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

  Ween’s third album, Pure Guava, offered something very different. Namely, it sounded nothing like traditional rock music. God Ween Satan’s live-band aura may have been an illusion, but that fact wasn’t obvious to the ear. Pure Guava, on the other hand, dispensed with this illusion entirely, a trend that had begun with Ween’s sophomore LP, 1991’s The Pod. These records portrayed Ween not as a band in the traditional sense, but as a kind of post-psychedelic home-recording project, one both constrained and inspired by limited resources.

  Recorded on a 4-track by Freeman and Melchiondo at their then-home, a fly-ridden shack known as the Pod — situated on a farm in the New Hope area — and issued more or less in their original form, these pair of releases reveled in an unabashedly artificial soundworld, full of plodding drum-machine beats and other synthetic textures. Put another way, The Pod and Pure Guava represent the ultimate realization of what the band likes to refer to as “brown,” a term for some combination of deranged, tripped-out and flagrantly weird.1

  It doesn’t get any more brown than The Pod, a deeply tranquilized-sounding slog. On twisted tracks like “Frank,” vocals are pitch-shifted to molasses speed, drum-machine rhythms clank and crawl at agonizingly slow tempos and Melchiondo’s obnoxiously distorted guitarwork squalls out of the speakers. The lyrics fixate on in-jokey memes such as the pork roll, egg and cheese — a breakfast sandwich popular in New Jersey and Philadelphia — and the Stallion, a pampered, ego-maniacal talking horse revisited by Ween on later songs. Yet buried within all this egregious mind-fuckery are some truly great songs, including the attitudinal anthem “Dr. Rock,” the eerie existential soul number “Demon Sweat” and the post-Beatles psych-pop marvel “Pork Roll Egg and Cheese.”

  Pure Guava is a sequel to The Pod in every sense. The 1992 release features a nearly identical mix of aggressive brownness — including the nursery rhyme from hell that is “Poop Ship Destroyer” as well as the overdriven noise miasma “Mourning Glory” — and skewed yet ingenious pop songs, such as the bedroom-prog triumph “Don’t Get 2 Close 2 My Fantasy.” There’s even another installment in the Stallion saga. In fact, there was only one significant difference between The Pod and Pure Guava, but it was a crucial one: The former album came out on the notoriously eccentric independent label Shimmy Disc and could therefore be pegged as just another strange dispatch from the teeming indie underground. And though it was actually complete at the time of Ween’s major-label signing and licensed as-is to the band’s new backer, Pure Guava took on a whole different meaning due to a few simple words on the back cover: “Elektra Entertainment, a division of Warner Communications Inc.” This particular slab of brown was, shockingly, a product of the mainstream record industry, issuing from the same label that had released multiplatinum smashes such as Natalie Cole’s Unforgettable: With Love and Queen’s News of the World.

  The textural loopiness of The Pod and Pure Guava, combined with Ween’s continued penchant for absurd humor and their self-perpetuated drugged-out image — “In the time that this album was completed, we filled up 3,600 hours of tape, and inhaled five cans of Scotchguard,” dead-panned The Pod’s liner notes — resulted in music that was easy to dismiss offhand as the product of a joke band. Few bands will ever come up with tunes as enduring as “Pork Roll Egg and Cheese” or “Don’t Get 2 Close 2 My Fantasy,” but however brilliant much of this material was, the medium of these albums overwhelmed the message. The low-tech presentation suggested that Freeman and Melchiondo were just horsing around, as if they couldn’t be bothered to recruit a real band or round up proper instruments.

  Ween’s concert appearances during the Pure Guava era only reinforced this notion. A DVD of the band’s early-’90s performances, issued along with the live CD At the Cat’s Cradle, reveals a duo wholly at peace with their amateur aura. In footage from March, 1992 at the Columbus, Ohio club Stache’s, a DAT2 player pipes in deafening drum-machine and bass accompaniment, as Freeman and Melchiondo strike funny poses and sing in pitch-shifted voices, yielding something that resembles a surreal talent-show act. Yet even in this setting, the strength of Ween’s songs, not to mention Melchiondo’s guitar prowess and Freeman’s vocal talent, shines through. If on The Crucial Squeegie Lip, Ween’s production values mirrored their nascent musicality, the two aspects had since grown to seem very much at odds. Somewhat shockingly, Ween had become a highly skilled band.

  This contradiction gave Pure Guava-era Ween a distinct underdog quality. In their own minds and in the minds of fans, the act of persisting with their rudimentary, DAT-driven setup even as their musical abilities and visibility skyrocketed was a point of punk-ethics-derived pride. In the liner notes to At the Cat’s Cradle, Melchiondo fondly recalled the Ween live experience during this period:

  Every night we had to face the crowd pretty much naked, there was nowhere to hide, no room for an off night. We did a lot of talking to the crowd and one another between songs — we pretty much had to. We faced a lot of hostile audiences when we were the opening act on a show. There was a lot to hate about us but we won over a lot of people in the process because of our sheer nerve. A lot of our closest friends feel that Ween live pretty much ended when we switched to a traditional band format with a bass player and drummer … Once we started releasing records and touring more as a duo we got a lot better at it, we stopped caring about what the audience thought of us and just focused on having fun onstage. This was when we maximized our brownness.

  Andrew Weiss, producer of God Ween Satan and many of Ween’s subsequent full-lengths, including Chocolate and Cheese, also alludes to this period’s antagonistic appeal:

  Back in the day, when it was just the two of them with the tape deck, it was almost like performance art in a way when you would see them. ’Cause it was Ween versus the audience. Everybody hated them, initially. They would do shows at City Gardens, which was like the hot spot in Trenton; all the bands would play there on tour. I remember one [show] in particular, and Ween was opening for Fugazi, and it was just Ween versus the audience. And it was hilarious — it was brilliant and it was great.

  Matt Sweeney remembers this very same show. A guitarist, vocalist and producer best known for his work with Chavez, Billy Corgan’s Zwan and Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Sweeney also played in the New Jersey indie-rock band Skunk, which shared bills with Ween in the late ’80s and contained future Ween drummer Claude Coleman. He recalls Ween’s duo years with a kind of perverse awe:

  I remember being blown away that Ween had become a band that everybody liked after years of being a band that would piss people off to the point of violence. I recall them opening for one of the early Fugazi shows at City Gardens — they were pelted with change by newly bald straight edge kids as Aaron sang the same Cat Stevens song over and over. Or the two of them clearing the room at NYC’s the Pyramid Club with [Pure Guava’s] “Reggaejunkiejew.” Mickey then gave Aaron an atomic wedgie for the benefit of the remaining few audience members. Keep in mind that people just playing to a tape deck was somehow really insulting and confrontational to a “rock” crowd.

  As Ween established themselves as a major-label act and made an in-road on MTV, fans picked up on and even relished the duo’s confrontational attitude toward live performance. In a February, 1993 MTV News segment on Ween, which features clips of Freeman and Melchiondo bringing their super-brown duo act to New York’s high-profile Irving Plaza venue a month earlier, fan interviews reveal a strange kind of masochism. “They think we suck,” one woman says. “I think they think we’re stupid for liking them because I think they’re a joke,” another clearly smitten female notes. Here, the segment cuts to an interview with the brothers Ween. “Our fans are the biggest losers in the whole world,” states Melchiondo with a smirk. Losers or not, the band’s growing cult clearly relished the less-is-more credo that Ween in the duo years prided themselves on. “The two guys have such a stage presence, even though they don’t have 50 instruments,” another showgoer says.

  Ween’s ability to
have it both ways, to reach a larger audience while retaining their initial DIY recording methods and every ounce of their insular obnoxiousness onstage, was no fluke. The band was fortunate enough to enjoy the support of a major-label staff who understood that to overdress Ween at this stage would be to spoil them. Steve Ralbovsky, the A&R representative who signed Ween to Elektra, explains:

  The lo-fi thing was almost a mark of distinction. It was kind of a turn away from super-hi-fi, super-deluxe digital recording. It gave [Ween] another measure of uniqueness, and it wasn’t so lo-fi that it was an unpleasant listening experience. It was part of their sound, and part of who they were, and part of what they did. It hearkened to what they did live, and I didn’t give it much of a second thought. If there was any second thought it was, “Sonically, this is cool that it’s 4-track and lo-fi.”

