Dean Ween

Dean Ween (real name: Mickey Melchiondo) is one of the two main members of Ween.

Early Life

• Deaner's family was Canadian-American on his mother's side, and Italian-American on his father's side. His father was a used-car dealer in Trenton, New Jersey. Nobody else in his family played a musical instrument. When he was 14 years old, he started making homemade recordings with a drum kit and a cheap used guitar his father had bought for him from a pawn shop.

Musical Influences

• Dean was influenced as a child by his father's record collection, which included soul, doo-wop, "old country", and funk. Some of the artists his father would play for him included Hank Williams Sr., Bob Wills & The Texas Playboys, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Parliament, and Kool & The Gang.
• Dean was turned on to rock music as a child by a family down the street, an "Irish family" with "like five kids" that "took turns babysitting" him. They played him records including David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, Lynyrd Skynyrd's One More From the Road, as well as records by Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes, and The Beatles.
• Dean has said that the Beatles "always has been my favorite band, always will be my favorite band," and that they were the first band that "really turned me out." As a kid, he had records of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1962–1966 ["The Red Album"], and 1967–1970 ["The Blue Album"].
• As a child, Dean was a fan of the radio shows The Dr. Demento Show and The King Biscuit Flower Hour.
• Other artists Dean has named as influences include Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Santana, Parliament/Funkadelic, and The Rolling Stones.

Guitar Playing

• Dean Ween in 2018: "A phaser, a wah-wah, and an echo, that's still what I use, that's pretty much it."
• Dean Ween on why he plays a Fender Stratocaster with a simple setup:

I have like 40 or 50 guitars, but I mean, my thing is so simple. . . . I wanted to play like Jimi Hendrix. That was, to me, from the first day and to this day, that's the greatest guitar player in the world. There's no argument that can be made for anybody else in a close second. And so I wanted to know what he had, so it's like, okay — a strat, a wah-wah, and a loud amp. That's all I needed to know. And, as it turns out, my friend Billy Tucker who taught me to play guitar, played exactly that. So I never changed — I just started there, and Tucker played it too, and these were the gauge strings he bought, and this was the gauge picks he used, and this was the kind of guitar, and I just have never really — I've tried other stuff, but that's my thing now at this point. There's no backing away from it.

I can borrow anybody's Strat, from any year, in any condition, made in any country — could be Japanese, Mexican, vintage, custom shop, and I can go to an amp and without it even being on, turn the dials, kick that thing on, and I know exactly what's gonna come out of it. That's my shit, the Strat.

Notable Quotes

On "jam bands"

I'm not gonna name names, but I'm just going to diss every single band on that scene at once. I mean, jamming is Deep Purple['s] Made in Japan. That's jamming, they're rocking out. You know, Yes live, they're jamming. [King] Crimson, you know — it rocks, but it jams, but it's in the context of a song, it's not just allthe jam. And plus, it has no teeth. A lot of that stuff doesn't rock at all, well, I haven't found anything that really rocks. You know, the Allman Brothers are a jam band. The Grateful Dead jammed. Deep Purple jammed. Carlos [Santana] jammed. James Brown jammed, you know, shit. But you can't just start off with a jam. I mean if you're going to do a 20-minute song and it's pre-planned, well that's bullshit right there. I'm always waiting for that moment where the distortion kicks in, you know? Like, ten minutes into the solo, all of a sudden — the flanger, and the distortion, and then you get the Echoplex, and you're freaking out on acid and like, fists are in the air. It just doesn't happen. I think that's where we come in.