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IVH: Ween / Chocolate and Cheese [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-20
Tonight’s selections from Ween’s fourth album, 1994’s Chocolate and Cheese. Let’s get weird.
Like walking through a record store on LSD. - Album of the Year
CHOCOLATE AND CHEESE is the fourth album by the group WEEN. It was recorded in an industrial park office in Pennington, New Jersey, not far from where we live. As always, it was produced and mixed by Andrew Weiss. The title is a lot deeper than anyone might assume. I suppose you could look at this as our “bustin’ out” album, the one that might establish us as the next COUNTING CROWS. Fuck it, we never even got to meet the chick on our cover. I feel that while this is our most mellow record, somehow it turned out to be the most aggressive of the four. It is also worth mentioning that for the first time in four years, this record was recorded with everyone in perfect health (except Andrew, who broke his ankle on a sheet of ice in January). We really wanted to buy new Mercedes Benzs’ with our Pure Guava advance, but, instead, we built our studio for Chocolate and Cheese. I drive a ’78 Cadillac and Gener has a brown Mercury Cougar. I read that Green Day has already been named Punk Band of the Year by Time Magazine (7-94), maybe we’ll be the Hard Rock Band of the Year. The next Collective Soul. We’re really goin’ for the whole banana this time. “Voodoo Lady” is gonna be the next “Feed the Tree.” I was told that whilst filming his new movie, Oliver Stone had GUAVA cranking on the set and Woody Harrelson threatened to walk off unless “that shit got turned off.” Woody, I saw you sing “Jailhouse Rock” on Letterman and the shit was weak. You’re no Lisa Loeb. We had a million great video concepts for our record, none of which will see the light of day without serious help from Oliver Stone, and a large financial institution. We wanted to film in Africa, with a nation of tribesman behind us with Paul Simon’s head superimposed on everyone. No go. We wanted to film our video in a white Bronco with 50 L.A.P.D. cars and choppers chasing us, people holding up “go deaner” signs. Forget it. Anyways, I’m pretty proud of the way this album ended up and I’m sure you’ll like it too. ’94 is our year, the whole banana… — Liner Notes, Dean Ween 7-94
Voodoo Lady
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In 1984 Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo met in school. They shared a passion for music, picked the name Ween (a combination of “wuss” and “penis”) and started recording their own music: “the music was designed to be obnoxious”. In the second half of the 1980s the group released a number of cassettes, containing music played by Ween while being supported by a Digital Audio Tape (DAT) machine (containing pre-recorded backup music). They also performed using the very same DAT. During one of their shows an A&R representative for the Twin/Tone label, operating from Minneapolis, saw the band play live and offered them a deal. In November 1990 Ween released their debut album, GodWeenSatan: The Oneness, an album with no less than 26 songs. Their motto for creating “obnoxious” music was clearly audible. A lot of it was a bit sappy, mediocre juvenile music, but it did contain some special pieces that showed the band was capable of true musical greatness, was able to play a lot of different genres and could be relevant. On the song L.M.L.Y.P., an adaptation of the Prince songs Shockadelica and Alphabet St., Ween is more ‘vintage Prince‘ than Prince was himself around that time. [...] Ween signed with a major label, Elektra Records, and released their third album in November 1992: Pure Guava, containing 19 songs. With Push Th’ Little Daisies it even spawned a minor hit, which was frequently incorporated into episodes of the MTV cartoon Beavis And Butt-Head. — A Pop Life
Take Me Away
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Chocolate and Cheese is a gateway drug sampler platter of an album. If you couldn’t see their genius through the audio muck of their first three, here was a big-budget sequel of songs that sounded cleaner, but more adventurous. Here, the boys weren’t just ADHD-addled stoners — they were genre-agnostic devourers of weirdness who wanted to return just as much varied strangeness to the world. Even better, Chocolate and Cheese presents them like virtuosic session guys given the keys to the kingdom and given free rein. Psych-rock shredder? “A Tear for Eddie” is here to melt your face. Breezy soft jazz-rock fit for a tourism board? “Freedom of ‘76” will make you want to take the next plane to Philly. It’s as though they had a hat full of suggestions like “Mexican revenge song” and “The theme song for a show about HIV/AIDS” and “Drunk and slightly unhinged lounge singer.” Even the implacable, like “Voodoo Lady” or “I Can’t Put My Finger on It,” feel like they were recorded by two dudes daring each other to pen songs, but didn’t count on all of them being awesome. Even “The HIV Song.” And “Candi.” — Spectrum Culture
Freedom of '76
First of all, Ween decided to finally use a real studio for their recording purposes so Chocolate and Cheese will prove to be their first highly-polished and professional-sounding offering ever! It’s amazing what kind of magic they’re able to perform with just a guitar and drum machine. Reasons for the decision to use a studio are unclear, since they had access when they signed onto Elektra a year earlier for Pure Guava, but you can’t complain about the results. Cheap recording equipment worked ok before, but I believe that these songs would not be as powerful as they are if they were muddied in lo-fi recording artifacts. Case in point is the opener “Take Me Away”, which would completely lose its charm if it sounded like a bedroom recording, but I’m ahead of myself already. Better production = big win! Second of all, starting with Chocolate and Cheese the already-fuzzy lines become even blurrier when it comes to trying to understand Ween’s songwriting intentions. Before, their sense of humor and their antics were pretty much laid