

W EEN: T HE P OD











The Pod (Shimmy Disk 049, New York, 1991 or later) sports a sleeve that ironically uses Leonard Cohen's Greatest Hits of 1975. It takes the background (not very well reproduced) and replaces Mr. Cohen's head with a young man's - long hair, wearing some sort of gas mask with a coil instead of the filter-tube. I cannot place the music, it seems rather disharmonic to me. No connection to Cohen that I can see - other than being the exact opposite of the atmosphere, with kind of a dark quality, stressed by repetitiveness, disharmony, slowgoing syncopated rhythm and abuse of sound-distortions (changes of pitch, filters, overstressed bass drum) plus the occasional rocky guitar or bass. Sounds anywhere between a sound-check of the Sparks and jam-session rock in a badly supervised summer-camp for Alice Cooper fans. One song is called She Fucks Me. Another: Pork Roll And Cheese. Another title, Dr Rock, is hardly rocky. I admit the sound of it didn't encourage me to find out more about the words, so that's all I can say (the words are hard to understand, not printed on the sleeve). Well, after listening to it several times, it does seem better and better. But not much. To understand the joke one should probably be born in the neighborhood (Solebury Township, Pennsylvania ? "in the middle of a horse farm"). Another quote from the sleeve-text: Recorded by Dean and Gene Ween ... between January and October 1990. ... In the time this album was completed, we filled up 3.600 hours of tape, and inhaled 5 cans of Scotchguard. ... Mean Ween played the Bass ... and that's him on the cover doin'up some Scotchguard powered bongs. New info from Rudi Schmid: "Ween is a rock duo, Dean and Gene Ween (born Mickey Melchiondo and Aaron Freeman). Appearently they took Leonard Cohen Best of record (LP) cover and just glued a friend's head onto it. The Cohen record supposedly belonged to Deaner Ween's mother." Comment from a Ween-fan to the above: "The Pod is quite an avant-garde album. Ween has no rules when it comes to music genre, and their catalog even includes an entire country album complete with Nashville session musicians. They are definitely a band that cannot be judged by any single album."



Thanks to Vlad Arghir, Germany, for the introduction,

and to Rudi Schmid, Berkeley CA, for the cover picture.









Another similar adaptation of Cohen's cover art

has been found on Mike Randle's CD with the cover

artwork takeoff of Death of a ladies' man



(Mena Schmid and Michael Judd)