  Ralbovsky’s faith in the band’s methods meant that he played a much more passive role in working with Ween than with many other artists. “It was basically: Give them the resources to make the records the way they wanted to make them, support their agenda within the label and try to come up with creative plans with my colleagues to support the releases,” he explains. “And just basically get out of the way.”

  Even if Ralbovsky was committed to getting out of the way, Ween wanted to make it official. Dave Ayers, Ween’s manager at the time of the Elektra deal and the man responsible for Ween’s initial Twin/Tone signing, still marvels at the conditions of the major-label contract:

  We were able to make this crazy record deal, still the best record deal I’ve ever been involved in. The record company not only had no artistic input; it said in the contract that the record company’s not allowed to come to the studio. That was in the contract. Because those guys just started coming up with shit. “How ’bout if they never come to the studio? Steve’s fine but I don’t want him coming to the studio. Can we put that in the contract?” And the lawyer would be like, “Sure.” And all that stuff ended up flying. And the money was significant — it wasn’t, like, millions of dollars, but it was hundreds of thousands per record for records that were to be judged not on artistic merit but on technical quality only, and the standard for technical quality was, in fact, Pure Guava, a 4-track record. So, their whole career, they could’ve made 4-track records and collected checks for $350,000. That was the joke: I think we got $200,000 for licensing Pure Guava, and that record cost them about $42 to make.

  Andrew Weiss stresses how unprecedented this all was. “No major label had ever put out a record recorded on a 4-track, except maybe [Bruce Springsteen’s] Nebraska,” he notes. “But obviously [Nebraska] didn’t sound Scotchguard. It didn’t wear its 4-track on its sleeve like Pure Guava does. So that was kind of a coup because they got all this dough for doing a record on a 4-track that cost, like, $100 to make, and that was probably all spent on pizza and weed.”

  The Elektra arrangement may have seemed like winning the stoner’s lottery, but to Dave Ayers, it was also emblematic of a unique era in the music industry. He’s quick to praise the shrewd instincts of Ralbovsky and Bob Krasnow, Elektra’s president at the time of Ween’s signing and an industry veteran who had previously worked with left-field visionaries such as Captain Beefheart, Sun Ra and Love’s Arthur Lee. “Steve was the odd and crucial link that could make something like Pure Guava happen,” says Ayers. “And Krasnow was as weird a guy in his own way. He had a very eclectic roster of real artists at a time when it was becoming quickly out of fashion to do that. The timing had to be right on something like that.”

  The timing clearly was right, and the 4-track-via-major-label mode of Pure Guava struck a chord beyond the underground. In 1993, Freeman and Melchiondo appeared as guests on The Jane Pratt Show, a daytime talk program hosted by the founder of Sassy and Jane magazines. Introducing the band as part of a “Homemade Media Festival,” Pratt played up the duo’s use of cheap gear, introducing them as “a band called Ween, that actually records on a portable 4-track system.” During an interview segment, Melchiondo portrayed Ween’s devotion to simple technology as both a badge of honor and a sort of truth serum:

  Pratt: Why do you guys use that relatively low-tech recording system, as opposed to, like, going into a studio the way most bands do?

  Melchiondo: I think it started out ’cause it was all we could afford really. And when you’re in the studio, you’re recording on the clock, and an hour of studio time plus the cost of the engineer is really more than your average, whatever, 16-year-old kid can afford, so …

  Pratt: But you actually like the sound that you get that way, right?

  Melchiondo: Yeah, sure; it sounds great.

  Pratt: What do you prefer about it? You like sort of a more low-tech sound anyway, or …?

