Ween's Chocolate and Cheese (33 1/3) (9 page)

The lyrics grew out of an article that Melchiondo stumbled across:

I was at home with my wife, who was my girlfriend back then, and we read a thing in the newspaper about this guy who was a retired city doctor and he opened up a health clinic in the Ozark Mountains or the Blue Ridge Mountains or somewhere. This was, like, West Virginia, and he was treating these backwoods people that didn’t have access to any kind of health care. And one of his hillbilly patients referred to spinal meningitis
as “Smile on, mighty Jesus,” and so I came up with the idea from that.

As Melchiondo recalls, the disturbing subject matter didn’t sit well with Ween’s label:

When we handed the record in to Elektra, [they] got back to us and they tried to hang it on the head of publicity. They said, [
imitating two-faced corporate-speak
] “Listen, guys, this is a great record. It’s such a great record. It’s the best record ever.” All this bullshit, you know. “We’re all so excited about it. Everyone at the company is talking about it. But, I gotta tell you, the girl at publicity thinks that no one is gonna be able to get past ‘Spinal Meningitis’ being the second song. They’re gonna put on the record, and it’s a tragedy, because all they’re gonna be able to think about is this song, because it’s so creepy and it’s so weird and you have to move it somewhere else in the sequence — it can’t be second.” And we were like, “Fuck you!” That was our response; it was like, “No way, the sequence is great — it stays.”

Record label friction and message-board comments aside, Freeman doesn’t recall getting any flak for the song. He offers the following anecdote as evidence to the contrary:

I remember after the record had come out, a bunch of seriously ill people came by in a special van with nurses to see our soundcheck. Mickey and I were convinced
of course that they were somehow protesting our song. I think our road manager mustered the courage to ask how these wheeled, bedded, seriously ill people were doing and they had said thanks for letting them come and see a band that “was able to talk about being sick openly and for making them laugh.” I still was eating my pants and never spoke to them.

“Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?” is another song that looks at disease from an innocent perspective, but it’s far more whimsical than “Spinal Meningitis.” As the title suggests, the track is basically an extended plea for assistance: The simple-minded narrator’s pony has taken ill, and he could use a hand. Ween uses unexpected lyrical twists to wring humor out of this potentially troubling scenario. The speaker catalogs the animal’s various symptoms — “He’s chewin’ bark and not the leaves”; “He coughed up snot in the driveway” — and constantly returns to the same, more-or-less nonsensical conclusion: “I think it’s his lung.”

Musically, the song definitely points to the ambition of late Ween. The verses employ a laid-back smooth-rock groove, featuring jangly guitar, a sinuous bass part, a sparkly keyboard line and tasteful drum fills executed by Melchiondo on a real kit. As with “Freedom of ’76,” you can picture a full band cutting the song live despite the
fact that the track was constructed piecemeal. The song’s structure is ambitious as well, especially the surprisingly complex multipart bridge section. A washy interlude heavy on the synthesized chimes points directly to the lush psychedelia Ween would explore on subsequent albums. Then Melchiondo takes a jazz-inflected solo, which climaxes in an oddly dramatic ascending figure. Despite its brief length, the track exhibits the arty, borderline-proggy feel that the band would begin to explore more fully on
The Mollusk
.

Weiss sees the song as a compositional breakthrough for Freeman and Melchiondo:

Maybe they’d done a rough version of that [prior to the album version], but it was a lot different. It didn’t have the whole bridge section in the middle and the modulation and all that. That’s an example of something you probably couldn’t have done on the 4-track. That one we worked on more than any other song they’d ever done up to that point. I mean, they didn’t even really know about bridges or modulations — I kinda dropped that on them.

Reflecting on “Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?,” Melchiondo seems simultaneously proud of the song’s complexity and annoyed by Weiss’s persistence:

Yeah, I put a bridge in that. It’s got the part that goes, [
sings
] ‘Poooo-ny / Poooo-ny,’ and that’s the chord from ‘Isn’t She Lovely’ by Stevie Wonder. I said to Andrew,
‘Okay, you want a bridge? Here it is: ‘Poooo-ny.’ It’s almost like a joke between us and [Andrew]. He’s like, ‘I’m hearing another bridge.’ And we’re like, ‘Hey Andrew, why don’t you fuckin’ suck my dick instead? We’re not doing it.’ He’s like, ‘You guys are fuckin’ lazy.’ But that is one of our better bridges in general. It’s got a whole bridge under the solo section, too. It’s got like a B, C and D section.

If the music represented Ween’s growing maturity, the lyrics came from another place entirely. Melchiondo explains:

We were on tour and we were in Seattle, and somebody brought us a gallon of mushroom tea, like a big, fucking gallon milk jug. So we had this gallon of mushroom tea backstage and we started just chugging on it. But when you drink mushroom tea, you start tripping really, really fast. It’s not like when you eat mushrooms; this is going right in your bloodstream, and you start tripping in, like, minutes. So we got spun, is what I’m getting at. We were so fucking high; we were tripping our faces off.

So they took Aaron and I back to the hotel, and it was like 3 o’clock in the morning, and we knew we were in it for the long haul. We were just too fucked up; there’s no way you’re turning out the lights and going to bed. So I was sitting in his room and we hear the elevator door opening right next to our room, and the guy dumped a big stack of
USA Today
s, to be delivered to every room, like “Boom!” right up against our door. Aaron was
barely holding on for dear life, and I opened up the door to find out what the noise was and the front page of
USA Today
, it’s got a picture of this little, like, retarded kid on it, and it says, “Am I gonna die, Mommy?” And it was so funny because we had just written and recorded “Spinal Meningitis” [the chorus of which features that exact line] — we had demoed it. Aaron was back in the room with his head in his hands, and [the coincidence] caused him to have a total breakdown — it being the first thing that we saw when we opened the door in that circumstance.

And so then later that night, he was laying there with his head in his hands, trying to get it together. And you come up with these crazy concepts or whatever when you’re tripping like that and I was just assaulting him with these phrases that were popping into my mind and one of them was, [
in fey voice
] “Hey mister, would you please help my pony?” I was, like, poking at him. “I think his lung’s fucked up.” And that became the basis for that song, remembering that. So I think of [“Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?” and “Spinal Meningitis”] as a pair, ’cause they’re disease songs and they were inspired under completely evil circumstances.

As Josh Homme recalls, this incident spawned not only the song but a verbal meme: “While [Kyuss were] on tour with [Ween] for
Chocolate and Cheese
, they were obsessively saying the word ‘pony.’ It was like a Swiss Army word, because it was so utilitarian; they would use it for any situation, and it was like a strange contagious strain
of Tourette’s. It would be like, ‘You guys wanna pony?’ Or out of nowhere, it was quiet and you’d hear, ‘Pooooony.’”

“A Tear for Eddie” is maybe the clearest example of Ween’s growing musical prowess during the
Chocolate and Cheese
era. A wholly sincere tribute to Funkadelic guitarist Eddie Hazel,
⁵
who died in December 1992, “Tear” is an instrumental jam, in which Melchiondo spins variations on a poignant, melancholy electric-guitar theme over a steady drum-machine beat. Near the end, Melchiondo reaches a distorted, sky-kissing climax that’s both over the top and completely righteous. The track — Ween’s first bona fide instrumental — signified the moment where Dean Ween outed himself as a guitar hero of sorts. Before
Chocolate and Cheese
, few made a point of praising Ween’s technical skill, but once Ween fleshed out their live presentation and began improvising more onstage, Melchiondo would come to be known as a master of psychedelic shred. (“Dean, you fake, you can play!” chided Terri Sutton’s
Chocolate and Cheese
review
in
Spin
.) “A Tear for Eddie” was the first major hint at that evolution. Like Hazel’s own epic, “Maggot Brain,” the track would become a calling card for Melchiondo.

“That was the beginning of his prowess as a musician that only became stronger and stronger,” says Steve Ralbovsky of “Tear.” “In the beginning, it was not something that you could really foresee. Mickey maybe had a couple of solos, when it was just the two of them, that showed you something. But once it got to the fuller band and more instrumentation and higher-fi on the records, something like ‘A Tear for Eddie’ is an indication that there was some serious musicianship going on.”

“Tear” arose spontaneously after Melchiondo heard word of Hazel’s death. “We were all really huge Funkadelic fans, so it was timely,” he explains. “It was written while we were doing the record, and it’s definitely a tribute to [Hazel’s] style of playing. I actually got a letter from his widow thanking me, and I ended up having a correspondence with her over the years.”

