from the LP The Mollusk, Mushroom Records, 1997I really love me some Ween! I didn’t used to be a fan, until one fateful night in early 1995 when some friends of mine talked me into joining them for a show at this shitty bar near Tampa; having heard the admittedly irksome “Push tha Little Daisies” single incessantly a few summers before, I wasn’t moved to dig any deeper. That show wound up totally kicking my ass, in a good way, and I found myself inside one of rock music’s greatest-kept secrets. That filter serves as a wonderful sieve when it comes to Ween’s fanbase, in that you can be assured you are surrounded by music heads, into many genres of tunes, and typically rather passionate about it all. This track and album find Dean & Gene Ween (not actually related, just stage names) ten years into releasing tunes, and millions of miles away from where they started; mind you, they were always rock stars in their own brains, it just needed to unfold in their typical brown, Ween-like fashion. One quickly learns that you could listen to thirty different songs of theirs and never hear anything similar in them, so don’t go thinking this track is emblematic if it doesn’t do it for you…but it does ROCK. Always on point with mystifying and bizarre lyrics, this song hits you right from the git-go: “A child without an eye, made her mother cry---why ask why, she kept her child clean, on buckingham green…” Gener’s vocal delivery is insistent and deeply serious, which is clearly the only way you can pull off phrases like these; “…the children saw the eye, as a sign from god, descending from the sky…” A brief, and might I say delightful, acoustic interlude follows, painted subtly with a lone oscillating synth; this gives way to the absolutely epic bridge which such a song deserves, and Deaner’s guitar solo friggin’ smokes. Then it all gets tight again, and a bevy of ominously stabbing violins backed with tympani-like drumming herald a blackening omen of things to come; “Summon the queen, spoke the child of eye, it’s time to fly…” Summon, the, fucking, QUEEN dude!! Yo, if that doesn’t make you smile, you’re probably already ridden with ulcers---loosen up. A music journalist summed it up nicely when he said, “…fueled by psilocybin mushrooms and an all-consuming craving for hot meals, Ween created their own self-contained universe, a parallel dimension where the only sacred cow was their own demon god, the Boognish.” Matty & Amanda, this one’s for you guys.
