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

by Shteamer, Hank

  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.

  Chocolate and Cheese, part I: The making of …

  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.

  “Some rat bag industrial complex”: Recording in an office park

  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 c
hemistry 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.

  “Really time-intensive for not much”: The shift to digital

  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.

  “Pro Tools didn’t even exist,” explains Weiss, referring to the now widely used computer-recording platform. He continues:

  [The program] was called Sound Tools and it was, like, two tracks. And we got a bunch of ADATs, like two or three ADATs. And the ADATs were a nightmare. ADATs were like primitive digital recording. It was done on VHS tapes, and they were eight tracks and you would sync them up. I think we had, like, three of them. And they were always going out of sync and they were eating the tapes all the time and stuff like that. I was splicing videotapes back together all the time. And I didn’t really know what I was doin’. So we were syncing all this stuff together. It was kind of like a technological nightmare. Like Pro Tools now — it’s kind of hard to imagine how prehistoric this shit was at the time compared to now. Now you turn it on and it works. Back then, you turned it on and there was a 50 percent chance that it wasn’t gonna work. Maybe even greater. The ADATs were all fucked up.

  The computer was just slow, ridiculously slow. You could do this thing where you could dump the track from the ADAT digitally into the computer and you could do things like EQ or editing and stuff like that. But it was so slow that you would go, “Okay, I wanna try some filter or some EQ on it,” and you would set up the settings and you would press [the button], “Okay, go.” And you would go make a cup of coffee and you would come back ten minutes later and see that it wasn’t done yet and you’d read The Trentonian for a couple pages and then it would get done and you’d listen to it and you wouldn’t like what you did, so you’d press “Undo” and do the whole thing again. It was really time-intensive for not much. For what you do now in real time, you know what I mean? It was ridiculous.

  For Melchiondo, the digital recording setup used on Chocolate and Cheese presented creative hurdles. Having employed only analog methods in the past, he and Freeman found that they had trouble pulling off some of their favorite sonic tricks, such as manipulating tape speed, which played a major role on The Pod and Pure Guava.3 Achieving these effects with the

  ADAT-and-computer set-up proved difficult:

  We fuck around with tape speed a lot. Things are sped up; they’re slowed down. It’s not like we take a whole song and we’re done recording it and we just slow it down and put it on the record. We’ll record different tracks at different speeds. We’ll drop the tape two whole steps or something and then do a track, so when you play it back at a normal speed, you’re hearing the guitar in a normal tuning but the vocals might be in a higher tuning or lower tuning. And you can really fuck with people, basically, by doing that, and get some great sounds.

  But with digital, it’s a different thing. You’re slowing down, like, the bit rate, basically. That was the first thing we noticed, because we’re constantly going over to the tape machine and slowing it down manually. That was one hurdle we had to overcome from doing it digitally. And there’s a number of ways to get distortion on a vocal or a guitar, or whatever. One way is to plug it into a distortion box or sing it through a telephone or something like that. And another way is to just record it so loud that it just distorts the tape, and just overdrives it and saturates it. And it actually sounds cooler than a distortion pedal. You do that digitally and it just sounds like shit. It clacks and pops and it’s unlistenable: You literally can’t listen to it. You can’t overdrive the recording machine when you’re doing it into a computer or ADATs like we did.

  Beyond their difficulties with manipulating tape speed, Melchiondo and Freeman had a tough time adjusting to the sonic quality of the digital setup. As Melchiondo explains, Ween learned the pitfalls of digital recording in real time:

  When you put something on tape, it instantly gains a production value, like an ambience. It warms up the sound of whatever you’re putting on there. It compresses it. It adds tape hiss to it. It makes the lows a little lower and it makes the highs a little higher. It does all sorts of shit that’s beyond your control, but it does something to it. And as long as you can engineer things pretty well, and what you put in sounds good, it’ll sound pretty good when you play it back.

  With digital recording — and this was, like, the beginning of digital popularity; it was so much easier than using tape, and we bought into it in 1993 and 1994 — it sounds like glass. It’s kind of hard to explain unless you actually do it. Things don’t really sit together. Like, you can record a drum track, a guitar track, a bass track and a vocal track, and it feels like you’re listening to five tracks at once, rather than one thing that’s all blending together and naturally compressing itself. And this is something that you have to learn by doing it. You can only learn it when you’re actually going through the process.

  Freeman recalls sharing Melchiondo’s concerns:

  I remember three ADAT machines strung together to provide us with more tracks. Andrew Weiss [sat] in his swivel chair chain-smoking Camel cigarettes and weed, [with] us sitting below him on the floor, all of us complaining that the ADATs sounded like shit. I remember us being worried about the quality because we had gone from a deep saturated cassette sound to a new digital technology sound — both were at the extreme. The ADAT was all about the analog-to-digital converter which at that time was in its infancy stage of development and sounded
bass-less and very tinny. I remember Andrew going through an enormous amount of work to offset the sound of those ADAT machines. I think in the end he did great.

  Melchiondo remembers reaching a different conclusion, and that he and Freeman struggled to reconcile their disappointment in the digital sound with their well-oiled productivity:

  We worked our asses off on that record. We wrote tons and tons and tons of songs. We were very selective in which ones we recorded. We left more songs off the record than we put on there — I mean, actually recorded them and mixed them. We still have B-sides from that record that have never come out, actually. When you’re doing something like that, you don’t think about these things as it’s going along because you got mixing in front of you and mastering in front of you. So you don’t know what it’s gonna sound like for months after you’re done throwing down your last track. So all along we’re listening to it and it sounded kinda fucked up and it was like, “Oh, whatever, just wait till we mix it,” or, “Just wait till it gets mastered,” or whatever. And then lo and behold when it was all said and done, it still kinda sounded like that, to our ears, and I think I can speak for everybody when I say that we were really disappointed at the time. It was horrifying.

  “This isn’t gnarly enough”: Giving up the 4-track

  Despite its drawbacks, the ADAT-and-computer recording method offered much greater sonic leeway than the 4-track used on previous Ween releases. Melchiondo and Freeman had used the 4-track to demo several of the Chocolate and Cheese tracks, but they eventually re-recorded these songs with Weiss at the makeshift studio in Pennington. As a producer, Weiss relished the freedom afforded by the multitrack setup: