Ween Gets Wild and Weird in Royal Oak

The Boognish was clearly present last Friday in Royal Oak as the sold-out crowd arrived at the city’s famed music theatre to celebrate and revel in their love for Ween, the alt-rock comedy favorites now  rapidly approaching their 40^th anniversary. After expanding from a duo to a five-piece band in the mid-‘90s (much like their “cleaner” new wave counterparts, They Might Be Giants), Ween built a strong cult following among the jam band community as well, and while not all of their songs are psychedelic (and many are just downright silly, sophomoric, or both), it is hard to find a more passionate and devoted fan base, many of whom show up to see the band every time they stop through to perform at the same venues every two to four years or so, including Royal Oak Music Theatre. Unlike other cities, such as Las Vegas, Port Chester, and Chicago, who recently got two or three nights of Ween in a row, the Royal Oak concert was Ween’s only Michigan date this time around, so the size and expectations of the overflowing, sold-out crowd were very high (as were many of the members of the audience).

Most patrons waited for nearly an hour or more in line outside, in sporadic rain, just to get into the venue. As Ween continues to tour without an opening act, the music began about an hour after doors opened, and the band made the long wait worthwhile by laying down two hours and 55 minutes of smoking licks and joyful singalongs, their longest show of the year so far. Co-founding bandleaders, Dean and Gene Ween, commanded the stage and the band with confident experience and ease as unplanned songs were added to the set on the fly or were moved to a different position in the show, and they even worked in a few requests shouted from the crowd. The group hasn’t issued any new material in well over a decade, but their vast catalog supplies more than enough to choose from and to rotate into the set from year to year, and they generally keep a balance of fan-favorites and deep cuts though they’ve been dipping into the more obscure tracks recently than in the past, much to the delight of the hardcore fans.

The show kicked off with a spirited run through “Piss Up a Rope” from Ween’s satirical country album and then alternated between accessible songs, such as “The Golden Eel,” and “Roses Are Free,” and B-sides like “How High Can You Fly?” and “Light Me Up.” Longtime drummer, Claude ColemanJr., with the band since 1992, and versatile bassist, Dave Dreiwitz, held down the rhythms consistently all night between the more and less-known songs alike, and Dreiwitz took lead vocals during a cover of Instant Death’s “The Enabler” about halfway through the concert. Keyboard whiz, Glenn McClelland, continues to be Ween’s secret weapon on stage as his keyboards seamlessly filled in the sounds of other instruments that were present on the studio recordings but not played live, most notably horns, strings, and accordion, and often many of the backing vocals, though everyone in the band had a mic nearby.

After a well-received rendition of The Mollusk’s “Buckingham Green,” Dean Ween introduced a trio of songs “about diseases” and ran through “The HIV Song” and “Spinal Meningitis,” two fan-favorites from the band’s strongest LP, Chocolate and Cheese, followed by “Mononucleosis,” the far less-known and less-accessible sludge rocker from The Pod which claims to be an autobiographical account of an experience with the illness that Dean and Gene credit for allowing the project to continue to exist at one point much less to get to the point it has now. While the show took place one day after Gene Ween’s birthday (March 17^th), the band did not include his ballad, “Birthday Boy,” or the seasonal sea chantey, “The Blarney Stone,” but they did include their ode to the music of Irish rock legends, Thin Lizzy, by performing their original song, “Gabrielle,” with green, orange, and white lights accompanying.

As the show went on, the band’s famously overpowered fog machines mixed with the heavy amounts of smoke already in the air, and at times the action on the stage was literally invisible. An extended psychedelic jam with blistering guitar solos from Dean Ween during “Woman and Man” gave way to singalongs like “Mutilated Lips” and White Pepper’s “Exactly Where I’m At” before a longer stretch of darker, experimental, and rare tracks such as “Frank” (which also contained a lengthy jam), “Don’t Sweat It,” “I Wuz Nothin’,” and the even longer instrumental jams on “Ice Castles” and “The Final Alarm,” balanced only briefly by Quebec’s heartbreaking ballad, “I Don’t Want It.”

