Ween's Chocolate and Cheese (33 1/3) (6 page)

“Pro Tools didn’t even exist,” explains Weiss, referring to the now widely used computer-recording platform. He continues:

[The program] was called Sound Tools and it was, like, two tracks. And we got a bunch of ADATs, like two or three ADATs. And the ADATs were a nightmare. ADATs were like primitive digital recording. It was done on VHS tapes, and they were eight tracks and you would sync them up. I think we had, like, three of them. And they were always going out of sync and they were eating the tapes all the time and stuff like that. I was splicing videotapes back together all the time. And I didn’t really know what I was doin’. So we were syncing all this stuff together. It was kind of like a technological nightmare. Like Pro Tools now — it’s kind of hard to imagine how prehistoric this shit was at the time compared to now. Now you turn it on and it works. Back then, you turned it on and there was a 50 percent chance that it wasn’t
gonna work. Maybe even greater. The ADATs were all fucked up.

The computer was just slow, ridiculously slow. You could do this thing where you could dump the track from the ADAT digitally into the computer and you could do things like EQ or editing and stuff like that. But it was so slow that you would go, “Okay, I wanna try some filter or some EQ on it,” and you would set up the settings and you would press [the button], “Okay, go.” And you would go make a cup of coffee and you would come back ten minutes later and see that it wasn’t done yet and you’d read
The Trentonian
for a couple pages and then it would get done and you’d listen to it and you wouldn’t like what you did, so you’d press “Undo” and do the whole thing again. It was really time-intensive for not much. For what you do now in real time, you know what I mean? It was ridiculous.

For Melchiondo, the digital recording setup used on
Chocolate and Cheese
presented creative hurdles. Having employed only analog methods in the past, he and Freeman found that they had trouble pulling off some of their favorite sonic tricks, such as manipulating tape speed, which played a major role on
The Pod
and
Pure Guava
.
³
Achieving these effects with the

ADAT-and-computer set-up proved difficult:

We fuck around with tape speed a lot. Things are sped up; they’re slowed down. It’s not like we take a whole song and we’re done recording it and we just slow it down and put it on the record. We’ll record different tracks at different speeds. We’ll drop the tape two whole steps or something and then do a track, so when you play it back at a normal speed, you’re hearing the guitar in a normal tuning but the vocals might be in a higher tuning or lower tuning. And you can really fuck with people, basically, by doing that, and get some great sounds.

But with digital, it’s a different thing. You’re slowing down, like, the bit rate, basically. That was the first thing we noticed, because we’re constantly going over to the tape machine and slowing it down manually. That was one hurdle we had to overcome from doing it digitally. And there’s a number of ways to get distortion on a vocal or a guitar, or whatever. One way is to plug it into a distortion box or sing it through a telephone or something like that. And another way is to just record it so loud that it just distorts the tape, and just overdrives it and saturates it. And it actually sounds cooler than a distortion pedal. You do that digitally and it just sounds like shit. It clacks and pops and it’s unlistenable: You literally can’t listen to it. You can’t
overdrive the recording machine when you’re doing it into a computer or ADATs like we did.

Beyond their difficulties with manipulating tape speed, Melchiondo and Freeman had a tough time adjusting to the sonic quality of the digital setup. As Melchiondo explains, Ween learned the pitfalls of digital recording in real time:

When you put something on tape, it instantly gains a production value, like an ambience. It warms up the sound of whatever you’re putting on there. It compresses it. It adds tape hiss to it. It makes the lows a little lower and it makes the highs a little higher. It does all sorts of shit that’s beyond your control, but it does something to it. And as long as you can engineer things pretty well, and what you put in sounds good, it’ll sound pretty good when you play it back.

With digital recording — and this was, like, the beginning of digital popularity; it was so much easier than using tape, and we bought into it in 1993 and 1994 — it sounds like glass. It’s kind of hard to explain unless you actually do it. Things don’t really sit together. Like, you can record a drum track, a guitar track, a bass track and a vocal track, and it feels like you’re listening to five tracks at once, rather than one thing that’s all blending together and naturally compressing itself. And this is something that you have to learn by doing it. You can only learn it when you’re actually going through the process.