Josh Homme, a widely respected guitarist himself, is effusive regarding the track, and Melchiondo’s instrumental prowess in general:

Well, I think Mickey is such a skilled guitar player, and it’s not about a technique thing, because that doesn’t mean shit. Having your own style, that’s the hardest thing you could ever possibly have: a style that’s indicative of your own personality. And Mickey uses the worst pedals of all time, made by some of the worst companies ever. But somehow, he knows how to use them exactly.
And so he’s able to paint great moods with his guitar with the worst stuff of all time. I really respect him.

Melchiondo’s bandmate saw the track as playing a small but important role in the album’s cohesion. “All albums should have just one instrumental track,” Freeman asserts. “Not any more or you kill the record, but one is perfectly acceptable. I think it’s a Led Zeppelin thing.” Sure enough, post-
Chocolate and Cheese
, this rule stuck:
The Mollusk, White Pepper, Quebec
and
La Cucaracha
each feature a single vocalless tune.

In much the same way that “A Tear for Eddie” showcased Melchiondo’s growing guitar prowess, “Baby Bitch” demonstrated Freeman’s development as a songwriter and lyricist. The title might sound crass, and there are elements of black comedy buried within, but the song — a kiss-off to an ex-lover — is devastatingly honest. It’s no exaggeration to call it one of the most heart-rending relationship songs ever composed.

Freeman’s lyrics dole out vitriol and self-loathing in equal doses. The line “Fuck you, you stinkin’ ass ho” finds a poignant counterpart in “Got fat, got angry, started hating myself,” a contrast that amounts to catharsis without easy closure. To underscore the song’s complicated tone, Freeman nods to another songwriter who rarely seemed to make peace with love. He sings, “Wrote ‘Birthday Boy’
for you babe,” name-checking another wrenching Ween breakup song (found on
God Ween Satan
) and borrowing a page from Bob Dylan, whose “Sara” — an ode to a failed marriage — contains the line “Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel / Writing ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you.” Freeman confirms that this reference was intentional with a simple e-mailed “YES!!”

In contrast with such raw lyrics, the composition is extremely artful. The song features an ingenious verse structure, consisting of four bars of 6/8 waltz time divided by an extra half bar. “Mickey has pointed that same thing out to me and it’s just how [my] brain hears and writes pentameters,” says Freeman. This rhythmic tag gives “Baby Bitch” an odd asymmetry; unlike a more typical waltz, such as the aforementioned “Sara,” it sounds tense and unsettled. The song also features a spare, tasteful arrangement. The backing track is classic folk-pop, with strummy acoustic guitar, an extreme rarity on prior Ween albums, and an unadorned drum-kit groove played by longtime Ween associate Patricia “Pat” Frey. The vocal track is doubled and slightly sped up, and the resulting effect both harks back to
Pure Guava
and also seems to prefigure the delivery of the then unknown Elliott Smith. (Interestingly, a bootleg has circulated of Smith and fellow songwriter Mary Lou Lord covering “Birthday Boy.”)

“Baby Bitch” is one of two
Chocolate and Cheese
songs (the other being “The HIV Song”) that were recorded with Greg Frey at his Graphic Sound Studios home facility before the office-park sessions with Weiss. At Graphic
Sound — also where some of the drum tracks for
God Ween Satan
were recorded — Freeman and Melchiondo demoed many of the songs that they would later redo with Weiss, but only this pair made the cut in their original form. Frey recalls these preliminary
Chocolate and Cheese
sessions, during which his wife, Pat, made a drum cameo on “Baby Bitch”:

I’m pretty sure it was the summer of ’92, At that point, Andrew Weiss was unavailable a lot of the time because he was on the road with [the Rollins Band]. [Freeman and Melchiondo] got in touch with us and said, “Andrew’s away a lot, and we’re writing a lot right now. Would you mind if we came over and did some songs now and then with you?” And we were like, “Oh, that’s fine.” Most of my work was evenings and weekends, ’cause in my studio, I worked with musicians that had day jobs. So Mickey would call me up at, like, 9 o’clock at night and say, “We’ve got a new song — what are you doing tomorrow?” And if I said, “I’m free until 4,” they said, “Okay, we’ll see you at 11” or something. And they’d come over and as far as I could tell, the situation would be that they had just written the song the day before, recorded it on their 4-track, and they loved it or it cracked them up in some way, so they said, “Let’s call Greg, and we’ll do a more official demo of it.” And so that would happen, over the course of the summer, six or eight times or something like that. Sometimes they got in that rhythm and they liked that rhythm of coming in once a week, and sometimes they would come in with
nothing, and they would just start from scratch and just sort of play around for three or four hours.