Ween's Chocolate and Cheese (33 1/3) Read online

  CHOCOLATE AND CHEESE

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  We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books—Pitchfork

  For more information on the 33 1/3 series, visit 33third.blogspot.com

  For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

  Chocolate and Cheese

  Hank Shteamer

  2011

  The Continuum International Publishing Group

  80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038

  The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

  www.continuumbooks.com

  Copyright © 2011 by Hank Shteamer

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by

  any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or

  otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A catalog record for this book is available from the

  Library of Congress.

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-7419-2

  Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: “These guys got no future”: Ween beat the odds

  Before Chocolate and Cheese, part I: “We both loved to hear ourselves on tape”: Ween’s humble origins

  Before Chocolate and Cheese, part II: Subsidized scribbles: Pure Guava and the underdog mystique

  After Chocolate and Cheese: “We can pull off our fantasies”: Ween come into their own

  Chocolate and Cheese, part I: The making of …

  Chocolate and Cheese, part II: The songs

  Chocolate and Cheese, part III: The artwork

  Outro: “The hardest thing to get”: Ween’s autonomy

  Interviews

  Other Sources

  I respectfully dedicate this book to Ween fans everywhere.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to express my gratitude to the following parties: Greg Frey, for fielding relentless inquiries, acting as middleman for the majority of my interviews and speaking on the record himself. These folks for giving of their time: Mickey Melchiondo, Aaron Freeman, Andrew Weiss, Steve Ralbovsky, Dave Ayers, Pat Frey, Claude Coleman Jr., Stephan Said, Scott Lowe, Ed Wilson, Chris Williams, John Kuczala, Roger Gorman, Rick Patrick, Marty Sarandria, Danny Clinch, Josh Homme, Matt Sweeney, Chris Applebaum, Mark Hamilton, Roman Coppola and Spike Jonze, as well as Danielle Stampe, Yamatsuka Eye, Aaron Burtch, Jesse Eisenberg, Max Bemis and several others whose input I was not able to include. And David Barker at Continuum for giving me a shot.

  And on a personal note, I would like to thank: My incredible family — Rick, Paula and Caroline — for anything and everything. I am blessed each day by your infinite love. Also the entire Michael and Shteamer clans. My dear friends: Jeff, Drew, Kyle, Chris and the rest of the KC contingent, with whom I discovered Ween (and pretty much everything else). Joe, Tony, Tom, Zack and the extended NYC crew, including all bandmates and musical collaborators past and present, my Time Out New York comrades and the Shams family (dogs included!).

  My future wife, Laal Fatima Shams-Molkara, for all the cross-country miles traveled, the day-to-day assistance provided, the love and wisdom shared, and the above-and-beyond patience demonstrated re: the endless mood fluctuations, second-guessings and mini crises associated with the creation of this book. You were there for me at every step.

  And finally, Luke and — once again — Joe, Laal and Zack for their valuable feedback on the manuscript.

  Introduction

  “These guys got no future”:

  Ween beat the odds

  It was a very creative time and a real bridge record. What came before that record and what was to come after were really very different things.

  —Gene Ween on Chocolate and Cheese

  “What the hell is this crap?” The inquisitor was Butthead, one of the two most influential music critics of the alternative rock era, responding to Ween’s 1993 video for “Push th’ Little Daisies.” Beavis chimed in, accusing singer Aaron “Gene Ween” Freeman of being a “pansy.” Following a few more insipid digs against the New Hope, Pennsylvania, duo, Butthead made a definitive proclamation: “These guys got no future.”

  As blunt as the observation was, it seemed sensible enough. At first, Ween did in fact register — to my own teenage self, for example — as just another one of the countless novelty acts that swarmed MTV in Nirvana’s wake. (Remember Whale and “Hobo Humpin’ Slobo Babe,” or Green Jellÿ, of “Three Little Pigs” fame?) “Daisies,” from Ween’s 1992 Elektra Records debut, Pure Guava, featured a chintzy synthesized lounge groove and a shrill, repetitive chorus. The video that incited the animated couch potatoes’ wrath depicted Freeman and his partner Mickey “Dean Ween” Melchiondo as disheveled burnouts, stuffing their faces in a dirty living room and contorting their bodies into goofy poses. The clip had a certain stoner appeal, but it hardly seemed like an auspicious start to a substantial musical career.

  Yet nearly two decades on, it turns out that Butthead’s prediction was utterly wrong. While most denizens of early-to-mid-’90s MTV — not to mention Beavis and Butthead itself, until the show’s recent revival — have long since gone extinct, Ween have earned themselves a permanent place in the pop-culture firmament. Freeman and Melchiondo currently preside over one of the most devoted cult fan bases in American music and regularly plays to sell-out crowds nationwide. A Grateful Dead-worthy community of bootleggers and set-list hounds obsesses over every detail of the band’s 3-hour-plus performances.