Freeman recalls sharing Melchiondo’s concerns:

I remember three ADAT machines strung together to provide us with more tracks. Andrew Weiss [sat] in his swivel chair chain-smoking Camel cigarettes and weed, [with] us sitting below him on the floor, all of us complaining that the ADATs sounded like shit. I remember us being worried about the quality because we had gone from a deep saturated cassette sound to a new digital technology sound — both were at the extreme. The ADAT was all about the analog-to-digital converter which at that time was in its infancy stage of development and sounded bass-less and very tinny. I remember Andrew going through an enormous amount of work to offset the sound of those ADAT machines. I think in the end he did great.

Melchiondo remembers reaching a different conclusion, and that he and Freeman struggled to reconcile their disappointment in the digital sound with their well-oiled productivity:

We worked our asses off on that record. We wrote tons and tons and tons of songs. We were very selective in which ones we recorded. We left more songs off the record than we put on there — I mean, actually recorded them and mixed them. We still have B-sides from that record that have never come out, actually. When you’re doing something like that, you don’t think about these things as it’s going along because you got
mixing in front of you and mastering in front of you. So you don’t know what it’s gonna sound like for months after you’re done throwing down your last track. So all along we’re listening to it and it sounded kinda fucked up and it was like, “Oh, whatever, just wait till we mix it,” or, “Just wait till it gets mastered,” or whatever. And then lo and behold when it was all said and done, it still kinda sounded like that, to our ears, and I think I can speak for everybody when I say that we were really disappointed at the time. It was horrifying.

Despite its drawbacks, the ADAT-and-computer recording method offered much greater sonic leeway than the 4-track used on previous Ween releases. Melchiondo and Freeman had used the 4-track to demo several of the
Chocolate and Cheese
tracks, but they eventually re-recorded these songs with Weiss at the makeshift studio in Pennington. As a producer, Weiss relished the freedom afforded by the multitrack setup:

It did allow us to do backing vocals and stuff like that, some arrangement stuff. Take the drums from the drum machine and put them on separate tracks: Put the kick on one and the snare on another so you could actually mix it later. Whereas on the 4-track, the drum machine goes on one track. So it allowed you to do stereo, basically. When you do it on a 4-track, you can put the guitars
in the middle and the drums on one side and the vocals on another side and the bass somewhere else or whatever — but that was basically it.

Nonetheless, as with the adjustment to digital recording, there were growing pains to contend with. As Ween’s
Jane Pratt Show
appearance made clear, recording on a shoestring had become a proud mark of distinction for Ween (“It makes you have to write better songs”). During the making of
Chocolate and Cheese
, Melchiondo remembers struggling with the sense that he was turning his back on the band’s original aesthetic, which played a huge role in the unique appeal of
Pure Guava
:

Ween had always been a duo to that point, onstage, and also in the — not even in the studio because we never had even really worked in the studio. We always worked at home, up until that record. So it was different in two very big ways: One is that it was a multitrack record instead of a 4-track record, and we were re-recording our songs for the first time. There was always just one version before: the 4-track version. That was what the records were. And then also we shifted to being a four-piece [live] band, with Claude on drums and Andrew on bass. So it was scary. You know, it was this punk-rock ethic, just two of us and a tape deck, and now it’s sort of a slicker-sounding record and a different presentation altogether. So it wasn’t as raw as
The Pod
or
Pure Guava
or the first record. It was more slick. There was more singing on it, more playing. There were songs with
choruses and all that instead of jams. It was a big step for us. Looking back, it was obviously a big step forward, but at the time, it felt like, “Oh, this isn’t gnarly enough,” or something like that.