out on the table. Now it’s harder to tell a lot of the time, and I believe, without a fraction of doubt, that this is also the result of the increased production values. You’ll start to ask yourself questions like: Are they being serious or are they being funny? Are they paying tribute earnestly or are they poking fun? Do they actually like the music they’re playing or are they just being derisive? Are they putting a lot of effort into this or did they barely try? Are they geniuses or are they getting lucky? The answer to all these questions is: Yes! Case in point is the opener “Take Me Away” which would come across as completely insincere if it sounded like a bedroom recording, but I’m ahead of myself yet again! Better production = mysterious intent! And as a dyed-in-the-wool asshole Ween fan I adore this aspect of the band, because no other band in the world meshes together so seamlessly the jokey, sarcastic, satirical shit with the heartfelt, genuine, musically competent shit. This particular album is where the band really starts to become something special. This particular album is where Ween finally carved out their lasting identity. — Tom Writes About Stuff
Roses Are Free
The album belongs to a more innocent, pre-edgelord era in pop-cultural trolling, when being actively offensive was seen as a noble act of punching up against an uptight boomer establishment, whose Democratic and Republican constituents were finding common cause in blacklisting records. It was the era of peak Howard Stern, of Bill Hicks’ ascendency to alt-comedy sainthood, and Denis Leary playing the Stone Temple Pilots to Hicks’ Nirvana in his MTV-commercial rants. Heck, even a young Radiohead were naming albums after Jerky Boys skits. As a pair of suburban stoners way more interested in food than politics, Ween didn’t project the same sort of outwardly hostile energy as the aforementioned contrarian cranks. But their deceptively affable demeanor meant they could get away with pushing the envelope even further. While Freeman and Melchiondo would shudder at being labeled “comedy rock,” they approached music-making like a sketch troupe: Every song was its own self-contained absurdist environment, each presenting a new opportunity to reinvent themselves with different sounds, scenarios, and some possibly ill-advised but endearingly executed fake-accented roleplay (see: the mock-Mexican murder ballad “Buenas Tardes Amigos” or the mutant, Middle Eastern metal of “I Can’t Put My Finger On It,” possibly the first only and song ever inspired by the stench of falafel). And like great comic actors, Ween can convey an entire universe in simple ad-libbed details: On the opening honky-soul swinger “Take Me Away,” Freeman drops in an Elvisesque “thank you” to a smattering of canned applause, and you’re immediately thrust into a sparsely attended supper club somewhere in the Midwest circa 1974, watching some aging and bloated former pop idol desperately trying to stay hip 15 years past his prime; you can practically picture the sweaty overgrown sideburns, unbuttoned dress shirt and dangling bowtie. It’s no coincidence that some of Ween’s most vocal fans are sketch-comedy creators themselves—Mr. Show, Tim and Eric, the South Park guys, and Tenacious D included. (And at a time when the alt-rock world was still grieving the death of Kurt Cobain, Ween dedicated Chocolate and Cheese to the late SCTV great John Candy, who died a month before him.) But where their past albums were liable to degenerate into giggle fits, Chocolate and Cheese never breaks the fourth wall or winks for the camera. It effectively traps the listener in deeply uncomfortable situations where you’re forced to ask yourself: Should I be laughing at this? — Pitchfork
Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down)
Oh well. Whatever. Never mind. Spin’s piece (see "the 40 weirdest post-Nevermind major label abums") shows the extent and level of outré acts who received patronage and exposure from big companies in the 1990s, the likes of which we will never see again. Babes In Toyland. David Baker-era Mercury Rev. Steel Pole Bath Tub. Drive Like Jehu. Entombed. Butt Trumpet. Butthole Surfers. Fudge Tunnel. (Scatological names and record sleeves were big in the 90s. Don’t ask me why. Maybe Sigmund Freud has the answer.) Claw Hammer. Unsane. Foetus. Mr Bungle. Boredoms! Compact disc profits were sloshing around. The music press was thriving. MTV still had music on it and the later in the evening/early morning its broadcasts, the stranger its videos got. Much chart fare was so bland, manufactured and cynically created that it pushed the curiously minded to the opposite extremes. After suffering unending radio play of Bryan Adams’ ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’, what right minded person wouldn’t be drawn to Fear, Emptiness, Despair by Napalm Death? For a little while in the final decade of the millennium, Ween were the embodiment of an alternative American dream in that they gave the impression that anything was possible. They wouldn’t become the biggest stars in the world. To do that, they’d have to be a lot more rubbish. But they could make a living as musicians while bending the rules, pushing the boundaries, having no single genre into which they could be lumped, using (often offensive) humour without sinking to the status of novelty act, and regularly testing the patience and expectations of their audiences, both live and on record. With enough freaks out there willing to lap up these shenanigans, the possibilities seemed endless. — The Quietus
I Can't Put My Finger On It
WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Harrison Ford, Ariana DeBose, My Morning Jacket (R 2/3/25)
Jimmy Fallon: Pete Davidson, Sadie Sink, Olivia Tiedemann (R 1/30/25)
Stephen Colbert: Al Roker, Monica Lewinsky
Seth Meyers: Aidy Bryant, Joe Alwyn, Aaron Chen (R 1/14/25)
After Midnight: Drew Tarver, Melanie Lynskey, Mary Holland, Morris Chestnut
LAST WEEK'S POLL: ARE YOU (OR SOMEONE YOU KNOW) AFFECTED BY THE FEDERAL CUTS AND FREEZES?
Yes 33%
No 0%
Not yet but will be 67%
Pie 0%
[END]
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