The last portion of the show picked up again with “Nan” from the band’s 1990 debut LP and fan-favorite, “Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?,” and then after one more extended jam on the rarity, “Transitions,” the main set ended with the lesser known but still up-tempo numbers, “Vallejo” and “Boys Club,” which got a particularly strong response from a group near the front of the stage. Returning after a short encore break, Ween thanked the audience for another great night and showed their appreciation with two more crowd-pleasers from The Mollusk and one of their own favorites, “Your Party,” before taking their final bows and mentioning they looked forward to seeing some of the audience again the next night in Chicago. While Ween may now be making up for time lost to the pandemic performance and touring restrictions or to their own years of inactivity due to various personal issues, it’s clear their devoted audience has remained as loyal as ever and continues to grow even after almost four decades of their creative ridiculousness, and yet, that unique blend of talent and humor is the primary reason why.

Ween set list:

Piss Up a Rope

The Golden Eel

How High Can You Fly?

Light Me Up

She Fucks Me

Roses Are Free

Tried and True

Buckingham Green

The HIV Song

Spinal Meningitis

Mononucleosis

I Saw Gener Cryin’ in His Sleep

Up on the Hill

Transdermal Celebration

Gabrielle

Shamemaker

Touch My Tooter

Woman and Man

The Enabler (Instant Death)

Mutilated Lips

Exactly Where I’m At

Frank

Don’t Sweat It

I Don’t Want It

I Wuz Nothin'

Ice Castles

The Final Alarm

Help Me Scrape the Mucus Off My Brain

The Stallion (pt.1)

Nan

Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?

Transitions

Take Me Down to the Bristles (tease)

Boys Club

Vallejo

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She Wanted to Leave

The Mollusk

Your Party

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(The Beach Boys-“In My Room” outro tape)

 

Watch a fan-shot bootleg of the full show here, mang!

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Tool Returns to Rock Grand Rapids

After a two-year wait that felt more like four, legendary psychedelic prog-metal rockers, Tool, triumphantly returned Tuesday night to Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids, MI, one of their most frequently visited venues in the region, to an enthusiastic capacity crowd. Singer Maynard James Keenan once lived in the city and often makes it a point to perform there when touring with any of his three main groups (including A Perfect Circle and Puscifer). A few songs into the band’s 2+ hour concert, Keenan joked the crowd was not even as loud as those in Ohio and demanded a louder reception, and the audience obliged. Originally scheduled to perform on the same stage in May of 2020, but cancelled like everything else due to the pandemic, it had been a long wait for Tool’s faithful followers in attendance, especially those who opted to pass on the band’s Detroit concert in November of 2019, shortly after the release of their latest LP, Fear Inoculum. Thankfully, with skilled precision and decades of professional experience, all four band members performed extremely well, and there was little room for criticism or disappointment by the end of the night or even from song to song.

 

The evening began with a 40-minute opening set from TheAcid Helps followed by a tight, 30-minute set change. Other cities on Tool’s current tour have reported the band taking the stage about 5 minutes later than they did in Grand Rapids, and the song selection varied slightly compared to some of their other recent shows (some of which have featured "Opiate," "Right in Two," and "Undertow"). Whereas the late 2019/early 2020 shows featured a blend of hits and new songs on the set list, the current tour leans harder into the newer songs and swapped out more of the radio singles for deep cuts, primarily from 1996’s AEnima and 2001’s Lateralus. A Tool fan attending one of their concerts for the first time might have felt a bit disappointed to not hear “Schism,” “Vicarious,” “AEnema,” or even “Stinkfist,” but the lengthy journeys through emotional multi-movement songs like “Pushit,” “The Grudge,” and “The Patient” blended even better with the dark and moody newer songs, even if they were less familiar and harder to sing along with by comparison. The first leg of the tour averaged only three of the six “proper” songs from Fear Inoculum per show, but the band’s recent concerts have included five of those six songs, sort of the opposite treatment compared to the first few tours for the band’s previous two LPs (where the first few months were focused on the new songs and then changed to feature other tracks in the years following). Those lucky enough to have caught them for a show on both legs of the tour probably got the most complete overall experience because the two shows were so different but complemented each other very well.

