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

  Dave Ayers recalls his dislike for this kind of juxtaposition. Having stressed that he never really judged Ween’s material on the scale of poor taste, he admits, “I had more of an issue, just as a listener, with the dark-brown corner on every record. ‘Candi’ is the track on Chocolate and Cheese. It’s like every record had a segment that almost defied the listener to get to the end of a seven- or eight-minute song. ‘Candi’ is only four minutes long, but it feels like nine.” Ayers responds enthusiastically to Melchiondo’s low estimation of the track. “I’m so happy to hear [him] say that, because I would argue with them about that on every record,” he says. “Because there is a ‘Candi’ on every record, and I always just figured it was their joke, even as they’ve grown older, to write songs to piss off their folks.”

  In Melchiondo’s view, the trivia that surrounds “Candi” is more interesting than the song itself:

  That song does have some interesting factoids about it. One is that it has the words ‘chocolate’ and ‘cheese’ in it, which came from our friend Mean Ween. I wrote that song with him when I lived at the Pod. He was always hanging out there and we were recording and I did that jam, and I was like, “Dude, write words for this.” And so he said, “Chocolate with cheese,”6 and when it came time to pick a name for the record, somebody said, “What about Chocolate and Cheese?” We just started laughing so hard, ’cause it’s like a perfect summary of what that record is and what Ween is basically. It’s just totally fucking brown and then there’s the cheesy element to it. And it sounds great; it’s a great name for a record. So that’s probably what got that song included on the record.

  Chris Williams is quite modest about his contribution to the song. “I didn’t (and still don’t) think it was memorable or special,” he says of the “chocolate with cheese” phrase. As for his lead-vocal turn, he chalks its unique sound up to circumstance rather than any calculated comedic intent: “I was probably totally gourded and had bad allergies at the time, but the rest was just however the channel was set to record.”

  Aside from the album-title phrase, Melchiondo also singles out the Jackass-style origin of the yelling audible in the background. Considering his view of “Candi” as a bottom-shelf Ween track, it’s surprising to hear that this aspect of the song grew out of a rather harrowing experience:

  We needed these sound effects for “Candi,” and we were trashed. We were in the studio drinking blackberry brandy, or something just horrible, or Schnapps — peppermint Schnapps, I think. And we were doing the song and there was snow on the ground, and I had a ’74 Coup de Ville at the time, and we rigged it up so Aaron took the cordless phone from the studio and we left the bay station on speakerphone [with Andrew]. And I put Aaron in the trunk of my Coup de Ville, drunk, and I did a donut around the parking lot in the snow for like 15 minutes, while he was just getting slammed from side to side in the trunk of my car on the phone. And that’s the vocal track on there. You can hear it in the background, like [mimics anguished screaming]. It comes blasting in and out. And I had my car sideways. It was this big ol’ Caddy, just tooling around this parking lot over and over again. And we had no way to communicate with Andrew. He had no way to talk to us, so basically Aaron was drunk enough to go for it. And I was just being a sadist. I didn’t care how long. I was just enjoying the whole experience. So I just did it for like 15 or 20 minutes — the song was like two minutes long, or something — not knowing if Andrew had ever rolled the tape or what part of it he recorded, or what he was even doing inside. Finally I hear Aaron, like, kicking in the back, so I parked and let him out. He was all pissed off. And then we came in and Andrew had recorded it.

  “Candi” may be short on substance, but as Coleman suggests, it’s a key track on Chocolate and Cheese, a reminder that Ween would never truly abandon their juvenile, druggy origins even as they cleaned up their sound.7

  “Roses Are Free” (Track 6 of 16)

  It’s quite possible that “Roses Are Free” is Ween’s single best-known song. The reason for this is that in 1997, the iconic jam band Phish began covering the tune and have employed it as a staple improv vehicle ever since. But Ween’s original has little to do with jamming: It’s a peppy, tightly constructed pop song rendered with multitrack vibrancy. The track’s pitch-shifted vocals — verging on Chipmunks territory — washy, tripped-out guitars and synthesized drum beat allude to “Pork Roll Egg and Cheese” and other sprightly masterpieces of Ween’s 4-track days. At the same time, there’s a surreal vividness to “Roses Are Free” that wasn’t there before. Keyboard and bass buoy Freeman’s voice, and the verses — each a string of quizzical proverbs, e.g. “Take a wrinkled raisin, and do with it what you will / Push it into third if you know you’re gonna climb a hill” — feature a catchy call-and-response structure. A hypnotic swirl of electronic sound greets each vocal line.

