by Dusty Hayes (@dustyshayes)
The year is 1996, Bill Clinton beats out Bob Dole in the U.S. presidential race, a Taco Bell taco costs about eighty-nine cents, and Ween has just released their, of all things, country album 12 Golden Country Greats. The record was another staggering side step on the bizarre path to world domination taken by the band. This is Ween, who you may recognize from songs like “Ocean Man” and “Loop De Loop” as featured in SpongeBob SquarePants and “Piss Up A Rope” as featured on the mixtape that's stuck in my car's cassette deck.
It was a weird journey to the top for Gene Ween and Dean Ween, known legally as Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo. A wild trip filled with whiplash-inducing genre shifts, absurdist lyricism, tasty guitar licks, and blind devotion to the demon-god Boognish. How it is that a musical freak show of such proportions found success would require an article all its own, but they found success. That success holds out to this day, forty years after the band's founding in New Hope, Pennsylvania, with fans still losing their minds over every new release.
Like many others, when it was announced earlier this year that their classic ‘96 record, 12 Golden Country Greats, was getting a deluxe reissue, I took to rioting in the street. Blood for Boognish and all that—you know how it is. That deluxe edition turned out to be a thirty-six-track, two-hour-long behemoth replete with demos, alternative recordings, and scrapped covers. But that wasn’t enough, no, as a few months later another addition to the 12 Golden Country Greats collection was announced, the Golden Wastes EP. Believe it or not, and it is hard to believe, with the deluxe edition of 12 Golden Country Hits being thirty-six songs long, there were yet more tracks intended to be included on the reissued record that didn’t make the cut. So, now we have Golden Wastes, which features four more previously unheard tunes; our cup runneth over.
The EP opens with an alternate mix of “I’m Holding You,” a mellow old-school country tune made up of two acoustic guitars sharing the spotlight with a simplistic beat. It nearly strays into folk territory, sitting in that blind spot somewhere between Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie. Not enough peacenik to be folk, not enough twang to be solely country, the one certainty here is that “I’m Holding You” is pure Americana. After that we come to the only original track on the EP, “There’s a Smooth Talkin’ Dude.” There’s a hard shift in sound between these first two tracks, Golden Wastes jumping quite suddenly from a laid-back country ballad to what can only be called punk-country. “There’s a Smooth Talkin’ Dude” is a semi-narrative song about… a smooth talkin’ dude and several other characters around his town. I call it semi-narrative because the song doesn’t so much tell a story as it does describe these characters - the dude, a pretty girl, a fat old trucker, and their limited interactions.
Next we have an alternate mix of “Mister Richard Smoker.” This is Ween at their finest, with absurdly tight arrangements and plain absurd lyrics. I don’t think I should write much of what this song is about here, as the contents are ten times more profane than the title would lead you to believe. Suffice to say this tune features ornate, almost jazzy, instrumentals paired with lyrics that are more vulgar than anything Sublime ever wrote. It all wraps up with an alternate mix of “I’m Gonna Fix Your Ass.” Here we have another retro country track, the EP finishing up right where it started. Weeping keys, a one-two drumbeat, simple guitar picking, and mournful lyrics with a faux southern drawl; it’s a neat bow on a disheveled package. This song is yet further proof that no matter how weird Ween gets, they are disturbingly competent musicians.
With the addition of Golden Wastes, the entire 12 Golden Country Greats collection comes out to a whopping forty songs. That’s over two hours of music built around one album. It’s a feat for a band like Ween, by and large an alt-rock band, to be able to produce such a catalog of out-of-genre music. It’s a testament to not only the band's refusal to play by the rules but to their skill in their trade. Nobody rocks like Ween; Golden Wastes is irrefutable evidence of that.