Ween Ready New Live CD/DVD, Colouring Book

If you’ve been hurtin’ for some old school Ween these days, Gene and Dean have just the thing to cure what ails you. The Boognish-worshipping duo have dug into the vaults and on November 11 will pull out a new live album titled Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill, NC, 12/9/92. As you can tell from the title, the disc features a performance from 1992, which, according to the band, is "so brown that it's almost black.”

Along with the live CD, which is being released by the band’s Chocodog Records, the album will come packaged with a bonus DVD. The visual companion features clips from the band’s first tour of Holland, as well as from a show in Columbus, OH, both of which will feature Ween’s early live set-up of just a few samples, tapes and a drum machine.

And in case you are still itching for some more Ween action, the band are also releasing a limited-edition colouring book designed by Thea Wolfe. "If there was a better X-mas gift for a Ween fan, I don't know what it is,” the band say via their website.

You can pre-order the album on October 11 via Ween’s website and via their MySpace page.

Below is an except of the liner notes for Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill, NC, 12/9/92 penned by Dean Ween, followed by the DVD tracklisting:

From our first "real’” concert in 1987 until the release of Chocolate and Cheese in 1994, we played concerts as a duo — Aaron on vocals and acoustic guitar and me on electric guitar with the bass and drums played from a cassette deck. Later on we purchased a DAT machine for the backing tracks and this speeded up our show a little.

A typical Ween set was no more than an hour long, and we’d play about 24 songs in that amount of time. There was no jamming at all whatsoever. Things are a lot different now. Every night we had to face the crowd pretty much naked, there was nowhere to hide, no room for an off night. We did a lot of talking to the crowd and one another between songs, we pretty much had to. We faced a lot of hostile audiences when we were the opening act on a show. There was a lot to hate about us but we won over a lot of people in the process because of our sheer nerve.

A lot of our closest friends feel that Ween live pretty much ended when we switched to a traditional band format with a bass player and drummer; I dunno about that but by the release of Pure Guava our show was no longer interesting to us. We were doing a lot more touring and playing the same songs with no room for improvising had gotten boring for us.

Once we started releasing records and touring more as a duo we got a lot better at it, we stopped caring about what the audience thought of us and just focused on having fun onstage. This was when we maximized our brownness. I don’t remember too much about this concert other than the fact that we played the Cat’s Cradle a lot of times and in a few different locations. Public Enemy had played the club a few nights before and blown up the PA and our sound man Kirk Miller was pissed.

I thought it was great because Public Enemy are one of my favourite bands of all time and I was just happy to be playing on the same stage. Our touring party consisted of Me, Aaron, and Kirk Miller, our soundman and driver. Once we signed to Elektra we added a tour manager, Paul Monahan, who would stay with us for many years. Anyway, this is pretty typical of what we sounded like on a good night those first few tours.

Bonus DVD tracklisting:

1. "Captain Fantasy”
2. "You Fucked Up”
3. "Tick”
4. "Boing”
5. "Listen To The Music”
6. "Don’t Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy)”
7. "Cover It With Gas And Set It On Fire”
8. "Seconds”
9. "Marble Tulip Juicy Tree”
10. "Gladiola Heartbreaker”
11. "Common Bitch”
12. "The Goin’ Gets Tough From The Getgo”
13. "Reggaejunkiejew”
14. "Old Queen Cole”
15. "Shalom Absalom”
16. "Don’t Laugh (I Love You)”
17. "Mountain Dew”

Ween "Cover It with Gas and Set It on Fire”