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

by Shteamer, Hank

“Did they hire a producer or something?”: Ween records after Chocolate and Cheese

  Before Chocolate and Cheese, Ween records registered as the handiwork of particularly gifted bedroom stoners. After Chocolate and Cheese, Ween records began to sound like the albums that those same bedroom stoners might trip out to — albums that rival the Beatles, Pink Floyd and other psychedelic-rock masters for enveloping detail. Even while keeping their circle of collaborators small and their budget frugal, Ween drastically heightened their production values and became a far richer band in the process.

  But before entering their psychedelic phase in earnest, Ween decided to throw a wondrous curveball. On 12 Golden Country Greats, the 1996 follow-up to Chocolate and Cheese, Ween dove into a hi-fi soundworld with both feet. As the title indicates, the record is a full-fledged country session recorded in Nashville with veteran session musicians. Predictably, the tracks sound outstanding, colored with warm pedal steel, wailing violin, honky-tonk piano and the cushy background vocals of Elvis Presley collaborators the Jordanaires. Thanks to such aural finery, the record seems to have emerged from an entirely different galaxy than Ween’s pre-Chocolate and Cheese work.

  Freeman’s wry lyrics (“Breakfast at Shoney’s / At $2.99 / Saved me some money / And eased up my mind”) skew the picture-perfect Nashville vibe somewhat, but 12 Golden Country Greats is a crucial step forward in Freeman and Melchiondo’s quest to pull off their fantasies rather than just hinting at them. As AllMusic.com put it, “While the song titles alone — among them ‘Japanese Cowboy,’ ‘Mister Richard Smoker,’ and ‘Help Me Scrape the Mucus Off My Brain’ — served notice that the group’s lyrical attitude had not altered one whit, the music was remarkably evocative of Nashville’s golden era, and performed with skill and affection.”

  Ween’s next three full-lengths — The Mollusk (1997), White Pepper (2000) and Quebec (2003) — took the hi-fi approach of 12 Golden Country Greats and applied it to the shared template of God Ween Satan, The Pod and Pure Guava, all pan-generic collections of staunchly diverse yet deeply memorable songs. After having cleaned up their sound on Chocolate and Cheese, the band would embrace hi-fi to an even greater degree on these records. Just as Mos Def and Jack Black remade Hollywood classics on a shoestring in Be Kind Rewind, Ween in their early years was all about Freeman and Melchiondo using rudimentary technology to approximate the widescreen sound vistas they were hearing in their heads. On this trio of albums, though, Ween no longer sounded like they were approximating anything: The band’s basic values of irreverence and eclecticism remained strong, but the polished execution would be nearly unrecognizable to an enthusiast of the pre-Chocolate and Cheese era.

  The Mollusk, issued in 1997 but recorded in part before the 12 Golden Country Greats sessions, was easily Ween’s most accomplished statement to date. Freeman and Melchiondo began work on the album in a spartan setting that recalled the Pod — a rented beach house in Holgate, New Jersey — with a 16-track in place of the customary 4-track. Ween eventually abandoned their outpost after the water pipes froze then burst, and completed the record in various studios and rented spaces. But even though the album’s initial sessions harked back to Ween’s initial two-guys-and-a-tape-machine method, there’s nothing primitive about the way The Mollusk sounds: It’s a state-of-the-art psych-rock record. (Fittingly, it features a cover designed by Storm Thorgerson, famed Pink Floyd cover artist.)

  The album contains some of the most beautiful examples of recorded Ween. “Mutilated Lips” is an exquisite example of psych-folk trippiness, coated in thick layers of bongos, acoustic guitars and theremin-like synths. Equally sumptuous is the dreamy title track, which features swirling keyboards, call-and-response vocals and a cryptic monologue. There’s bizarre humor to be found in both of these songs, not to mention plenty of Ween’s patented warped vocal effects, but the tracks have an unmistakable air of professionalism. This isn’t the 4-track version of psychedelia; it’s the real thing. The record does contain several tracks that recall the pre-Chocolate and Cheese era — including “I’ll Be Your Jonny on the Spot” and “Waving My Dick in the Wind,” both fast, twangy songs with rudimentary drum-machine accompaniment — but in the context of the more ornate pieces that make up the rest of The Mollusk, these efforts seem stripped-down by choice, rather than out of necessity.

