Ween's Chocolate and Cheese (33 1/3) Page 9
Considerably more innovative than the lyrics is the midsong noise interlude. Melchiondo explains its origin:
Aaron and I [initially] recorded that song on a 4-track. And instead of having a guitar solo in the middle, I just jacked up the echo as long as it could go and turned up the feedback all the way, and then just started turning all the knobs on it, so it was going [imitates pure cacophony], just like noise getting sped up and slowed down. So we did [that] in the studio. Andrew took it upon himself to take that solo, so he had like rack-mount kind of stuff, and he just went to town on it. On the album version, it’s like a two-minute breakdown of waste, just total waste. We do it onstage now. We do it for, like, ten minutes, though, with a guitar solo.
Despite this potentially off-putting episode, the song remains a live favorite. “Yeah, I love playing it,” says Melchiondo. “It’s got a great rhythm; it’s catchy; and it’s one of our few songs that people dance to every time.”
The “Voodoo Lady” video is a classic mid-’90s time capsule: a melange of video effects — inverted colors, disorienting overlays — that might have seemed outlandish at the time but now register as quaintly dated. Freeman lip-syncs while lying in an underwater bed, as Melchiondo assumes the role of a demonic tormentor and the titular female feeds the pair bites of banana. The clip was overseen by Roman Coppola (an accomplished video director and a frequent collabor of his father, Francis Ford Coppola), who remembers treating “Voodoo Lady” as an opportunity to experiment without having to worry too much about narrative:
It was certainly a learning-experience type of video where you’re just sort of trying everything. It becomes a sort of unusual collage that hopefully evokes the spirit of the music.
I had done a lot of visual effects just preceding this, when I worked on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. There were a lot of things I had researched and little optical tricks that I wanted to explore. In negatives from color film, natural skin tone is green and everything is inverted. That suggested an idea of, “What if we filmed everything with the colors inverted?” So [the woman’s] face was painted green and her lips were painted black, and we inverted it and it kind of came out a weird color. And we painted the banana a weird color, so when it was inverted, it looked yellow. But then when you opened the banana, it was black, so it was kind of disgusting and odd and hopefully sort of appealing.
And there’s another technique which I’m pretty proud to have used, which I discovered when I was researching Dracula. It’s an unusual photographic process called Schlieren photography, and we had a guy from NASA supervise that, J. T. Heineck. It’s a very weird process where you just do concave mirrors and create a beam of light between them and you’re able to photograph heat waves, which is that effect where you see [Freeman and Melchiondo] with heat waves coming out of their mouths.
We shot the underwater scenes in a pool, and the hope was that you wouldn’t really perceive that they were underwater — it was to have their hair floating and stuff, but I didn’t want any bubbles coming out of their nose or mouth. I’m not sure if we totally succeeded, and it’s pretty evident that you are underwater. But again, it was just kind of a concept.
So these were all things that were bubbling up in my area of interest, just different tricks and techniques. And I remember describing it to [Ween] and they were very, very supportive, like, “Hey that sounds great; that sounds weird. And we’re eager to just go for it.” I remember the shoot being long hours and trying to get a lot done very quickly, and some bands can be kind of fussy, but I remember Mickey and Aaron were very enthusiastic and helpful and happy to do anything.
I think basically it was just me having a lot of different ideas, like, “Oh, that’d be cool in a video; that’d be cool in a video,” and just stirring them all up and gathering all these various optical ideas and trying to fit it to the music.
Like the song itself, the video isn’t too deep, but it’s fun and diverting, and a nice encapsulation of the offbeat spirit of the post-Nirvana era.
“Take Me Away” (Track 1 of 16)
Chocolate and Cheese’s opening track is, like “Voodoo Lady,” another perennial staple of Ween’s live shows. Aside from its considerable fun factor, the extremely rousing song announced the arrival of Ween 2.0: It wasn’t performed live by a full band, but it definitely sounds like it was.
Unlike “Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?,” “Roses Are Free” and some of the other more elaborate songs on the record, “Take Me Away” is stubbornly simple: An upbeat, repetitive swing groove (guitar, bass, Claude Coleman’s live drums and hints of auxiliary bongos) serves as the backdrop for Freeman’s impression of a cheesily suave singer. Between certain lines, Gene Ween tosses out an Elvis-esque “Thank you!,” which meets with scattered overdubbed applause. The song embodies much of the humor of early Ween, but the presentation is much more ambitious and in its own peculiar way, conventional. Again, it isn’t a 4-track mock-up of glitzy lounge music; it’s more or less a literal example of the style. It’s fitting, then, that the “Thank you!” asides arose spontaneously out of Freeman’s portrayal of a Vegas-style crooner. “The opening line was so strong I had to thank myself,” says Freeman. “It came naturally and there were no questions asked.”
