What Ren and Stimpy are to Tom and Jerry, Dean and Gene Ween are to, well, just about any pop duo you can name, from the Everly Brothers to They Might Be Giants.

Watching Ween at the Whisky on Thursday was something like watching two kids playing with their food but turning it into scale-model Rodins. Ween’s medium is musical mashed potatoes, bits of ‘70s Spinners and Bowie and Aerosmith stirred up with a post-everything attitude.

It’s too much fun to be performance art but too Dada to be rock ‘n’ roll; too sophisticated to be easily dismissed but too jokey and crude to be taken very seriously. Yet the Pennsylvania duo’s latest album, “Pure Guava,” was released by Elektra Records, making Ween probably the least mainstream pop act on a major label. And the Whisky was packed with ultra-hip Hollywood Weenies.

To their credit, Dean (most of the guitar playing) and Gene (most of the singing) and their prerecorded backing tracks did little Thursday that seemed aimed at cultivating that hip cachet. By all appearances, they could just as easily have been performing at a frat house talent show as for record industry scenesters.


Goofballs or geniuses? It’s all the same in the world of Ween.

Los Angeles trio Failure opened with a sometimes entrancing set of intricate time signatures and complex power-riffing that, much richer than on a recent debut album, sounded something like a cross of Sonic Youth and the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Ween appears tonight at Bogart’s in Long Beach.