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

by Shteamer, Hank

  “Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?” (Track 8 of 16)

  “Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?” is another song that looks at disease from an innocent perspective, but it’s far more whimsical than “Spinal Meningitis.” As the title suggests, the track is basically an extended plea for assistance: The simple-minded narrator’s pony has taken ill, and he could use a hand. Ween uses unexpected lyrical twists to wring humor out of this potentially troubling scenario. The speaker catalogs the animal’s various symptoms — “He’s chewin’ bark and not the leaves”; “He coughed up snot in the driveway” — and constantly returns to the same, more-or-less nonsensical conclusion: “I think it’s his lung.”

  Musically, the song definitely points to the ambition of late Ween. The verses employ a laid-back smooth-rock groove, featuring jangly guitar, a sinuous bass part, a sparkly keyboard line and tasteful drum fills executed by Melchiondo on a real kit. As with “Freedom of ’76,” you can picture a full band cutting the song live despite the fact that the track was constructed piecemeal. The song’s structure is ambitious as well, especially the surprisingly complex multipart bridge section. A washy interlude heavy on the synthesized chimes points directly to the lush psychedelia Ween would explore on subsequent albums. Then Melchiondo takes a jazz-inflected solo, which climaxes in an oddly dramatic ascending figure. Despite its brief length, the track exhibits the arty, borderline-proggy feel that the band would begin to explore more fully on The Mollusk.

  Weiss sees the song as a compositional breakthrough for Freeman and Melchiondo:

  Maybe they’d done a rough version of that [prior to the album version], but it was a lot different. It didn’t have the whole bridge section in the middle and the modulation and all that. That’s an example of something you probably couldn’t have done on the 4-track. That one we worked on more than any other song they’d ever done up to that point. I mean, they didn’t even really know about bridges or modulations — I kinda dropped that on them.

  Reflecting on “Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?,” Melchiondo seems simultaneously proud of the song’s complexity and annoyed by Weiss’s persistence:

  Yeah, I put a bridge in that. It’s got the part that goes, [sings] ‘Poooo-ny / Poooo-ny,’ and that’s the chord from ‘Isn’t She Lovely’ by Stevie Wonder. I said to Andrew, ‘Okay, you want a bridge? Here it is: ‘Poooo-ny.’ It’s almost like a joke between us and [Andrew]. He’s like, ‘I’m hearing another bridge.’ And we’re like, ‘Hey Andrew, why don’t you fuckin’ suck my dick instead? We’re not doing it.’ He’s like, ‘You guys are fuckin’ lazy.’ But that is one of our better bridges in general. It’s got a whole bridge under the solo section, too. It’s got like a B, C and D section.

  If the music represented Ween’s growing maturity, the lyrics came from another place entirely. Melchiondo explains:

  We were on tour and we were in Seattle, and somebody brought us a gallon of mushroom tea, like a big, fucking gallon milk jug. So we had this gallon of mushroom tea backstage and we started just chugging on it. But when you drink mushroom tea, you start tripping really, really fast. It’s not like when you eat mushrooms; this is going right in your bloodstream, and you start tripping in, like, minutes. So we got spun, is what I’m getting at. We were so fucking high; we were tripping our faces off.

  So they took Aaron and I back to the hotel, and it was like 3 o’clock in the morning, and we knew we were in it for the long haul. We were just too fucked up; there’s no way you’re turning out the lights and going to bed. So I was sitting in his room and we hear the elevator door opening right next to our room, and the guy dumped a big stack of USA Todays, to be delivered to every room, like “Boom!” right up against our door. Aaron was barely holding on for dear life, and I opened up the door to find out what the noise was and the front page of USA Today, it’s got a picture of this little, like, retarded kid on it, and it says, “Am I gonna die, Mommy?” And it was so funny because we had just written and recorded “Spinal Meningitis” [the chorus of which features that exact line] — we had demoed it. Aaron was back in the room with his head in his hands, and [the coincidence] caused him to have a total breakdown — it being the first thing that we saw when we opened the door in that circumstance.

  And so then later that night, he was laying there with his head in his hands, trying to get it together. And you come up with these crazy concepts or whatever when you’re tripping like that and I was just assaulting him with these phrases that were popping into my mind and one of them was, [in fey voice] “Hey mister, would you please help my pony?” I was, like, poking at him. “I think his lung’s fucked up.” And that became the basis for that song, remembering that. So I think of [“Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?” and “Spinal Meningitis”] as a pair, ’cause they’re disease songs and they were inspired under completely evil circumstances.

