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

  It did allow us to do backing vocals and stuff like that, some arrangement stuff. Take the drums from the drum machine and put them on separate tracks: Put the kick on one and the snare on another so you could actually mix it later. Whereas on the 4-track, the drum machine goes on one track. So it allowed you to do stereo, basically. When you do it on a 4-track, you can put the guitars in the middle and the drums on one side and the vocals on another side and the bass somewhere else or whatever — but that was basically it.

  Nonetheless, as with the adjustment to digital recording, there were growing pains to contend with. As Ween’s Jane Pratt Show appearance made clear, recording on a shoestring had become a proud mark of distinction for Ween (“It makes you have to write better songs”). During the making of Chocolate and Cheese, Melchiondo remembers struggling with the sense that he was turning his back on the band’s original aesthetic, which played a huge role in the unique appeal of Pure Guava:

  Ween had always been a duo to that point, onstage, and also in the — not even in the studio because we never had even really worked in the studio. We always worked at home, up until that record. So it was different in two very big ways: One is that it was a multitrack record instead of a 4-track record, and we were re-recording our songs for the first time. There was always just one version before: the 4-track version. That was what the records were. And then also we shifted to being a four-piece [live] band, with Claude on drums and Andrew on bass. So it was scary. You know, it was this punk-rock ethic, just two of us and a tape deck, and now it’s sort of a slicker-sounding record and a different presentation altogether. So it wasn’t as raw as The Pod or Pure Guava or the first record. It was more slick. There was more singing on it, more playing. There were songs with choruses and all that instead of jams. It was a big step for us. Looking back, it was obviously a big step forward, but at the time, it felt like, “Oh, this isn’t gnarly enough,” or something like that.

  Weiss seems to have harbored fewer misgivings:

  It was still really brown. I mean, we weren’t going into the Hit Factory or the Record Plant or something and blowing like a half million dollars — which I would’ve loved to have done. Now everybody records their own records. Back then it wasn’t nearly as common; it was still pretty punk rock to do that. So in my mind, it was still totally keeping it real. It was just technologically a step up from the 4-track. But it was still very insular. It was primarily just the three of us making this record. So it was very in-house. It wasn’t like we were relegating decisions to an outside producer or something like that. It was still very much the core. For me, it wasn’t really an issue. But it provided more freedom, just having more tracks and stuff, to do stuff that couldn’t be done before with four tracks.

  There’s a lot to be said for four tracks. When you do something on four tracks, everything’s gotta count; there’s no room for fluff. And on some later stuff, we were maybe guilty of that. Quebec was definitely guilty of that. There was a lot of fluff there. By that point, Pro Tools had gotten really user-friendly and you could just record, like, a million fucking vocal tracks and all that stuff. But [at the time of Chocolate and Cheese], the equipment was so tenuous that I think we didn’t trust it to go much further. So even though it was more than four tracks, it was still pretty nitty-gritty. It was still pretty much the most important stuff.

  “It was born out of necessity and became an aesthetic”: Goodbye to the drum machine

  In Weiss and the band’s estimation, “the most important stuff” included real drums, as opposed to the clunky electronic beats that had driven The Pod and Pure Guava. This shift resulted in Chocolate and Cheese’s most straightforward, professional-sounding tracks, such as “Freedom of ’76” and “Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?” The switch to real drums also allowed Freeman and Melchiondo to get back to their simulated-live-band roots.

  Melchiondo explains:

  When we did God Ween Satan, we were living in my parents’ house. And I had a drum kit, so all of our songs were very natural instrumentation: bass, drums, guitar and vocals. That whole first record, pretty much, if you didn’t know it was two guys, you would assume it was a band. But when we moved into the Pod and did The Pod and Pure Guava, we just adapted to it. It was like, “Okay, we can’t do that anymore, so we’ll just have a drum machine.” And it changed our sound from more of a punk-rock thing to more of a — I don’t know what you want to call those records, but you can’t just do something like that and think it’s not gonna change the sound, you know?

  Andrew Weiss also emphasizes that the use of drum machine started as a matter of convenience. “It was born out of necessity and kind of became an aesthetic, as opposed to ‘We’re doing this with a drum machine because that’s what we like,’” he notes. “If you were going to record real drums on the 4-track, the whole kit would be on one track. That’s all you could do, you know? Unless you wanted to do it on three tracks and bounce it down to one, but that’s way too complex.” Aaron Freeman concurs: “The only reason we used a drum machine was because it required no space. We didn’t have to feed it and listen to it complain.”

