The area encompassing upper bucks Bucks County, PA and Hunterdon County, NJ, all bucolic farmland and rolling hills spilling into lush forests, separated by the Delaware River and dotted by well-preserved Revolutionary-era structures on each side, is enjoying a moment. You could, if you were a jackass, refer to it as the stealth Upstate New York, if of course by “stealth” you meant that you had a nearly terminal case of myopia. But it’s got the hallmarks of a budding second-home hub. The trend pieces have come, touting high-profile relocations such as Bradley Cooper, the Hadids, and, per the failing New York Times, “other famous people.” Cal Peternell, formerly the chef of Chez Panise, has opened a restaurant in downtown Frenchtown called Finnbar, whose farm-fresh dishes and natural wines fund his wife’s arts program across the street. Sean Gay, formerly of Momofuku, has set up shop in an historic inn. There’s a fucking field of rocks out in Upper Black Eddy that’s gone viral on TikTok. I’ve been, you hit the rocks with a hammer and it kinda sounds like a bell.

At the spiritual center of it all is New Hope, PA, a historical arts enclave known at times for arts, antiques, and its historic playhouse. Its downtown, connected by a bridge over the Delaware River to its spiritual sibling Lambertville, NJ, consists of a few streets featuring the typical mix of oddball shops (Pet Photos Plus! The New Hope House of Jerky! Fred Eisen Leather & Art Knives!) and world-class dining in either historic or shockingly modern buildings, plus side streets with experimental-looking houses that seem cozily lived-in and an unfathomably cute canal. The area hasn’t experienced a shark-jumping moment of absurdity akin to Justin Timberlake’s 2024 DUI in Sag Harbor, in which the arresting officer had no idea who he was, but it’s not hard to imagine a future in which Keanu Reeves’s jangle-grunge band gets booed offstage at MOMs over in Doylestown.

Perhaps no establishment in the town represents the tension of outside money falling in love with an area’s charm and, as the affair deepens, inadvertently threatening to price out all which once made it charming than God Save the Qweens, a little vintage shop dedicated to both all things punk rock and all things Ween, tucked up a hill off the main drag, steps from the canal. If you’re in the neighborhood, you’ll recognize it because it’s got a lot of stuff with the word “FUCK” printed on it displayed outside, as well as a few items prominently displaying the Boognish, Ween’s logo that surely is up there in the pantheon of ‘90s band logos along with Wu-Tang, Oasis, and maybe Sublime.

God Save the Queens in New Hope, PA. Above image: Punk Rock Michelle at the counter.

God Save the Qweens’s proprietor, who goes publicly by Punk Rock Michelle, opened it nearly 20 years ago after defecting from Love Saves the Day, an outpost of the now-defunct East Village vintage store of the same name. She’s spent her entire life in the area, growing up in nearby Buckingham and attending Bucks County Community college for art, settling into a concentration in glassblowing, because “all the cute boys were blowing glass.” At 55, Michelle scans as a Gen X lifer. She dresses like a member of Lydia Lunch’s entourage, her hair a shock of Manic Panic pink. Despite the fact that the store is her life — she’s the owner, proprietor, and sole employee — she seems uninterested in making money unless it’s on her terms, which means making sales in-person or, if it’s a t-shirt, over Facebook. She loves The Cure, the Dead Kennedys, the Sex Pistols, and Elvis, and refers to Billy Idol as “my future ex-husband” multiple times during our conversation. Her store is a reflection of all of these things. “This is my 15-year-old self’s dream,” she says.

God Save the Qweens also has the distinction of being able to call itself Ween’s officially sanctioned headquarters. Michelle is longtime friends with the group’s principals — they met in high school — and they’ve at times used the store as a clearinghouse for their unsold merch or bootleg shirts sent to them in tribute, as well as a hangout space for when they’re in town. At this point, it’s the only place where a Ween fan can go and hear about the band and its history from someone who knows them firsthand.

For the uninitiated: Ween is a band from New Hope, PA, started by Gene and Dean Ween, aka Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiado, when they were in high school. Their career arc could best be described as two very stoned teenage punks deciding to dedicate the next 20 years of their lives to chasing some platonic ideal that existed at the intersection of compositional sophistication and abject lyrical stupidity. Along the way, they became (scene-acceptably) rich and (scene-acceptably) famous and developed one of the most intensely loyal fandoms this side of Jim Jones. We’ll talk more about the band itself later, but this is not, strictly speaking, a story about Ween as much as it is one about them in absentia. The main thing you need to know about them is that they are inextricably tied to their town of origin. They recorded their early work in parental basements before graduating to an apartment they dubbed The Pod, and cut their teeth as a live act playing at John and Peter’s just by the river; when they got bigger, they stuck around, upgrading to an unused office building for Chocolate and Cheese and remaining local fixtures for the duration of their tenure as a studio band. As Michelle jokes to me, “It’s like, the Liberty Bell is Philly. Ween is New Hope.”