  Melchiondo: No, I think when you only have four tracks to record on, you have to write better songs, ’cause you can’t do much production … [laughs]

  The duo goes on to offer an unmistakably brown yet undeniably beautiful version of one such song, the smooth soul number “Freedom of ’76,” which would end up on Chocolate and Cheese in a much more fleshed-out form. A DAT machine onstage churns out a plodding funk beat, over which Melchiondo strums jazzy chords, while Freeman shows off a supple, Prince-like falsetto. The pair’s easy virtuosity and comfort onstage constrasts starkly with their makeshift setup and disheveled appearance. (“This was filmed early in the morning and we were very stoned,” wrote Melchiondo, annotating the clip on YouTube.) It’s clear that at this point in Ween’s career, this contrast was key to their appeal. Like expert pool hustlers, Freeman and Melchiondo came off as a couple of postadolescent burnouts — until you saw their formidable talents in action. At this point, Ween seemed completely content in their brownness. When Pratt asked Freeman and Melchiondo if they’d ever thought of upgrading, all she received in response is playful sarcasm.

  Pratt: But now that you’re on Elektra, are you gonna do your next album still the same way, or are you gonna, like, fly to the Bahamas and go to a big studio and all that [laughs]?

  Freeman: Yeah, we’re gonna record the next album in Maui, in a 48-track studio [laughs].

  Melchiondo: I think we wanna get, like, Michael Bolton’s backing band … [laughs] and do the drums on 30 tracks.

  Neither Maui nor Michael Bolton’s backing band lay in the band’s future, but on their next record, Ween would begin to set aside the homegrown approach that made it so easy for them to play the lovable underdogs. Before the year was out, the duo would make a modest yet very significant upgrade to their tried-and-true methods, tracking the follow-up to Pure Guava in a rented space with producer Andrew Weiss rather than at home, and taking advantage of state-of-the-art digital recording. It was a move that would pave the way for Ween’s more-mature later work and that would have a profound effect on the way fans and the general public perceived the group.

  After Chocolate and Cheese

  “We can pull off our fantasies”: Ween come into their own

  The difference between Ween ten years ago and Ween now: Instead of talking about something, we can actually do it…. We’ve gotten to the point where we can pull off our fantasies.

  —Melchiondo on the 2007 Ween full-length,

  La Cucaracha

  It’s September of 2009 — 16 years after the Jane Pratt Show appearance — and Ween is playing to a crowd of more than 6,300 at Red Rocks, a gorgeous outdoor amphitheater near Denver that’s ground zero for the jam-band movement. Much of the audience is singing along, glow sticks are flying through the pot-scented air, and the mood is festive. Freeman and Melchiondo are onstage, but the DAT machine is nowhere to be found. In its place is a seasoned rhythm section, which serves up lean funk, bombastic prog or tidy pop as the song demands. There are busy stage lights and a hyperactive smoke machine. This is, in other words, a big rock concert at a world-famous venue (the Allman Brothers had played there just a few nights prior), and Ween are more than holding their own. Melchiondo solos frequently and with gusto, and the whole
band comes off as exceedingly professional. How in the world did this happen?

  Ween never did fly to Maui and recruit Michael Bolton’s rhythm section, but they did enhance their approach significantly. Chocolate and Cheese set off a process by which the band gradually polished their studio sound, as well as their live show, while never letting go of their inherent weirdness. Post-Chocolate and Cheese records such as The Mollusk, White Pepper and Quebec found the band — along with Weiss and other producers — constructing tracks of dazzling lushness. Simultaneously, by the late ’90s, Ween began to garner a reputation as a great live band in the improv-friendly, post-Grateful Dead lineage, rather than an outfit who triumphed onstage despite their technical shortcomings. Auxiliary live players such as drummer Claude Coleman, bassist Dave Dreiwitz and keyboardist Glenn McClelland applied their consummate versatility to Ween’s increasingly accomplished songs, yielding a live ensemble that could play anything, from a concentrated two-minute metal onslaught to an epic half-hour funk jam. In the midst of this live and studio evolution, Ween received an unlikely audience boost when iconic jam band Phish covered the Chocolate and Cheese track “Roses Are Free” and adopted the song into their core live repertoire.

  Together, these factors helped Freeman and Melchiondo cultivate an adoring legion of fans enamored of their every oddball whim. Listeners who might not have given the staunchly crude Pure Guava the time of day, or who may have been tempted to dismiss the band as a postadolescent in-joke, discovered that beneath Ween’s scruffy facade lay a truly skillful and imaginative outfit. As it turned out, it was Beavis and Butthead who would soon disappear (from 1997 until the show’s recent revival); Ween, on the other hand, thrives to this day.