  White Pepper, issued in 2000, is an even more full-sounding album. Produced by Chris Shaw (whose résumé includes work with Bob Dylan, Jewel and Sarah McLachlan), the record contains some particularly strong writing, but what stands out most about White Pepper is its hi-fi sound, rendered with help from the members of Ween’s touring band. The hippie-ish waltz “Flutes of Chi,” the flamboyant rocker “Even if You Don’t,” the bittersweet love song “Stay Forever” and other tracks here are fully dressed up in multitrack finery — practically the polar opposite of 4-track-era Ween. The best example of White Pepper’s elaborateness is probably the infectious “Bananas and Blow,” a groovy amalgam of Tex-Mex and Caribbean kitsch. Bolstering Freeman’s smooth croon are a full Latin percussion section, prominent steel drums, wailing backup singers and, of course, Melchiondo, who turns in a fiery mariachi-style solo on acoustic guitar. As a whole, White Pepper is a straightforwardly enjoyable record, on which the band’s sonic quality seemed perfectly in line with their unusually broad ambition. Many reviewers took note of this new harmoniousness. Entertainment Weekly called White Pepper “an album for non-stoners,” which proved that Ween’s “newfound melodic skills and long-standing arrangement smarts [could] blossom without weedy drug buffoonery.” Rolling Stone, meanwhile, ventured that the album “could be Ween’s most accessible release yet” and pointed out that “[their] sick sound is augmented with full-bodied melodic arrangements.”

  Ween’s next full-length, 2003’s Quebec — issued on the now defunct Sanctuary label, following the band’s split from Elektra — features a much darker emotional hue than White Pepper, yet its sound is similarly ambitious. Helping Freeman and Melchiondo to achieve this effect were Andrew Weiss and the celebrated session drummer Josh Freese (Guns N’ Roses, Weezer, Nine Inch Nails, etc.). Psychedelia continued to play a large part in Ween’s sound here, as heard on two of the record’s standout tracks, “Transdermal Celebration” and “Alcan Road.” The former is a stadium-worthy rock song that moves from ballsy to delicate. Melchiondo plays an epic, man-alone-on-top-of-a-mountain guitar solo, and the final verse features an effect that sounds like a roaring jet engine. The huge-sounding production, which wouldn’t sound out of place on modern-rock radio, befits the song’s innate drama. (“Did they hire a producer or something?” wonders one clearly baffled YouTube commenter beneath an animated video for the track.) “Alcan Road,” on the other hand, takes a minimalist approach, though it’s one that bears no resemblance to the pre-Chocolate and Cheese days. It’s essentially a menacing drone piece, shot through with copious echo, woozy synth tones and the sounds of whooshing wind. The track is highly unsettling, and it could never have worked with a lo-fi sound palette. The same is true for the majority of the album, which is filled with atmospheric, profoundly melancholy songs such as “Tried and True” and “The Argus.” The album’s eerie, claustrophobic mood stems directly from its multilayered, psychedelic sound quality.

  On 2007’s La Cucaracha, Ween opted for a less heady feel, one that focused on pristine playing and singing rather than mind-warping sonics. Andrew Weiss’s production here doesn’t draw attention to its own richness, as on Quebec, but the album still sounds entirely state-of-the-art, thanks in part to a number of high-profile session musicians. Pop-jazz sax icon David Sanborn and cellist-arranger Larry Gold, a veteran of the Philadelphia soul scene, both cameo on the record, and it was these guests that prompted Melchiondo’s “We’ve gotten to the point where we can pull off our fantasies” remark. The presence of these heavyweight players underscores just how far Ween had come since their early days: Their central vision remained intact, but they now had a vastly wider array of resources at
their disposal. “Your Party,” a brilliant soft-rock number that pairs Sanborn’s silky horn with hilariously deadpan lyrics (“There were beverages laid out for the party / There were candy and spices, and tri-colored pastas”), demonstrates that the brownness of the pre-Chocolate and Cheese years was still very much alive on La Cucaracha; it was merely hidden beneath a palatable veneer.

  The clean sound only made the strangeness underneath seem that much more potent. In a sense, then, Chocolate and Cheese may have only represented the beginning of a shift in window dressing. Nevertheless, Ween’s increasingly slick presentation acted as a Trojan horse, allowing Ween to reach a much broader audience than before, turning this onetime after-school hobby into a rock ’n’ roll institution.

  “Give me some fuckin’ hard rock!”: Ween embraces the jam

  The Ween live show in the pre-Chocolate and Cheese era had its own anti-virtuosic charm: two snotty music geeks taking on the world with nothing but a DAT machine. But Freeman and Melchiondo’s duo had little to do with the greater rock ’n’ roll pantheon. That all changed after Chocolate and Cheese.

  The oft-repeated phrase “great live band” can have all sorts of different meanings. In the realm of underground music, it often refers to a band’s raucousness and intensity — think of Black Flag or the Jesus Lizard — but in the wider imagination, the term still carries a strong whiff of the Grateful Dead. Post-Dead, “great live band” often connotes an outfit that offers lengthy, improvisation-driven sets, which draw upon a vast and varied catalog. In the pre-Chocolate and Cheese era, Ween never resembled this model: Melchiondo and Freeman’s duo gigs had the scrappy appeal of a great talent-show performance. Post-Chocolate and Cheese though, Ween refined their live act in much the same way that they overhauled their studio sound.

