Ween's Chocolate and Cheese (33 1/3) (11 page)

What happened was that Phish started playing our songs, which was cool. Then we played the Bonnaroo thing, which was totally hippied out. Then our booking agent kind of took that flag and started running with it. Now in a way, money is money, and if it’s going to increase our audience, that’s fine. But the last hippie-fest we did, which was the Adirondack Festival — that was it. Never, ever doing another one of those again. I had to listen to this fucking jam band for three hours in the rain, waiting to go on. I was like, “Just kill me.” I can’t take any more white boys noodling around on their guitars.

Freeman and Melchiondo also had reservations about the cover itself. “When I finally heard [Phish’s] version, it was terrible,” asserts Melchiondo. “It didn’t have any of the things that I liked about the song.” This reaction seems to have brought out his competitive streak. “We didn’t start playing it [live] until after Phish started playing it,”
he explains. “We felt like we had to kind of reclaim it, because we didn’t have a keyboard player so we never bothered playing it live. But by the time Phish started playing it, we had Glenn [McClelland] in the band, so we revisited it, and now we play it all the time. I love playing it.” Freeman also remembers being none too pleased with the Phish rendition. “It was god-awful at the time,” he laments. “It was really not cool in my circle of friends to be into Phish in any way, shape or form. It really came to a head when my ‘Phishhead’ younger cousin played the version at a big family function thinking I would be pleased. I came very close to kicking his ass in front of his and my grandmother.”

Improbable as it may seem, though, both he and Melchiondo are ultimately grateful for the unlikely nod. “I know the guys from Phish, and Trey [Anastasio] I would now consider a friend of mine,” says Freeman.
⁸
“I’m
happy for them and wish them all the best.” Melchiondo reaches a similar conclusion. “I don’t want to rail on those guys,” he says. “It brought a lot of fans to us, you know? A lot of people checked us out and discovered there was more to it. And they’re our fans now. I hear it all the time: ‘I first heard you guys through the Phish cover.’” And the September 2009 Ween show at Red Rocks bears this out: The opening notes of the band’s “Roses Are Free” encore receive the night’s loudest ovation. Strangely, Phish had played the same venue the previous month, opening with none other than “Roses Are Free.”

Much like “Freedom of ’76,” “Joppa Road” is another disarmingly authentic genre homage. The use of drum machine — playing a brisk ride-cymbal rhythm — offers a hint that one is listening to a Ween creation, but the rest of the track conjures a spot-on AM Gold vibe: strummy acoustic guitar, an agile, funky bass line and a relaxed,
high-pitched vocal performance by Freeman. Two solos, one on Spanish-guitar and the other on fretless electric bass, heighten the sensation of cheesy yet innocuous ’70s virtuosity. Thanks to accents like these, “Joppa Road” comes off as a perfect simulation of what would later come to be known as yacht rock. The lyrics match the song’s light, carefree mood, telling of a relaxing getaway by car: “Put your best dress on, there’s a place I know / Where we can go, called Joppa Road.” As with “Freedom of ’76,” bits of double-take-inducing silliness creep in: “Hey, yo bro, that’s a dude I know / Works on Joppa Road, at the Sunoco.” Then, near the end of the song, Freeman offers an odd spoken-word aside: “Baby, you look great today.” The line serves as a reminder that even as Ween was starting to reflect their influences with greater accuracy, it was still determined to subtly push these tributes over the top.

According to Melchiondo, the intensely laid-back retro vibe of the track was no accident:

Joppa Road is a road outside of DC that we used to drive past on tour, and it looks so fucking funny on a sign. So we had this idea, like, “We gotta do a song called ‘Joppa Road,’” and then halfway through recording it, we were like, “Wait a second, this is like our version of ‘Ventura Highway’ [by ’70s AM staples America],” and we just took it all the way there and that’s what it is. It was like the same sentiment. The idea was you’re cruisin’ down a road, which is the name of the song, with the wind blowing through your hair, and it’s, like, the cruisin’
vibe — sunny, cruisin’, blue-sky vibe, which is basically what “Ventura Highway” is, taken to the max. It’s the Ween bastardization by accident.

This stylistic detour took some longtime listeners by surprise. “I don’t think they’ve touched upon as fusiony a jam as that one,” says Claude Coleman of “Joppa Road.” “It has a really amazing groove to me. It’s kinda different, kinda off. It’s kinda like quasi-samba fusion, which I thought was really funny. It sounds like Peter Gabriel, the groove of it. It shocked the hell out of me when I heard it.”

As Ween delved further into various musical styles after
Chocolate and Cheese
, they would continue to shock listeners with the accuracy of their genre homages. The classic example of this is Ween’s single most divisive record,
12 Golden Country Greats
. Any way you look at it, that album emerged out of left field, but diligent fans may have realized that Ween foreshadowed this odd stylistic detour with “Drifter in the Dark.” The song is a straightforwardly mopey country ballad that bears only the faintest hints of Ween’s trademark irreverence. A sleepy-sounding chorus echoes Freeman’s twangy lead vocal (which at one point digresses into wordless “Doo doo-doos”) and a lone acoustic guitar serves as accompaniment. The lyrics paint a somewhat depressing picture of futile romantic longing: “Do you ever walk
alone? / Like a drifter in the dark / Seeking out what isn’t there / Looking only for a spark.” The song does boast one blatantly brown element: the aimless, queasy-sounding harmonica solo that closes the track. Still, it’s safe to say that “Drifter” would’ve sounded utterly out of place on any of Ween’s previous full-lengths.

As with “Joppa Road,” “Drifter” grew out of a specific musical influence. “That was inspired by Roger Miller and a late-night walk around Lambertville, New Jersey one summer’s eve,” says Freeman, citing the late country-pop crooner, whom he later covered with his Gene Ween Band. Melchiondo takes a bit of credit for this stylistic foray. “Sometime around then I hipped [Aaron] to Roger Miller and he started listening to all that shit: ‘King of the Road’ and ‘Kansas City Star,’ and that’s like Roger Miller’s signature thing: [
sings in twangy voice
] ‘Doo doo-doo doo-doo doo-doo.’ The solos are him doing it with his mouth.”

Neither Ween member has much else to say about the tune, but Josh Homme cites it as a favorite. “The lyrics of that song, this whole topic of driving around at night and hoping for something to explode, hoping for something to happen in this life: It’s such a true sentiment,” he enthuses. “Their delivery of that could confuse somebody. [
imitates Freeman’s twangy singing
] ‘Do you ever walk alone?’ But really they’re singing about something that’s so true, and I understand so quickly.”

It would take some serious digging to find any such existential message in “Voodoo Lady,” but the song is nevertheless one of
Chocolate and Cheese
’s most enjoyable and enduring tracks. It’s also the one that most clearly foreshadows the band’s future incarnation as an improvisational powerhouse onstage: It features a mind-bending noise breakdown — like the sound of an amplifier being sucked against its will into an alternate dimension — which Ween would later stretch out like taffy in the live setting, and some brilliant psych-rock guitar breaks from Melchiondo.

The recording showcases Weiss’s crafty multitrack skill. On the bottom is an insistent bass-drum pulse, accented by busy bongo druming courtesy of Claude Coleman (“That was fun to do, to put galloping bongos all over — who doesn’t love galloping bongos?” reflects the drummer). Crisp, funky guitar and bass round out the insistent, danceable rhythm. Freeman’s lyrics deliver exactly what one might expect from the title: a caricatured ode to a bayou enchantress (“Your lips are hot and spicy / Servin’ up red beans and rice / At midnite she’s a’ howlin’ and a’ stompin’ / Makin’ love to the gators in the swampin’”) built around the nonsense refrain “You drive me crazy with that boogie oogie oogie oogie oogie.” The arrangement isn’t quite as vibrant as those of
White Pepper
’s “Bananas and Blow,”
La Cucaracha
’s “Woman and Man” and other exotic groove pieces that would appear on later Ween albums, but “Voodoo Lady” is
unmistakably not a 4-track creation.

If the song itself is relatively sophisticated, the origin isn’t, as Melchiondo explains:

The story behind that is so shallow that it’s funny. It’s so unbelievably bad that it’s worth telling. We went to New Orleans for the first time on the
Pure Guava
tour and there was, like, the voodoo culture down there and we wrote this shallow song called ‘Voodoo Lady.’ We wrote it in a hotel room on the tape recorder — I have it somewhere. The song has, like, every New Orleans cliché in it: the lady with a bone in her hair, the red beans and rice, and oysters and jambalaya and all this fucking bullshit, but it has a really good beat, and it’s part of the Ween catalog forever. But it’s really
that
shallow. In all seriousness too. It wasn’t, like, us trying to make fun of it; we thought we were doing something really original.

