Ween's Chocolate and Cheese (33 1/3) (2 page)

What follows is an account of how Ween upped their game during the
Chocolate and Cheese
era, flouting
Beavis and Butthead
— and any other lingering detractors — and paving the way for a singular modern-pop success story. To illustrate this shift, I’ve chosen a simple three-part structure:

I. Before
Chocolate and Cheese
: A brief glimpse into Ween’s humble origins, followed by an account of how Ween attained cult fame while retaining their homegrown appeal.

II. After
Chocolate and Cheese
: A discussion of Ween’s mature work, with an emphasis on the increasingly elaborate production style of their recordings and their evolution into a world-class live act.

III.
Chocolate and Cheese
: An in-depth examination of the record itself, and how it served as a bridge between Ween’s early and late phases. I discuss the making of the record, followed by the songs and the artwork.

This book was an intensely collaborative project. In the course of my research — from June, 2009 through August, 2010 — I interviewed both Mickey Melchiondo and Aaron Freeman, as well as many others who played a part in the making of
Chocolate and Cheese
. I also spoke with several well-known Ween associates. A complete cast of characters follows the manuscript.

We had both just been in the school district for about a year, so we were both kind of new. And we didn’t like each other, typically. He was more of a jock, and I was more of a trenchcoat-wearing guy. And we met in typing class. We sat next to each other and both realized we were into music. And it started out as me telling him about the Devo records I was listening to and Laurie Anderson and Prince. And he hated Prince, thought Prince was a big fag. He gave me some Dead Kennedys records and some stuff like that to listen to, and I gave him some of my stuff and we just traded music and introduced each other to different sides of early ’80s music. And we just started getting together at his house after school and we both loved to hear ourselves on tape: I think that was the common unity. We started recording immediately, and we named ourselves Ween and that was it.

—Aaron Freeman

B
eavis and Butthead
may have pegged “Push th’ Little Daisies” as a dud, but beneath the silliness, the track is an artful, tender and infectious pop song. The same can’t always be said for much of Ween’s earliest output, found on a series of cassettes issued by the fledgling band in the mid-to-late ’80s. To understand what a major step forward
Chocolate and Cheese
was for Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo, it’s vital to get a sense of just how humble their artistic beginnings were.

The Crucial Squeegie Lip
lends credence to Freeman’s assertion that Ween “started recording immediately.” The tape is Ween’s inaugural release, dating from roughly a year after the band’s 1984 formation as an after-school outlet for two New Hope, Pennsylvania eighth-graders. At heart,
Squeegie Lip
is an ultra-raw punk record, full of brief, noisy outbursts rendered in lo-fi sound.

Many of the tracks privilege hyperactive energy over song structure. “Go!” plays like amateur grindcore, with guitar and drums starting at a crawl and accelerating into a frenzied blur. “Jessica” channels the same manic catharsis into creepy obsession, as anguished cries of a female name give way to outright rage (“Fuck you, Jessica!”). The aptly named “Mindfuck” finds the brothers Ween reveling in scribbly guitar, tumbling drums and apelike yelps.

Buried under the antimusical din of
The Crucial Squeegie Lip
are some genuinely inventive moments. Not yet up to the task of reproducing genres, Freeman and Melchiondo seemed content to merely allude to them. At only 45 seconds, “Boobs (Part III)” is a
dead-on evocation of Spinal Tap-ish sleaze — “I love your boobs! / I love your soft and spongy boobs!!!” — while the even shorter “Duke of Denim” nails Jonathan Richman’s droll protopunk monologues. “Red as Satan” is meandering and nonsensical (“Dust particles shinin’ in my window remind me of you”), yet it’s still a poignant stab at acoustic folk-pop.

Other tracks reveal that
The Crucial Squeegie Lip
was as much an experiment in home recording as it was an album of songs. The tape’s intermittent spoken-word pieces, fashioned as mock interviews, end up stealing the show. “Introview” matter-of-factly explains Ween’s typing-class origins, as well as their patron deity, the Boognish, represented as a spiky-haired cartoon head that adorns much of the band’s artwork to this day. “Drinktalk,” which introduces the sub–Black Flag punk tune “I Drink a Lot,” is a charming piece of sound art that could resonate with anyone who’s ever reveled in the simple joys of home recording. “We totally support and urge young children to smoke crack and drink a lot,” says Melchiondo in an ace deadpan, which wobbles in and out of intelligibility thanks to a slathering of effects.

All in all,
The Crucial Squeegie Lip
sounds like what it is: the product of two adolescent buddies discovering DIY art and indulging their freakiest sonic fantasies without the slightest regard for listener comfort. Ween would carry this spirit with them all the way to the point of 1992’s
Pure Guava
, their major-label debut and the record that earned them their MTV breakthrough.

For [
The Pod
and
Pure Guava
], Mickey and Aaron recorded on the 4-track at the Pod, which was a shack they lived in on this horse farm outside New Hope. They recorded all this shit and they would just give me, like, a bag of tapes, and I would just sift through it, pick out songs and mix them and sequence the record.

—Andrew Weiss

One day, a box of
Pure Guava
discs shows up from Elektra, and I think I started crying, because I was a music junkie and now we were on the same label as the Doors. Here was this record that we recorded in our apartment for not even two dollars — we didn’t even buy new tape, just taped over demo tapes bands gave us on the road — and it’s on Elektra.

—Mickey Melchiondo in
Magnet Magazine
;
August/September, 2000

… a major label is now subsidizing their scribbles.

—
Spin
on Ween’s
Pure Guava
; December, 1992

The years following
The Crucial Squeegie Lip
yielded several more self-released Ween cassettes, as well as the now-classic full-lengths
God Ween Satan: The Oneness
(1990) and
The Pod
(1991). During this period, Freeman and Melchiondo’s project evolved considerably, in both the musical and professional senses. Yet Ween seemed to feel no compulsion to outpace their origins.
Pure Guava
, the band’s 1992 major-label debut, and the record that earned Ween their MTV moment, grew directly out of their two-guys-and-a-4-track beginnings. Moreover, it flaunted the duo’s primitive aesthetic to a striking degree. Freeman and Melchiondo’s boldly unadorned live show followed suit.

In terms of production,
Pure Guava
actually registered as a step backward from previous Ween records. Compared to
The Crucial Squeegie Lip
and the other cassette releases, Ween’s first proper full-length,
God Ween Satan
— issued on the Minneapolis indie Twin/Tone, which had previously nurtured the careers of the Replacements and Soul Asylum — featured vastly improved playing, a far more diverse stylistic palette and much crisper sound, realized via the 16-track home studios of Andrew Weiss and Greg Frey, both part of Ween’s inner circle to this day. There’s plenty of
Squeegie Lip-
style obnoxiousness on
God Ween Satan
(the nightmarish bee-sting lament “Bumblebee”; the cock-rock meltdown “Common Bitch”; and a monolithic, Ted Nugent-worthy
version of “You Fucked Up,” which had originally appeared on
Squeegie Lip
), but the album is rendered in bright, relatively hi-fi sound, befitting the band’s transition to a visible and respected label. Melchiondo handled both guitar and drums on the record, yet many of the songs, such as the jazzy hepcat riff “Never Squeal,” sound like a band playing live.

Ween’s third album,
Pure Guava
, offered something very different. Namely, it sounded nothing like traditional rock music.
God Ween Satan
’s live-band aura may have been an illusion, but that fact wasn’t obvious to the ear.
Pure Guava
, on the other hand, dispensed with this illusion entirely, a trend that had begun with Ween’s sophomore LP, 1991’s
The Pod
. These records portrayed Ween not as a band in the traditional sense, but as a kind of post-psychedelic home-recording project, one both constrained and inspired by limited resources.

Recorded on a 4-track by Freeman and Melchiondo at their then-home, a fly-ridden shack known as the Pod — situated on a farm in the New Hope area — and issued more or less in their original form, these pair of releases reveled in an unabashedly artificial soundworld, full of plodding drum-machine beats and other synthetic textures. Put another way,
The Pod
and
Pure Guava
represent the ultimate realization of what the band likes to refer to as “brown,” a term for some combination of deranged, tripped-out and flagrantly weird.
¹

It doesn’t get any more brown than
The Pod
, a deeply tranquilized-sounding slog. On twisted tracks like “Frank,” vocals are pitch-shifted to molasses speed, drum-machine rhythms clank and crawl at agonizingly slow tempos and Melchiondo’s obnoxiously distorted guitarwork squalls out of the speakers. The lyrics fixate on in-jokey memes such as the pork roll, egg and cheese — a breakfast sandwich popular in New Jersey and Philadelphia — and the Stallion, a pampered, ego-maniacal talking horse revisited by Ween on later songs. Yet buried within all this egregious mind-fuckery are some truly great songs, including the attitudinal anthem “Dr. Rock,” the eerie existential soul number “Demon Sweat” and the post-Beatles psych-pop marvel “Pork Roll Egg and Cheese.”

