The Freedom of ’76 is another fluffy pop song that received the bands only real radio play. The album then moves onto the best known Ween song, and maybe the best song in their discography. Following that is the darkly humorous Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down) which introduces listeners to the band’s dark humor. It opens on the raucous Take Me Away which is a great piece of pop-rock fun that exemplifies what the band is all about. That album is a masterwork, and there isn’t a bad song on it. In all the first album probably isn’t the best introduction to the band, and may have contributed to their magnum opus Chocolate and Cheese receiving little acclaim in 1994. It’s interesting to listen to, though it resembles little that the band would do afterward. Also on the album is Reggaejunkiejew which is the Ween’s attempt at electronic music. It didn’t chart well though, even though it is a fine song if not anything special. It still introduced Gene and Dean Ween’s vocal style to a much wider audience. It features the band’s first single Push Th’ Little Daisies, which is a standard early 90s pop song. The bands first major studio release was Pure Guava which was put out on Elektra Records in 1992. The other parts of their discography are worth listening to though, and I recommend that you look into it even if I won’t discuss it here. Besides having an extremely large discography most of the best, and most famous songs by the band were in this four album run. Taking this into account I will only be discussing the bands first four albums that were released on a major label. There are many Ween songs that are so different from each other you wouldn’t even suspect they were the same band if you didn’t know better. In every album they also explored different genres in a way that is unique to them. Ween’s career was very long, and in the beginning it wasn’t unusual for their albums to have twenty or more songs on it. Though they were never chart toppers, they were always one of the most interesting and creative bands going during their run. They are remembered, by those that know, as one of the best bands of the 1990s and one of the bands with the most varied discography of all time. In 2012 the broke up after Gene Ween left the band, citing a need to remain sober. They released a slew of live albums in the first decade of the 2000s and toured almost constantly. After their prolific 1990s which saw them release almost an album a year, they changed their focus to touring. Their eclectic nature made it hard for them to get mainstream radio play, and none of their singles ever charted higher than 116 on the charts. The first is written for Jerry Garcia and is trying to emulate the Grateful Dead, and the second is for Eddie Hazel the guitarist of Parliament Funkadelic. Their songs So Long Jerry, and A Tear For Eddie are examples of this. Ween also became known for doing tributes to musicians who had died. Consequently some of their albums run through four of five genres. They were just as willing to explore guitar driven funk music as they were standard pop. By the time their heyday came in the 90s they were constantly mixing and exploring music genres. Even from the beginning however, Dean and Gene Ween (their stage names) were experimenting with different styles of music. For the first decade of their act they were just two guitarists and a backing track. The band was founded in 1984 as a garage band in the suburbia of Pennsylvania.
They are stuck in the middle of being known and obscurity. On the other hand, most people haven’t heard of them.
They have a devoted cult following, and sold out arenas until they disbanded in 2012, even though that was almost a decade after their peak in popularity. They released twelve studio albums over almost three decades in the industry. To call the eclectic pop-rock band Ween unknown is a little bit unfair.