Ween's Chocolate and Cheese (33 1/3) (14 page)

Beyond its enhanced sonics,
Chocolate and Cheese
represented Freeman and Melchiondo’s first brush with the mainstream in another key sense. It marked the first and only time that a Ween album cover would trade on blatant sex appeal. On one hand, the headless, semi-nude portrait that adorns the record works as good, prurient fun. On the other, the photo functions as a sly
commentary on Ween’s increasingly polished presentation — a caricature of rock ’n’ roll excess.

Prior to
Chocolate and Cheese
, Ween’s album art ran counter to the rock mainstream and matched the band’s low-tech aesthetic perfectly. The sleeves of the band’s self-released tapes were gross-out doodles in the time-honored DIY tradition;
The Crucial Squeegie Lip
cover, for example, depicted a young man wearing an oversized Ween T-shirt and apparently caught mid-sneeze, with snot particles emanating from his mouth. The
God Ween Satan
cover featured a neon blue-on-pink rendering of Ween’s cartoon deity, the Boognish, while
The Pod
’s art was a brilliant piece of pop subversion, like a classic punk flyer. The base of this latter image was simply the pilfered cover of Leonard Cohen’s
Greatest Hits
, a brooding, sepia-toned portrait of the artist seen through a circular lens. Pasted over Cohen’s head, though, was the head of Mean Ween wearing a gas mask — as the liner notes put it, he was busy “doin’ up some Scotchguard powered bongs.” Neither Williams nor anyone else in the Ween camp ever actually huffed Scotchguard, but the photo served as a plausible-enough justification for the profoundly warped music contained within.
Pure Guava
sported another bit of found art: several enlarged and pixelated images of guava fruit — stolen from the side of a Gerber baby-food jar — coupled with a whimsical orange, yellow and blue color scheme. Again, the art was nontraditional, rough-hewn and a little wacky, like the album itself.

The
Chocolate and Cheese
sleeve art is something very
different. Taken at face value, it’s simply soft-core porn. The layout features three photos of a healthily tanned woman posing against a white background. Only the model’s midsection is visible, from her shoulders down to her hips. She’s nude except for two very important articles: a red tank top that covers roughly the top two-thirds of her breasts, and a blue boxing-style championship belt garishly decorated with a gold metallic image of the Boognish. The proper cover is a front view of the model, while the back cover shows her from behind, revealing the faintest hint of her backside as well as the belt’s buckle. The inside cover features the same rear angle, but here the model is topless; she tilts slightly to the right, revealing a sliver of her breast as well as a single roll of back fat.

There’s nothing extraordinary about adorning one’s record with a barely concealed depiction of female nudity. But rarely has erotic album art seemed so at odds with the music inside as it does in the case of
Chocolate and Cheese
. Contemplating the photos of the Boognish-belt-clad model, one thinks of countless other borderline-pornographic album covers: Roxy Music’s
Country Life
, the Black Crowes’
Amorica
— which came out less than two months after
Chocolate and Cheese
and employed the same red-white-and-blue color palette — the Cars’
Candy-O
or various ’70s funk titles by the Ohio Players and similar acts. (The nonprurient-minded might light upon the Commodores’
All the Great Hits
, a 1982 release whose cover depicted the midriff of a muscular male boxer wearing a championship belt.) But while all
these releases explore themes of lust and romance with varying degrees of sleaze, there’s barely a mention of sex to be found on
Chocolate and Cheese
. The album’s nearest thing to a sex-themed song is “Voodoo Lady,” with its obliquely suggestive chorus of “You drive me crazy with that / Boogie oogie oogie oogie oogie.” But on the whole,
Chocolate and Cheese
deals more directly with disease (“Spinal Meningitis,” “The HIV Song”), love gone wrong (“Take Me Away,” “Baby Bitch”) and drugged-out juvenilia (“Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?,” “Candi”). The content of the album seems much more in keeping with the disheveled weirdos audiences encountered in the “Push th’ Little Daisies” video rather than any sort of oversexed rock stars. In that sense, the cover scans as a send-up of ultra-exploitative rock ’n’ roll imagery as opposed a sincere example of it. Perhaps the band was even satirizing their own sonic upgrade, complementing their slicked-up sound with an image that could be superficially read as a desperate attempt to conform to the rock mainstream.

