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

  There’s nothing extraordinary about adorning one’s record with a barely concealed depiction of female nudity. But rarely has erotic album art seemed so at odds with the music inside as it does in the case of Chocolate and Cheese. Contemplating the photos of the Boognish-belt-clad model, one thinks of countless other borderline-pornographic album covers: Roxy Music’s Country Life, the Black Crowes’ Amorica — which came out less than two months after Chocolate and Cheese and employed the same red-white-and-blue color palette — the Cars’ Candy-O or various ’70s funk titles by the Ohio Players and similar acts. (The nonprurient-minded might light upon the Commodores’ All the Great Hits, a 1982 release whose cover depicted the midriff of a muscular male boxer wearing a championship belt.) But while all these releases explore themes of lust and romance with varying degrees of sleaze, there’s barely a mention of sex to be found on Chocolate and Cheese. The album’s nearest thing to a sex-themed song is “Voodoo Lady,” with its obliquely suggestive chorus of “You drive me crazy with that / Boogie oogie oogie oogie oogie.” But on the whole, Chocolate and Cheese deals more directly with disease (“Spinal Meningitis,” “The HIV Song”), love gone wrong (“Take Me Away,” “Baby Bitch”) and drugged-out juvenilia (“Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?,” “Candi”). The content of the album seems much more in keeping with the disheveled weirdos audiences encountered in the “Push th’ Little Daisies” video rather than any sort of oversexed rock stars. In that sense, the cover scans as a send-up of ultra-exploitative rock ’n’ roll imagery as opposed a sincere example of it. Perhaps the band was even satirizing their own sonic upgrade, complementing their slicked-up sound with an image that could be superficially read as a desperate attempt to conform to the rock mainstream.

  Some took the bait. “This female entertainment editor sent the record back and refused to review it because of the cover, which she deemed as being sexist,” says Melchiondo. Playboy was another outlet that didn’t really distinguish between Ween’s version of sex appeal and any other; in this context, though, the exploitation was welcome. The magazine’s website included Chocolate and Cheese in a 2002 roundup of the “sexiest album covers of all time” alongside the aforementioned Roxy Music, Black Crowes and Ohio Players sleeves, as well as other classic designs for records by 2 Live Crew, Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass and more. The article also featured a reader poll, and when the results were tabulated, Chocolate and Cheese came out on top. Mickey Melchiondo takes pride in having triumphed over various time-tested favorites: “I think Ween fans spammed the vote. So we beat out the Ohio Players and Roxy Music and anybody else who has naked chicks on their record cover, like the ten records you would think of.” The Playboy poll proved to be a trailblazer: subsequent sexiest-album-cover round-ups from Nerve and the sci-fi site UGO featured Chocolate and Cheese as well.

  If the cover registers as an over-the-top sight gag in light of the music within, it doesn’t seem quite so outlandish in the context of Ween’s discography, which had its share of sex-themed material. God Ween Satan featured the salacious, nearly nine-minute-long funk jam “L.M.L.Y.P.” (i.e. “Let Me Lick Your Pussy”), while The Crucial Squeegie Lip included an entirely trilogy of songs simply called “Boobs,” parts I through III (really the same song performed at three different intensity levels). The lyrics exemplify Ween at their most crassly hilarious. In light of observations such as “I love your boobs,” the cover of Chocolate and Cheese starts to seem like the ultimate realization of Freeman and Melchiondo’s adolescent fantasies, a triumphant Wayne’s World-esque “Schwing!” What could be cooler, after all, than a seminude woman modeling your band’s crude logo?

  Ultimately, as with much of Ween’s output, the Chocolate and Cheese cover doesn’t conform to a single interpretation. Classic example of shamelessly sexualized rock ’n’ roll imagery? Twisted meditation on (or parody of) same? According to admirers such as Stephan Said, who seems almost in awe of the artwork, the answer would be a little bit of both:

  [The cover] really was effective in putting across the whole Ween ideal. You didn’t have to know exactly what the point was, because the point was that it forced you to question. It made a mockery of pop culture. The record cover looked so pop that the first thing you thought was, “Oh yeah, right” — it just fit right in. Except then you looked at it, and it said “Ween” and then it was like, “But isn’t that really almost disgusting?” It was twisted but very smart. I’m sure it raised lots of eyebrows in different ways, positively and negatively and everything, which is, you know — that’s Ween.

