Ween's Chocolate and Cheese (33 1/3) (18 page)

“I knew friends that knew them and I was really proud because for months they were saying, ‘In LA, this Hasidic Jewish guy came and danced with us!’ They didn’t know it was me. So we met in a very romantic way — we kind of already had a shared moment together.”

⁵
Chocolate and Cheese
also featured a tribute to a different sort of inspiration. A note on the inside sleeve reads, “Dedicated in Loving Memory to John Candy (1950–1994).” Aaron Freeman explains: “John Candy had died around the time we were making
Chocolate and Cheese
. I remember seeing
Cool Runnings
with my sister and being impressed as always with his performance. I hate it when fat comedians die.”

⁶
Freeman actually attributes the phrase to himself and Melchiondo rather than to Williams: “Europe comes to mind: It was where I and Mickey realized that if Europe is good for one thing, it was both their chocolate and cheese products. This epiphany led to the title, sort of like chocolate and peanut butter but with cheese.”

⁷
For more evidence of same, see
Z-Rock Hawaii
, a thoroughly zany album that Freeman and Melchiondo recorded with Eye — leader of legendary Japanese avant-rock collective Boredoms — in the midst of the
Chocolate and Cheese
sessions.

⁸
When approached for this book, Phish frontman Anastasio declines to comment directly on “Roses Are Free” but he’s complimentary toward Ween in general:

“When we got signed to Elektra in ’92 or ’93, Sue Drew, our A&R person at the time, gave me a copy of
Pure Guava
. Ween had also just been signed to the label. I loved that record from the second I put it on, and remember playing it with my wife Sue (then my girlfriend) in my room in Winooski [Vermont], and the two of us just cracking up. That was my first encounter with Ween. I thought they were incredible. I particularly loved ‘I Play It Off Legit,’ which had that line, ‘My mom bought me this new shirt / When I wear it I’m the shit / It’s really not that legit, my mom bought it.’ I also loved ‘Reggaejunkiejew.’

“I decided to go backwards in their catalogue and I bought
The Pod
, which had the masterpiece, ‘Pork Roll Egg and Cheese’ and also ‘Dr. Rock.’ Then I discovered
God Ween Satan
and went around the house singing ‘Squelch the Weasel’ and ‘El Camino’ for weeks. I was hooked. The interesting thing to me about
Chocolate and Cheese
is that it has some songs on it that really showcase the depth of their songwriting talent. Particularly ‘Baby Bitch,’ and ‘Freedom of ’76.’”

In a 1998 interview, Anastasio summed up his feelings about Ween thusly: “I love Ween. Ween is white soul.”

⁹
In an earlier conversation, Melchiondo had referred to the character as Lebanese.

¹⁰
Scott Lowe, who was present during the session, recalls that orchestrating these drop-outs was somewhat tricky:

With “The HIV Song,” there’s a couple points where the band is playing on the track but we wanted the music to stop for one of the little [instances of] “HIV.” And to stop it, we all had to line up on the board and hit a mute button on the mixer on all the channels that we wanted to mute, just leaving the vocals on, and we all had to hit it on cue. We had to mute maybe ten tracks or more, so it required four or five of us to all stand next to each other and we could each hit maybe four buttons apiece and we just kind of hit them on the beat and then put them back on after it said “HIV.”

I think that there were a couple of rests in there, but they wanted to put more in. Initially when they played it live, they did play it with a couple of rests, but there were times when they played it all the way through and they decided later, “Let’s lift it here and here, too.” So we basically, by hand, had to put it back in, and we did that in the mixdown stage. Today you could do that on Pro Tools with the click of a mouse, and even in the old days of analog mixing, they would still have computer controls that would do it automatically, but we didn’t have that ability in this studio.

¹¹
See
Honey
in particular.

¹²
This conversation took place in 2007, for a
Time Out New York
story on
La Cucaracha.