Some took the bait. “This female entertainment editor sent the record back and refused to review it because of the cover, which she deemed as being sexist,” says Melchiondo.
Playboy
was another outlet that didn’t really distinguish between Ween’s version of sex appeal and any other; in this context, though, the exploitation was welcome. The magazine’s website included
Chocolate and Cheese
in a 2002 roundup of the “sexiest album covers of all time” alongside the aforementioned Roxy Music, Black Crowes and Ohio Players sleeves, as well as other
classic designs for records by 2 Live Crew, Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass and more. The article also featured a reader poll, and when the results were tabulated,
Chocolate and Cheese
came out on top. Mickey Melchiondo takes pride in having triumphed over various time-tested favorites: “I think Ween fans spammed the vote. So we beat out the Ohio Players and Roxy Music and anybody else who has naked chicks on their record cover, like the ten records you would think of.” The
Playboy
poll proved to be a trailblazer: subsequent sexiest-album-cover round-ups from Nerve and the sci-fi site UGO featured
Chocolate and Cheese
as well.

If the cover registers as an over-the-top sight gag in light of the music within, it doesn’t seem quite so outlandish in the context of Ween’s discography, which had its share of sex-themed material.
God Ween Satan
featured the salacious, nearly nine-minute-long funk jam “L.M.L.Y.P.” (i.e. “Let Me Lick Your Pussy”), while
The Crucial Squeegie Lip
included an entirely trilogy of songs simply called “Boobs,” parts I through III (really the same song performed at three different intensity levels). The lyrics exemplify Ween at their most crassly hilarious. In light of observations such as “I love your boobs,” the cover of
Chocolate and Cheese
starts to seem like the ultimate realization of Freeman and Melchiondo’s adolescent fantasies, a triumphant
Wayne’s World
-esque “Schwing!” What could be cooler, after all, than a seminude woman modeling your band’s crude logo?

Ultimately, as with much of Ween’s output, the
Chocolate and Cheese
cover doesn’t conform to a single interpretation. Classic example of shamelessly sexualized rock ’n’ roll imagery? Twisted meditation on (or parody of) same? According to admirers such as Stephan Said, who seems almost in awe of the artwork, the answer would be a little bit of both:

[The cover] really was effective in putting across the whole Ween ideal. You didn’t have to know exactly what the point was, because the point was that it forced you to question. It made a mockery of pop culture. The record cover looked so pop that the first thing you thought was, “Oh yeah, right” — it just fit right in. Except then you looked at it, and it said “Ween” and then it was like, “But isn’t that really almost disgusting?” It was twisted but very smart. I’m sure it raised lots of eyebrows in different ways, positively and negatively and everything, which is, you know — that’s Ween.

The cover concept for
Chocolate and Cheese
came directly from the band, but it fell to several talented visual artists to execute the image. Every aspect of the process, from finding a model to designing the belt, presented unique challenges.

Initially, Ween had a very different
Chocolate and Cheese
cover idea in mind. “We were gonna try and get a sailor, like a gay sailor, in red, white and blue wearing the belt,”
explains Melchiondo. “And then somehow that didn’t go over very good and it turned into the chick. That’s all I remember: We wanted to get a sailor dude wearing the belt, with some ugly-ass body.”

It’s unclear exactly where in the process the gay sailor “turned into the chick,” but it seems that when the band first approached the firm in charge of realizing the cover, NYC’s still-active Reiner Design Consultants, Inc., they specified a preference for the female anatomy. “I’m pretty sure I came up with the idea,” says Freeman. “I had sketched it out and still have the notebook somewhere. I remember telling Mickey how the top of the [shirt] would cut out right below the nipple line and so it was very important to have big breasts with a large ‘under portion.’” Reiner’s creative director Roger Gorman says, “Basically the direction we were given was that they wanted to do something that picked up on the old ’70s Ohio Players covers,
¹¹
which always smacked of nudity and sexuality. So we were trying to think about how to come up with something that sort of reflected the album. And then somehow in our conversation, the idea of one of those classic wrestling belts came up, as a way of incorporating the Boognish.” Melchiondo remembers feeding Reiner a very specific image for the prop: “I think the instruction we gave was that it should look like the WBA World Championship belt for boxing.”