  “It turned into the chick”: Behind the scenes

  The cover concept for Chocolate and Cheese came directly from the band, but it fell to several talented visual artists to execute the image. Every aspect of the process, from finding a model to designing the belt, presented unique challenges.

  Initially, Ween had a very different Chocolate and Cheese cover idea in mind. “We were gonna try and get a sailor, like a gay sailor, in red, white and blue wearing the belt,” explains Melchiondo. “And then somehow that didn’t go over very good and it turned into the chick. That’s all I remember: We wanted to get a sailor dude wearing the belt, with some ugly-ass body.”

  It’s unclear exactly where in the process the gay sailor “turned into the chick,” but it seems that when the band first approached the firm in charge of realizing the cover, NYC’s still-active Reiner Design Consultants, Inc., they specified a preference for the female anatomy. “I’m pretty sure I came up with the idea,” says Freeman. “I had sketched it out and still have the notebook somewhere. I remember telling Mickey how the top of the [shirt] would cut out right below the nipple line and so it was very important to have big breasts with a large ‘under portion.’” Reiner’s creative director Roger Gorman says, “Basically the direction we were given was that they wanted to do something that picked up on the old ’70s Ohio Players covers,11 which always smacked of nudity and sexuality. So we were trying to think about how to come up with something that sort of reflected the album. And then somehow in our conversation, the idea of one of those classic wrestling belts came up, as a way of incorporating the Boognish.” Melchiondo remembers feeding Reiner a very specific image for the prop: “I think the instruction we gave was that it should look like the WBA World Championship belt for boxing.”

  It fell to Rick Patrick, the Reiner designer who directly oversaw the Chocolate and Cheese cover, to realize the prop. “I worked with a jeweler friend of mine, Marty Sarandria, who ended up making the gold-plated Boognish emblem,” says Patrick. “I gave him the Boognish and sized it. We sort of polished up the Boognish for that but it’s pretty true to form. I think we just crisped it up a little bit. And I had another friend of mine, Tina Attila, create the red, white and blue wrestler’s belt to fit on the girl’s body.”

  Marty Sarandria, who had previously fashioned a metal headpiece for the cover of Living Colour’s 1993 effort, Stain, notes that while today, an image such as the metal Boognish might be rendered with Photoshop, back then, it was necessary to fabricate the actual object.

  At the time, it was just when the computer animation for graphic art was beginning, and they were having a hard time mimicking metal. So I had a side job of making metal pieces, and [Rick Patrick] would incorporate that into [his] artwork. I used brass plate. I actually used a whole plate, because if you look at the Boognish design that I did, it’s sort of like a whole connected kind of piece. So I just used a plate of metal that was that circumference and I pierced it with a saw and ground it and cut it out and just got that one-dimensional shape. And then I made fasteners for it, kind of like back rivets, and I had a plate of really shiny, 24-karat gold. And [Tina Attila] had made the belt to the dimensions that I was making the piece. I just gave it to her, and she attached it.

  Locating a cover model proved just as complex, as Gorman attests:

  We had a really hard time. We approached a lot of the top modeling agencies, but we wanted a little bit of nu
dity in there, and as soon as you equate nudity with music, a red flag goes up. No one wanted to get involved in this cover. And there’s hardly anything revealed on that cover: I mean, there’s just a little bit of breast and you see a little bit of ass cheek on the back, and that’s it. It’s really pretty tame when you think about it. But in those days, it was always hard, because these covers were being carried in Wal-Mart and stuff. Everyone really got kind of scared.

