The Deep Brown Sea

Dean Ween wants to get you drunk and take you fishing.

by Shaun Brady

Chris Gatley BAIT MASTER: "I love bass fishing; I do a ton of it, but it's the NASCAR of fishing," says Mickey Melchiondo, aka Dean Ween. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Fishing shows are the whipping boys of sports television, duking it out with bowling programs near the bottom of the ESPN hierarchy. This perennial punchline status makes the genre ripe for the ironic hipster picking, as evidenced by Lounge Lizards leader John Lurie's surreal, scripted Fishing with John series, which ran on the Independent Film Channel in 1991 with guests like Tom Waits, Dennis Hopper and Jim Jarmusch. But although Ween may be the smartest-assed of rock smart-asses, guitarist Dean Ween's new online fishing show is completely genuine.

The Brownie Troop Fishing Show grew out of a small corner of the Ween Web site, which Mickey Melchiondo, aka Dean Ween, has run since its inception in 1995. A lifelong fisherman who got his start in the "ugly ponds" of his native Yardley, Melchiondo began posting pictures of his frequent excursions and keeping a log of his catches under the "Waste" heading at the band's site, until his sideline passion began to overtake his main one.

"I was so into it, the site would have tour dates from last year but the fishing page was updated daily," Melchiondo laughs, speaking from a "rented shack" in New Hope which he was in the process of salvaging from the aftermath of a fishing trip in a thunderstorm the day prior. "I kept it going to the point where I felt like it was a distraction from the Ween Web site. So I moved it off to its own site and kept a running blog with pictures and a permanent fishing diary, and on this last Ween tour I got to fish with people all over the country and the world."

The show, which abides by the Internet attention span of a few minutes at a time, is not your typical, sedate, pros-in-a-boat tedium. It's raucous, messy and fueled by alcohol — just like a real fishing trip.

"Our show is definitely a bunch of shlubs fishing," Melchondo says, which in this case is a boast. "We don't show you any tips or techniques. We don't want anyone to learn anything from watching our show."

Melchiondo was well aware of the comparisons that would be drawn to Lurie's show, and extended an invite to the saxophonist as he launched the show. (Lurie, however, has been suffering from a neurological disorder for years and limits his pursuits to painting these days.) He was also aware of the pitfalls of televised fishing.

"Our show is not some dude in a leather motorcycle outfit covered in patches on a bass boat trying to win a $3 million tournament on Lake Ossamwaga somewhere. I love bass fishing; I do a ton of it, but it's the NASCAR of fishing. Why don't you just watch Formula One, where the cars are faster and they're better engineered, rather than watching Jimmy Dale Jackson going around in an oval for 10 million laps? When we fish, we're getting completely fucking drunk — we catch as much fish as anybody, we actually know what we're doing, but we're totally just having a good time."

The "we" in question is whoever is along for the trip on a day that warrants both fishing and filming. In most cases, that just means Melchiondo and his buddies out on a boat on the Delaware, or surfcasting off a Jersey Shore beach. That may also mean a drunken excursion with Butthole Surfers Gibby Haynes and Jeff Pinkus, who tagged along on the Manasquan River during an off day while touring.

"Gibby's a good friend of mine," Melchiondo says, "and he just called me at like 4 in the morning and said, 'We have a day off, what's there to do?' It was perfect, because he would have been my first choice if I could've had any guest on the show anyway. When you're just sitting around with him he's fucking hilarious."

The site has garnered a surprising amount of attention since its launch, earning Melchiondo and friends sponsors and access to outings wherever they go. Of course, given the nature of Ween fans who still form the bulk of the show's audience, Melchiondo has to be selective about the invites he accepts.

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"My filter has gotten really good from all the years of doing the Web site," he says. "I'll get an e-mail from someone that says, 'I'm the manager of a boutique hotel and I can get you a great rate,' where you can go to their Web site and you can tell it's for real — as opposed to some dude after a gig that's all coked up and goes, 'Hey, my buddy owns a bar and he'll keep it open all night for us.' I apply the same formula to the Ween fishing invites. Like, this is some fat, 16-year-old dude that's smoking a bunch of weed who can't fish at all and just wants to hang out with Ween for the day."

Brownie Troop F.S. has recently launched its first contest, the "Freshwater Shit Fishing Derby" (or "Trash Fishing," as it has suddenly seemed to be cleaned up into). The derby, the first of what Melchiondo hopes to be regular events, is open to anyone who sends in 10 bucks for a special BTFS tape measure as a standard for comparing fish. "I figured the best way to level the playing field was to do the kind of fishing that everybody can do," Melchiondo explains. "A 6-year-old kid could win our derby."

For the man otherwise known as Dean Ween, fishing is an escape when his long-running band is off the road, one that fulfills much the same function. "If I had to pick words to describe myself, I'm not patient — except when I fish," he says. "I'll go out and for six or eight hours, I'm completely alone, completely relaxed and focused. It's probably the only thing other than music that makes me forget about every single other thing on the planet. Even if Ween is standing in front of a crowd of people, I have no idea that they're there, and fishing also does that for me."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

The Brownie Troop F.S. Shit Fishing Derby is accepting entries through Oct. 12, more info at brownietroopfs.com.