  Greg Frey, Ween’s current manager and longtime associate, offers a similar perspective. “The Pod and Pure Guava were completely recorded by Mickey and Aaron on the floor of their living room on a 4-track,” he says. “And because it was done on the floor of their living room, there was no drum kit. They’re not recording engineers: Even if they wanted to get real drums involved, there was no practical way to do it, so everything was done with a drum machine.”

  Employing a drum machine may not have been a calculated decision. Nevertheless, it had a huge effect on Ween’s sound, and on the way the band was perceived. For Melchiondo and Freeman, and the band’s early fans, The Pod and Pure Guava could be heard as part of a larger body of work, but when Ween first appeared on the greater pop-culture radar — via “Push th’ Little Daisies” on Beavis and Butthead — many immediately categorized the duo according to their penchant for low-tech sound. (Spin’s review of Pure Guava likened Ween to “a They Might Be Giants for the Ren and Stimpy generation,” invoking a band already well known for their prominent use of synthetic drums.) And since Ween was still appearing live in their two-guys-and-a-DAT-machine guise and flaunting their rudimentary recording methods in the media (e.g. the Jane Pratt appearance), the notion of Ween as an eccentric project rather than a proper band stuck. Despite Ween’s considerable evolution since the 4-track period, that reputation lingers to this day. “Yeah, that’s still common,” admits Melchiondo. “I think that’s what people think: ‘[Ween is] a weird, electronic, home-recording thing.’ But it’s really just [The Pod and Pure Guava] that are like that.”

  So by returning to more of a live-band sound in the Chocolate and Cheese era, Ween was definitely challenging fans — and, for that matter, detractors — of those distinctly primitive-sounding earlier albums. Reflecting on the shift, Melchiondo seems newly struck by its significance:

  I was playing drums on every song that we ever did up until [The Pod and Pure Guava]. By moving into the studio and doing Chocolate and Cheese, we got back to that, and it’s a really big thing. That’s huge, you know! It’s like, imagine a band that has a drummer, and then all of a sudden, they decide they’re going to do everything with a drum machine after that, you know? And we never mentioned it, but that was something very different about Chocolate and Cheese, returning to that.

  A brief comparison of live-drum Chocolate and Cheese tracks like “Freedom of ’76,” and Freeman and Melchiondo’s drum-machine demos of the same songs reveals that Ween was indeed entering a whole new sonic realm. Greg Frey views the shift as part of the album’s “We decided to step it up” ethos. As he puts it, “[The use of live drums] was definitely an emphasis on Andrew’s part to kick the whole thing up a notch in terms of the professionalism of the presentation.”

  “All the tasters”: The Chocolate and Cheese auxiliary players

  Another new el
ement that upped the professionalism of the Chocolate and Cheese recording process was the use of auxiliary players that could best be termed session musicians. It’s extremely common for, say, a mainstream pop singer to employ a large supporting cast of virtuosos to construct basic studio tracks, but pre-Chocolate and Cheese, Ween was never this sort of operation; on the contrary, Freeman and Melchiondo seemed to pride themselves on their self-contained methods. The God Ween Satan liner notes formally announce, “All songs arranged, composed and performed by Ween,” while Pure Guava’s insert contains a similar declaration of independence: “All songs written, performed and produced by Ween.” The Pod spelled things out even more specificially: “Recorded by Dean and Gene Ween on a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder.”

  It’s important to note that Ween in the early days wasn’t an entirely self-sufficient entity. The Crucial Squeegie Lip included a guest vocal turn from Chris Hoecke, and Freeman and Melchiondo’s childhood friend Chris “Cribber” Williams (aka Mean Ween) appeared live with the duo during this era. On The Pod and Pure Guava, the cast expanded to include additional associates, such as Guy Heller (Melchiondo’s partner in the side project Moistboyz) and Scott Lowe (another longtime friend). It’s clear, though, that these musicians were featured as much for their personal proximity to Ween as for their musical aptitude.

