Ween
12 Golden Country Greats [30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition]
RHINO
Beyoncé didn’t invent the concept of the genre outsider taking a worthy stab at country. Ray Charles did it in 1962 with Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. Dylan did it in 1969 with Nashville Skyline, and Ringo Starr followed him a year later with Beaucoup of Blues. Tina Turner did it in the ’70s, and Elvis Costello did it in the ’80s. It was a thing for rockers and soul-identifying artists, far and wide. Yet when the weirdo Ween brothers from New Hope, Pennsylvania did so in 1996 with the help of another Elvis’ backing vocalists, a handful of true-to-country session players, and producer Ben Vaughn, it was as if Gene and Dean had chewed the head off the Boston chicken they sang about without properly frying it up first.
Ween had certainly dipped their unusually long, crooked toes into sounds that weren’t necessarily “rock,” having previously created genre-tweaking exercises in smooth R&B, nasty funk, and genuinely ominous gospel-tinged music prior to the release of 12 Golden Country Greats in 1996. Yet while those albums were thoroughly Ween-ed—or “brown,” in the duo’s parlance: fuzz-toned into the red, messed up beyond any avant-garde in terms of music or lyrics—Greats and, by extension, this expanded 30th anniversary edition featuring 20-plus unreleased demos and Nashville studio session outtakes, was as devotedly Catholic to a single sound as Dean and Gene would ever be, before and after its debut three decades ago.
With Presley’s Jordanaires singing behind a calm (well, calmer than usual), warble-crooning Ween, Nashville session vets such as dobro player Pete Wade, fiddler/mandolinist Buddy Spicher, and drummer Gene Chrisman wouldn’t have helped a lick if Dean and Gene didn’t have the goods when it came to earnest, melody-driven song-smithing and performing. From Dean’s quick-stepping Haggard riffing on “Help Me Scrape the Mucus Off My Brain” and the heated “Piss Up a Rope,” to everything else Gene—“Powder Blue” and beyond—Ween traffics within the walls of every tried-true meme known to traditional country with heartfelt dedication to form.
Lyrically, they’re still daring doofuses (“Curvy sticks and wooden poles / Assisting you in plugging holes / Plug them holes ’til you see straight through to the mind's eye,” goes “You Were the Fool”), so you won’t confuse them with Rodney Crowell or John Prine—but musically, this Ween was country, bona and fide. What winds up being the greatest proof of concept is listening to the faux Ween bros’ rare demos as part of this anniversary package. Outside of borrowing the melody of Vangelis’ athletic Chariots of Fire film theme for “Japanese Cowboy,” each Ween sketch from “Fluffy” to “So Long Jerry” is one golden hillbilly elegy after another.
