Ween's Chocolate and Cheese (33 1/3) Page 6

  It wasn’t just a sonic makeover that allowed Ween to sound so authentically soulful. As Melchiondo explains, the track was a showcase for his newly broadened palette of guitar techniques:

  We had a friend — I’m still friends with him — this guy named Ed Wilson, who’s probably in his fifties now. Ed was a local guitar player and he worked at the taco joint with Aaron as a short-order cook. And Ed is like the local shit-hot guitar player, a legend in the Trenton area. And we hung out with Eddie a lot, and I played a ton of guitar with him and he was always showing me new things. He was a pretty big influence on that record. He’s credited on ‘Freedom of ’76.’ And he started showing me all those fancy-schmancy chords that are on that record and on that song and on all of our records after that. More jazzy type of stuff: major 7th chords, and all sorts of fancy shit. And Ed taught me those chords by teaching me that pattern in “Freedom of ’76.” And it started as something else. It was like “Use Me,” Bill Withers. It kind of started like we were playing a Bill Withers thing and then we changed it all around and bastardized it. Anyway, that became “Freedom of ’76.” Aaron wrote words to it, but Ed is the one who taught me all those chords that are in all those songs: “Freedom of ’76” and “Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?” and then on all the records after that. He kind of taught me to play more standards, like jazz standards or something.

  Ed Wilson recalls using the guitar-teaching platform to expose Freeman and Melchiondo to some of his original tunes, one of which unexpectedly morphed into “Freedom of ’76”:

  They had been working on Chocolate and Cheese, and I came over one night, and I had an idea for a song. I thought it was a cool idea, and it sounded very Philly soul. So I showed Mickey the chord progression, and I showed Aaron the bass part a couple nights later. We were always sittin’ around and playing guitar and stuff — they didn’t know that I was doing this, but I was actually showing them one of my songs. And they got together a couple days later and Aaron said, “Ed showed me this great bass part,” and Mickey said, “Ah, that’s funny — he showed me this great chord progression.” And once they showed them to each other, they put them together.

  And I had no idea that it would be a song, in the sense that they would do anything with it. I didn’t come out and say, “I wrote this great song.” I was kind of sneaky about it, I guess. And a couple of months later, I got a call from their manager, Dave Ayers, and he said, “You can sue us if you want, Ed, but the song you wrote with Ween is going to be on The Jane Pratt Show today,” and I said, “What song?” “The song you wrote, ‘Freedom of ’76.’” And I was like, “Wow, what a cool thing — that all worked.” Somehow or another, this crazy way of me presenting this, they liked it and put some lyrics to it and there we go. Kind of a cool goof.

  The smooth sophistication of the resulting song inspired Andrew Weiss to experiment with his newfound multi-track capability:

  From an arrangement aspect, “Freedom of ’76” — with all those backing vocals — that was something that Aaron had never really tried before, and I was trying to get him to do that. I heard this kind of like bed of vocals going underneath, and I made him think of Marvin Gaye or Al Green or something like that. He didn’t really know how to approach it at that point because he’d never really done it, so I was like, “Okay, let’s just start at the bottom. Just sing a line that’s like the tonic of the chord goin’ along.” Okay, and he would hear that and it’s like, “Try some harmonies or something like that.” You know, Aaron’s not very schooled. None of us are very schooled in terms of knowing a shitload of theory or something like that. It’s all pretty rudimentary, so it’s all intuitive or by feel. “Okay, so now you got that line. Try singing something against that.” Do that like half a dozen times and then you got that thing there.

  “It is a very tedious process, but it’s always worth it when listening back to the finished product,” says Freeman, of the technique Weiss describes. “Besides the Beatles and Beach Boys being so strong an influence, I always think of the incredible album A Capella by Todd Rundgren when I’m laying down harmonies and backing vocals.”

  Coleman also remembers a meticulous tracking process. “We spent a lot of time getting the drums to that,” he recalls. “Quite rightly, they felt that the song was really great and they wanted it to be as smooth and soulful as possible. I remember doing a lot of takes.”