  Post-Chocolate and Cheese, Ween embraced the session-player concept wholeheartedly. As we’ve seen, Freeman and Melchiondo eventually assembled a stable live band in 1997, with Glenn McClelland, Dave Drewitz and Claude Coleman, and they used this lineup on White Pepper. Even after Coleman joined as a full-time live member, Freeman and Melchiondo experimented with other percussionists in the studio, using Sim Cain (who had played in the Rollins Band with Andrew Weiss) and Josh Freese on Quebec. Most recently, of course, David Sanborn turned in the grandaddy of all Ween session cameos on La Cucaracha’s “Your Party.”

  On Chocolate and Cheese, the band took their first significant steps toward this mix-and-match approach. The personnel list offered the first clue that something was different. Noticeably absent was any sort of “All songs … by Ween” designation. In its place was a list of “The Players,” which credited Coleman, Lowe, Mean Ween, Patricia Frey and the singly named Stephan (last name Said: a noted songwriter and sometime Ween auxiliary musician) alongside Dean Ween, Gene Ween and Andrew Weiss.

  In terms of Ween’s increasingly professional approach to record-making, the most noteworthy names above are Coleman and Said, since these players brought a high degree of instrumental skill to the table. Freeman and Melchiondo first encountered Coleman as a member of Skunk. (The bond between the two bands was a significant one: Ween had signed their Twin/Tone deal after opening for Skunk at a basement party in Maplewood, New Jersey.) After Skunk dissolved, Coleman became a fixture at the Pod, and eventually signed on as the live drummer in “The Ween,” a short-lived early-’90s Ween incarnation featuring Shimmy Disc’s Mark Kramer on bass. When an extra drummer was needed for Chocolate and Cheese, Coleman was an obvious choice.

  As we know from God Ween Satan and the demo era, Melchiondo had plenty of experience as a drummer, and in fact, he appears behind the kit on two Chocolate and Cheese tracks, “Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?” and “What Deaner Was Talkin’ About.” But for other songs, Ween sought a more polished sound. When asked why he thought he was tapped to play on two of the album’s tracks, Coleman answers, “[Drums are] my primary instrument and my career. Mickey’s a pretty awesome drummer in his own right, but he just wanted someone who was a real drummer, to play something a little more technically complicated that was maybe out of his reach.”

  “Take Me Away” and “Freedom of ’76,” the tracks on which Coleman plays, don’t seem so much complicated as sophisticated. On “Freedom” in particular, Coleman lays down a smooth, relaxed groove that perfectly complements the song’s mellow vibe. His presence is very much in keeping with the album’s overall sonic upgrade. Since Coleman’s “Freedom of ’76” drum part mirrors Freeman and Melchiondo’s drum-machine demo of the song almost exactly, it’s clear that Coleman wasn’t coming on board to offer creative input. Instead, he was there for his technical expertise, something that didn’t seem to concern Ween much in the pre-Chocolate and Cheese days. Recruiting Coleman, then, was a significant step away from a DIY sound. However, Melchiondo stresses that the drummer wasn’t so much a hired gun as a talented friend. “We were pretty tight,” he says of Coleman. “It didn’t feel like we were bringing in a guy to play on the record — that’s for sure. He was hanging out all the time smoking pot and drinking.”

  Stephan Said served a similar function to Coleman. A virtuosic multi-instrumentalist, he too was brought in to sweeten up various tracks, providing the haunting Spanish-guitar lead on “Buenas Tardes Amigo” and other crucial acccents. More so than Coleman, who lived in the area and had spent time with Freeman and Melchiondo, Said fit the bill of the hired-gun session player. He recalls meeting Freeman and Melchiondo through a mutual friend — Danielle Stampe, better known as Slymenstra Hymen of GWAR — and later receiving a spontaneous invitation to stop by the Chocolate and Cheese sessions. “I just remember passing through one night, and they were like, ‘Come up to the studio,’” says Said. “And they knew I was a master of folk and traditional music from all around the world. I grew up playing violin and banjo, Dobro, mandolin, fiddle, and so that fit really well with Ween, because they were borrowing from all these different styles, and I did all the tasters, you know what I mean? That was my involvement, to just authenticate some of the traditional references.” This notion of authentication seems foreign to Ween’s initial mission of producing shoestring approximations of any genre they pleased, however sketchily. In fact, fans of God Ween Satan and The Pod will recall how the willful in authenticity of ethnic-flavored tracks such as “El Camino” and “Pollo Asado” contributed hugely to their appeal. Said’s involvement, then, perfectly encapsulates Ween’s growing meticulousness.

