Mickey Melchiondo (Dean Ween) was born on September 25, 1970. He grew up listening to everything from the Beatles to Parliament/Funkadelic to Leonard Cohen to Prince to the Ramones to Laurie Andersen. He met Aaron Freeman in a junior high school typing class in their hometown of New Hope, Pennsylvania, and although the two did not get along at ...
Bends and holds the guitar low, almost touching the floor during many of his guitar solos.
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Quote
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Well since like the early '90s, Nirvana kind of changed everything, you know? They were a great band. I remember hearing Pearl Jam for the first time and thinking, "man these guys are fucking like Nirvana rip-offs, the guy sings like Kurt Cobain." And then you hear like Stone Temple Pilots and it sounds like he's ripping off the guy from Pearl Jam. And now looking back, those bands really aren't that bad. At the time, I was being like a player hater, you know? Like, "fuck this shit," you know? And now, you hear the Stone Temple Pilots shit and it sounds great. It's like... fuck man, you had no idea how much worse it was gonna get, but it's perpetuated itself with bands like Bush that were ripping off fuckin' Stone Temple Pilots. There's like twelve generations later of bands ripping off bands that have ripped off shit that wasn't very good to begin with, you know? And it's really kind of a drag. It's really a drag. All you have to do is put on rock radio and hear one measure before you know you want to turn it off.
2
We love our fans. They are passionate about our band. We are totally grateful and privileged to have it that way. But that doesn't mean that I want to get to know them or hang out with them. That's only because we've been touring for 17 years now. For the first 10 years, we hung out with everybody, everywhere we went. We did their drugs with them. But you can't sustain that. Now we're a lot more insular. The guys in our band and road crew are all brothers. There's a level of trust from being in a band and a road crew for a really, really long time. We guard it on the road. There isn't one guy who will bring a drunken idiot on our bus.
3
When we decide what's making the cut, we factor in how it works with the other songs. I don't think enough bands think in terms of records any more, but we definitely do. I get sick when I think about someone going to iTunes and downloading two songs off our album. It's not meant to be listened to that way. But you can't expect too much of people. That's how people listen to music and buy it. But we put a lot of time into sequencing the record, and making it flow. We put a lot into the artwork, the whole package. And we take a lot of time to make it sound good. We recorded this record to tape, which is expensive, and those big machines are cumbersome and require a lot of maintenance. But we try our best to make it sound as good as we can. And then I think of somebody with those little fucking ear buds stuck in their head-whenever I see someone with an iPod, I want to take it and smash it or steal it. I hate everything about it, especially since it says "Designed In California" on the back. It's fucking gay. It sounds like shit.
4
A lot of times, I'll lay down a beat, and then I'll start fucking around with a guitar over it. Then Aaron (aka Gene Ween) will take out the notebook. That's how we end up with so many songs. I didn't say they were all good.
5
We're trying to entertain ourselves. That's it. And we don't really care so much about other people. But the way it works is if you're having a good time and you're being honest, then it just transcends all that and people will dig it. And you play shows and they have a great time and you have a great time. The same with our records...we always said when it's not fun anymore then we'll quit.
6
I have said this before in interviews, but I would never say that drugs are something that I would endorse or whatever. It's really a personal decision. If you haven't gotten high and listened to Jimi Hendrix then there is a certain thing in life that you don't know about that you missed. It doesn't make you a lesser person if you haven't done it, but you lose that fraternity of millions of people that know exactly how it is.
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Fact
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WEEN cancelled their tour before Halloween, 2004. They had some shows still to play including a Halloween show, and had to cancel all the dates because of an intervention, according to Dean on the Ween.com site, needed for one of the band members. [October 2004]
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Still lives in and around his hometown of New Hope, Pennsylvania, having consistently ignored claims that Ween would have been more successful if they had relocated to Los Angeles or New York City.
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He and his whole family are rabid hockey (and Philadelphia Flyers) fans.
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He is an avid deep-sea fisherman and spends much of free time fishing from his boat.
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Is also a member of the Moistboyz, a thrash-metal side band he started with lead singer Guy Heller. Mickey and Guy refer to themselves as Mickey Moist and Dickey Moist. Each of their albums are numbered: MOISTBOYZ I, II, II, and VI (so far).
6
In spite of the fact that his voice is rarely heard on Ween records (with Gene Ween doing a great majority of the singing), he is by far the more outspoken of the two Ween boys. He even often does interviews for the band solo, without the more elusive Gene.
$19 Million