After writing the song, Melchiondo recalls knowing instinctively what its function ought to be. “I think our feeling about it was, ‘Well, this’ll be, like, the perfect first track on our record.’ And a lot of times decisions get made based on things like that, when you have a batch of songs you’re working from. ‘Take Me Away’ was one of those examples: We knew that was gonna be the first track on our record, so it was on the keeper list.”
Freeman and Melchiondo originally devised a counterpart track for “Take Me Away.” “There was supposed to be a bookend,” explains Andrew Weiss. “There was another song they had written called ‘The Concert Is Over,’ which was supposed to be the final track on the album — another Sinatra[-esque] song, kind of like ‘One for the Road.’ It was a brilliant song, but we just never got a great vocal take. Aaron tried it twice and he was like, ‘Fuck it — I’m not trying it again.’” Melchiondo confirms this account. “Yeah, I totally forgot about that song,” he says. “That’s a great song. We used to play it live all the time; we used to close with that song. If I remember correctly, Aaron just got lazy and didn’t finish it.”
Even without “The Concert Is Over,” “Take Me Away” still functions as a perfect album opener. As Claude Coleman sees it, the song works much the same way live. “‘Take Me Away’ is, I think, one of the greatest opening songs of any record in the history of rock ’n’ roll,” he asserts. “And it serves as this awesome opener to the show. It’s always awesome whenever we play it: You can put it in the middle of the set and it’s like starting a new show.”
“I Can’t Put My Finger On It” (Track 4 of 16)
In the vein of “Spinal Meningitis” and “Roses Are Free,” “I Can’t Put My Finger On It” is another track that demonstrates a subtly heightened approach to the Pure Guava sound. The song features a grinding, bottom-heavy funk rhythm with a colorful drum-machine pattern (bongos, tambourine, chimes and what sounds like a cabasa) and a blustery, heavily accented vocal caricature from Freeman that’s coated in a thick layer of CB-radio-like distortion. The lyrics follow a nursery-rhyme call-and-response pattern: “Is it green, is it red? / Is it alive or is it dead? / I can’t put my finger on it.” The track seems simplistic at first, but two subsequent sections provide an interesting contrast in mood. The verse segues into the Ween equivalent of a New Age passage, a placid interlude with heavily reverbed guitar and samples of cawing seagulls. Following the second repetition of this section is a bridge that sounds like a brown facsimile of Black Sabbath. “Are you surprised when I touch the dwarf inside?” Freeman bellows over a cartoonishly ominous riff, filled out with swirling synth and acid-fried guitar. When the verse returns, the band adds an exotic tinge in the form of a snake-charmer organ line. Lasting less th
an three minutes, the track captures the aggressive obnoxiousness of Pure Guava songs such as “Touch My Tooter,” but adds an extra layer of intricacy, lending “I Can’t Put My Finger On It” the feel of a song rather than an offhanded tangent.
As with “Voodoo Lady,” the track grew out of an extremely basic idea. “I don’t think there’s a lot of depth to [‘I Can’t Put My Finger On It’],” Melchiondo says with a chuckle. “I think I came up with the title for that, and I was like, ‘Okay, it’s gonna go, [sings] “I can’t put my finger on it.”’ I think that’s about how far that one goes. Aaron filled in the fucking spots, and we made the rhythm work with that sound. [sings, laughing] ‘I can’t put my finger on it.’” Surprisingly, though, the persona Freeman assumes is a precisely plotted caricature. “It’s some guy working behind a counter at a falafel shop,” explains Melchiondo. “Some big, sweaty Lebanese mother fucker, slicing meat off the spool of gyro.”