  The lyrics may sound nonsensical, but they represented Freeman’s heartfelt tribute to his hometown. “I was born in Philadelphia and both sides of my family had immigrated and settled in Philly, so that is where I regard myself as truly being from,” he says. “An ode to that city was easy for me to write.” As Melchiondo puts it, “Aaron’s somehow free-associating the soulfulness of the song with the sound of Philadelphia.”

  As for the odd references to Boyz II Men and the ’80s comedy Mannequin, they came about organically. “That song was wholeheartedly inspired by Boyz II Men,” explains Freeman. “I loved that group.” Melchiondo points out a regional connection, solidifying the link. “[Boyz II Men] are just a couple people removed [from Ween]. We rehearsed at the same place for a while, which was basically their studio, actually. But they payed us back for that [lyric]. Like ten years ago, one of those cats was being interviewed on TV and they asked him what he’d been listening to and he said Ween.” Regarding Mannequin, Freeman offers a matter-of-fact clarification:

  “Actually the movie Mannequin from the ’80s was filmed at Wanamaker’s in Philly, which was a classic twentieth-century department store. ‘Woolworths’ fit the song better, so I changed it.”

  The video for the song, directed by Spike Jonze (and released in 1995, the year after his smash-hit clips for the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” and Weezer’s “Buddy Holly”), also features quintessential Philly imagery. It’s an ingenious narrative, executed with Jonze’s typical surreal flair, casting Freeman and Melchiondo as vandals who attempt to steal the Liberty Bell, get caught red-handed and find themselves under assault by a machine-gun-equipped SWAT team. Freeman sings the song as the pair is walking out of the courthouse and being driven to the jail.

  Before working on the “Freedom of ’76” clip, Jonze, a great admirer of Ween then and now, had encountered the band in LA under extremely unusual circumstances.4 When it came time to work on the video, Jonze drew on his own Philly roots. “I lived in Philly as a kid for a little while, so I already had a Philly connection,” he says. He doesn’t remember much about where the narrative for the video came from or about the shoot itself (other than that “it was January in Philly and it was brutally cold”), but he does offer an amusing anecdote. “We left a prop hand grenade at Independence Hall, and the next day a kid found it in the bushes,” Jonze recalls. “And they shut down the whole Independence Hall that day and it was a bomb scare and it was on the news: [imitates clueless news anchor] “Rock band Ween [mispronounced as ‘When’] was shooting a music video at Independence Hall over the weekend. …”

  When the video popped up on Beavis and Butthead, the pair reacted more positively than they had to “Push th’ Little Daisies.” Freeman’s lead vocal even inspired Beavis to try his hand at a falsetto impersonation.

  “Buenas Tardes Amigo” (Track 13 of 16)

  The seven-minute ballad “Buenas Tardes Amigo” is another Chocolate and Cheese track that bears almost no resemblance to Ween’s earlier work. The lyrics concern a Mexican man attempting to avenge his brother’s death, and the music sets an appropriately somber mood. Both before Chocolate and Cheese and after, Ween relied largely on a variety of plugged-in textures, but “Buenas Tardes” features a strummy acoustic guitar, conjuring an image of a lonely, haunted troubadour. Other accents gradually nudge the song into spaghetti-Western territory: trudging percussion (drums, sleigh bells and hand claps), ominous synths that suggest a mournful choir and a potently twangy Melchiondo solo.

  As with “Freedom of ’76,” the lyrics flirt with absurdity. At one point the narrator reflects, �
�I looked at every fiesta / For you I wanted to greet / Maybe I’d sell you a chicken / With poison interlaced with the meat.” The result is a baffling South of the Border tale that’s part Speedy Gonzalez caricature and part Ennio Morricone melodrama. The song ends on an appropriately WTF note: a drawn-out sample of an explosion.

