March 18-24, 2004

cover story

Philadelphia Freedom

Remember when Ween tried to steal the Liberty Bell?

by Jesse Delaney | Photo by Spike Jonze

It’s fitting that one of the finest homages to the City of Brotherly Love was penned by two unrelated men who adopted each other as musical brothers. Gene and Dean Ween (Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo, respectively) call "Freedom of ’76" a "quick breezy fly-through of Philadelphia on the wings of the eagle." With some assistance from Ed Wilson -- a mutual friend and a "shit-hot guitar player" -- Ween created an oddball classic full of hometown imagery and the Philly soul sound that’s smoother than the bronze on William Penn’s ass. On break before embarking on a spring tour, the duo spoke about "Freedom of "76" by telephone.

City Paper: Did you listen to a lot of Philly soul before recording?

Gene: Yeah. It sounds really pitiful [but] Those early Hall and Oates records -- like Abandoned Luncheonette -- the amount of soul in those records [is] unbelievable, and I'm not discounting any real Philly black soul, but for me, I was kind of obsessed with that record, and it epitomized in a way a white man's interpretation of Philly soul, but it was still real. … I think if you're born in Philly, you just naturally have some sort of floating soul chromosome going on that's very uniquely Philadelphia. I really do believe that. So I just let it come out.

Dean: Sure. Definitely. Harold Melvin, and The O'Jays and everything. We're music fiends. We were raised on the stuff. It wasn't a stretch at all. It's not like we had to listen to it for inspiration, it's ingrained in our fiber.

CP: Your falsetto on the song is impressive, particularly on the "Fairmount Park" verse. Is this the highest register you've sung?

Gene: Well, we did a song called "Cover It With Gas and Set It on Fire," and I kind of got to that falsetto before at that point. It's definitely one of the highest I sing.

CP: What do you think of Gene's falsetto?

Dean: I love when he does that. We're both Prince junkies, so for him to sing in falsetto is something I'm sure he does in the shower every day.

CP: Prince?

Gene: Prince always was a vocal hero, 'cause he could go from the lowest ranges to the highest falsetto in a second flat. And I did listen to an awful lot of Prince for a long time. " I don't think he ever gets a higher falsetto than in his song "God," which is like a B-side. If you can ever listen to that song, you can probably trace that back to where I was coming from in "Freedom."

CP: What was it like making the video for "Freedom of '76" with Spike Jonze?

Dean: Spike Jonze did the video for it and he was red-hot at the time. All the top-10 videos on MTV were his videos. He had the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage," Weezer's "Buddy Holly" and "The Sweater Song"; there was a great Mike Watt video he did. So, he was a Ween fan and he was a cool guy, and he was a friend and I met him, and it was just our luck that he happened to be at a great point in his career, too. [Elektra Records] wanted to do the single, they wanted to go all out and spend a lot of money on a video, so they asked if we would get Spike, and it was like "Yeah!' He agreed to it immediately and he came to New Hope from California. He had the resources at that time to do a lot of things that probably no one else could've pulled off, because of the juice he had. He rented out Independence Hall. We were there for a night.

CP: Describe the video.

Dean: The video is all Philly. 100 percent. " The song is about freedom, so we were going to liberate the Liberty Bell by stealing it. So we stole it and we get caught doing it in the video, so they have this SWAT team. It was like this major fucking production for Ween. We had done really low-budget videos to that point. There were all these props and the next day was like the Fourth of July or something or, I forget, it was a national American holiday that's very important at Independence Hall, and they dropped one of the props and they left a hand grenade there at the place. So the people came in, the tour groups the next day and some kid apparently picked up this hand grenade. So they closed fucking Independence Hall because of Ween. We were on all the local news. I have a videotape of it. We made the local news, they shut down the area, they cordoned off the block. It was pretty neat.

Gene: It was a really good time. We had this big budget to work with and we were just going nuts.

Dean: Yeah. We went to Boathouse Row and we had to have a guy teach us how to row, and we were in burglar suits. Black knit hats and black stealthy suits and clips on the belt and all this fucking professional-burglary-looking stuff. We're rowing this boat out there in the middle of the river while the film crew is everywhere. " The video, especially for the ones we had done at the time, came out like "Thriller." It was like this mini-movie. The video was two minutes before the song started, there the whole storyline unfolded. Two minutes into the video the music started. It was intense. I think it was a really, really high concept for MTV. It ended up on 120 Minutes, Beavis and Butt-head and I think they wanted to show it, but it was too over the top. It was an eight-minute video for a three-minute song.

Gene: It's a pretty stupendous video. It's totally out of control. That's what we tried to do. We tried to make it like Law & Order or something.

Dean: I forget what the video cost, it was somewhere between one- and two-hundred-thousand dollars. It ended up not getting played. So, it was a colossal waste of time but it was a really cool experience.

CP: Were you pleased with the way the song turned out?

Gene: Yeah, I was. And the false information. Mannequin wasn't filmed at Woolworth's, it was filmed at Wanamaker's. It just didn't work to say, "Mannequin was filmed at Wanamaker's.' It didn't sound as good.

Dean: So, it's totally inaccurate and we get called on it all the time. People from Philly, it's like, "You know, Mannequin wasn't shot at Woolworth's,' it's like, "Yeah, we know.' And we did know, too, when he wrote the lyric it was wrong. Yeah, Wanamaker's. Try rhyming that.

CP: Do you have a favorite place in Philly to get a bacon steak?

Gene: The bacon steak [in the song] I actually had in the Northeast. My first bacon steak ". I don't remember the place that I had the bacon steak, but it was fucking amazing. I don't get bacon steaks too much anymore. I hate to sound like a tourist, but I still go to Pat's. I just go to Pat's and get my steak with the Wiz. The Cheese Wiz and the hot sauce.

CP: When is Ween getting its plaque on the Philadelphia Music Walk of Fame?

Dean: Is there such a thing? I don't know if we'll be next to Teddy [Pendergrass] and Hall and Oates and Todd Rundgren and all, but shit, man [trails off]. Anything like that would just be a dream. I would take it in a second.

Gene: You know, we should get our plaque on the Philadelphia Music Walk of Fame. I don't know. Philly's always been good to us" . I would gladly welcome it, and my family would be thrilled.

Freedom of the mind

A ho on South Street hired for tricks

Little girls pickin' up sticks

Freedom of '76

Wastee little weasel

Wants cheap tricks

Liberty Bell cracked in half

A bacon steak

A perfect match

Freedom of '76

My girl Sasha

Lookin' good on the street

Mannequin was filmed at Woolworth's

Boyz II Men still keepin' up the beat, yeah

Freedom of '76

Fairmount Park in the summer

Lookin' good on the street

Mannequin was filmed at Woolworth's

Boyz II Men still keepin' up the beat, yeah

Freedom of '76, nah yeah, yeah

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Ohh, baby, yeah yeah, yeah

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