The song’s low-budget video illustrates this exact scenario. In the clip, Freeman lip-syncs the song while posing as a worker at the now-closed Mohamed’s Falafel Star in New York’s East Village, as the employees of the establishment back him up. During the New Age interludes, meanwhile, Melchiondo plays guitar alone on the beach. The modest but highly effective clip was directed by Chris Applebaum, who went on to oversee videos for Rihanna, Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, Paris Hilton and other pop megastars. Applebaum has fond and vivid memories of the shoot:
[Freeman and Melchiondo] never really told me what the song was about. They just said, “Have you ever tried a delicious lamb shank?” And I said, “Yeah, I think I have.” And then, they were like, “Have you ever seen a succulent lamb shank skewered and spinning on a rotisserie while lit by a beautiful amber light?” And I said, “Yeah, I have — at a gyro shop.” And they said, “That’s where we should do it: at a gyro shop.” And I lived in New York and I told them there was one down the street and it was the first gyro shop I had ever seen. And they said, “Why don’t you just go and see if we can shoot the video there.” So I walked over and I bought a gyro sandwich, and I asked to talk the owner, and the owner said, “You could do whatever you want to do here, but if you disrupt our business, we’re going to need to charge you.” And I think we found out how much they would make per hour, and we said, “We need it for six hours,” and they said, “Okay, we need $125” [laughs]. And we’re like, “Okay, no problem!”
[The shop] was on Eighth Street and Avenue A and it was called Mohamed Falafel [Star], and Mohamed and his brother, I believe, lived there and they slept in the back. And I think that they didn’t have a shower; I think they had a big sink, and they took showers or bathed in this giant sink that they had. But what ended up happening was, Mohamed and his brother were in the video. I think I’d taken a photo or something and Aaron said, “We should ask the guys if they would be in the video — if they would back me up, like if I were a big rapper and they were part of my posse.” So Mohamed said yes. [Freeman and Melchiondo] basically said, “We should make the whole thing about this delicious lamb that’s cooked at a gyro restaurant.” And Mickey said, “The only thing about it is, we want to also describe paradise, so it would be beautiful if I were playing the guitar on the beach, just sort of staring out at the sea, maybe with the sun hanging low in the sky.” And that was basically all they gave me in terms of what the song meant and what they wanted to do for the video, and from there, it was just kind of like off the cuff. We weren’t [at the shop] for very long, ’cause we had to go to Coney Island to shoot the rest with Mickey.
I think we went to go see playback after one or two takes, and Mohamed the whole time was talking to one of his employees who was running the shop while we were shooting. Because he said, “Maybe if people want gyros or a nice falafel, maybe they could come in,” and we were like, “Sure! Why not?” I had become friends with Mohamed at that time and I wanted to see the best for him, so I think that there was somebody who was off-camera, one of his employees, who kept speaking to him in Arabic while we were actually rolling the camera. And when Aaron and Mickey saw it — I didn’t know what the guys would think, but we were looking at playback, and the whole time Mohamed just can’t act at all! He can’t sing; he was totally behind, and Aaron and Mickey saw the playback and thought, “This is just fucking brilliant. This is great. This is exactly what we want. We couldn’t get a better performance out of anyone.”
We had our lunch there, and Aaron wanted to do a scene behind the counter, and he asked if he could wave a knife. He wanted one of those knives for cutting the lamb shank, and Mohamed’s like, “Sure, you can use it.” So Aaron started waving it around, and Mohamed’s like, “Fuck, man, you gotta check out this knife!” And he kept bringing out more and more knives. We looked in the back, and it didn’t look like they had a lot, but all of a sudden when it came to knives … Mohamed starts bringing out these gigantic fucking — not samurai swords, but the Arab equivalent of it. He just had all this shit that he kept bringing out, and I think that’s one of the knives that he used in the last shot.
Even after having moved on to much more high-profile, big-budget directing endeavors — including the clip for Rihanna’s epochal “Umbrella” — Applebaum still reserves a special pride for “I Can’t Put My Finger On It.” “That was my best video,” he says. “I think I peaked early.”
Melchiondo also sees the clip as a high point:
That video is our best video and the reason why is we completely fucking came up with that concept, and it was the only video that we ever did that with. We just said, “Here’s what we want it to be: We want it to be Aaron in a falafel or kebab shop with three sweaty fucking Syrian9 dudes around him and him singing that song.” There’s only two parts to that song — the sweaty Syrian part and the seagulls part. “The seagulls part will be at the beach with the seagulls and the surf. And then when it goes to the ‘dwarf inside’ part in the middle, the whole thing goes negative, and it’s a bad acid trip.” And that was it. It’s like, “Here’s the concept; here’s the song,” and [Chris] was like, “Okay.” And he went out and he location-scouted it, and it was easy.
