May 2000. Where were you? I was in Cincinnati, essentially waiting to move to Lake Tahoe until my friend’s second child was born. About a year before, I was living with them…Uncle Steve living in the basement (under the staircase even…which sounds creepy especially since it was an unfinished basement). I look back on that time really fondly, as not only did they give me a comfortable landing pad after moving back from upstate New York, but one of my duties was to help with their first child, my goddaughter, Halley. We had a little dance to Ween’s song “Big Jilm” from Pure Guava. Seems everyone likes Ween, including 4 year olds.

Daily life with a kid is non-stop preparation and clean-up. Sean and Robin were married really young, expecting their second child, and Sean still says that my moving in helped saved their marriage. Whether or not that is true, I did realize having a kid, while at the same time preparing for a second (or third, or fourth, etc), is a pretty arduous process. Plus, after the labor, feedings, clothing, potty training, and everything else that goes into raising a kid, you don’t really know what all your efforts did to the thing you popped out until many years later. “Did I screw this kid up?”

Recording an album is kind of like that. Writing, arranging, re-writing, recording and tracking, engineering, post-production, track order, art…so many things go into making an album, I would imagine the artist sometimes wonders if they the album they popped out will be a “good child.” I always wonder with some of my favorite albums, as well as seminally classic albums, did they know they were putting out one of the greatest albums from start to finish? Did The Beatles realize The White Album was as good as it is? Or The Stone’s Let It Bleed, or The Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head, or Metallica’s Master of Puppets? Did WEEN realize that all the work that was put into White Pepper would create a child that after 14 years still stands up to all the greatest albums put out? Some may say so since the title is believed to reference The White Album and Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, two albums that are considered “the bests” of The Beatles.

Let’s get a few things out in the open first. Number one, since 1995 I’ve never gone through period when I didn’t have Ween music around. Masters of all genres who can not only write truly emotional songs dealing with heartache, but also can flip on dime to sing about genitalia waving in the breeze, lost cheese and horses, love for guacamole and setting things on fire with gasoline. Number two, when WEEN would enter the studio, they would write around 40 songs, then pick the best 11-15 that get on the record. You read that right…FORTY SONGS. Can you imagine if all bands did this? This is why no album by Ween has truly ever sucked, just some you like a little less. Each has it’s own vibe, which allows for personal taste to truly dictate a favorite and this favorite changes throughout your day, week, year, decade, or current state of mind. Thus I’m not really writing to dictate which is best, but without question White Pepper was a major turning point for Ween.

Rogers/Gilmore, McCartney/Lennon, Garcia/Hunter, Jagger/Richards are a few of the most renowned songwriting teams and I place Dean and Gene Ween in with this alumni. Difference with Gene and Dean….these guys always sounded like they could be your buddies or next-door neighbors. A lot of us understood their jokes, their tongue-in-cheek humor resonated with us, but…we were also emotional humans that desired that aspect as well. Ween brought all that to the table…and more. They exposed us to new genres, new thoughts, one of the greatest live rock experiences ever, and most importantly a new demon-god,  THE BOOGNISH!

All the records before White Pepper were cut with Gene and Dean writing and recording most of the instruments, yet with White Pepper it was their first album to record with their touring band: Claude Coleman on drums, Dan Dreiwitz on bass and Glenn McClelland on keys. The effect was dramatic. The album sounds fuller and more refined, yet stayed true to their “masters of all genres” that people expected from Ween. Muscle car rockers a la Motorhead (“Stroker Ace”), gentle love ballads (“Stay Forever,” “She’s Your Baby”), island calypso (“Bananas and Blow”), beautiful instrumental (“Ice Castles”), and late-era sounding Beatles songs (“Flutes of  Chi”) were all perfectly arranged and produced to create one of the strongest song-to-song albums in rock history. So it’s really fruitless extract breakdowns of songs on the album…listen, feel it, and make your own decision.

White Pepper isn’t a singles album…it’s an entire piece of art, meant to be experienced from start to finish. Do yourself a favor…listen to it by clicking on the image below.…then support Ween and purchase it. After that….go deep. You have literally years of enjoyment digging into Ween, then even more years enjoying their side projects The Moistboyz, Aaron Freeman, Dean Ween Band, etc. No one makes music like this band.

Purchase all Ween music through www.ween.com. Listen to full album by clicking image.