It’s a grim moment to be a Ween fan, but it’s as good a time as any to assess the band’s legacy: Pure Guava, Ween’s major-label debut and the album that spawned their biggest hit, the Beavis and Butt-head–mocked “Push th’ Little Daisies,” turns 20 tomorrow, November 15. In May, Freeman called The Onion from rehab, stating that he was “ready to put on the back burner.” Later that month, he made a definitive proclamation to Rolling Stone: “I’m retiring Gene Ween.” Disbelief and increasingly sordid online infighting ensued, and as the situation currently stands, it appears that the Freeman/Melchiondo partnership is no more. Once the publicity cycle for that album kicked in, things started getting weird. Ween did eventually return to the road, playing select festivals and one-offs through the end of 2011, but this past January brought news of Marvelous Clouds, a Freeman solo record featuring material by the poet-songwriter Rod McKuen. The reasonable assumption was that Freeman would take some time to cool off, as he had after a canceled 2004 tour, and Ween would eventually reemerge with another string of triumphant three-hour gigs and brilliantly offbeat LPs.Įxcept it didn’t happen that way. At that point, core members Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo - Gene and Dean Ween, respectively - hadn’t put out a new record since 2007’s La Cucaracha, and Freeman had freaked out fans with a blotto anti-performance at a Vancouver show two months earlier, but as any Ween devotee could attest, such speed bumps were a familiar feature of the New Hope, PA duo’s two-decade-plus cruise. In March of 2011, when I published a book about Ween as part of the 33 1/3 series, it seemed as though the band would go on forever.
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