We play guitars and record music; we don’t think about videos and shit like that — not in a serious way. Back then it was like, “Okay, you make two or three videos for every fuckin’ record, on the chance that it would get played on the mighty MTV,” which is just totally ridiculous, a waste of a lot of money. A lot of people wasted a lot of money making videos in that decade.
There really wasn’t anything to it. “Did you find the gyro shop?” “Yeah.” “Where’s the only beach in New York?” “Coney Island.” So we went to those two places and that’s all there was to it. But that’s why it’s our best video. It cost like $5,500 — or maybe it was even less, like $2,500.
“Don’t Shit Where You Eat” (Track 16 of 16)
Crass title aside, the concluding track of Chocolate and Cheese is thoroughly laid-back. Melchiondo plays a breezy, loping acoustic-guitar progression brimming with soulful nuance, and the drum machine lays down a midtempo shuffle. Freeman croons gently, summoning the same smoothness he demonstrates on “Freedom of ’76,” and handling his own harmony vocals. He sings of easy pleasures (“Lamb, veal, and some good ole wine / This is the life for me”), and Melchiondo responds with a beautifully twangy, ’50s-style electric-guitar solo that drives home the mood of leisure. There’s nothing particularly elaborate about the arrangement, but it’s unmistakably a product of the post-4-track Ween. Synthesized drums and elliptical lyrics aside, “Don’t Shit Where You Eat” is simply a quirky, retro pop song, livened up by an offhanded virtuosity not foregrounded on Ween albums before Chocolate and Cheese.
As with “I Can’t Put My Finger On It,” “Don’t Shit Where You Eat” grew out of a very specific visual image. “The thing that we were going for was a strolling-down-the-promenade-in-Paris kind of vibe,” explains Melchiondo. To achieve that vibe, he employed what he calls the “jazzy chords” he had learned from
Ed Wilson and also put to use on “Freedom of ’76.” Freeman cites another inspiration. “I believe on some level, Mickey and I are and were both smitten with Seals and Crofts,” he says. “I see songs like ‘Don’t Shit Where You Eat’ and ‘Joppa Road’ coming from that place, and that’s always a good place to come from.”
Lyrically Melchiondo drew on an inspiration much closer to home. “‘Don’t Shit Where You Eat’ is one of, like, ten songs that we’ve done based on things that my father has said,” he says. “My father was filled with all sorts of great quotes, like ‘Piss Up a Rope’ [from 12 Golden Country Greats] is another. [‘Don’t Shit Where You Eat’] is just sort of like life advice, lessons, that kind of thing. I can’t really remember too much about it, other than that the expression was so funny, we felt it was worthy of its own song.”
“What Deaner Was Talkin’ About” (Track 15 of 16)
Clocking in at exactly two minutes, “What Deaner Was Talkin’ About” is the shortest song on Chocolate and Cheese, but it’s by no means slight. Like “Baby Bitch,” “Deaner” is a simple yet highly moving example of bittersweet guitar pop. Similar songs had showed up on earlier Ween albums: God Ween Satan’s “Don’t Laugh (I Love You),” or the enduring “Pork Roll Egg and Cheese.” But as with “Baby Bitch,” “Deaner” clearly represents a new phase of the band’s work.
The production is spare, and it keeps overt weirdness to a minimum. Melchiondo layers a gently psychedelic guitar line over his own steady drum beat, played on a live kit. Freeman delivers an extremely brief verse, rendered without any of Ween’s warped vocal effects. Then comes a beautiful chorus fleshed out with acoustic guitar, harmony vocals — arranged by Freeman and Melchiondo’s longtime friend Scott Lowe — and a wave of washy synth. After another verse-chorus repeat, Melchiondo plays a heavily treated guitar solo that hints at the wobbly tone of a theremin, leading into a final chorus reprise. Overall, the track is concise and tasteful: The synths and guitar effects hint at the expansive psych-pop vistas found on later Ween albums such as Quebec, but the accompaniment mainly serves to highlight the poetic simplicity of the tune. On “What Deaner Was Talkin’ About,” you can hear Freeman and Melchiondo coming to terms with their own burgeoning genius as songwriters, realizing that they don’t need to hide behind brown sonics or insular humor in order to sound like themselves.