  As Josh Homme recalls, this incident spawned not only the song but a verbal meme: “While [Kyuss were] on tour with [Ween] for Chocolate and Cheese, they were obsessively saying the word ‘pony.’ It was like a Swiss Army word, because it was so utilitarian; they would use it for any situation, and it was like a strange contagious strain of Tourette’s. It would be like, ‘You guys wanna pony?’ Or out of nowhere, it was quiet and you’d hear, ‘Pooooony.’”

  “A Tear for Eddie” (Track 5 of 16)

  “A Tear for Eddie” is maybe the clearest example of Ween’s growing musical prowess during the Chocolate and Cheese era. A wholly sincere tribute to Funkadelic guitarist Eddie Hazel,5 who died in December 1992, “Tear” is an instrumental jam, in which Melchiondo spins variations on a poignant, melancholy electric-guitar theme over a steady drum-machine beat. Near the end, Melchiondo reaches a distorted, sky-kissing climax that’s both over the top and completely righteous. The track — Ween’s first bona fide instrumental — signified the moment where Dean Ween outed himself as a guitar hero of sorts. Before Chocolate and Cheese, few made a point of praising Ween’s technical skill, but once Ween fleshed out their live presentation and began improvising more onstage, Melchiondo would come to be known as a master of psychedelic shred. (“Dean, you fake, you can play!” chided Terri Sutton’s Chocolate and Cheese review in Spin.) “A Tear for Eddie” was the first major hint at that evolution. Like Hazel’s own epic, “Maggot Brain,” the track would become a calling card for Melchiondo.

  “That was the beginning of his prowess as a musician that only became stronger and stronger,” says Steve Ralbovsky of “Tear.” “In the beginning, it was not something that you could really foresee. Mickey maybe had a couple of solos, when it was just the two of them, that showed you something. But once it got to the fuller band and more instrumentation and higher-fi on the records, something like ‘A Tear for Eddie’ is an indication that there was some serious musicianship going on.”

  “Tear” arose spontaneously after Melchiondo heard word of Hazel’s death. “We were all really huge Funkadelic fans, so it was timely,” he explains. “It was written while we were doing the record, and it’s definitely a tribute to [Hazel’s] style of playing. I actually got a letter from his widow thanking me, and I ended up having a correspondence with her over the years.”

  Josh Homme, a widely respected guitarist himself, is effusive regarding the track, and Melchiondo’s instrumental prowess in general:

  Well, I think Mickey is such a skilled guitar player, and it’s not about a technique thing, because that doesn’t mean shit. Having your own style, that’s the hardest thing you could ever possibly have: a style that’s indicative of your own personality. And Mickey uses the worst pedals of all time, made by some of the worst companies ever. But somehow, he knows how to use them exactly. And so he’s able to paint great moods with his guitar with the worst stuff of all time. I really respect him.

  Melchiondo’s bandmate saw the track as playing a small but important role in the album’s cohesion. “All albums should have just one instrumental track,” Freeman asserts. “Not
any more or you kill the record, but one is perfectly acceptable. I think it’s a Led Zeppelin thing.” Sure enough, post-Chocolate and Cheese, this rule stuck: The Mollusk, White Pepper, Quebec and La Cucaracha each feature a single vocalless tune.

  “Baby Bitch” (Track 7 of 16)

  In much the same way that “A Tear for Eddie” showcased Melchiondo’s growing guitar prowess, “Baby Bitch” demonstrated Freeman’s development as a songwriter and lyricist. The title might sound crass, and there are elements of black comedy buried within, but the song — a kiss-off to an ex-lover — is devastatingly honest. It’s no exaggeration to call it one of the most heart-rending relationship songs ever composed.

  Freeman’s lyrics dole out vitriol and self-loathing in equal doses. The line “Fuck you, you stinkin’ ass ho” finds a poignant counterpart in “Got fat, got angry, started hating myself,” a contrast that amounts to catharsis without easy closure. To underscore the song’s complicated tone, Freeman nods to another songwriter who rarely seemed to make peace with love. He sings, “Wrote ‘Birthday Boy’ for you babe,” name-checking another wrenching Ween breakup song (found on God Ween Satan) and borrowing a page from Bob Dylan, whose “Sara” — an ode to a failed marriage — contains the line “Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel / Writing ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you.” Freeman confirms that this reference was intentional with a simple e-mailed “YES!!”

