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 →