Pure Guava
is a sequel to
The Pod
in every sense. The 1992 release features a nearly identical mix of aggressive brownness — including the nursery rhyme from hell
that is “Poop Ship Destroyer” as well as the overdriven noise miasma “Mourning Glory” — and skewed yet ingenious pop songs, such as the bedroom-prog triumph “Don’t Get 2 Close 2 My Fantasy.” There’s even another installment in the Stallion saga. In fact, there was only one significant difference between
The Pod
and
Pure Guava
, but it was a crucial one: The former album came out on the notoriously eccentric independent label Shimmy Disc and could therefore be pegged as just another strange dispatch from the teeming indie underground. And though it was actually complete at the time of Ween’s major-label signing and licensed as-is to the band’s new backer,
Pure Guava
took on a whole different meaning due to a few simple words on the back cover: “Elektra Entertainment, a division of Warner Communications Inc.” This particular slab of brown was, shockingly, a product of the mainstream record industry, issuing from the same label that had released multiplatinum smashes such as Natalie Cole’s
Unforgettable: With Love
and Queen’s
News of the World
.

The textural loopiness of
The Pod
and
Pure Guava
, combined with Ween’s continued penchant for absurd humor and their self-perpetuated drugged-out image — “In the time that this album was completed, we filled up 3,600 hours of tape, and inhaled five cans of Scotchguard,” dead-panned
The Pod
’s liner notes — resulted in music that was easy to dismiss offhand as the product of a joke band. Few bands will ever come up with tunes as enduring as “Pork Roll Egg and Cheese” or “Don’t Get 2 Close 2 My Fantasy,” but however brilliant
much of this material was, the medium of these albums overwhelmed the message. The low-tech presentation suggested that Freeman and Melchiondo were just horsing around, as if they couldn’t be bothered to recruit a real band or round up proper instruments.

Ween’s concert appearances during the
Pure Guava
era only reinforced this notion. A DVD of the band’s early-’90s performances, issued along with the live CD
At the Cat’s Cradle
, reveals a duo wholly at peace with their amateur aura. In footage from March, 1992 at the Columbus, Ohio club Stache’s, a DAT
²
player pipes in deafening drum-machine and bass accompaniment, as Freeman and Melchiondo strike funny poses and sing in pitch-shifted voices, yielding something that resembles a surreal talent-show act. Yet even in this setting, the strength of Ween’s songs, not to mention Melchiondo’s guitar prowess and Freeman’s vocal talent, shines through. If on
The Crucial Squeegie Lip
, Ween’s production values mirrored their nascent musicality, the two aspects had since grown to seem very much at odds. Somewhat shockingly, Ween had become a highly skilled band.

This contradiction gave
Pure Guava
-era Ween a distinct underdog quality. In their own minds and in the minds of fans, the act of persisting with their rudimentary, DAT-driven setup even as their musical abilities and visibility skyrocketed was a point of punk-ethics-derived
pride. In the liner notes to
At the Cat’s Cradle
, Melchiondo fondly recalled the Ween live experience during this period:

Every night we had to face the crowd pretty much naked, there was nowhere to hide, no room for an off night. We did a lot of talking to the crowd and one another between songs — we pretty much had to. We faced a lot of hostile audiences when we were the opening act on a show. There was a lot to hate about us but we won over a lot of people in the process because of our sheer nerve. A lot of our closest friends feel that Ween live pretty much ended when we switched to a traditional band format with a bass player and drummer … Once we started releasing records and touring more as a duo we got a lot better at it, we stopped caring about what the audience thought of us and just focused on having fun onstage. This was when we maximized our brownness.