  So how has an outfit that seemed destined for joke-band oblivion managed to build and sustain such a healthy legacy? The short answer is that there’s a whole lot more to Ween than just offbeat humor. The long answer is this in-depth examination of the follow-up to Pure Guava, 1994’s Chocolate and Cheese, the album where the band announced to the world that they had no plans to settle for fad status.

  Chocolate and Cheese marked a key turning point in the way Ween presented their music. The band’s previous efforts had flaunted low-tech sound quality as a badge of honor. Ween started as the quirky home-recording project of two middle-schoolers, and even as Freeman and Melchiondo’s career took off, they remained true to this ap
proach: Pure Guava, their breakthrough release and major-label debut, consisted entirely of material recorded at home on a 4-track. Chocolate and Cheese, however, found Freeman, Melchiondo and longtime producer Andrew Weiss constructing a modest studio in a rented space, upgrading to a multitrack digital-recording setup, making use of highly skilled auxiliary players and generally fleshing out their sound in ways that would never have been possible with the primitive approach they had previously favored.

  On Chocolate and Cheese, Freeman and Melchiondo’s songs sounded every bit as trippy and peculiar as they had in the past, but they also came off as surprisingly polished. The album’s higher-fi production allowed the band to deliver their music more accessibly without compromising their core weirdness, and to showcase their growing technical facility and mastery of songcraft, as well as their uncanny grasp of a wide array of musical styles. In this sense, the record presaged the marvelous lushness of later Ween albums such as The Mollusk and Quebec. But it also represented an important step away from the rudimentary yet ingenious home-recording methods on which the band forged their early success, leading some — including at least one of the two band members — to question whether Ween were forsaking an integral aspect of their appeal.

  As they were upgrading their recording methods, Ween were also evolving as a live entity. Before and after their initial brush with MTV success, Ween toured as a scrappy two-piece, just a pair of guys taking the stage with skeletal prerecorded backing tracks and a healthy middle-finger attitude. During this phase, the band cultivated a unique brand of underdog charm that still resonates with diehard fans. But just as Freeman and Melchiondo upgraded their studio methods on Chocolate and Cheese, they also overhauled their live approach, scrapping the canned backing and recruiting virtuoso sidemen, who could keep up with their every pan-stylistic whim. The result was that Ween grew into a well-oiled, highly improvisational machine that would eventually come to be known as one of the great live bands in America.

  What follows is an account of how Ween upped their game during the Chocolate and Cheese era, flouting Beavis and Butthead — and any other lingering detractors — and paving the way for a singular modern-pop success story. To illustrate this shift, I’ve chosen a simple three-part structure:

  I. Before Chocolate and Cheese: A brief glimpse into Ween’s humble origins, followed by an account of how Ween attained cult fame while retaining their homegrown appeal.

  II. After Chocolate and Cheese: A discussion of Ween’s mature work, with an emphasis on the increasingly elaborate production style of their recordings and their evolution into a world-class live act.

  III. Chocolate and Cheese: An in-depth examination of the record itself, and how it served as a bridge between Ween’s early and late phases. I discuss the making of the record, followed by the songs and the artwork.

  This book was an intensely collaborative project. In the course of my research — from June, 2009 through August, 2010 — I interviewed both Mickey Melchiondo and Aaron Freeman, as well as many others who played a part in the making of Chocolate and Cheese. I also spoke with several well-known Ween associates. A complete cast of characters follows the manuscript.

  Before Chocolate and Cheese, part I

  “We both loved to hear ourselves on tape”:

  Ween’s humble origins

  We had both just been in the school district for about a year, so we were both kind of new. And we didn’t like each other, typically. He was more of a jock, and I was more of a trenchcoat-wearing guy. And we met in typing class. We sat next to each other and both realized we were into music. And it started out as me telling him about the Devo records I was listening to and Laurie Anderson and Prince. And he hated Prince, thought Prince was a big fag. He gave me some Dead Kennedys records and some stuff like that to listen to, and I gave him some of my stuff and we just traded music and introduced each other to different sides of early ’80s music. And we just started getting together at his house after school and we both loved to hear ourselves on tape: I think that was the common unity. We started recording immediately, and we named ourselves Ween and that was it.

  —Aaron Freeman

  Beavis and Butthead may have pegged “Push th’ Little Daisies” as a dud, but beneath the silliness, the track is an artful, tender and infectious pop song. The same can’t always be said for much of Ween’s earliest output, found on a series of cassettes issued by the fledgling band in the mid-to-late ’80s. To understand what a major step forward Chocolate and Cheese was for Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo, it’s vital to get a sense of just how humble their artistic beginnings were.

  The Crucial Squeegie Lip lends credence to Freeman’s assertion that Ween “started recording immediately.” The tape is Ween’s inaugural release, dating from roughly a year after the band’s 1984 formation as an after-school outlet for two New Hope, Pennsylvania eighth-graders. At heart, Squeegie Lip is an ultra-raw punk record, full of brief, noisy outbursts rendered in lo-fi sound.

  Many of the tracks privilege hyperactive energy over song structure. “Go!” plays like amateur grindcore, with guitar and drums starting at a crawl and accelerating into a frenzied blur. “Jessica” channels the same manic catharsis into creepy obsession, as anguished cries of a female name give way to outright rage (“Fuck you, Jessica!”). The aptly named “Mindfuck” finds the brothers Ween reveling in scribbly guitar, tumbling drums and apelike yelps.

  Buried under the antimusical din of The Crucial Squeegie Lip are some genuinely inventive moments. Not yet up to the task of reproducing genres, Freeman and Melchiondo seemed content to merely allude to them. At only 45 seconds, “Boobs (Part III)” is a dead-on evocation of Spinal Tap-ish sleaze — “I love your boobs! / I love your soft and spongy boobs!!!” — while the even shorter “Duke of Denim” nails Jonathan Richman’s droll protopunk monologues. “Red as Satan” is meandering and nonsensical (“Dust particles shinin’ in my window remind me of you”), yet it’s still a poignant stab at acoustic folk-pop.

  Other tracks reveal that The Crucial Squeegie Lip was as much an experiment in home recording as it was an album of songs. The tape’s intermittent spoken-word pieces, fashioned as mock interviews, end up stealing the show. “Introview” matter-of-factly explains Ween’s typing-class origins, as well as their patron deity, the Boognish, represented as a spiky-haired cartoon head that adorns much of the band’s artwork to this day. “Drinktalk,” which introduces the sub–Black Flag punk tune “I Drink a Lot,” is a charming piece of sound art that could resonate with anyone who’s ever reveled in the simple joys of home recording. “We totally support and urge young children to smoke crack and drink a lot,” says Melchiondo in an ace deadpan, which wobbles in and out of intelligibility thanks to a slathering of effects.

  All in all, The Crucial Squeegie Lip sounds like what it is: the product of two adolescent buddies discovering DIY art and indulging their freakiest sonic fantasies without the slightest regard for listener comfort. Ween would carry this spirit with them all the way to the point of 1992’s Pure Guava, their major-label debut and the record that earned them their MTV breakthrough.

  Before Chocolate and Cheese, part II

  Subsidized scribbles: Pure Guava and the underdog mystique

  For [The Pod and Pure Guava], Mickey and Aaron recorded on the 4-track at the Pod, which was a shack they lived in on this horse farm outside New Hope. They recorded all this shit and they would just give me, like, a bag of tapes, and I would just sift through it, pick out songs and mix them and sequence the record.

  —Andrew Weiss

  One day, a box of Pure Guava discs shows up from Elektra, and I think I started crying, because I was a music junkie and now we were on the same label as the Doors. Here was this record that we recorded in our apartment for not even two dollars — we didn’t even buy new tape, just taped over demo tapes bands gave us on the road — and it’s on Elektra.

  —Mickey Melchiondo in Magnet Magazine;

  August/Septembe
r, 2000

  … a major label is now subsidizing their scribbles.

  —Spin on Ween’s Pure Guava; December, 1992

  The years following The Crucial Squeegie Lip yielded several more self-released Ween cassettes, as well as the now-classic full-lengths God Ween Satan: The Oneness (1990) and The Pod (1991). During this period, Freeman and Melchiondo’s project evolved considerably, in both the musical and professional senses. Yet Ween seemed to feel no compulsion to outpace their origins. Pure Guava, the band’s 1992 major-label debut, and the record that earned Ween their MTV moment, grew directly out of their two-guys-and-a-4-track beginnings. Moreover, it flaunted the duo’s primitive aesthetic to a striking degree. Freeman and Melchiondo’s boldly unadorned live show followed suit.

  In terms of production, Pure Guava actually registered as a step backward from previous Ween records. Compared to The Crucial Squeegie Lip and the other cassette releases, Ween’s first proper full-length, God Ween Satan — issued on the Minneapolis indie Twin/Tone, which had previously nurtured the careers of the Replacements and Soul Asylum — featured vastly improved playing, a far more diverse stylistic palette and much crisper sound, realized via the 16-track home studios of Andrew Weiss and Greg Frey, both part of Ween’s inner circle to this day. There’s plenty of Squeegie Lip- style obnoxiousness on God Ween Satan (the nightmarish bee-sting lament “Bumblebee”; the cock-rock meltdown “Common Bitch”; and a monolithic, Ted Nugent-worthy version of “You Fucked Up,” which had originally appeared on Squeegie Lip), but the album is rendered in bright, relatively hi-fi sound, befitting the band’s transition to a visible and respected label. Melchiondo handled both guitar and drums on the record, yet many of the songs, such as the jazzy hepcat riff “Never Squeal,” sound like a band playing live.