When I take a day trip up from Philadelphia to visit one late-summer day, I find Michelle sitting behind the counter, occasionally emailing back and forth with Freeman — she doesn’t use her prepaid cell phone, so this is their version of texting — to see if he can call in and speak with me. Unfortunately, he can’t, as he’s tied up at a tire dealership. There’s a half-empty fifth of vodka on a shelf behind her; throughout our conversation, she pours something from a Poland Springs bottle into a little plastic cup and takes periodic sips.

God Save the Qweens is also just a mind-bogglingly interesting space to be inside: In addition to housing a vintage Ms. Pac-Man machine that once lived in Ween’s old studio, it’s packed with clothes, mostly black, a truly staggering amount of vintage toys, including one called “Gay Bob” (“He was the first gay doll,” Michelle explains. “He has, um, a giant penis.”), and what must be the largest collection of second-hand Dr. Martens this side of the Atlantic.

About the Docs: Despite the fact that all of the pairs she sells were manufactured in England and many appear to be one of a kind or at least very hard to find, she refuses to sell them online. When I suggest that she could likely do good business selling her stock on eBay, she proclaims that prospective customers need to try them on in person. “They’re all vintage. You don’t wanna get someone’s shoes and be like, ‘Ew, this person had weird feet.’” She tells me she once sold a couple pairs to Gigi Hadid, a claim I have no way to verify, but I can say that light online research indicates that Hadid began being spotted in Doc Martens in 2017, the same year the family purchased its New Hope estate.

Only one person is allowed inside God Save the Qweens at a time, though I can’t tell if that’s because of some latent COVID policy or because of the physical constraints imposed by the store itself. I tell her the vibe, of racks from the ceiling whose wares droop out of racks on the walls whose wares droop onto the Docs, cabinets full of toys and juvenalia and ephemera just fucking everywhere even in the middle of a quite narrow store, feels like the equivalent of a Ween song: dirty, messy, its coherence knowable only to the person who created the chaos in the first place. “I take that as a compliment,” she says. “20 pounds of shit in a 10 pound bag” she jokes.

Much like the music of Ween itself, the store is not for everyone: A quick survey of online reviews reveal reactions to Michelle and her shop ranging from “very rude,” “dangerously cluttered,” and “unhinged” (negative) to “Authentic and American as apple pie,” “actually pretty badass,” and “a soul that takes no shit!” (positive). As she and I speak, a couple customers come and go without buying anything; Michelle remains on good behavior with the exception of an errant side-eye or two. One zoomer seems really excited by her surplus of Dead Milkmen gear only to also leave empty-handed. “You know, people say I’m mean,” Michelle says, seemingly in reference to her reputation on Yelp, Google et al. “And sometimes I am. But only if you’re a dick.”

To me, the people who find Michelle’s approach to customer service have clearly never been in a skate shop or really good record store; any abrasiveness, perceived or intended, is part of the charm.

Personally, I am too old to know whether or not kids these days are really into Ween, but if they’re not, they absolutely should be. Before 100 gecs were a band of two deeply weird people who openly fabricated their lore, built up a massive underground fanbase off the strength of their home recordings, then signed to a major label whose largesse allowed them to plumb the depths of bad taste and trash culture with a zealous earnestness and/or just-goofin’ irony, there was Ween. Before Geese intentionally undercut the extremely hooky opening track on their breakthrough record by screaming “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR” over and over, Ween started Chocolate and Cheese with an Elvis tribute followed by a borderline unlistenable song called “Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down).” Before artists like Post Malone and BigXthePlug cynically decamped to Nashville to hard fork into country, Ween did the same, recording a record with a cadre of session legends including Elvis’s backing singers, but for reasons that were mysterious as they were important. Before Vampire Weekend accidentally became a jam band, Phish randomly decided to cover a Ween song which caused them to accidentally become one too. Before YouTube was flooded with AI-generated bangers rapped by Mr. Krabs, Ween hand-crafted “She Wanted to Leave,” the most genuinely devastating breakup song to be sung in a silly pirate voice, a song whose emotional heft is somehow tied to the silly pirate voice itself. I could go on, but if I did this paragraph would never end.

