Late last year, beloved rockers Ween surprised fans with the announcement of their reunion. Drummer Claude Coleman, Jr. spoke at length about that decision to reunite in a piece with Songfacts, talking about how the pressure of having four of five members in the Dean Ween Group eventually spurred Gene Ween to rejoin the fray.
Coleman talks at length about the situation, and you can read his comments below.
Mickey [Melchiondo] was doing all these Dean Ween Group shows. It was pretty cool, we were having a lot of fun with those, and I think Mickey was just planning on doing those forever and ever. And I think somehow unconsciously, having Mickey out there doing those shows affected the whole process of them sort of coming back together. We were starting to sell out everywhere. We did this run on the West Coast and we were just crushing it – I think that put a little insidious pressure on Papa Gene.
I’m kind of hypothesizing, but there wasn’t any real concerted thing that happened. There wasn’t like an instance or moment where it happened. It was a slow, gradual process with Mickey out there playing. A lot of people were like, “What is this? This is four fifths of the band. What’s the point?” I think it was the natural pressure of that, and I think it sort of happened on its own.
Another thing too was the management. Mickey and Aaron’s managers, Ben Sands and Patrick Jordan, worked closely together. So there’s a lot of this in-family jostling around, and again it was like this insidious, subtle nudging and pressure on those two. Having the same company and managers kind of brought them together, and everything kind of fell in line. It’s kind of super-insidious and super-incestuous. They did great work, Patrick and Brad are both great guys, and they brought it together.
Coleman also spoke about how Ween is different now than they were in 2012.
It’s a little more formal now, for us. Backstage is really tight. It’s a dry backstage, and there’s a lot less nonsense now. I think that makes the whole thing more professional, sort of formal. Another thing that’s lending itself to that feeling is that we’re rehearsing a lot, which we never really used to do because Mickey and Aaron hated rehearsing. Now they love it because they can see the benefits of it. For the Denver shows, we rehearsed seven days straight, every day, in the afternoons before the shows, in the arena, and I think it really showed. We just crushed it.
So that makes a difference: We’re into rehearsing. It’s a given now that we have to rehearse. And when we get together, there’s this new revived energy about it all. It’s pretty badass.
We’d been doing it for so long, you know? Then we took three-and-a-half years off and when we got back together, it was just like, “Hey, what’s up?” and then we were playing again. It wasn’t much different than that, just the way we went about it was a lot more careful, more considerate and thoughtful. It’s a more purposeful thing now, and it’s good. It’s a great thing. That’s not to say that we take ourselves seriously, but we take ourselves a little more seriously now.
The drummer also denied that the band is working on a new album, though he has stated that Mickey Melchiondo, Jr. has been writing for the Dean Ween Group. You can read the full interview here!