  Weiss himself played a similar role, performing on the record in addition to producing it. At the time of Chocolate and Cheese, he was already a seasoned musician, having played bass in two key offshoots of Black Flag — the Rollins Band and guitarist Greg Ginn’s instrumental trio Gone. (Additionally, Freeman and Melchiondo would tap Weiss to handle live bass duties on the tour that followed Chocolate and Cheese — which featured Claude Coleman on drums — and this stint prompted Melchiondo to label Weiss “the mighty bassosaurus” in the Paintin’ the Town Brown liner notes.) Weiss recalls contributing bass to several Chocolate and Cheese tracks, including “Take Me Away” and “Joppa Road.” On the latter song, Weiss provided one of the album’s most memorable tasters: a busy, jazz-fusion-worthy fretless-bass solo that drives home the song’s yacht rock–ish approach.

  It should be clear by now that Chocolate and Cheese was an entirely different project from the Ween records that preceded it. Freeman, Melchiondo and Weiss made a conscious decision to step up their approach on many fronts: by re-recording their initial home demos, by embracing state-of-the-art multitrack recording, by replacing drum machine with live drums and by roping in seasoned auxiliary musicians. These changes amounted to a major facelift. The eclecticism and irreverence of early Ween were still present on Chocolate and Cheese, but the songs no longer sounded like the work of a band that recorded on their living-room floor. This initial shift would pave the way for Ween’s formidably lush late work and for the band to gain a lasting foothold in pop culture.

  Chocolate and Cheese, part II:

  The songs

  Chocolate and Cheese might be a far cry from the enveloping psychedelia that characterizes later Ween efforts such as White Pepper or Quebec, but the album still represents a major step forward from its predecessors. Yet the record’s fuller, warmer pieces — more ambitious than anything Ween had previously attempted — sit alongside songs that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Pure Guava. In that sense Chocolate and Cheese is a text
book transitional record. This chapter examines the album song-by-song, explicating how Chocolate and Cheese retained the quirky charm of Ween’s early work while pointing the way to the depth of the later albums, and also — with help from Melchiondo, Freeman, Weiss and others — delving deep into the music itself, both its creation and its reception. Rather than discuss the songs in their actual running order, I’ve chosen a sequence that seemed most relevant to the themes dealt with in this book.

  “Freedom of ’76” (Track 3 of 16)

  Since its release on Chocolate and Cheese, “Freedom of ’76” — a silky-smooth soul number — has become one of Ween’s most beloved songs. But at the time, a fan of the band’s prior work would’ve had a tough time even identifying it as a Ween track. In stark contrast to the drum-machine-driven material on The Pod and Pure Guava, “Freedom” sounds like it was performed by a live band.

  It features an impressively laid-back, expertly recorded drum-set performance from Claude Coleman. According to Melchiondo, he overdubbed the final guitar track, but he did originally play along with Coleman in the studio as a guide. The vocal performance is similarly natural-sounding, with Freeman busting out a deadly falsetto. On an earlier record, he might’ve sped up his voice by simply tinkering with the tape, but here he’s genuinely craning for the high notes in the manner of one of his major vocal influences, Prince. Luminous “oohs” and “aahs” drift up from the background to buoy Freeman’s lead part. The lyrics indulge in some classic Ween absurdity (“Mannequin was filmed at Woolworth’s / Boyz II Men still keepin’ up the beat”), but otherwise the performance sounds remarkably straightforward.

  A demo version of the song, dating from the summer of 1992, gives a glimpse at what “Freedom of ’76” would’ve sounded like had it ended up on an earlier Ween record. The composition itself is identical, but here, the drums are synthesized and tinny-sounding, and a slight yet trippy distortion muddies the vocal. On this first version, you can still hear the middle-school Ween: two teenage music fans offering a loving yet markedly homegrown tribute to a beloved genre. But on the final version, you hear the genre itself. As it appears on Chocolate and Cheese, “Freedom of ’76” is a bona fide soul song.