  During the ’90s, Ween tried out several different line-ups, touring with former Skunk drummer Claude Coleman and either Mark Kramer — who had issued The Pod on his Shimmy Disc label — or Andrew Weiss on bass. But Ween as a bona fide great live band didn’t really gel until 1997, when Freeman and Melchiondo recruited bassist Dave Dreiwitz and keyboardist Glenn McClelland to join Coleman in a lineup that persists to this day. Since then, the quintet has proved to be a virtuosic onstage force, capable of rendering any of Ween’s many styles convincingly, be it country, metal, reggae, psych or straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll. In this incarnation, Ween can stretch out and improvise at will, constructing 3-hour-plus sets unfettered by the lengths of prerecorded backing tracks. Spot-on covers of tunes by Van Halen, Led Zeppelin, the Carpenters, Neil Young and more are also in the mix. In short, Ween has evolved into the kind of live band you admire for their proficiency rather than despite their crudeness. Meanwhile fans hungry for epic performances have flocked to Ween shows, tipped off by Phish’s version of the Chocolate and Cheese track “Roses Are Free.”

  Just as listeners took note of Ween’s increased live prowess in the post-Chocolate and Cheese era, so did the band. Live recordings became something of a cottage industry for Freeman and Melchiondo, as evidenced by four in-concert Ween albums issued between 1999 and 2004. Over the course of these records, you can hear Ween coming into their own as a live band. Paintin’ the Town Brown, which features recordings made with various lineups between 1990 and 1998, is a study in juxtaposition. On one hand, you have a four-and-a-half-minute 1990 duo performance of Pure Guava’s “Tender Situation,” rendered with only guitar, voice and trudging drum machine, and on the other, you have a half-hour 1994 reading of the fan-favorite B-side “Vallejo,” featuring the live rhythm section of Weiss and Coleman. The latter track, which evolves from a tight Latin-punk gallop into a throbbing sound collage, finds Ween discovering their inner jam band. Freeman serves as a kind of conductor for the performance. “Harder, man, harder!” he shouts at the musicians during a particularly intense moment. “Give me some fuckin’ hard rock!” At other times he addresses the players directly: “Andrew, help me out, man … Deaner! Where are you?” During these moments, Freeman is clearly reveling in the freedom that came with abandoning the DAT backing tracks, enjoying the camaraderie and spontaneity that only a live band can provide. These aren’t the funky, good-time improvisations normally associated with the jam-band scene, but it’s not hard to see why fans of that genre would gravitate toward Ween as they began to stretch out onstage.

  Dave Ayers, Ween’s manager during this period, recalls how his skepticism over Ween’s burgeoning jam tendencies gave way to awe:

  Yeah, those shows [with Weiss and Coleman] were pretty legendary. They were kind of locked in with the DATs, but as soon as they had two other players onstage, it was kind of scary for them at first and then it just became this incredibly liberating thing, because they went from being hemmed in to, “Shit, we could play for four hours if we wanted.” I mean, the idea that Bruce Springsteen plays for hours on end? I’d rather go to the dentist. The Grateful Dead? I never had any time for it, so when they started doing that, I would hear about it, and I would think, “Oh shit, I gotta go out on the road with them and spend a few days with them and sit there for four hours.” But I couldn’t get enough of it — they were amazing. They played three-and-a-half-hour shows that were fascinating. Their amount of fearlessness and invention — really insane stuff.

  Josh Homme (now of Queens of the Stone Age and Them Crooked Vultures) witnessed this insanity firsthand while playing in his former band Kyuss, which toured with the Weiss-Coleman lineup of Ween in 1994. He too remembers being blown away by what Ween was able to pull off onstage:

  They would play “Vallejo” at the end of each night. And at some point, they would start to stack things on Claude’s drum kit, and it wasn’t like breaking your gear; it was like making a pyramid of howling feedback. During the song, Mickey would, like, throw his amp at Claude, and it was piled up high and they’d put drinks on it. It was the end-of-the-night sculpture of howling feedback, and somehow managing to keep the song cohesive at the same time. So I thought that was very mixed-medium, very avant-garde.

  By the early aughts, Ween’s fearless onstage invention had reached world-class levels. Consider the nearly 40-minute version of God Ween Satan’s profane funk jam “L.M.L.Y.P.” that concludes Live at Stubb’s, recorded in Austin, Texas in 2000. The band hews closely to the recorded version at first, but around the seven-minute mark, Freeman calls for a breakdown and embarks on a cartoonish sex fantasy in which he plays both seducer and seduced. (“You better take off that towel right now.” [in high feminine voice] “Gener, what’s that got to do with the massage?”) In the background, Dreiwitz and Coleman lay down an expertly controlled slow-jam groove, leaving wide-open spaces to accommodate Freeman’s vocal flights. Then Melchiondo takes over on lead guitar, building from funky squiggles to screaming post-Hendrix static. And that only brings us to the halfway mark. After a vocoder episode, a jazzy, Steely Dan-esque keyboard solo from Glenn McClelland and a Coleman drum feature, the band hits the finale: a churning, Zeppelin-worthy, blues-metal stomp through the song’s central riff. Sure the performance has its goofy moments, but overall, it’s a great example of Ween’s mastery of classically styled rock dynamics.

  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: