“Analyses of Two Ween Songs: ‘I Can’t Put My Finger on it’ and ‘Even if You Don’t’”

June 14, 2021June 14, 2021 by Mike Beal

It’s certainly nice to have things kicking back up into full gear this year, as live concerts and festivals begin to commence for the summer. Also of note, though, might be the hard-won lesson from our friends Ween that this too is bound to lead to various frustrations and complications as “the going gets tough from the get go” as you deal with a “stinkin’ a** hoe” of an ex-girlfriend.

Ween, for their own part, a band often lumped in with the “jam” scene but possessive of more songwriting and technical skill than all jam bands combined in history aside from the Grateful Dead, have been silent for a long time now. Their last album befell us in 2007 in the form of the strangely electro-tinged, halfway-inspiring La Cucaracha. Since then, they seem to have a special proclivity for playing Chicago shows, and even have a live album available on Spotify called Live in Chicago, which I believed was originally conceived as the bonus disc to a DVD but apparently accumulated appeal and popularity.

Their live shows are also available on archive.org and can be pretty zany and inviting but truth be told, these guys were wizards on production, at least by the point of White Pepper (2000) in their career, and there’s really no beating just sitting at home and taking in their studio recordings. “I Can’t Put My Finger on it” springs from their ’94 effort Chocalate and Cheese, an LP that’s at this point in time still pretty firmly entrenched in their early metal days. The track list, as is par for the Ween course, is littered with goof-offs, but at the points when they do immerse themselves in genre of any sort, it’s to cheese out on hair metal like a stoned, sarcastic version of Judas Priest, again, at this point in their career, that is.

“I Can’t Put My Finger on it,” a standout cut in its own right, plays as this hilarious poor man’s hair metal performed by two dudes each rocking out on electric guitar over cheap, programmed drums, likely all done in some basement. Dean Ween sings the song in the accent of some deranged Indian gas station clerk, which I think is just a coincidence but is kind of amusing to note nonetheless.

Twisted, warped, bizarre and “slime”-referencing, “I Can’t Put My Finger on it” struts out as the hardest-rocking song on side A of Chocolate and Cheese and probably on the whole album as well. I mention that the band makes a “slime” quip here and this is not accidental but birthed in the realm of the band’s explicitly sexual m.o. that includes such jollities as “L.M.L.Y.P.” [1] Here Dean Ween is taking on the same subject matter of that dirge but getting active in his mourning of the object’s absence in his life, the qualm of “I can’t put my finger on it” then made literal as well as figurative. He asks “Is it really out of sight?” as a reference to it literally being out of the sight of the host person herself, as well as anybody not positioned under the woman in a way that’s of course compromising and far deviant from casual behavior.

“Even if You Don’t” is a blatantly poppy, catchy anthem from their 2000 project White Pepper, an impeccably-sounding rock LP that was co-produced by the band themselves, upon what must probably have been a newly blossomed studio budget. Ironically, even though White Pepper contains what I consider pretty much the benchmark in alternative rock sound, buoyed not with the least significance by the psychedelic majesty of “Flutes of Chi,” the band in these sessions was still utilizing a drum machine, and indeed there is no “drummer” credited in the personnel section of the album’s Wikipedia page.

Nonetheless, “Even if You Don’t” is a magnanimous, sweeping achievement in radio rock (not to say it ever got any airplay, maybe for the fact that it would have bullied every other song in 2000 into irrelevance, whether it was Eve 6, Limp Bizkit, Matchbox 20 or what have you). Regarding its semantic message, then, it encompasses a discourse of extreme foolishness, a sort of amorous paean to a degenerate, dysfunctional psychopath. The reason for this paradigm of extreme foolishness isn’t just randomness or fanfare — well, on one hand it is and it works as just that, but in fact, this was Ween’s stab at creating a song which would act as the theme song of a TV sitcom. To me, that is the pinnacle of rock songwriting, a bastion the Beatles have reached in three instances in the form of “With a Little Help from My Friends” [2] and The Wonder Years, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La Da” and Life Goes on and “Lady Madonna” and Grace under Fire. This puts the blokes from Liverpool in pretty impressive territory, you would have to admit, seeing as I don’t know of any other band that’s had ONE song become a sitcom jingle other than the ephemeral Citizen Kane, which contributed “Better Days (And the Bottom Drops out)” to the bold and pithy Malcolm in the Middle, pretty close in time to the release of White Pepper, coincidentally enough.

[1] This song’s title is an acronym for “let my lick your potato,” except it’s not potato, if you know what I mean.

[2] Granted, in The Wonder Years we’re observing the Joe Cocker version of the Beatles classic which is track two on their magnum opus Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.