  It’s safe to say that while Freeman and Melchiondo could have easily sketched out a song like “Buenas Tardes” on their home setup, they would’ve had a tough time realizing the elaborate version that appears on Chocolate and Cheese. As Andrew Weiss observes, “The arrangement on that with the handclapping and the keyboards and stuff — you never could’ve done that on a 4-track.” This is one song where you can really hear the band capitalizing on their technological upgrade, using their newfound multitrack capabilities to yield an impressively elaborate piece of work. With “Buenas Tardes,” any lingering brownness is in the music itself, rather than in the crudeness of the sound.

  A key element of the song’s professional veneer is the presence of Stephan Said, who plays an ongoing Spanish-guitar solo that runs parallel to the verses of the song. Said’s understanding at the time was that he was there to “authenticate some of the traditional references” — in this case, to help impart a believable mood to the song. “I’m [playing] the nylon-string guitar that’s doing tasters throughout the whole thing that actually makes it sound somewhat flamenco-y,” explains Said. “That [feeling] was there before, but they were right to add just that little hint, to take it there.” The guest artist apparently had no trouble achieving this effect quickly. “[‘Buenas Tardes’] was one take, with Andrew mixing it, and I remember tracking it in the dark — there were no lights on in the whole fucking place. I remember not being able to see my instrument or my hands. I think we were just in such a vibe. It was just such a late-night, rock ’n’ roll affair.”

  Despite the high level of musicianship on display in “Buenas Tardes,” Melchiondo is quick to point out that there’s nothing advanced about the song’s inspiration. “Aaron wrote that from Sesame Street,” he explains. “You know how Sesame Street has those little Spanish sequences? You know, they had Maria and a couple other characters and occasionally they would do that, and [Aaron] was watching it and they said, ‘Hola means “hello.” Buenas tardes means “Good afternoon.”’ And I think he just ran with it.”

  Freeman elaborates:

  I remember writing that song better than most for some reason. I had moved into my very first apartment by myself after some years at Brookridge Farm. I had my own big bed in my own big room and a TV to watch in bed as well. I remember it being the first time I had really felt like being a musician and artist was my calling and settling into the notion. I remember it was a beautiful morning and I woke up hungover. I looked to my bed table and saw the bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the night before. I leaned, turned on the TV and it was Sesame Street and a very white-looking and -sounding puppet was schooling the other puppets on how to say “Good morning,” “Good evening” and “Good afternoon” in Spanish. I remember laughing really hard and almost throwing up — then the song came very quickly thereafter.

  Freeman’s exaggerated yet still believable Mexican accent seals the deal. “I am and always have been very much like the movie Zelig from Woody Allen — it comes naturally,” says the singer of his ability to slip into various accents at will. But Melchiondo draws attention to the ersatz nature of Ween’s approach to Mexican culture, a perspective that nevertheless passes for the real thing overseas:

  We always go for the cheesy Mexican-American thing, not the true Mexican thing. But that’s what we know, so that’s what you get. But people in other countries don’t have that point of reference. They don’t know Mexicans like we know Mexicans. Like someone who lives in San Diego has a completely different view of Mexicans than somebody in Canada. So that song has become definitely our most popular song overseas. When we play that shit for, like, Germans or Dutch people or Swedes, or something, they go totally fucking batshit because they think you’re tapped into something really authentic that they don’t know about, when it fact, it’s like, I’ve never even fucking been to Mexico. I have no idea what they actually eat in Mexico. It’s not Doritos, but as far as I’m concerned, it might as well be, ’cause I don’t know. They don’t have Taco Bell, but Ween’s version of all that shit is always like that. But like I said, they don’t have those points of reference in England or whatever. Like how many British people have even met a Mexican? How many Mexicans are even living in London? So when we play that song overseas, we can stop playing and there will be like 5,000 Germans singing it. And it never gets less funny. It’s funnier every year.

  Perhaps the meticulous arrangement of “Buenas Tardes Amigo” has had something to do with the song’s ability to deceive so many foreign fans. At any rate, Melchiondo’s claim is supported by the use of “Buenas Tardes Amigo” in two German films — 2001’s Lammbock and 2003’s Herr Lehmann— as well as an excess of German comments on a YouTube version of the song.

  “Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down)” (Track 2 of 16)

  I used to really love “Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down).” Then one of my friends contracted it and almost died. She now has MS as a direct result of her illness, which will probably kill her.

  —Comment from Tribe.net Ween forum

  “Buenas Tardes Amigo,” with its hammy ethnic caricature, may register as a blip on the questionable-taste scale. But “Spinal Meningitis” takes things a good deal further: As illustrated by the comment above, the song — an “Am I gonna die?” lament from a sick child to its mother — has considerable off-putting potential. It’s not surprising to hear that it has elicited a variety of strong reactions.

  Production-wise, the track serves as the perfect bridge between early and late Ween. The song’s spare verses combine synthesized chimes and bass drum with staccato guitar and two overlaid vocal tracks, one at normal pitch and one that’s sped up to simulate a child’s voice, creating a feel that’s very similar to eerier, more minimal Pure Guava tracks such as “I Play It Off Legit.” The chorus, on the other hand, sounds vivid and full. A hazy drone hangs over an intricate drum-machine groove, providing the backdrop for a chantlike refrain: “Smile on mighty Jesus / Spinal meningitis got me down.” It’s a classic Ween chorus, trippy yet danceable, and it has helped make “Spinal Meningitis” a live favorite. Overall, “Spinal Meningitis” feels like a subtle overhaul of Pure Guava aesthetics — the template is the same, but the execution is more ambitious and evocative.

  The song’s pervasively creepy mood seems to be a point of pride for the band. During a 2003 interview for PopMatters, writer Matt Gonzales informed Freeman that one of his friends, “an otherwise thick-skinned grown man, [refused] to stay in the room whenever someone plays ‘Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down).’” Freeman responded with perverse relish. “That’s good, and that’s what I want, because it’s fucked up for us, too,” he said. “That’s why we do it. That song didn’t come out of any kind of making fun of. That song came out of fear of death, fear of needles in the spine, and that’s not cool at all. That’s really bad news. There is a lot of psychological terror going on in Ween, and there always has been.”

  The lyrics grew out of an article that Melchiondo stumbled across:

  I was at home with my wife, who was my girlfriend back then, and we read a thing in the newspaper about this guy who was a retired city doctor and he opened up a health clinic in the Ozark Mountains or the Blue Ridge Mountains or somewhere. This was, like, West Virginia, and he was treating these backwoods people that didn’t have access to any kind of health care. And one of his hillbilly patients referred to spinal meningitis as “Smile on, mighty Jesus,” and so I came up with the idea from that.

  As Melchiondo recalls, the disturbing subject matter didn’t sit well with Ween’s label:

  When we handed the record in to Elektra, [they] got back to us and they tried to hang it on the head of publicity. They said, [imitating t
wo-faced corporate-speak] “Listen, guys, this is a great record. It’s such a great record. It’s the best record ever.” All this bullshit, you know. “We’re all so excited about it. Everyone at the company is talking about it. But, I gotta tell you, the girl at publicity thinks that no one is gonna be able to get past ‘Spinal Meningitis’ being the second song. They’re gonna put on the record, and it’s a tragedy, because all they’re gonna be able to think about is this song, because it’s so creepy and it’s so weird and you have to move it somewhere else in the sequence — it can’t be second.” And we were like, “Fuck you!” That was our response; it was like, “No way, the sequence is great — it stays.”

  Record label friction and message-board comments aside, Freeman doesn’t recall getting any flak for the song. He offers the following anecdote as evidence to the contrary:

  I remember after the record had come out, a bunch of seriously ill people came by in a special van with nurses to see our soundcheck. Mickey and I were convinced of course that they were somehow protesting our song. I think our road manager mustered the courage to ask how these wheeled, bedded, seriously ill people were doing and they had said thanks for letting them come and see a band that “was able to talk about being sick openly and for making them laugh.” I still was eating my pants and never spoke to them.