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Earlier this month, Facebook friends of Mickey “Dean Ween” Melchiondo were shocked to find a status update from the guitarist that contained a two-disc, MP3-only collection called The Caesar Demos. Included were rough takes on tunes Ween recorded from 2001 to 2003 in preparation for what would become the Quebec LP. Only a handful of the songs wound up making the album, which was originally set to be titled Caesar, and most of the tracks in the collection feature only Deaner and Aaron “Gene Ween” Freeman.

[Fan-Made Art via Santa Sangre Redux]

These tracks give an aural look at an important era in the band’s history. They had recently fulfilled their contract with Elektra and were returning to their indie roots. Drummer Claude Coleman Jr. was seriously injured in a car accident during this time, making his future with the band unclear. Deaner explained the backstory in his Facebook post…

well what can i say about this here, lemme see. the first thing that comes to mind is that all the while we were doing this we still had claude coleman on drums, he eventually got into a major car wreck and wasn’t around when it finally came time to make the “real” record. instead the drum duties fell on me, josh freese, and sim cain for a couple of tunes. almost all of this was recorded at our beach house in holgate, nj onto 16 track tape. a tiny bit of it was recorded in the garage behind aaron’s house in pt. pleasant, pa. some of it was recorded in the spare bedroom of my house in new hope. most of the tunes are just me and aaron, with the two of us playing everything, with me on drums. the songs with claude, dave, and glenn are pretty obvious. on just a few tunes we took what you hear here and cleaned them up and had andrew weiss mix them for the record after some overdubs. dave sings on “it’s gonna be a long night”, this was days before he had surgery to remove polyps in his throat and his voice was really rough so we figured he was the guy for the job. This isn’t even all of the tunes that we ended up choosing from, just the ones i happened to burn to cd before we drove home from the beach every week. hope you dig it for what it is.

– Mickey

Once Mickey posted links for fans to download the album, the servers hosting the tracks were bombarded leading Deaner to delete his Facebook posting. Luckily, a number of folks who grabbed the files have reposted them elsewhere. In listening, some of the songs that didn’t make the album are ridiculously good and we’re shocked a few of ’em haven’t turned up live or on future albums. We’re also fans of the mixes from some of the tunes that did eventually make their way onto Quebec such as this version of Happy Colored Marbles…

[audio:https://glidemag.wpengine.com/hiddentrack/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/HappyColoredMarbles.mp3]

Don’t sleep on this folks, here’s download links…

• Ween Quebec Demos: Disc One, Disc Two

READ ON for the full track list…