The show was amazing and bizarre. Some drunk broad hopped on stage and Gene waved security away to let her sing with them and, when they played Baby Bitch, sorority girls were singing along to lyrics like “Fuck you, you stinkin’ ass ho” while swaying their heads side to side with their eyes closed like it was one of Michael Bolton’s “greatest hits“.
Ween is currently touring for their latest release La Cucaracha (Rounder/Chocodog) and I was able to catch their most recent show in Seattle and to have a copy of the album sent to me to peep out for a review. I have a quite a few opinions about each. Read the rest of this entry →