More shit that makes Ween cool: Early on in their career they claimed to be operating under the direction of a deity called The Boognish. It was around this time that Henry Rollins became a gigantic fan of theirs. They once made a five-song suite about a stallion, each entry into which was called “The Stallion.” They once got David Sanborn, who did the sax solo on Bowie’s “Young Americans,” to noodle all over a song called “Your Party,” an AOR groover where the narrator trembles in awe at how much fun he and his wife had at a very sedate dinner party. Pizza Hut hired them to write a jingle about stuffed crust pizza and they turned in a song that included the lyric, “Where’d the motherfuckin’ cheese go at?” (The pizza chain rejected it.) But that song, along with parts one through five of “The Stallion,” as well as tracks like “Cover It with Gas and Set It On Fire” and “Mononucleosis,” appeared on the 2003’s All Request Live, a livestreamed set in which the band performed its most demonically stupid songs at the behest of its message board and inadvertently predicted the streamer/chat doomloop that now defines our online lives. They have dabbled in blue-eyed soul, country, sea shanties, funk, disco, Dylanesque folk, Buffetesque beach-Boomer jams, psych, hard rock, jazz, electronica, cabaret, mariachi, and pitch-perfect Thin Lizzy impressions. Freeman and Melchiado’s children are now young adults who are both active in the more avant-garde corners of the music world; in April, they performed together under the name “We Are Not Ween.”

Despite having written several hundred words about Ween without using the term “brainrot,” I must do so now so that I can say that before brainrot was a thing, the closest approximation we had was probably “Brown,” which Ween used to describe an ineffable quality to their music, of seemingly discordant elements meshing together perfectly to form something both genuinely off-putting and deeply compelling. I have an Apple Music playlist containing 94 tracks spanning the extended Ween corpus; listening to it on shuffle for more than 20 minutes often induces a pleasant, temporary schizophrenia.

As Freeman and Melchiado have aged, each seems to have recognized the toll that tying one’s entire identity to some shit you started as a teenager, especially if it’s very cool and popular and lucrative, can have on a person’s brain. In 2011, Freeman entered rehab after a string of shows during which it was a crapshoot whether he’d be too debilitatingly intoxicated to play; his sobriety has stuck, but ever since, the band has ceased recording and has remained only a sporadic live concern. Melchiado, got his captain’s license and began giving guided fishing tours in both New Hope and off the Jersey Shore. He pops by the store to hang, Michelle told me, but when Ween got back together for a 2024 tour to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Chocolate and Cheese, they made it to three shows before Melchiado dropped out; the band issued a statement that read in part, “It’s become clear that performing is too taxing on Deaner’s mental health.”

“Mickey needed a break,” Michelle says when I bring this up to her. “We all need a break sometimes.”

To this day, Ween fans are rabid, and they continue to make pilgrimages to New Hope. The current state of the band being what it is, God Save the Qweens has become one of the few direct connections to the band still left in New Hope. The Pod, a dilapidated apartment where they recorded their album of the same name, is long gone. So is the taco spot where Freeman used to work, as is the gas station where Melchiado worked. John and Peter’s, the closest thing the band had to a home venue, is still here, and one of the owners is actually Ween’s old bassist, Chris Williams, but as I learned later on that day, it’s too busy being an active bar/restaurant/venue to really lean into the Ween stuff with too much specificity — more Cafe Wha than Cavern Club. She’s happy to share memories of the band, corroborate fan theories as best she can, and offer suggestions of what other bits of Ween ephemera still stand. Unfortunately, it turns out that Buckingham Green, which Freeman sung about as if it were a RuneScape-ass mythological realm, is just a strip mall near town. “At a certain point, all you have is the stories. That’s why I’m here,” Michelle says. “I try to give people as much history as I can, but a lot of stuff’s not here anymore.”

As you might suspect, running a retail establishment that traffics exclusively in Ween merch, Doc Martens, toys so off-putting they’re better off being described as oddities, and clothes for punks is not always the most lucrative business. “I don’t know if my shop’s gonna be here next year,” Michelle says. “My landlord raised my rent a lot this year, and he’s gonna raise my rent again next year. Just down the block, the street has been overtaken by technically nice-looking but ultimately generic condo developments, and she suspects the guy who owns her building would like to cash in on what feels inevitable. “This could be a condo next year.”

The past few years in general have been hard on the locals, she says. “A lot of New Yorkers moved here and prices went up again.” A friend of hers, she says, watched his $800 rent skyrocket to $2,200. Meanwhile, the rapid development nearby led to her street being blocked off, leading prospective customers to not even venture down the block. At some point, it started to cost more to park in town, and lots that used to be free now required payment through an app. “This town used to have maybe 15 to 20 restaurants and bars. Now, we probably have 70,” she adds. “Everyone’s fighting for the same $20.” She makes ends meet by selling vintage pieces from her personal collection on eBay to overseas collectors, but stuff like her original, Bleach-era Nirvana t-shirt or iconic (and very rare) Sub Pop “LOSER” shirt are a finite resource.

But I want Michelle’s store to keep going forever. That’s why I wrote this specifically for SSENSE, a website for people who buy clothes. You should go to New Hope and purchase some used Doc Martens from her. They will look wonderful. Do not try to enter in a large group, do not try to haggle with her, do understand that if she’s rude, it’s part of the performance. Above all, cherish the weird shit while it’s still here.

Before leaving New Hope, I grab a bite at John and Peter’s, which is best described as an objectively perfect dive. Despite the moneyed nonsense outside, it’s as if I’ve entered a wormhole to the past, into a version of the town untouched by the creep of capital. Everything’s wood. Gig posters pepper the walls. Down a set of stairs, a guy plays Jerry Garcia covers in the style of the Circle Jerks to an audience of no one. As I eat a couple of tacos, I consider the spectre of Bradley Cooper that is haunting Bucks County. Home-grown A-Lister and dutiful (if performative) Eagles fan that he might be, Cooper’s presence in the area feels not necessarily villainous, but at least emblematic of a certain villainy, imposed upon us by the landed gentry, that things that are authentic and pure and, most importantly, cheap, can be taken away from us by them whenever they feel like it, simply by dint of them finding out about it and getting really into it. That this process is not any one person’s fault, or even a conscious decision being made, somehow makes it suck even more shit. Shouldn’t Bradley Cooper, one of America’s most competent actors, know better?

There is only one way to find out, and that is to leave John and Peter’s, where there is no cell reception, and look up Bradley Cooper’s address so that I can drive by his house while listening to Ween. I will not be sharing my exact methods for figuring out where he lives, but I will say that those “Oh wow, look at all these photos we pulled from the Zillow listing of this house that Celebrity X just bought!” stories in New York Post-style publications are basically doxing and should be banned.

Even in the mania of the moment, I understand that what I am attempting is extremely pointless — I assume that if he’s actually there and I try to talk to him, someone will pop out of the bushes with a taser — but the Eagles home opener is coming up, so I assume there’s a good chance he’s at least in the area.

Perhaps I will pass Cooper as he checks his mailbox at the end of his driveway, and, upon hearing the sweet sounds of “The Mollusk” emanating from my Prius, he will flag me down, tell me he fucking loves Ween, and emerge from this story absolved. I turn onto his road and get to the house and feel nothing. Turns out it’s just a big house set away from the road next to a bunch of other big houses that are either set away or not set away from the road. There’s a fancy-looking gate and a Beware of Dog sign, but it’s not even the most imposing estate in the neighborhood.

I decide the problem with my plan is that I am not listening to Ween hard enough. I pull into some non-gated driveway and crank GodWeenSatan: Live, in which the band revisited their first, extremely offensive, album at John and Peter’s, three days after 9/11. As a charmingly unlistenable song about a weasel plays, I cut the wheel and turn around, humbly praying that the Boognish, in his infinite wisdom, will summon Bradley Cooper, a man whose career was greatly bolstered by the success of the Hangover franchise, and force him to face me.

A man stands in Bradley Cooper’s yard. He is too far away for me to make out who he actually is, and I am (thankfully) too far away for him to hear the Ween coming from my car. Here are the facts as best as I can relay them. The man wears jeans, a plain blue t-shirt, and white shoes. He is looking down at his phone. He had hair. Hair is a thing that Bradley Cooper, too, has. A quick perusal of recent pictures of Cooper on Getty Images, sorted by date, indicates that he owns white shoes, as well as jeans and a plain blue t-shirt, and these items feature into his current clothing rotation.

An email to Bradley Cooper’s representatives inquiring as to his whereabouts on the specific day I went to New Hope would have gone unreturned, so I didn’t bother sending one. But if we face quotidian bullshit all around us head-on, really look it in the eye, and throttle it with the unexpected, there is always the possibility of wringing out a little bit of magic, or at least enough absurdity to tide us over until the magic comes. That, I think, is the point of Ween.

Drew Millard is a writer and the co-host of Macho Pod.

• Written by: Drew Millard
• Photographed by: Brian Karlsson
• Date: December 17, 2025