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

CHOCOLATE AND CHEESE

Praise for the series:

It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom
Exile on Main Street
or
Electric Ladyland
are as significant and worthy of study as
The Catcher in the Rye
or
Middlemarch
… The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration—
The New York Times Book Review

Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough—
Rolling Stone

One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—
Bookslut

These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—
Vice

A brilliant series … each one a work of real love—
NME
(UK)

Passionate, obsessive, and smart—
Nylon

Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—
Boldtype

[A] consistently excellent series—
Uncut
(UK)

We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books—
Pitchfork

For more information on the 33 1/3 series, visit
33third.blogspot.com

For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

Hank Shteamer

2011

The Continuum International Publishing Group
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

www.continuumbooks.com

Copyright © 2011 by Hank Shteamer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the
Library of Congress.

eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-7419-2

Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand
Printed and bound in the United States of America

Acknowledgments

Introduction: “These guys got no future”: Ween beat the odds

Before
Chocolate and Cheese
, part I: “We both loved to hear ourselves on tape”: Ween’s humble origins

Before
Chocolate and Cheese
, part II: Subsidized scribbles:
Pure Guava
and the underdog mystique

After
Chocolate and Cheese
: “We can pull off our fantasies”: Ween come into their own

Chocolate and Cheese
, part I: The making of …

Chocolate and Cheese
, part II: The songs

Chocolate and Cheese
, part III: The artwork

Outro: “The hardest thing to get”: Ween’s autonomy

Interviews

Other Sources

I respectfully dedicate this book to Ween fans everywhere.

I would like to express my gratitude to the following parties: Greg Frey, for fielding relentless inquiries, acting as middleman for the majority of my interviews and speaking on the record himself. These folks for giving of their time: Mickey Melchiondo, Aaron Freeman, Andrew Weiss, Steve Ralbovsky, Dave Ayers, Pat Frey, Claude Coleman Jr., Stephan Said, Scott Lowe, Ed Wilson, Chris Williams, John Kuczala, Roger Gorman, Rick Patrick, Marty Sarandria, Danny Clinch, Josh Homme, Matt Sweeney, Chris Applebaum, Mark Hamilton, Roman Coppola and Spike Jonze, as well as Danielle Stampe, Yamatsuka Eye, Aaron Burtch, Jesse Eisenberg, Max Bemis and several others whose input I was not able to include. And David Barker at Continuum for giving me a shot.

And on a personal note, I would like to thank: My incredible family — Rick, Paula and Caroline — for anything and everything. I am blessed each day by your infinite love. Also the entire Michael and Shteamer clans. My dear friends: Jeff, Drew, Kyle, Chris and the rest of
the KC contingent, with whom I discovered Ween (and pretty much everything else). Joe, Tony, Tom, Zack and the extended NYC crew, including all bandmates and musical collaborators past and present, my
Time Out New York
comrades and the Shams family (dogs included!).

My future wife, Laal Fatima Shams-Molkara, for all the cross-country miles traveled, the day-to-day assistance provided, the love and wisdom shared, and the above-and-beyond patience demonstrated re: the endless mood fluctuations, second-guessings and mini crises associated with the creation of this book. You were there for me at every step.

And finally, Luke and — once again — Joe, Laal and Zack for their valuable feedback on the manuscript.

It was a very creative time and a real bridge record. What came before that record and what was to come after were really very different things.

—Gene Ween on
Chocolate and Cheese

“W
hat the hell is this crap?” The inquisitor was Butthead, one of the two most influential music critics of the alternative rock era, responding to Ween’s 1993 video for “Push th’ Little Daisies.” Beavis chimed in, accusing singer Aaron “Gene Ween” Freeman of being a “pansy.” Following a few more insipid digs against the New Hope, Pennsylvania, duo, Butthead made a definitive proclamation: “These guys got no future.”

As blunt as the observation was, it seemed sensible enough. At first, Ween did in fact register — to my own teenage self, for example — as just another one of the
countless novelty acts that swarmed MTV in Nirvana’s wake. (Remember Whale and “Hobo Humpin’ Slobo Babe,” or Green Jellÿ, of “Three Little Pigs” fame?) “Daisies,” from Ween’s 1992 Elektra Records debut,
Pure Guava
, featured a chintzy synthesized lounge groove and a shrill, repetitive chorus. The video that incited the animated couch potatoes’ wrath depicted Freeman and his partner Mickey “Dean Ween” Melchiondo as disheveled burnouts, stuffing their faces in a dirty living room and contorting their bodies into goofy poses. The clip had a certain stoner appeal, but it hardly seemed like an auspicious start to a substantial musical career.

Yet nearly two decades on, it turns out that Butthead’s prediction was utterly wrong. While most denizens of early-to-mid-’90s MTV — not to mention
Beavis and Butthead
itself, until the show’s recent revival — have long since gone extinct, Ween have earned themselves a permanent place in the pop-culture firmament. Freeman and Melchiondo currently preside over one of the most devoted cult fan bases in American music and regularly plays to sell-out crowds nationwide. A Grateful Dead-worthy community of bootleggers and set-list hounds obsesses over every detail of the band’s 3-hour-plus performances.

So how has an outfit that seemed destined for joke-band oblivion managed to build and sustain such a healthy legacy? The short answer is that there’s a whole lot more to Ween than just offbeat humor. The long answer is this in-depth examination of the follow-up to
Pure Guava
, 1994’s
Chocolate and Cheese
, the album where
the band announced to the world that they had no plans to settle for fad status.

Chocolate and Cheese
marked a key turning point in the way Ween presented their music. The band’s previous efforts had flaunted low-tech sound quality as a badge of honor. Ween started as the quirky home-recording project of two middle-schoolers, and even as Freeman and Melchiondo’s career took off, they remained true to this approach:
Pure Guava
, their breakthrough release and major-label debut, consisted entirely of material recorded at home on a 4-track.
Chocolate and Cheese
, however, found Freeman, Melchiondo and longtime producer Andrew Weiss constructing a modest studio in a rented space, upgrading to a multitrack digital-recording setup, making use of highly skilled auxiliary players and generally fleshing out their sound in ways that would never have been possible with the primitive approach they had previously favored.

On
Chocolate and Cheese
, Freeman and Melchiondo’s songs sounded every bit as trippy and peculiar as they had in the past, but they also came off as surprisingly polished. The album’s higher-fi production allowed the band to deliver their music more accessibly without compromising their core weirdness, and to showcase their growing technical facility and mastery of songcraft, as well as their uncanny grasp of a wide array of musical styles. In this sense, the record presaged the marvelous lushness of later Ween albums such as
The Mollusk
and
Quebec
. But it also represented an important step away from the rudimentary yet ingenious home-recording methods on which the band forged their early success,
leading some — including at least one of the two band members — to question whether Ween were forsaking an integral aspect of their appeal.

As they were upgrading their recording methods, Ween were also evolving as a live entity. Before and after their initial brush with MTV success, Ween toured as a scrappy two-piece, just a pair of guys taking the stage with skeletal prerecorded backing tracks and a healthy middle-finger attitude. During this phase, the band cultivated a unique brand of underdog charm that still resonates with diehard fans. But just as Freeman and Melchiondo upgraded their studio methods on
Chocolate and Cheese
, they also overhauled their live approach, scrapping the canned backing and recruiting virtuoso sidemen, who could keep up with their every pan-stylistic whim. The result was that Ween grew into a well-oiled, highly improvisational machine that would eventually come to be known as one of the great live bands in America.