Weiss seems to have harbored fewer misgivings:

It was still really brown. I mean, we weren’t going into the Hit Factory or the Record Plant or something and blowing like a half million dollars — which I would’ve loved to have done. Now everybody records their own records. Back then it wasn’t nearly as common; it was still pretty punk rock to do that. So in my mind, it was still totally keeping it real. It was just technologically a step up from the 4-track. But it was still very insular. It was primarily just the three of us making this record. So it was very in-house. It wasn’t like we were relegating decisions to an outside producer or something like that. It was still very much the core. For me, it wasn’t really an issue. But it provided more freedom, just having more tracks and stuff, to do stuff that couldn’t be done before with four tracks.

There’s a lot to be said for four tracks. When you do something on four tracks, everything’s gotta count; there’s no room for fluff. And on some later stuff, we were maybe guilty of that.
Quebec
was definitely guilty of that. There was a lot of fluff there. By that point, Pro Tools had gotten really user-friendly and you could just record, like, a million fucking vocal tracks and all that stuff. But [at the time of
Chocolate and Cheese
], the
equipment was so tenuous that I think we didn’t trust it to go much further. So even though it was more than four tracks, it was still pretty nitty-gritty. It was still pretty much the most important stuff.

In Weiss and the band’s estimation, “the most important stuff” included real drums, as opposed to the clunky electronic beats that had driven
The Pod
and
Pure Guava
. This shift resulted in
Chocolate and Cheese
’s most straightforward, professional-sounding tracks, such as “Freedom of ’76” and “Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?” The switch to real drums also allowed Freeman and Melchiondo to get back to their simulated-live-band roots.

Melchiondo explains:

When we did
God Ween Satan
, we were living in my parents’ house. And I had a drum kit, so all of our songs were very natural instrumentation: bass, drums, guitar and vocals. That whole first record, pretty much, if you didn’t know it was two guys, you would assume it was a band. But when we moved into the Pod and did
The Pod
and
Pure Guava
, we just adapted to it. It was like, “Okay, we can’t do that anymore, so we’ll just have a drum machine.” And it changed our sound from more of a punk-rock thing to more of a — I don’t know what
you want to call those records, but you can’t just do something like that and think it’s not gonna change the sound, you know?

Andrew Weiss also emphasizes that the use of drum machine started as a matter of convenience. “It was born out of necessity and kind of became an aesthetic, as opposed to ‘We’re doing this with a drum machine because that’s what we like,’” he notes. “If you were going to record real drums on the 4-track, the whole kit would be on one track. That’s all you could do, you know? Unless you wanted to do it on three tracks and bounce it down to one, but that’s way too complex.” Aaron Freeman concurs: “The only reason we used a drum machine was because it required no space. We didn’t have to feed it and listen to it complain.”

Greg Frey, Ween’s current manager and longtime associate, offers a similar perspective. “
The Pod
and
Pure Guava
were completely recorded by Mickey and Aaron on the floor of their living room on a 4-track,” he says. “And because it was done on the floor of their living room, there was no drum kit. They’re not recording engineers: Even if they wanted to get real drums involved, there was no practical way to do it, so everything was done with a drum machine.”

Employing a drum machine may not have been a calculated decision. Nevertheless, it had a huge effect on Ween’s sound, and on the way the band was perceived. For Melchiondo and Freeman, and the band’s early fans,
The Pod
and
Pure Guava
could be heard as part of a larger
body of work, but when Ween first appeared on the greater pop-culture radar — via “Push th’ Little Daisies” on
Beavis and Butthead
— many immediately categorized the duo according to their penchant for low-tech sound. (
Spin
’s review of
Pure Guava
likened Ween to “a They Might Be Giants for the Ren and Stimpy generation,” invoking a band already well known for their prominent use of synthetic drums.) And since Ween was still appearing live in their two-guys-and-a-DAT-machine guise and flaunting their rudimentary recording methods in the media (e.g. the
Jane Pratt
appearance), the notion of Ween as an eccentric project rather than a proper band stuck. Despite Ween’s considerable evolution since the 4-track period, that reputation lingers to this day. “Yeah, that’s still common,” admits Melchiondo. “I think that’s what people think: ‘[Ween is] a weird, electronic, home-recording thing.’ But it’s really just [
The Pod
and
Pure Guava
] that are like that.”