Ween's Chocolate and Cheese (33 1/3) (5 page)

By this point in their career, Ween’s live incarnation could expound at length in pretty much any style
they wanted and sound completely convincing. And as evidenced by several later live versions of “L.M.L.Y.P.” viewable on YouTube — each of which features a stageful of dancing females — the song’s aphrodisiac appeal is no joke. Most likely, this is the exact fantasy scenario Freeman and Melchiondo had in mind when they penned tunes like “Boobs” back in the mid-’80s.

Undoubtedly, Ween’s increasingly fluid jamming abilities were a major asset to the band’s onstage presence. But even as improv became a greater part of the group’s live act in in the post-DAT era, Freeman and Melchiondo wisely kept the focus on their sizable catalog of memorable songs. The difference was that whereas the duo had offered sketchy evocations of a variety of genres, the full-band Ween could reproduce them with utter accuracy. It’s remarkable to compare the aggressively chintzy-sounding version of “Dr. Rock” that appeared on
The Pod
to the pummeling glam-punk freakout heard on the 2003 CD/DVD
Live in Chicago
. And while on
Pure Guava
, the song “Big Jilm” is a loping two-minute lark, on
Chicago
, it’s a jaunty, uptempo pop-rock number with an anthemic refrain. Elsewhere in the concert, Ween demonstrates their stylistic breadth, tearing through an Irish waltz (“The Blarney Stone”), a countryfied bar anthem (“Booze Me Up and Get Me High”), a prog-rock epic (“Buckingham Green”) and even a flawless, majestic version of Zeppelin’s “All My Love,” during which McClelland reproduces verbatim the florid keyboard solo of the original. These loud, tight, fleshed-out performances stand in stark contrast to Ween’s early
work. A
Live in Chicago
viewer whose only prior exposure to the band had been catching “Push th’ Little Daisies” on
Beavis and Butthead
might think they were witnessing some sort of glossified Ween revue, or a particularly ambitious cover band. At bottom, the material is still Ween, but the difference in presentation is like night and day.

As the Ween live experience evolved from two guys and a DAT tape to a full-on rock ’n’ roll spectacle, reviewers took note of the band’s improbable evolution. Responding to a
12 Golden Country Greats
-era Ween show in 1996,
New York Times
critic Jon Pareles observed, “Spiffed up and treated like professional rock, Ween’s songs became even more richly twisted.” Covering a 2007 Ween concert in the same paper, Kelefa Sanneh summed up the full-band Ween live experience thusly: “Over the years, Ween has evolved into a shaggy but virtuosic live band, playing with an exuberance that sometimes flattens the music … but more often enriches it.”

Other critics have held up the full-band version of Ween as a group for the ages. In 2009, John Lingan, writing on the website Splice Today, called Ween “possibly the best live band in the world” and marveled at the current quintet’s power and versatility:

I don’t know a lot of Ween’s music, and I don’t even like all of what I know, but after seeing them live last week I’m prepared to say they’re my favorite band on earth … What I saw at Ween’s Baltimore performance on July 16 was just about as close to a perfect rock
concert as I’ve ever witnessed. The music was uniformly amazing, and often more affecting and visceral than the band’s relatively obtuse studio versions. The crowd was huge, diverse, and in thrall. The band — Gene and Dean Ween complemented by their longstanding keyboard/bass/drums rhythm section — couldn’t have exhibited more excitement, or played with greater energy. They flew through stoner speed metal jams and loose country-rock, new wave pop to gnarly, effects-laden prog. It was all glory.

Reviews such as these proved that the
Chocolate and Cheese
-era gambit had paid off handsomely. In upgrading their sound, both in the studio and onstage, Freeman and Melchiondo may have relinquished their initial underdog charm, but what they gained was an audience who truly appreciated them as musicians and songwriters, and who understood that underneath the virtuosity, they were still the same irreverent visionaries from the ultrabrown years.

