Story #1 "I can't put my finger on it" -- Ween

"Is it brown, is it white, is it really outta sight?I can't put my finger on it."

Ween is one of those criminally overlooked bands, thanks to their most famous song, the super quirky, helium-laced nonsense ditty known as "Pust th' little daisies." For artists of this caliber to be known for just one song is criminal. We're talking about a small snapshot in a long-running band that has complete control of every genre you can name from country to 80's funk to earnest love songs to Motörhead offshots to, well, an alternate reality of Michael McDonald singing the praises of, well, boys clubs. And that's not even counting straight ahead pop songs with odd time signatures and skewered lyrics.

"I can't put my finger on it," is on their 1994 album Chocolate and Cheese. Sung like a half-crazed Turkish man, Aaron Freeman (aka Gene Ween) asks a litany of questions about what it is he can't put his finger on. The lyrics become a warped version of a Dr Seuss book, ranging from the esoteric "Can it heal, is it real, can it feel the threads of time?" to the ponderous "Is it alive, does it writhe can it survive under the sun?" We never know what it is he's talking about. I think they probably just liked the phrase and built the song around it.

The song then takes another left turn when Gener screams "Are you surprised when I touched the dwarf inside?" before the psychedelic freak-out recedes back into Turkish delight.

"I can't put my finger on it," the story that opened my collection A-Sides and B-Sides, has zero to with Ween's subject matter. In the story, a recent college grad on a European sojourn promises to pick up a Theremin for his best friend back home. He gets more than he bargains for when a group of British inventors ask him to test out a new machine they've built that is..strange. Like all stories in this collection, one of the conceptual threads is technology but I don't like to explain my stories. It's up to the reader to read in to it.

I should also hint that a scintilla of this is actually based in truth but I won't tell you where the scintilla is.

Back to Ween. I was trying to think of another song by a somewhat famous artist who delved into Middle Eastern sounds as much as "I can't put my finger on it," does. The only one that springs to mind is David Bowie's "Yassasin," off the last album in the late 70's Bowie/Eno trilogy, Lodger.

At least in my mind these share some kind of connection.

A-Sides and B-Sides is available on iBook as well as Amazon and also Kobo and Nook. You can preview a nice chunk of it, too. Hope you'll consider buying if you like what you see. Here's what the cover looks like.

They shot this in Philly. Man, I miss good gyros.

I'd love to know how much Eno "treated," this. But you can see from the middle eastern scales what I mean by the collection.