 

The thunderous drums of Danny Carey and the rumbling bass of Justin Chancellor thoroughly rumbled the seats and walls throughout the night and laid the perfect foundation for the soaring guitar work of Adam Jones and the intense vocal segments from Keenan to decorate and enhance with their own unique styles. Longtime fans know how unique both the sound and the visual presentation of this band can be, and it is arguably incomparable certainly to any of their peers if even their influences, such as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, King Crimson, and others. The abstract visual projections and carefully synchronized lights and lasers created an atmosphere of awe for even the uninitiated concertgoer and added another layer of emotional engagement that brought most in the audience along for the 9 to 13-minute rides that made up each individual song. The band continued with their tradition of atmospheric, interstitial jams and soundscapes between many songs as well, most of which cannot be found on any of their official recordings and may perhaps become parts of other new songs in the future.

 

The other notable highlights from the night included the performance of the band’s most-known hit, “Sober,” which at this point feels almost like seeing Radiohead live and them just casually featuring “Creep,” and a hard rocking take on “Hooker with a Penis” to close the main set. The lone song to be included from 2006’s 10,000 Days, “The Pot,” also got a strong crowd response, and while it sounded great and was very well executed, the band now plays the song in a lower key to accommodate the difficult vocals Keenan finds harder to pull off nearly 16 years after he recorded it, somewhat similar to some of Stone Temple Pilots’ later tours with Scott Weiland, though Tool has not changed the tempo of any of their songs by comparison.

 

The surprises continued beyond the 12-minute encore break (which included a projected countdown clock to clarify the exact time the show would continue), where Carey first dazzled with his traditional drum and synthesizer solo, “Chocolate Chip Trip,” but rather than ending with high-energy fan favorites, the band closed with two new songs, back-to-back, including “Culling Voices,” Fear Inoculum’s quietest song which was presented almost unplugged-style with stools and Carey playing bongos while all four band members met at the front and center of the stage and which also featured a slow sprinkling of darkly tinted confetti throughout. They followed this with the more dynamic, “Invincible,” rather than the hit with which they usually close, “Stinkfist,” and at twice that song’s length, bringing the overall runtime of the concert to about two hours and 15 minutes or so. Keenan also announced, prior to the beginning of the final track, that fans had permission to photograph and film it, also a standard practice following the band’s recent no phones policy during all other parts of all their shows, also seizing the opportunity to call those who quickly had their phones in hand, “crackheads,” to illustrate their addiction to them. While Keenan also explained before the final song that he was tired and old now, so they needed to wrap it up, and walked off stage before “Invincible” concluded, Jones, Carey, and Chancellor took their time exiting the stage after the final notes were played, waving to fans in the bright stage lights to a strong ovation from the audience. It continues to be clear that Tool put on one of the most engaging rock shows one can see today. The carefully timed and sequenced audio/visual experience is top notch compared to all the band’s contemporaries and places them in a higher category among the classic rock legends of the ‘70s, especially, if not all of rock history.

 

The Acid Helps (set list):

Killing an Animal

Disco Blanco

Idiot Vs. Moron

Sick City

Rattled

This Thing Will Not Die

All Insane

Sink Pisser

LA BREA

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Tool (set list):

Litanie contre la Peur (intro tape)

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Fear Inoculum

Sober

The Pot

Pushit

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Pneuma

The Grudge

Eon Blue Apocalypse

The Patient

Descending

Hooker with a Penis

-----------------------------------------(encore  break)-------

Chocolate Chip Trip

Culling Voices

Invincible

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