  Rick Patrick had to turn to his personal contacts to recruit Ashley Savage, whose torso appeared on the cover. “Today I think it would be easier to do that photo shoot, but then it wasn’t that easy to get someone who would pose topless,” he recalls. “The girl was a friend of a friend. She was a dancer.” The design team knew from the start that Savage’s face would be cropped out. “It was really a case of putting the emphasis on the belt,” says Gorman. “Because the thing is, as soon as you have a face in a picture, people’s eyes always go to the person’s face. So the idea was to kind of have something that suggested this look from the ’70s, but what it did was actually focus you on the belt.”

  Photographer John Kuczala, another friend of Patrick’s, handled the shoot in his own studio. He and Patrick tried several different approaches before settling on the half-tank-top. “They had initially wanted her to be shot topless, and we tried,” says Patrick. “We did shoot some stuff with her arms over her boobs.” Kuczala remembers one other approach: “We started by putting an Ace bandage on her instead of the shirt, because it was going to be cropped below the nipples, but that just wasn’t really looking too good.” Eventually the team settled on the red shirt. “She was a dancer, and obviously was super-well-endowed,” Patrick notes. “So we ultimately went with the chopped-off shirt. It was just sort of an evolution during the shoot. We shot her topless, and then we shot her with the shirt and then we made the shirt shorter and tucked it under. It was always supposed to just be the torso, and to be sexy and risqué in a weird way.”

  Some of the outtakes featured a more fetish-like focus. “We did some shots of her with chocolate and cheese on her feet,” Kuczala says matter-of-factly. “You know, like, chocolate dripped over her feet.” Rick Patrick explains: “I’m not sure where the inspiration came from, but sometimes you have a photo opportunity and you try to just experiment. A close-up of that might have just been interesting as a little detail in the package. So we just did different variations and tried some things, and I remember we did shoot that but we just decided it wasn’t working. I think it was melted chocolate and chunks of cheese. That sounds bad, for some reason!”

  Even without the feet shots, the album cover has accrued a serious cult following. Unsurprisingly, many have inquired after the whereabouts of Ashley Savage, who has yet to surface for an interview regarding her Chocolate and Cheese experience. Ween have perpetuated the mystery, claiming never to have met her. Melchiondo confirms this, but Claude Coleman remembers things differently. “We met her once; she came to a show,” he says. “It must have been shortly after that record. It was definitely that time. Andrew was definitely in the band. It was definitely New York. Maybe it was like Tramp’s or something. She came to the gig and she was passing around like, ‘Hey, this is the Chocolate and Cheese girl.’”

  As for Savage’s current whereabouts, no one seems to have a clue. An online search turns up only a brief IMDb entry with several obscure late-’90s entries. However, Rick Patrick’s friend who initially recommended Savage for the job was able to confirm that the Ashley Savage on the Chocolate and Cheese cover was the same Ashley Savage who appeared in a late-’90s Seinfeld spoof — made for Saturday Night Live but never aired — starring actor Peter Austin Noto. (Those interested in seeing the rest of Savage are advised to locate this clip on YouTube.)

  A similar mystery surrounds the Boognish belt. The band has claimed over the years (e.g. in a 2008 Spin article) that the design firm had confiscated the belt, but at one point (according to a post on the Ween forum), Melchiondo apparently promised the item to the millionth visitor to the Ween website. Said visitor never received their prize, and in fact, Melchiondo now claims to have the item in his possession. “I have it,” he says impishly. “Nobody knows that, but I’ll give it up. It took me about three or four years to get it, but I got it. I never told anyone that I got it. I did my independent research and found it.”

  As Melchiondo describes it, the retrieval was fairly arduous:

  Well, I think what happened is the record came out and we never thought about the belt. And then years went by and we were like, “Hey, what happened to the belt?” And nobody wanted to cop to it, at first. We were all suspicious of one another as to where it was. ’Cause we knew somebody had it; we knew it didn’t get thrown away. It was too nice, you know? I had to get somebody to cop to it. Everybody stonewalled me till I insisted that it came back. I think Reiner, the design company had it. I got it through our old manager, his secretary, who worked with us for years — that’s who I talked to 80 times a day on the phone. I think after they closed down I got her to track it down for me. I don’t remember. I have it in storage, though. I don’t ever look at it. We have, like, 25 replicas hanging in our studio. People bring them to gigs and throw them onstage. There’s a whole ton of them.