  As with “Pony,” the structure of “Roses” is fairly involved. Each verse follows a blueslike scheme, consisting of four cyclical repetitions (the “proverbs” mentioned above) followed by two turnaround segments. This pattern repeats once and gives way to a loopy, four-bar keyboard solo. Then the original form resumes, but in a wordless version, with Melchiondo’s snarling guitar taking the lead. “A Tear for Eddie” is a more obvious showcase for Dean Ween’s instrumental prowess, but this section of “Roses” just might be Chocolate and Cheese’s most gripping six-string episode. In classic blues fashion, Melchiondo hews close to Freeman’s verse melody but uses gritty distortion and agile string bends to give it a potent kick. Eddie Hazel himself would no doubt have been proud of the solo’s hyberbolically overdriven, multitracked climax, during which Melchiondo seems to multiply infinitely. When Freeman re-enters, the guitar remains high in the mix, and the song fades on this energetic duet. “Roses” is no jam, but thanks to its detailed structure, busy production and impassioned performance, it feels surprisingly epic for a song that lasts four and a half minutes.

  Melchiondo sees the song as a nod to one of Ween’s prime inspirations, another artist who loves to combine funky beats with wailing guitars. “At the time, I remember thinkin’, ‘This is so fuckin’ Prince,’” he recalls. “I think it was one of the coolest songs that Aaron ever did, actually. Aaron did that on his own, on the 4-track, and on the album, obviously it’s me and him both. But I just thought it was the coolest thing — I can’t think of any other songs he’s ever done that are like that. It was very Prince, but not. Like totally Ween, you know?” Freeman had a similar impression:

  I remember writing the guitar solo first and being very pleased with myself because it sounded like something Prince would have written. The rest of the song was based around an old electric-organ type keyboard that I had pulled out of the trash. The lyrics were really just a twenty-something suburban-white-boy-blues type thing that came quickly and really wasn’t thought about [except] to have the syllables work for the groove.

  As it turned out, this suburban-white-boy blues resonated with the members of the hugely popular Phish (also an Elektra act during the ’90s). Their “Roses Are Free” cover proved immensely beneficial to Ween, leading to an influx of jam-band fans at shows, a development that coincided with Ween coming into their own as an improvisational force onstage. Yet Melchiondo recalls being somewhat baffled by the extra attention. “[The Phish cover] was one of those backhanded things where it’s like you do all this hard work, and then something like Beavis and Butthead has an impact,” he says. “Something that you have no control over at all and it’s totally, seemingly random. It exposes all these people to Ween. It was like that when Phish started playing our shit. It was like, ‘After all we’ve done, this is what’s bringing more people to our shows? What the fuck?’ But you take it, you know? It’s great. Who cares how people find out about it? If they find out about it and they dig it, then that’s the desired effect, right?” Freeman expressed a similar ambivalence over the Phish cover and its aftermath when speaking with PopMatters in 2003:

  What happened was
that Phish started playing our songs, which was cool. Then we played the Bonnaroo thing, which was totally hippied out. Then our booking agent kind of took that flag and started running with it. Now in a way, money is money, and if it’s going to increase our audience, that’s fine. But the last hippie-fest we did, which was the Adirondack Festival — that was it. Never, ever doing another one of those again. I had to listen to this fucking jam band for three hours in the rain, waiting to go on. I was like, “Just kill me.” I can’t take any more white boys noodling around on their guitars.