  In contrast with such raw lyrics, the composition is extremely artful. The song features an ingenious verse structure, consisting of four bars of 6/8 waltz time divided by an extra half bar. “Mickey has pointed that same thing out to me and it’s just how [my] brain hears and writes pentameters,” says Freeman. This rhythmic tag gives “Baby Bitch” an odd asymmetry; unlike a more typical waltz, such as the aforementioned “Sara,” it sounds tense and unsettled. The song also features a spare, tasteful arrangement. The backing track is classic folk-pop, with strummy acoustic guitar, an extreme rarity on prior Ween albums, and an unadorned drum-kit groove played by longtime Ween associate Patricia “Pat” Frey. The vocal track is doubled and slightly sped up, and the resulting effect both harks back to Pure Guava and also seems to prefigure the delivery of the then unknown Elliott Smith. (Interestingly, a bootleg has circulated of Smith and fellow songwriter Mary Lou Lord covering “Birthday Boy.”)

  “Baby Bitch” is one of two Chocolate and Cheese songs (the other being “The HIV Song”) that were recorded with Greg Frey at his Graphic Sound Studios home facility before the office-park sessions with Weiss. At Graphic Sound — also where some of the drum tracks for God Ween Satan were recorded — Freeman and Melchiondo demoed many of the songs that they would later redo with Weiss, but only this pair made the cut in their original form. Frey recalls these preliminary Chocolate and Cheese sessions, during which his wife, Pat, made a drum cameo on “Baby Bitch”:

  I’m pretty sure it was the summer of ’92, At that point, Andrew Weiss was unavailable a lot of the time because he was on the road with [the Rollins Band]. [Freeman and Melchiondo] got in touch with us and said, “Andrew’s away a lot, and we’re writing a lot right now. Would you mind if we came over and did some songs now and then with you?” And we were like, “Oh, that’s fine.” Most of my work was evenings and weekends, ’cause in my studio, I worked with musicians that had day jobs. So Mickey would call me up at, like, 9 o’clock at night and say, “We’ve got a new song — what are you doing tomorrow?” And if I said, “I’m free until 4,” they said, “Okay, we’ll see you at 11” or something. And they’d come over and as far as I could tell, the situation would be that they had just written the song the day before, recorded it on their 4-track, and they loved it or it cracked them up in some way, so they said, “Let’s call Greg, and we’ll do a more official demo of it.” And so that would happen, over the course of the summer, six or eight times or something like that. Sometimes they got in that rhythm and they liked that rhythm of coming in once a week, and sometimes they would come in with nothing, and they would just start from scratch and just sort of play around for three or four hours.

  “Baby Bitch” benefited from the loose, casual vibe at Graphic Sound. Pat Frey recalls being tapped spontaneously to play on the track and having some trouble with the song’s tricky structure:

  [The studio] is in our basement, and I was just upstairs doing what I do. Mickey usually plays drums on the recordings, but around this time, they were also using Claude. But he was in London. So they wanted a drummer and they just called upstairs and I came down. I think Mickey and Aaron ran through [the song] once with guitars, and then the three of us ran through it, and the take is the second time through. And I really wanted to do it one more time, ’cause there’s a dropped beat. And halfway through the second take, I was finally realizing where that happened, so I definitely miss it, if you listen on the recorded version. A real drummer probably would’ve picked it up quicker. I wanted to do a third take and they didn’t want to do it. That’s how they work: the faster the better. And that’s great — I think that was one of the beauties of how they worked. They didn’t belabor details.

  The tracking for “Baby Bitch” may have happened quickly, but it resulted in one of Ween’s most accessible and memorable songs. The tune’s various quirks — lyrical obscenity, pitch-altered vocals — take a backseat to its straightforward melancholy beauty. The placidness of the presentation only heightens the sense of raw pain that Freeman expresses. Gene Ween would pick up this thread with simultaneously devastating and gorgeous results on later tunes such as The Mollusk’s “It’s Gonna Be Alright,” White Pepper’s “She’s Your Baby” and Quebec’s “I Don’t Want It.”

