The Portland summer didn’t technically begin Saturday, but it felt as if it officially started for the outdoor music season, as Ween came to Thompson’s Point for the first concert this year on the evening of a blistering hot day.
Ween emerged from an era in the 1990s when bands such as Primus, Beck, Phish, the Flaming Lips, and They Might Be Giants found lasting audiences in part by being weird, and their appearance recalled the summers when bands like these owned the hot weather, hopping aboard touring festivals and stopping at venues like The Ballpark at Old Orchard Beach. Despite the fact that Ween was competing with the Old Port Festival and a sold-out Moth Mainstage concert at the State Theatre, a robust crowd was here to greet them.
It’s now been a decade since Ween’s last studio album, 2007’s “La Cucaracha,” but they use the road to unearth older treasures and explore their entire discography. This setlist was different from one they performed at the Maine State Pier in 2010, leaning hard on their lo-fi first album, “God Ween Satan,” and playing early, deep-album cuts that delighted the die-hard fans. They tempered abrasive songs such as “Fat Lenny” and “Stallion, Part 1” with cheerful crowd-pleasers such as “Take Me Away,” the triumphant opening song of 1994’s “Chocolate and Cheese.” They even played songs that were a bit of both, such as the oddly anthemic “Big Jilm.”
Their signature playfulness pervaded the set; if they opened the show with “Marble Tulip Juicy Tree” and “Happy Colored Marbles” for no other reason than both songs have “marble” in the title, then at least they’re staying on brand.
The band was in top form, nailing the hairpin turns of rarely played songs, and giving lead guitarist Dean Ween a platform to inflect many of them with searing solos that, coupled with a wildly unpredictable set, pushed the concert into jam-band territory. This particularly worked on songs such as “I’ll Be Your Jonny On the Spot,” a two-minute ditty on 1997’s “The Mollusk” that evolved into colorful new forms on stage. They even covered Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s angry response to the Kent State Massacre, “Ohio,” which might have been their only political statement of the night – or they may have just played it because its double-guitar stomp is so firmly in their wheelhouse.
Like Phish and other jam bands, Ween offers a sprawling set that encompasses rock, funk, country and reggae, displaying tight musicianship and genuine affection for the genres that they are, on the surface, thumbing their noses at. They’re able to channel Zapp & Roger on the funk workout “Monique the Freak,” and Michael McDonald on the yacht-rock homage “Your Party,” and even as they sing lines about tri-colored pasta, they always seem like they’re laughing with, not at, the artists that inspired the songs. The influence of Frank Zappa constantly hovers over Ween’s acrobatic guitar turns and sly sense of humor, although Zappa’s jokes always felt more cruel than Ween’s 1990s-era update.
Besides, if Ween shared Zappa’s aversion to disco then we may not have the glorious “Roses are Free,” one of three songs, along with “Buckingham Green” and “The Mollusk” that anchored a stout encore. The latter song, one of their most beautiful compositions, ended the evening. It felt fitting for a set with considerable twists and turns to close it all out – not with a resounding climax but a song that simply squiggles off into the cool night.
Robert Ker is a freelance writer who lives in Portland.
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