  Freeman and Melchiondo also had reservations about the cover itself. “When I finally heard [Phish’s] version, it was terrible,” asserts Melchiondo. “It didn’t have any of the things that I liked about the song.” This reaction seems to have brought out his competitive streak. “We didn’t start playing it [live] until after Phish started playing it,” he explains. “We felt like we had to kind of reclaim it, because we didn’t have a keyboard player so we never bothered playing it live. But by the time Phish started playing it, we had Glenn [McClelland] in the band, so we revisited it, and now we play it all the time. I love playing it.” Freeman also remembers being none too pleased with the Phish rendition. “It was god-awful at the time,” he laments. “It was really not cool in my circle of friends to be into Phish in any way, shape or form. It really came to a head when my ‘Phishhead’ younger cousin played the version at a big family function thinking I would be pleased. I came very close to kicking his ass in front of his and my grandmother.”

  Improbable as it may seem, though, both he and Melchiondo are ultimately grateful for the unlikely nod. “I know the guys from Phish, and Trey [Anastasio] I would now consider a friend of mine,” says Freeman.8 “I’m happy for them and wish them all the best.” Melchiondo reaches a similar conclusion. “I don’t want to rail on those guys,” he says. “It brought a lot of fans to us, you know? A lot of people checked us out and discovered there was more to it. And they’re our fans now. I hear it all the time: ‘I first heard you guys through the Phish cover.’” And the September 2009 Ween show at Red Rocks bears this out: The opening notes of the band’s “Roses Are Free” encore receive the night’s loudest ovation. Strangely, Phish had played the same venue the previous month, opening with none other than “Roses Are Free.”

  “Joppa Road” (Track 11 of 16)

  Much like “Freedom of ’76,” “Joppa Road” is another disarmingly authentic genre homage. The use of drum machine — playing a brisk ride-cymbal rhythm — offers a hint that one is listening to a Ween creation, but the rest of the track conjures a spot-on AM Gold vibe: strummy acoustic guitar, an agile, funky bass line and a relaxed, high-pitched vocal performance by Freeman. Two solos, one on Spanish-guitar and the other on fretless electric bass, heighten the sensation of cheesy yet innocuous ’70s virtuosity. Thanks to accents like these, “Joppa Road” comes off as a perfect simulation of what would later come to be known as yacht rock. The lyrics match the song’s light, carefree mood, telling of a relaxing getaway by car: “Put your best dress on, there’s a place I know / Where we can go, called Joppa Road.” As with “Freedom of ’76,” bits of double-take-inducing silliness creep in: “Hey, yo bro, that’s a dude I know / Works on Joppa Road, at the Sunoco.” Then, near the end of the song, Freeman offers an odd spoken-word aside: “Baby, you look great today.” The line serves as a reminder that even as Ween was starting to reflect their influences with greater accuracy, it was still determined to subtly push these tributes over the top.

  According to Melchiondo, the intensely laid-back retro vibe of the track was no accident:

  Joppa Road is a road outside of DC that we used to drive past on tour, and it looks so fucking funny on a sign. So we had this idea, like, “We gotta do a song called ‘Joppa Road,’” and then halfway through recording it, we were like, “Wait a second, this is like our version of ‘Ventura Highway’ [by ’70s AM staples America],” and we just took it all the way there and that’s what it is. It was like the same sentiment. The idea was you’re cruisin’ down a road, which is the name of the song, with the wind blowing through your hair, and it’s, like, the cruisin’ vibe — sunny, cruisin’, blue-sky vibe, which is basically what “Ventura Highway” is, taken to the max. It’s the Ween bastardization by accident.

  This stylistic detour took some longtime listeners by surprise. “I don’t think they’ve touched upon as fusiony a jam as that one,” says Claude Coleman of “Joppa Road.” “It has a really amazing groove to me. It’s kinda different, kinda off. It’s kinda like quasi-samba fusion, which I thought was really funny. It sounds like Peter Gabriel, the groove of it. It shocked the hell out of me when I heard it.”