  Claude Coleman rightly identifies “Baby Bitch” as a Ween landmark, both compositionally and sonically. “I think that ‘Baby Bitch’ was the beginning of the super-serious side to Aaron’s stuff,” he says. “It’s obviously just a beautiful dark ballad. And I think that on the records before Chocolate and Cheese, the serious songs were still sort of cloaked in a veil of humor and retardation. On ‘Baby Bitch,’ Aaron’s voice is somewhat altered, but the recording and the production itself is really straight-forward, and I think it serves the song really well.”

  Other admirers react on a gut level. “That’s one of my top ten songs of all time,” says Josh Homme. “The melody is so beautiful, and those lyrics are so fucking true.” Andrew Weiss concurs:

  Aaron just deals with it head-on in that song. “Fuck you, you stinkin’ ass ho” — it doesn’t get more basic than that. But you couldn’t hate like that if you didn’t love to begin with. That’s what inspires that kind of hate. And he gets right to the fucking core of that in that song. And I think anybody who hears that song recognizes that, unless they’re so much of a prude that they’re just offended by it. A lot of people are afraid to open themselves up like that, to put themselves out like that and then to do a song like “Sarah” [a sweet love ballad from Pure Guava], which is as tender as it gets.

  When I mention to Melchiondo that “Baby Bitch” is my favorite track on Chocolate and Cheese, he recalls having a similar reaction. “I felt kind of like you did: It was one of my favorite tunes,” he explains. “We all sort of felt that way: ‘It’s going on [the record], somewhere.’ I remember thinking, ‘This is really … real,’ you know? It comes through. Aaron’s thing comes across on it, the way he’s feeling. That’s the benefit of recording things really fast after you write them.”

  Freeman explains the song’s inspiration matter-of-factly. “I was going out with someone and that someone had run into someone else that I had gone out with,” he says. “They started talking about me in an unflattering way and now I go out with neither of them and … ‘Baby Bitch.’” Melchiondo offers a bit more insight. “It’s about Aaron’s old girlfriend, who he wrote a lot of great songs about,” he reveals. “I won’t name her name, but he wrote ‘Birthday Boy’ about her, which is probably, I think, the best song that Aaron ever wrote. And then, when they broke up
, that kind of devastated him for a while, and then he fell in love with his future wife, and suddenly that girl came back around, and that song is sort of like this vicious attack on her for moving back to our area.” Melchiondo can’t say for sure, but he’s pretty sure the woman in question is aware of the song. “You suck it up and you say, ‘I don’t care whose feelings I hurt,’” he explains with a sadistic laugh. “That’s one of the perks of being in a band: You get to fucking kick somebody in front of 8 million people.”

  “Candi” (Track 12 of 16)

  If “Baby Bitch” is the emotional and compositional apex of Chocolate and Cheese, “Candi” is the album’s nadir, an unrepentantly vapid example of the chintzy funk that featured prominently on Pure Guava and The Pod. The beat sounds like it was constructed on a toy keyboard: Generic-sounding chime and bongo samples mingle with a cheesed-out wah-wah bass line, a bevy of weird extraneous sounds that recall Looney Tunes explosions and mysterious background yelling. As in a dub-reggae version, the effects grow and mutate, threatening to overwhelm the skeletal rhythm. Chris “Mean Ween” Williams handles lead vocals, speak-singing in his best elderly-Jewish-man-with-a-cold voice and free-associating on the general topic of confections: “Candi / Custard and berry / Candi / Peaches and creme,” etc. Eventually he hits upon a key line: “Chocolate with cheese.” As a whole, the track plays like an assurance to old-school Ween fans that Freeman and Melchiondo could still construct a trippy, 4-track-style mind-fuck if they so chose.

  Melchiondo doesn’t mince words when it comes to “Candi.” “That is the worst song that’s on any Ween record,” he confesses with a laugh. “If I could go back and change anything about our career, I would leave everything exactly as it is. I have no regrets about any of our records or any of our songs, or anything we’ve ever said, or any gig we’ve ever played, no matter how drunk or horrible it was, except for that song.” Freeman takes another view. “I remember laughing my ass off when we recorded that song!” he protests, when informed of his bandmate’s perspective. Claude Coleman places no value judgment on the track, but he does touch on its uniquely regressive quality: “Even if it is the worst song, it serves an important purpose on Chocolate and Cheese. All those other songs come one after the other that are so crafty and so well-executed, and you just stick ‘Candi’ in there like a big, runny diarrhea shit.”