As we’ve clearly seen, Ween began as a classic DIY recording endeavor (e.g.
The Crucial Squeegie Lip
) and eventually evolved into something much more professional, a group whose albums could stand with time-tested psychedelic classics (e.g.
Quebec
). While this change didn’t occur in one fell swoop,
Chocolate and Cheese
, recorded from fall 1993 to spring 1994 and released in September of ’94, represented the first crucial step along this path. It marked the point at which Ween began to behave — both onstage and in the studio — a little less like an eccentric project and a little more like a conventional band. The album found Ween remaking their home 4-track demos with the benefit of a multitrack setup, upgrading to an industry-standard digital format, recording in a rented space rather than their own living room, employing the talents of highly skilled auxiliary musicians, complementing the drum-machine-driven sound that marked
The Pod
and
Pure Guava
with tracks featuring a real drum kit, and generally rendering the
trademark Ween sound in a more embellished, palatable format. As Ween’s post-
Chocolate and Cheese
flowering proved, this transition was ultimately fruitful, but it wasn’t without its considerable challenges.

During the writing of what would become
Chocolate and Cheese
, Ween formalized their working method, in part out of necessity.
The Pod
and
Pure Guava
were the products of Freeman and Melchiondo cohabitating and working together in close quarters at the Pod, but by the
Chocolate and Cheese
era, Melchiondo had moved in with his future wife, while Freeman had relocated to Brookridge Farm, a kind of neohippie countryside sanctuary situated in Lambertville, New Jersey (across the Delaware River from New Hope). “This was the first time we had not been living with our parents or each other,” says Freeman of the period. Partly as a result of this change, the pair began to treat their time spent on Ween in a more professional manner. By the time of
Chocolate and Cheese
, they were deliberately working toward a major-label-backed album rather than simply recording out of the love of hearing themselves on tape. Melchiondo elaborates:

All the time that we lived together, we constantly were writing and recording, but it was just a continuation of
what we had been doing in high school and junior high, except that now we were living together and we were able to do it all the time. But looking back to when we were doing [
Chocolate and Cheese
], we kind of circled the wagons and had more of a work ethic when we were getting together. ’Cause it was something that was still very important to us. It was kind of like the main central thing in our lives. So when we got together, I think we were kind of overdoing it, like, “No, we don’t have enough good songs,” or, “We need more.”

And when we were doing
The Pod
and
Pure Guava
, a lot of the reason there was no anxiety when those records were coming out is ’cause we did them at home, so we had a year before we even knew that an album was coming out to get acquainted and comfortable. They were just these songs that we had done at home, and we’d been living with for a long time, until we had enough to call it a record. We could get feedback from friends and people for months and months and months before ultimately putting the stuff out in public. It was a very different mindset from working on
Chocolate and Cheese
, and all the records after that. Yeah, I think we overachieved for the five years after we didn’t live together. We probably worked more often. It was like, “Okay, Aaron and I are recording today.” He’d come over to my house; I’d go over to his house. Like I said, I think our work ethic improved because that time had to be sacred to write.

This process of “He’d come over to my house; I’d go
over to his house” yielded 4-track versions of many of the songs that would end up on
Chocolate and Cheese
, but unlike in the past, these demos were treated as merely a blueprint for the final product. The band eventually reworked their initial scribbles into full-fledged paintings, a process that Melchiondo cites as a significant departure from Ween’s working method on
The Pod
and
Pure Guava
:

We weren’t in the habit of doing demos for songs and then re-recording them. Our typical thing was there’s one version of it and that’s the version that’s on the record.
Chocolate and Cheese
was more rooting through the best of 50 or 60 songs, whittling it down and recording, like, 25 of them and leaving nine or ten off the record. It was a lot more structured and a lot more methodical than what we usually do, which is quantity not quality: Do a song as fast as you can and then do another one.

As Andrew Weiss puts it, “We decided to step it up.” Dave Ayers stressed that this was an entirely internal decision: “The stepped-up production — more conventional, state-of-the-art multitracking — that part of it was a conversation, but it was more like, ‘Here’s what we wanna do — does the Elektra deal provide us with the up-front money to do it?’ It wasn’t like Elektra asked for a more hi-fi record. I think honestly they could’ve kept delivering
Pure Guava
and everybody would’ve been thrilled.”

But Ween was intent on trying something a little different this time around. The first step was finding a facility. Given that Ween was by this point a major-label act, it’s conceivable that they could have sought out a fully outfitted studio, but instead Freeman, Melchiondo and Weiss chose to stay local and hands-on. “We went around and we found this office park in Pennington, New Jersey,” recalls Weiss. “We rented the spot, just one big open space, up on the second floor. There were phone jacks all over the walls, so obviously it had been some telemarketing thing or something.”

Melchiondo’s memories of the space paint a similarly antiseptic picture. “Yeah, Andrew found the spot,” he says. “It was in this office park, like if you were going to get a check-up or somethin’. Except you walk in and in one building it was a dentist and directly next door was Ween making a record, every day and every night at top volume.”

“I remember the place was an emptied out telemarketers office on the second floor of some rat bag industrial complex,” recalls Freeman. “I think we were the only ones occupying the space at the time — if we weren’t than we were soon to be.”

Steve Ralbvosky emphasizes the makeshift nature of the endeavor: “
Chocolate and Cheese
was the first time that they did it with so-called pro gear, but it was gear that they had chosen and put together in a rented space. So they sort of made their own home studio.”

Drummer Claude Coleman, who played on several
Chocolate and Cheese
tracks and would later join Ween as
the band’s permanent live drummer, retains fond memories of the space. “It was just this large room totally crammed with gear, haphazardly strewn about everywhere, just like drum machines and pedals and stuff like that,” he recalls. “And in the middle of it all was this gigantic console with Andrew Weiss behind it, and shit just strewn everywhere. It was just a real fun, real free way to make music.” Coleman also remembers being impressed by the working chemistry shared by Freeman, Melchiondo and Weiss:

There was an amazing synergy. Everyone seemed like an extension of the same hand, a finger off of the same hand or something. The three of them have been working together like that for a while, and I think by that time they were starting to hit a really neat stride, almost on a telepathic level. Everything just flowed: The songs came in; they figured out what to do, recorded them, listened to the playbacks and kind of made decisions where to go from there. It was pretty easy.

Just as Freeman and Melchiondo had disciplined themselves during the writing and demoing process, the pair and Weiss adhered to a tight recording schedule at the Pennington office park. “We worked every day,” says Melchiondo. “I think it was like noon to dinner time. Sometimes we’d have dinner there and work through the night.”

Predictably, the noise level was an immediate and constant problem. “Right next door, on the other side of the
wall, which we found out was paper thin, was Comcast or something,” Weiss explains. “The first thing we did was set up the drum kit and start playing, and we could hear the phone ringing next door, so we realized that there was an issue with the walls.” It didn’t take long for said issue to come to a head. “One day, the neighbor, to get revenge, put speakers up against the wall and turned rock ’n’ roll radio up as loud as it could go and left, thinking they were gonna blast us out,” says Melchiondo. “But we had much louder equipment, so we just won the volume battle.”

Sound pollution wasn’t the band’s only offense. Melchiondo elaborates:

We came in there and we just amassed mountains of trash. And it was all just beer bottles, booze bottles, pizza boxes and Chinese food containers, so it was, like, the most rancid stench in the whole world. Finally we got the idea to clean it out, and we took it and we literally filled the next door neighbor’s Dumpster with it. So when they came in, their Dumpster was overflowing with our shit. And we dumped our fan mail in there too. So they were able to figure out really quickly by looking in the trash who had done it. It was in the first few weeks we were there, so a bad vibe was established really fast. It got to the point where I felt really uncomfortable every time I parked my car. I walked as fast as I could to the door with my head down, till I got to safety and locked the door behind me.

Amid waging war with their neighbors, Freeman, Melchiondo and Weiss were grappling with various technical hurdles. Many of these stemmed from the fact that
Chocolate and Cheese
was the first Ween album to make use of digital recording, specifically a VHS-tape-based format called ADAT, which Weiss used in tandem with a computer. Today’s digital recording is a snap, but the early-’90s equipment Weiss had to contend with presented constant headaches.