Ween's Chocolate and Cheese (33 1/3) (10 page)

“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.”

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.”

Dave Ayers recalls his dislike for this kind of juxtaposition. Having stressed that he never really judged Ween’s material on the scale of poor taste, he admits, “I had more of an issue, just as a listener, with the dark-brown corner on every record. ‘Candi’ is the track on
Chocolate and Cheese
. It’s like every record had a segment that almost defied the listener to get to the end of a seven- or eight-minute song. ‘Candi’ is only four minutes long, but it feels like nine.” Ayers responds enthusiastically to Melchiondo’s low estimation of the track. “I’m so happy to hear [him] say that, because I would argue with them about that on every record,” he says. “Because there is a ‘Candi’ on every record, and I always just figured it was their joke, even as they’ve grown older, to write songs to piss off their folks.”

In Melchiondo’s view, the trivia that surrounds “Candi” is more interesting than the song itself:

That song does have some interesting factoids about it. One is that it has the words ‘chocolate’ and ‘cheese’ in it, which came from our friend Mean Ween. I wrote that song with him when I lived at the Pod. He was always hanging out there and we were recording and I did that jam, and I was like, “Dude, write words for this.” And so he said, “Chocolate with cheese,”
⁶
and when it came time to pick a name for the record, somebody said, “What about
Chocolate and Cheese
?” We just started laughing so hard, ’cause it’s like a perfect summary of what that record is and what Ween is basically. It’s just totally fucking brown and then there’s the cheesy element to it. And it sounds great; it’s a great name for a record. So that’s probably what got that song included on the record.

Chris Williams is quite modest about his contribution to the song. “I didn’t (and still don’t) think it was memorable or special,” he says of the “chocolate with cheese” phrase. As for his lead-vocal turn, he chalks its unique sound up to circumstance rather than any calculated comedic intent: “I was probably totally gourded and had bad allergies at the time, but the rest was just however the channel was set to record.”

Aside from the album-title phrase, Melchiondo also singles out the
Jackass
-style origin of the yelling audible in the background. Considering his view of “Candi” as a bottom-shelf Ween track, it’s surprising to hear that this aspect of the song grew out of a rather harrowing experience:

We needed these sound effects for “Candi,” and we were trashed. We were in the studio drinking blackberry brandy, or something just horrible, or Schnapps — peppermint Schnapps, I think. And we were doing the song and there was snow on the ground, and I had a ’74 Coup de Ville at the time, and we rigged it up so Aaron took the cordless phone from the studio and we left the bay station on speakerphone [with Andrew]. And I put Aaron in the trunk of my Coup de Ville, drunk, and I did a donut around the parking lot in the snow for like 15 minutes, while he was just getting slammed from side to side in the trunk of my car on the phone. And that’s the vocal track on there. You can hear it in the background, like [
mimics anguished screaming
]. It comes blasting in and out. And I had my car sideways. It was this big ol’ Caddy, just tooling around this parking lot over and over again. And we had no way to communicate with Andrew. He had no way to talk to us, so basically Aaron was drunk enough to go for it. And I was just being a sadist. I didn’t care how long. I was just enjoying the whole experience. So I just did it for like 15 or 20 minutes — the song was like two minutes long, or something — not knowing if Andrew had ever rolled
the tape or what part of it he recorded, or what he was even doing inside. Finally I hear Aaron, like, kicking in the back, so I parked and let him out. He was all pissed off. And then we came in and Andrew had recorded it.

“Candi” may be short on substance, but as Coleman suggests, it’s a key track on
Chocolate and Cheese
, a reminder that Ween would never truly abandon their juvenile, druggy origins even as they cleaned up their sound.
⁷

It’s quite possible that “Roses Are Free” is Ween’s single best-known song. The reason for this is that in 1997, the iconic jam band Phish began covering the tune and have employed it as a staple improv vehicle ever since. But Ween’s original has little to do with jamming: It’s a peppy, tightly constructed pop song rendered with multitrack vibrancy. The track’s pitch-shifted vocals — verging on Chipmunks territory — washy, tripped-out guitars and synthesized drum beat allude to “Pork Roll Egg and Cheese” and other sprightly masterpieces of Ween’s 4-track days. At the same time, there’s a surreal vividness to “Roses Are Free” that wasn’t there before. Keyboard
and bass buoy Freeman’s voice, and the verses — each a string of quizzical proverbs, e.g. “Take a wrinkled raisin, and do with it what you will / Push it into third if you know you’re gonna climb a hill” — feature a catchy call-and-response structure. A hypnotic swirl of electronic sound greets each vocal line.

As with “Pony,” the structure of “Roses” is fairly involved. Each verse follows a blueslike scheme, consisting of four cyclical repetitions (the “proverbs” mentioned above) followed by two turnaround segments. This pattern repeats once and gives way to a loopy, four-bar keyboard solo. Then the original form resumes, but in a wordless version, with Melchiondo’s snarling guitar taking the lead. “A Tear for Eddie” is a more obvious showcase for Dean Ween’s instrumental prowess, but this section of “Roses” just might be
Chocolate and Cheese
’s most gripping six-string episode. In classic blues fashion, Melchiondo hews close to Freeman’s verse melody but uses gritty distortion and agile string bends to give it a potent kick. Eddie Hazel himself would no doubt have been proud of the solo’s hyberbolically overdriven, multitracked climax, during which Melchiondo seems to multiply infinitely. When Freeman re-enters, the guitar remains high in the mix, and the song fades on this energetic duet. “Roses” is no jam, but thanks to its detailed structure, busy production and impassioned performance, it feels surprisingly epic for a song that lasts four and a half minutes.

Melchiondo sees the song as a nod to one of Ween’s prime inspirations, another artist who loves to combine
funky beats with wailing guitars. “At the time, I remember thinkin’, ‘This is so fuckin’ Prince,’” he recalls. “I think it was one of the coolest songs that Aaron ever did, actually. Aaron did that on his own, on the 4-track, and on the album, obviously it’s me and him both. But I just thought it was the coolest thing — I can’t think of any other songs he’s ever done that are like that. It was very Prince, but not. Like totally Ween, you know?” Freeman had a similar impression:

I remember writing the guitar solo first and being very pleased with myself because it sounded like something Prince would have written. The rest of the song was based around an old electric-organ type keyboard that I had pulled out of the trash. The lyrics were really just a twenty-something suburban-white-boy-blues type thing that came quickly and really wasn’t thought about [except] to have the syllables work for the groove.

As it turned out, this suburban-white-boy blues resonated with the members of the hugely popular Phish (also an Elektra act during the ’90s). Their “Roses Are Free” cover proved immensely beneficial to Ween, leading to an influx of jam-band fans at shows, a development that coincided with Ween coming into their own as an improvisational force onstage. Yet Melchiondo recalls being somewhat baffled by the extra attention. “[The Phish cover] was one of those backhanded things where it’s like you do all this hard work, and then something like
Beavis and Butthead
has an impact,” he says. “Something
that you have no control over at all and it’s totally, seemingly random. It exposes all these people to Ween. It was like that when Phish started playing our shit. It was like, ‘After all we’ve done,
this
is what’s bringing more people to our shows? What the fuck?’ But you take it, you know? It’s great. Who cares how people find out about it? If they find out about it and they dig it, then that’s the desired effect, right?” Freeman expressed a similar ambivalence over the Phish cover and its aftermath when speaking with PopMatters in 2003: