Read Dean Ween’s hilarious story about stealing Carlos Santana’s gear for a night

Okay, so this is something you simply couldn’t make up if you tried. You know the guitar solo from the Ween song “Transdermal Celebration”? That one single from the quebec album? That was recorded with Carlos Santana’s gear without him knowing.  

According to a in a (grammatically questionable) post on Facebook this week, Dean Ween told his “favorite Ween story of all time”: how his roadie at the time also just happened to work for a backline company (those are essentially companies that will supply or help transport a band’s gear to their concerts for them) and tipped him off that Ween’s shipping company would have Carlos Santana’s gear in transit at his backline company’s storage facility.  As a result, Ween decided to break in to the facility at 2 in the morning and record the solo to “Transdermal Celebration.” — the very take that appears on the album — through Carlos Santana’s PRS and Mesa Boogie amp.

“What needed to be done was immediately clear to me, I had an opportunity to play the solo on “Transdermal Celebration” through Carlos Santana’s amplifier and guitar. I had one shot at it, it meant taking a hard disk recorder to a storage space where all of Carlos’ stuff was sitting in transit. I arrived at 2am. We (very carefully) unpacked his equipment and set up his stage gear and in one take I recorded the guitar solo for “Transdermal Celebration” (the one that appears on the album, playing thru Carlos Santana’s guitar, pedalboard, and amplifier. The whole think took 10 minutes and we were terrified we were going to get caught. A lot of people would have lost their jobs. We got the fuck outta there relly fast after that. So the solo on “Transdermal Celebration” was played thru all of Sanatana’s shit in what resembled an early morning bank heist or something”

Check out the whole story, which is backed up with photographic evidence on Dean Ween Group’s Facebook page here.