  “Drifter in the Dark” (Track 9 of 16)

  As Ween delved further into various musical styles after Chocolate and Cheese, they would continue to shock listeners with the accuracy of their genre homages. The classic example of this is Ween’s single most divisive record, 12 Golden Country Greats. Any way you look at it, that album emerged out of left field, but diligent fans may have realized that Ween foreshadowed this odd stylistic detour with “Drifter in the Dark.” The song is a straightforwardly mopey country ballad that bears only the faintest hints of Ween’s trademark irreverence. A sleepy-sounding chorus echoes Freeman’s twangy lead vocal (which at one point digresses into wordless “Doo doo-doos”) and a lone acoustic guitar serves as accompaniment. The lyrics paint a somewhat depressing picture of futile romantic longing: “Do you ever walk alone? / Like a drifter in the dark / Seeking out what isn’t there / Looking only for a spark.” The song does boast one blatantly brown element: the aimless, queasy-sounding harmonica solo that closes the track. Still, it’s safe to say that “Drifter” would’ve sounded utterly out of place on any of Ween’s previous full-lengths.

  As with “Joppa Road,” “Drifter” grew out of a specific musical influence. “That was inspired by Roger Miller and a late-night walk around Lambertville, New Jersey one summer’s eve,” says Freeman, citing the late country-pop crooner, whom he later covered with his Gene Ween Band. Melchiondo takes a bit of credit for this stylistic foray. “Sometime around then I hipped [Aaron] to Roger Miller and he started listening to all that shit: ‘King of the Road’ and ‘Kansas City Star,’ and that’s like Roger Miller’s signature thing: [sings in twangy voice] ‘Doo doo-doo doo-doo doo-doo.’ The solos are him doing it with his mouth.”

  Neither Ween member has much else to say about the tune, but Josh Homme cites it as a favorite. “The lyrics of that song, this whole topic of driving around at night and hoping for something to explode, hoping for something to happen in this life: It’s such a true sentiment,” he enthuses. “Their delivery of that could confuse somebody. [imitates Freeman’s twangy singing] ‘Do you ever walk alone?’ But really they’re singing about something that’s so true, and I understand so quickly.”

  “Voodoo Lady” (Track 10 of 16)

  It would take some serious digging to find any such existential message in “Voodoo Lady,” but the song is nevertheless one of Chocolate and Cheese’s most enjoyable and enduring tracks. It’s also the one that most clearly foreshadows the band’s future incarnation as an improvisational powerhouse onstage: It features a mind-bending noise breakdown — like the sound of an amplifier being sucked against its will into an alternate dimension — which Ween would later stretch out like taffy in the live setting, and some brilliant psych-rock guitar breaks from Melchiondo.

  The recording showcases Weiss’s crafty multitrack skill. On the bottom is an insistent bass-drum pulse, accented by busy bongo druming courtesy of Claude Coleman (“That was fun to do, to put galloping bongos all over — who doesn’t love galloping bongos?” reflects the drummer). Crisp, funky guitar and bass round out the insistent, danceable rhythm. Freeman’s lyrics deliver exactly what one might expect from the title: a caricatured ode to a bayou enchantress (“Your lips are hot and spicy / Servin’ up red beans and rice / At midnite she’s a’ howlin’ and a’
stompin’ / Makin’ love to the gators in the swampin’”) built around the nonsense refrain “You drive me crazy with that boogie oogie oogie oogie oogie.” The arrangement isn’t quite as vibrant as those of White Pepper’s “Bananas and Blow,” La Cucaracha’s “Woman and Man” and other exotic groove pieces that would appear on later Ween albums, but “Voodoo Lady” is unmistakably not a 4-track creation.

  If the song itself is relatively sophisticated, the origin isn’t, as Melchiondo explains:

  The story behind that is so shallow that it’s funny. It’s so unbelievably bad that it’s worth telling. We went to New Orleans for the first time on the Pure Guava tour and there was, like, the voodoo culture down there and we wrote this shallow song called ‘Voodoo Lady.’ We wrote it in a hotel room on the tape recorder — I have it somewhere. The song has, like, every New Orleans cliché in it: the lady with a bone in her hair, the red beans and rice, and oysters and jambalaya and all this fucking bullshit, but it has a really good beat, and it’s part of the Ween catalog forever. But it’s really that shallow. In all seriousness too. It wasn’t, like, us trying to make fun of it; we thought we were doing something really original.