Considerably more innovative than the lyrics is the midsong noise interlude. Melchiondo explains its origin:

Aaron and I [initially] recorded that song on a 4-track. And instead of having a guitar solo in the middle, I just jacked up the echo as long as it could go and turned up the feedback all the way, and then just started turning all the knobs on it, so it was going [
imitates pure cacophony
], just like noise getting sped up and slowed down. So we did [that] in the studio. Andrew took it upon himself to take that solo, so he had like rack-mount kind of stuff,
and he just went to town on it. On the album version, it’s like a two-minute breakdown of waste, just total waste. We do it onstage now. We do it for, like, ten minutes, though, with a guitar solo.

Despite this potentially off-putting episode, the song remains a live favorite. “Yeah, I love playing it,” says Melchiondo. “It’s got a great rhythm; it’s catchy; and it’s one of our few songs that people dance to every time.”

The “Voodoo Lady” video is a classic mid-’90s time capsule: a melange of video effects — inverted colors, disorienting overlays — that might have seemed outlandish at the time but now register as quaintly dated. Freeman lip-syncs while lying in an underwater bed, as Melchiondo assumes the role of a demonic tormentor and the titular female feeds the pair bites of banana. The clip was overseen by Roman Coppola (an accomplished video director and a frequent collabor of his father, Francis Ford Coppola), who remembers treating “Voodoo Lady” as an opportunity to experiment without having to worry too much about narrative:

It was certainly a learning-experience type of video where you’re just sort of trying everything. It becomes a sort of unusual collage that hopefully evokes the spirit of the music.

I had done a lot of visual effects just preceding this, when I worked on Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
. There were a lot of things I had researched and little optical tricks that I wanted to explore. In negatives from color film,
natural skin tone is green and everything is inverted. That suggested an idea of, “What if we filmed everything with the colors inverted?” So [the woman’s] face was painted green and her lips were painted black, and we inverted it and it kind of came out a weird color. And we painted the banana a weird color, so when it was inverted, it looked yellow. But then when you opened the banana, it was black, so it was kind of disgusting and odd and hopefully sort of appealing.

And there’s another technique which I’m pretty proud to have used, which I discovered when I was researching
Dracula
. It’s an unusual photographic process called Schlieren photography, and we had a guy from NASA supervise that, J. T. Heineck. It’s a very weird process where you just do concave mirrors and create a beam of light between them and you’re able to photograph heat waves, which is that effect where you see [Freeman and Melchiondo] with heat waves coming out of their mouths.

We shot the underwater scenes in a pool, and the hope was that you wouldn’t really perceive that they were underwater — it was to have their hair floating and stuff, but I didn’t want any bubbles coming out of their nose or mouth. I’m not sure if we totally succeeded, and it’s pretty evident that you are underwater. But again, it was just kind of a concept.

So these were all things that were bubbling up in my area of interest, just different tricks and techniques. And I remember describing it to [Ween] and they were very, very supportive, like, “Hey that sounds great;
that sounds weird. And we’re eager to just go for it.” I remember the shoot being long hours and trying to get a lot done very quickly, and some bands can be kind of fussy, but I remember Mickey and Aaron were very enthusiastic and helpful and happy to do anything.

I think basically it was just me having a lot of different ideas, like, “Oh, that’d be cool in a video; that’d be cool in a video,” and just stirring them all up and gathering all these various optical ideas and trying to fit it to the music.

Like the song itself, the video isn’t too deep, but it’s fun and diverting, and a nice encapsulation of the offbeat spirit of the post-Nirvana era.

Chocolate and Cheese
’s opening track is, like “Voodoo Lady,” another perennial staple of Ween’s live shows. Aside from its considerable fun factor, the extremely rousing song announced the arrival of Ween 2.0: It wasn’t performed live by a full band, but it definitely sounds like it was.

Unlike “Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?,” “Roses Are Free” and some of the other more elaborate songs on the record, “Take Me Away” is stubbornly simple: An upbeat, repetitive swing groove (guitar, bass, Claude Coleman’s live drums and hints of auxiliary bongos) serves as the backdrop for Freeman’s impression of a
cheesily suave singer. Between certain lines, Gene Ween tosses out an Elvis-esque “Thank you!,” which meets with scattered overdubbed applause. The song embodies much of the humor of early Ween, but the presentation is much more ambitious and in its own peculiar way, conventional. Again, it isn’t a 4-track mock-up of glitzy lounge music; it’s more or less a literal example of the style. It’s fitting, then, that the “Thank you!” asides arose spontaneously out of Freeman’s portrayal of a Vegas-style crooner. “The opening line was so strong I had to thank myself,” says Freeman. “It came naturally and there were no questions asked.”