Dean Ween Discusses His Favorite Album Of All-Time & Shares ‘Brown’ Examples

Mickey “Dean Ween” Melchiondo recently participated in a few interviews. He spoke with the Creature Culture about his solo career and more, while he revealed and discussed his favorite album with 1Artist1Album.

Deaner picked Sly & The Family Stone’s 1971 album There’s A Riot Goin’ On as his favorite album of all-time. Mickey feels Sly made a record that is “funkiest thing ever” and talks about the back story behind the LP. He notes “Family Affair” is the “weirdest, coolest sounding song ever made.” Listen to Dean Ween discuss There’s A Riot Goin’ On:

https://audioboom.com/posts/5393321-artist-dean-ween-album-sly-the-family-stone-s-there-s-a-riot-goin-on

The guitarist went into detail about The Deaner Album in his expansive chat with Culture Creature. Deaner reveals he already has a second solo album in the can and exclaimed, “my best music is in front of me.” While Deaner is in a good place now, he had a hard time following Gene Ween’s decision to break up Ween. Melchiondo credits Les Claypool with helping him get out of the dark space. “When things go down, you find out who your friends are. I felt like a pariah, in a way. He would not let it stand. He wouldn’t have it! He stayed on my jock. He was like, ‘You’re Dean Ween. Here’s what I did. I went out and formed Colonel Claypool’s Bucket of Bernie Brains, I did Frog Brigade, I did all this stuff. I got my friends and we got in an RV and we just played music.’ And I took him at his word, and I did it, and he was right.… He got my heart beating again, basically. And I owe him forever for that. Because he was really the only one. I mean, maybe not the only one, but the first one for sure,” Deaner said.

Often the word “brown” is used to describe Ween and Culture Creature asked Deaner to discuss what the phrase “brown” means to him. Here’s how the guitarist responded:

I can’t really explain ‘brown’ except to give examples… Ween opened for The Ramones in 1991. The Ramones showed up in a Country Squire station wagon that was smashed on one side, and missing a window. Dee Dee, Joey, and Marky. That’s brown. The beautiful side of brown. That is brown – that’s real. That’s brown. It can be really bad, it can be a horrible thing, when you get browned out by some band. A band shows up and they’re brown – none of their equipment works or whatever. But it’s a strength. You know you’re getting the real thing.

Ween is nothing else but brown. It has been our asset – our principle asset – our whole lives. It means that we show up at the festival, and we’re playing with Nine Inch Nails or whoever the fuck it is, and we don’t have any guitars with us, because nobody thought to bring them. So we had to borrow them from the other band. That’s what makes Ween great, is our brownness. It’s a total setback for us, but it’s what makes Ween Ween, is the brownness. It’s fuckin’ brown. It’s so fuckin’ brown all the way through: bad punch-ins, punch-outs on tapes. Dean Ween Group: bad guitar cable left on the master recording [makes loud feedback noise] halfway through the solo. Brown can’t be faked. If you fake the brown, people will figure you out.

Ween is just brown. The harder we try, the browner we are. The more legit we try and pretend we are, the more it blows up in our face. That’s what I’m saying – ‘Gum’ represents the brown. For every one of those ‘Gum’ songs that’s out there, there’s a trillion more that occupies most of our catalogue. It had to be represented. So just let it fly. It doesn’t belong with the respectable songs, like ‘Mercedes Benz’ or something – which is tight and nice…. At the core of it, we are brown, we are the worst. In a way, not the worst – we’re the best! You know?

Iggy [Pop] is brown. He’s out there still at ninety-nine years old or whatever he is, and fuckin’ crapped his pants or something. Literally. [laughter]

Brown has nothing to do with poop – that’s the thing I wanna clear up. Brown and poop have no relation. People think because of ‘Poop Ship Destroyer’ that Ween is scatological or whatever. I don’t like poop. I don’t like talkin’ about it, I don’t think it’s funny!

Brown, they misunderstand. They think it’s poop – ‘Poop Ship Destroyer.’ The song is brown, but not like when Ween does a rehearsal and somebody forgot to tell two members of the band that we had a rehearsal. [laughter] You can’t fake that shit, you know? No matter if we get better management or whatever, it’ll never change, you know? It’s brown.