All Request Live

A gift to its fans, who voted on which songs they wanted to hear, All Request Live is a chance for Ween to revisit and reinvent its vast song catalog. Recorded live in studio on Nov. 22, 2003, and originally broadcast on Internet radio, this set shows that Ween had as much fun fiddling with its old songs as its fans did. “Demon Sweat” and “Reggaejunkiejew” reach back to the band’s earliest releases, but where those songs were originally the products of two loners tinkering in an apartment, they take on new life when played by a full band. After all those years as a musical prankster, Ween finally stepped into the light as a fully matured unit on these performances of “Mononucleosis” and “Stay Forever.” That’s not to say Ween doesn’t have fun: its rejected Pizza Hut jingle closes the set and is an outright classic. For longtime fans, however, it’s all about the “Stallion" suite. For the first time, this performance strings together all five parts of the perennial Ween theme. If the concert featured nothing more than that five-song sequence, it'd still act as a full representation of Ween’s evolution as a band and its powerful range as a musical entity.