For teenaged lo-fi diddler Aaron Freeman, the rarefied state of “brown” was the ultimate achievement. Starting with 1986’s home-recorded The Crucial Squeegie Lip, Freeman and his best friend Mickey Melchiondo, recording as Gene and Dean Ween, aimed to create a sound (and life) experience that was extremely “fucked-up, in a good way,” as Melchiondo describes it. What #based is for Lil B—a good-natured raison d’etre doubling as a foggy aesthetic manifesto and rallying cry for fans—“brown” was for Ween. Early on in the duo’s fledgling career, brown meant making themselves happy, often at the expense of their audiences. During an opening slot for Fugazi in the late 1980s, ex-Ween tourmate Matt Sweeney remembered in a recent book, “they were pelted with change by newly bald straight-edge kids as Aaron sang the same Cat Stevens song over and over."
Flash-forward 30 years from the DIY spirit of Ween’s early recordings and performances, past the decade-plus when they packed amphitheaters, played late-night TV, got Elvis’ old backing group to perform on an album with a song called “Piss Up a Rope”, and released a double-disc live album on Elektra called Paintin’ the Town Brown. Now, there’s FREEMAN: on Aaron Freeman's self-titled solo album, the 44-year old singer finds himself on the other side of recovery, atoning for a life lived brown. “Covert Discretion” opens the album with a crushing level of vulnerability: “Another gig now, got an aching head, and I’m back on display,” he murmurs in a soft, folky voice that hasn’t deepened much since he was a teenager. “I’m your best friend, I’m your superstar/ Yeah, I’m down with the brown.” Despite it all, Ween could be a very reflective band, but “Discretion” is the first song sung by Aaron Freeman about the cost of living as Gene Ween.
“Discretion” is also the first public step of a drying-out process triggered by a sad January 2011 Ween show in Vancouver that would lead to the band’s dissolution the following year. In front of 3,000 fans who paid $50 per ticket, Freeman laid down on the stage during songs and slurred his lyrics when he could remember them. The same behaviors that a 20-something Freeman would use to antagonize audiences, and with which he accumulated a fanbase of countless suburban stoners, had become blatant symptoms of a serious problem—what made Ween also killed it. As is his wont, however, there’s no easy emotional true north on FREEMAN. After gently pirouetting on a “Dust in the Wind”-style guitar figure for a few minutes, “Discretion” suddenly shifts gears into a slick hesher anthem. “Fuck you all, I got a reason to live/ And I’m never gonna die,” he asserts, as the image of a New Age recovery facility gives way to a vision of a packed arena. Such balance of abject pathos and profane teenage-boy hardheadedness is a Ween trademark, which Freeman mastered on 1994’s “Baby Bitch,” a heartrending breakup song that had “Bitch” in the title and the line “Fuck you, you stinkin’-ass ho” gently inserted into the verse.
Indeed, part of what made Ween so great was Freeman and Melichiondo’s refusal to distinguish between sincerity and silliness, a mainstay of the druggy teenage boyhood that neither ever left. On “(For a While) I Couldn’t Play My Guitar Like a Man”, Freeman toys around with a bluesy lament, but it’s impossible to tell if he’s aiming toward a Crossroads-style soul-selling or a 12-step-style soul search (or if, after Clapton, there is even a difference). Though “Black Bush” was inspired by the bucolic surround of the upstate New York region where the album was recorded, Freeman takes the opportunity to sing about the “crab man” and “woody-pecker” in his most cartoonishly mannered guru voice, even lapsing into Hindi on the chorus. FREEMAN is a thoroughly mellow—one might say anesthetized—recording, but throughout, Freeman’s gentle absurdity combines with the crack studio musicianship (Megafaun’s Brad Cook and the Foreign Exchange’s Chris Boerner contribute) to make an eerily soothing form of psychedelia bent on exploring the other side of getting fucked up.
Aaron Freeman’s search for brown has long faded, and what powers FREEMAN is his unique gift—audible since Ween sequenced the heartbreaking “Birthday Boy” two tracks after “Papa Zit” on 1990’s God Ween Satan—in his inability to compartmentalize his emotions in his creative work. For three decades, he sacrificed his sobriety and nearly his life so that people like me could soundtrack stupors and sentimental moments in equal measure. As a teenager, I watched my skater friends huff Redi-Whip in an attempt to really understand “Big Jilm” (perhaps the band’s brownest song), and 12 years later, I watched two of my best friends dance to “Stay Forever” at their wedding reception. For Ween newcomers, FREEMAN is bound to sound odd, even off-putting. I get it. But this is the promise and labor of appreciating a lifelong cult artist like Freeman: taking the time to engage him on his own terms.
