bbs.bunglefever.com

The Mollusk Sessions



I've been told that "file sharing" is all the rage among kids nowadays so I figured I would take this opportunity to share something with all y'all. I meant to do this during the summer, but we were pretty busy getting the new record together and touring. It has been ten years since we released "The Mollusk", our 6th studio album, so to celebrate this we've decided to give you the raw sessions from the record. I don't mean to come off like a self righteous storyteller but indulge me for a minute here.

We had always talked about recording an album down at the beach during the offseason, when no one else was around. Holgate, (which is the southern tip of Long Beach Island, New Jersey) was the spot where we decided on recording. This was because my father had built a house there in the '70's and I had a lot of roots in Holgate. My sister and I have a trailer down there presently. Anyway, in the fall of '95 Aaron and I rented a beachfront property where we were gonna write and record our new record. Greg Frey (who would later become our manager) helped us rent a Ryder truck and set up our 16 track tape deck and mixing console. The place was gorgeous and it turned out to be a very productive environment, for awhile at least.



In November we halted our sessions in Holgate and went to Nashville to record "12 Golden Country Greats", a project we had scheduled prior to the Mollusk sessions. We had already written the tunes for that record and the albums were treated as separate projects. After we got back from Nashville our enthusiasm for our weekly beach trips had diminished somewhat from laziness and fatigue. We took a few weeks off and finally we went back down to the beach house in December, only to find that the pipes had frozen and burst and water had been continually running across the floor for at least a month. Everything was dripping with beads of water, like an aquarium.



We had no choice but to move out and finish the album back at home. We wrote and recorded a few more songs in a rented farmhouse in Holicong, PA and Claude's home studio in Hopewell, New Jersey. Andrew Weiss then took the tapes and mixed them, we also did some overdubs and re-recorded a few tunes from the beach. The bulk of the record was made at the shore though, and that was where the album took shape. We worked from Sunday til Thursday every week and would go home for the weekends. These sessions were bounced from a cassette that I kept for the ride home. Every Thursday I would add whatever we had recorded that week onto this tape. I transferred this old tape to my computer and encoded it here for you. It doesn't have the songs we made at home, like The Blarney Stone, Jonny on th' Spot, etc. This is just the music recorded in that flooded beach house. We would rent it two more times to write the songs for White Pepper and then Quebec. The record was eventually released in June of 1997.

You can download it here.

http://www.chocodog.com/chocodog/mollusksessions.mp3 (one long track)

I have finally given in and started a blog for fishing reports and tour diaries. I need to keep the waste page free of such things, and reserve it for more important items like recipes, naked pictures, and sports rants. You can follow my shit at http://brownietroop.ning.com If you join I may even send you a brownietroop666 sticker for the back of your car. Rock on.

Purgatory

That's the best way to describe the past week. Whenever you have a tour staring at you from the calendar you go into a mental holding pattern for about a week before it starts. It's hard to carry on with your normal home life, you sort of already have one foot out the door all the time. I've been dealing with it by watching the Ken Burns series "The War" which is pretty good, watching a lot of baseball and football, fishing, and going to the bar at night. The irony in all of this is that once we've been on the road for a little while, all you wanna do is be sitting at home watching baseball and doing all the things I just mentioned. The Ken Burns series is sometimes awesome, and sometimes a little slow. I'm undecided about that guy's work, but I respect the massive undertaking that he takes on. There's almost no way to do it without someone finding fault with it. I am a WWII nut, I have a whole library of books, literally, on WWII. I thought it was awesome that he didn't focus on the flag raising at Iwo Jima, because it really had nothing to do with that battle at all. It took the Marines like another month to take the island after the flag was raised, it was basically just a good picture. I haven't watched the final episode yet and I'm looking forward to seeing how he handles Okinawa. Whoever did the audio editing for the series deserves an award too. The combat footage is intense and I'm guessing that much of it has never been seen before--Americans in 1944 didn't much wanna see film footage of dead Marines lying all over the beaches of the Pacific. Anyway, I posted the Mollusk sessions on ween.com but will probably take it down today or tomorrow. We were looking for a live version of "Your Party" to use as a b-side for the "Your Party" 45 and we came across a killer version of "Voodoo Lady" from Pittsbugh earlier this year. It's pretty ferocious. Check it out at http://www.chocodog.com/chocodog/vood.mp3

The Sexy Guy wrote:Studio version of DC Won't Do You No Good.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=LBCGDHFU

From a chairty compilation released last month.

The Sexy Guy wrote:Studio version of DC Won't Do You No Good.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=LBCGDHFU

From a chairty compilation released last month.

Nonetheless, Ween has chosen to persevere and the band is due in the studio this winter to start work on what will be its 12th album.

Hitman wrote:Ween are a terrible band...

Hitman wrote:Ween are a terrible band...

nasio wrote:

Hitman wrote:Ween are a terrible band...

not half as terrible as your "bands" and "projects"...