Maybe this is a big ask, but we should be going out of our way to listen to music that we don’t like. It’s certainly my Catholic upbringing shining through, but we need to go through extreme, borderline pornographic pain to achieve enlightenment. Ween’s second LP The Pod is celebrating 30 years of existence on September 20, 2021. If you haven’t heard it, my gut says you’re not going to like it. At first.

The Pod is probably the most challenging record put out by a sometimes challenging band. It’s 23 songs in roughly 80 minutes. Even if you’re writing a 70s prog record, 80 minutes is a lot. Instead of fine tuned prog, they were committing to tape cave drawings of what pop music might sound like. Some of them work, some feel like dead ends, but they’re all part of the trial and error process for two weird dudes making music in a dungeon.

It’s kind of a slog to be honest. I’m a massive Ween fan and I just listened to this album, in its entirety just now, for the first time in maybe a decade. It’s gross, it’s muddy, but there are real songs in there! It’s the tar man from Return of the Living Dead if he were a record. An ugly dripping sticky mess, but with human bones underneath. In the Ween world, that’s referred to as “brown.” The Pod is definitely the brownest record. None browner.

We put a lot of pressure on being perfect out of the gate these days. Today, any TV show has to be not only structurally perfect, but also have a gripping pilot to even stand a chance at making it. Now look back at The Simpsons. It’s maybe the most beloved show during its prime and the first year or two are from another planet. The jokes are about how it’s weird that a dad drinks beer and the audacity of a boy to do “The Bartman.” Not to bad mouth The Simpsons, I mean to do the exact opposite, it might be the funniest TV show ever. We just need to allow creators time to breathe, adjust to the world, and let the world adjust to them.

Ween represents the principle of letting an artist have time and space to find their voice. I can’t imagine anyone would ever hear the rudimentary twang of “Sorry Charlie” in 1991 and expect this seed to be nurtured into a whole country album masterfully created with Nashville’s best four years later on 12 Golden Country Greats. It is clearly part of the process in retrospect though.

You may not want to listen to The Pod in its original state, but one thing Ween has proven in their decades long history is that they are one of the best live bands on planet Earth. I could go on about this for paragraphs, but to keep it short: they have a singer who can do a Prince falsetto, an Elliott Smith mellow croon and everything in between, the best guitar player I’ve seen live, an extremely tight rhythm section, an absolute ringer on keyboards that used to be in Blood, Sweat & Tears, plus they play for 3+ hours, they jam (but not too much), mix up their set lists and seem enthusiastic to be doing their job.

So how did these songs go from dirty four-track recordings to being the foundation for one of the best live shows in rock music? They were allowed by the salad days of the 90s record industry to just fuck around while high and record inside jokes for a few years.

I don’t think I understood “Demon Sweat” until I saw it played live back to back with a cover of Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds.” Then it just clicked: oh, these are real songs. They just have stupid names and are about things like ordering food at a drive-thru or getting mono. “Pork Roll Egg and Cheese” is one of the tightest pop rock songs you’ll ever hear. It’s just recorded through a vocal filter, sounds like the tape was left in the back of a hot car, and it’s about a regional sandwich, so I guess it never really stood a chance to compete for chart space with “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

The Pod is a challenging record. You’ll be asked to go along with them playing country, pop, metal, and prog all filtered through the worst recording equipment you can imagine. You, the listener, are required to do some of the work. That’s a big ask even 30 years later, but it’s absolutely worth it for the weird, grimey journey.

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