  When discussing the actual object, Melchiondo speaks with a certain degree of awe. “It’s leather, and it’s really heavy, which is the way you always measure quality,” he asserts. “It’s really, really heavy — the buckle itself, it’s brass or steel. And it’s got the rhinestones all over it. It’s got a real thick buckle. Like I said, it’s heavy. It’s like you’d imagine if you put on the real heavyweight title belt. It’s a quality thing. It looks good in the pictures because it is well-made.” It seems that Melchiondo has denied his partner the pleasure of savoring the accessory. When queried about it, Freeman writes, “I would still like to know where the belt is!”

  “What do you normally do?”: The

  Chocolate and Cheese portraits

  In light of the risqué gaudiness of the album cover, the layout of the inside sleeve is surprisingly tender and reflective. The spread features three gorgeous black-and-white portraits by noted rock photographer Danny Clinch, an Annie Liebowitz protégé whose portfolio includes shots of Tom Waits, Björk, Kanye West, Bono, Bruce Springsteen, Green Day and other pop royalty. There are two mirror-image shots of Freeman and Melchiondo — each sitting in a fishing boat on a placid lake — and one picture of the pair standing barefoot underneath a waterfall. For all their simplicity, the photos sum up a few key ideas regarding the band’s evolving self-image. First, the photos root Ween in the natural beauty of their native, nonurban surroundings. Second, they impart a sense of adventure, of a humble local band venturing beyond their comfort zone. And third, they display a self-conscious artiness that’s absent from the previous Ween album packages, and thus, they serve as a visual representation of the band’s increasingly professional attitude toward their art.

  These portraits were all shot in the vicinity of the band’s hometown of New Hope, Pennsylvania, a quaint, hippie-ish borough of 2,000 people or so in Bucks County. The photos are so picturesque, they could almost double as postcard images. The sincerity on display here is a bit disarming, considering Ween’s sometimes-irreverent attitude toward their native environment. The Pure Guava track “Pumpin’ 4 the Man,” chronicling Melchiondo’s thankless gig as a gas-station attendant, doubles as an antipatriotic dis:

  So read ’em up and stick ’em

  Pump that fucker good

  Some woman down on Main Street needs a jump

  Get your fingers outta your ass

  And pump some faggot’s gas

  And think about how bad New Hope sucks

  Yet Ween has long taken pride in the fact that they’re not a big-city band. Despite its proximity to New York City — only about a 90-minute drive — New Hope still feels like a rustic haven. Thus, it’s served as the perfect home base for Freeman and Melchiondo, artists intent
on reaching a broad audience while at the same time retaining their trademark eccentricity. “We always just tried to avoid going to New York for anything that had to do with the band,” says Melchiondo, reflecting on the decision to shoot the Chocolate and Cheese portraits near New Hope. “We just found it was a lot less stressful to do things down here. We’ve always done our interviews down here; we shot some videos down here. Our photo shoots are always done down here. It’s kind of parallel with everything we do: We just do it down here, at home.”

  Beyond capturing the band at home, the photos depict a typical day in the life of Ween circa Chocolate and Cheese. “[Danny Clinch] came down and said, ‘What do you normally do?’” recalls Melchiondo. “We were just fishing a lot back then. And I had a big old Coupe deVille back then; I remember driving around and he was taking pictures of us with that, just around our farmhouse that we lived in at the time.” Freeman paints a similar picture of the shoot: “We had started working with our good friend Danny Clinch at the time and he loves to be in his subjects’ natural settings. I remember having a great day fishing with Mickey and Danny, and by the day’s end, [we] had the insert cover.”