It fell to Rick Patrick, the Reiner designer who directly oversaw the
Chocolate and Cheese
cover, to realize the prop.
“I worked with a jeweler friend of mine, Marty Sarandria, who ended up making the gold-plated Boognish emblem,” says Patrick. “I gave him the Boognish and sized it. We sort of polished up the Boognish for that but it’s pretty true to form. I think we just crisped it up a little bit. And I had another friend of mine, Tina Attila, create the red, white and blue wrestler’s belt to fit on the girl’s body.”

Marty Sarandria, who had previously fashioned a metal headpiece for the cover of Living Colour’s 1993 effort,
Stain
, notes that while today, an image such as the metal Boognish might be rendered with Photoshop, back then, it was necessary to fabricate the actual object.

At the time, it was just when the computer animation for graphic art was beginning, and they were having a hard time mimicking metal. So I had a side job of making metal pieces, and [Rick Patrick] would incorporate that into [his] artwork. I used brass plate. I actually used a whole plate, because if you look at the Boognish design that I did, it’s sort of like a whole connected kind of piece. So I just used a plate of metal that was that circumference and I pierced it with a saw and ground it and cut it out and just got that one-dimensional shape. And then I made fasteners for it, kind of like back rivets, and I had a plate of really shiny, 24-karat gold. And [Tina Attila] had made the belt to the dimensions that I was making the piece. I just gave it to her, and she attached it.

Locating a cover model proved just as complex, as Gorman attests:

We had a really hard time. We approached a lot of the top modeling agencies, but we wanted a little bit of nudity in there, and as soon as you equate nudity with music, a red flag goes up. No one wanted to get involved in this cover. And there’s hardly anything revealed on that cover: I mean, there’s just a little bit of breast and you see a little bit of ass cheek on the back, and that’s it. It’s really pretty tame when you think about it. But in those days, it was always hard, because these covers were being carried in Wal-Mart and stuff. Everyone really got kind of scared.

Rick Patrick had to turn to his personal contacts to recruit Ashley Savage, whose torso appeared on the cover. “Today I think it would be easier to do that photo shoot, but then it wasn’t that easy to get someone who would pose topless,” he recalls. “The girl was a friend of a friend. She was a dancer.” The design team knew from the start that Savage’s face would be cropped out. “It was really a case of putting the emphasis on the belt,” says Gorman. “Because the thing is, as soon as you have a face in a picture, people’s eyes always go to the person’s face. So the idea was to kind of have something that suggested this look from the ’70s, but what it did was actually focus you on the belt.”

Photographer John Kuczala, another friend of Patrick’s, handled the shoot in his own studio. He and
Patrick tried several different approaches before settling on the half-tank-top. “They had initially wanted her to be shot topless, and we tried,” says Patrick. “We did shoot some stuff with her arms over her boobs.” Kuczala remembers one other approach: “We started by putting an Ace bandage on her instead of the shirt, because it was going to be cropped below the nipples, but that just wasn’t really looking too good.” Eventually the team settled on the red shirt. “She was a dancer, and obviously was super-well-endowed,” Patrick notes. “So we ultimately went with the chopped-off shirt. It was just sort of an evolution during the shoot. We shot her topless, and then we shot her with the shirt and then we made the shirt shorter and tucked it under. It was always supposed to just be the torso, and to be sexy and risqué in a weird way.”

Some of the outtakes featured a more fetish-like focus. “We did some shots of her with chocolate and cheese on her feet,” Kuczala says matter-of-factly. “You know, like, chocolate dripped over her feet.” Rick Patrick explains: “I’m not sure where the inspiration came from, but sometimes you have a photo opportunity and you try to just experiment. A close-up of that might have just been interesting as a little detail in the package. So we just did different variations and tried some things, and I remember we did shoot that but we just decided it wasn’t working. I think it was melted chocolate and chunks of cheese. That sounds bad, for some reason!”

Even without the feet shots, the album cover has accrued a serious cult following. Unsurprisingly, many
have inquired after the whereabouts of Ashley Savage, who has yet to surface for an interview regarding her
Chocolate and Cheese
experience. Ween have perpetuated the mystery, claiming never to have met her. Melchiondo confirms this, but Claude Coleman remembers things differently. “We met her once; she came to a show,” he says. “It must have been shortly after that record. It was definitely that time. Andrew was definitely in the band. It was definitely New York. Maybe it was like Tramp’s or something. She came to the gig and she was passing around like, ‘Hey, this is the
Chocolate and Cheese
girl.’”