Ween's Chocolate and Cheese (33 1/3) (15 page)

As for Savage’s current whereabouts, no one seems to have a clue. An online search turns up only a brief IMDb entry with several obscure late-’90s entries. However, Rick Patrick’s friend who initially recommended Savage for the job was able to confirm that the Ashley Savage on the
Chocolate and Cheese
cover was the same Ashley Savage who appeared in a late-’90s
Seinfeld
spoof — made for
Saturday Night Live
but never aired — starring actor Peter Austin Noto. (Those interested in seeing the rest of Savage are advised to locate this clip on YouTube.)

A similar mystery surrounds the Boognish belt. The band has claimed over the years (e.g. in a 2008
Spin
article) that the design firm had confiscated the belt, but at one point (according to a post on the Ween forum), Melchiondo apparently promised the item to the millionth visitor to the Ween website. Said visitor never received their prize, and in fact, Melchiondo now claims to have the item in his possession. “I have it,” he says impishly. “Nobody knows that, but I’ll give it up. It took
me about three or four years to get it, but I got it. I never told anyone that I got it. I did my independent research and found it.”

As Melchiondo describes it, the retrieval was fairly arduous:

Well, I think what happened is the record came out and we never thought about the belt. And then years went by and we were like, “Hey, what happened to the belt?” And nobody wanted to cop to it, at first. We were all suspicious of one another as to where it was. ’Cause we knew somebody had it; we knew it didn’t get thrown away. It was too nice, you know? I had to get somebody to cop to it. Everybody stonewalled me till I insisted that it came back. I think Reiner, the design company had it. I got it through our old manager, his secretary, who worked with us for years — that’s who I talked to 80 times a day on the phone. I think after they closed down I got her to track it down for me. I don’t remember. I have it in storage, though. I don’t ever look at it. We have, like, 25 replicas hanging in our studio. People bring them to gigs and throw them onstage. There’s a whole ton of them.

When discussing the actual object, Melchiondo speaks with a certain degree of awe. “It’s leather, and it’s really heavy, which is the way you always measure quality,” he asserts. “It’s really, really heavy — the buckle itself, it’s brass or steel. And it’s got the rhinestones all over it. It’s got a real thick buckle. Like I said, it’s heavy. It’s like
you’d imagine if you put on the real heavyweight title belt. It’s a quality thing. It looks good in the pictures because it is well-made.” It seems that Melchiondo has denied his partner the pleasure of savoring the accessory. When queried about it, Freeman writes, “I would still like to know where the belt is!”

In light of the risqué gaudiness of the album cover, the layout of the inside sleeve is surprisingly tender and reflective. The spread features three gorgeous black-and-white portraits by noted rock photographer Danny Clinch, an Annie Liebowitz protégé whose portfolio includes shots of Tom Waits, Björk, Kanye West, Bono, Bruce Springsteen, Green Day and other pop royalty. There are two mirror-image shots of Freeman and Melchiondo — each sitting in a fishing boat on a placid lake — and one picture of the pair standing barefoot underneath a waterfall. For all their simplicity, the photos sum up a few key ideas regarding the band’s evolving self-image. First, the photos root Ween in the natural beauty of their native, nonurban surroundings. Second, they impart a sense of adventure, of a humble local band venturing beyond their comfort zone. And third, they display a self-conscious artiness that’s absent from the previous Ween album packages, and thus, they serve as a visual representation of the band’s increasingly
professional attitude toward their art.

These portraits were all shot in the vicinity of the band’s hometown of New Hope, Pennsylvania, a quaint, hippie-ish borough of 2,000 people or so in Bucks County. The photos are so picturesque, they could almost double as postcard images. The sincerity on display here is a bit disarming, considering Ween’s sometimes-irreverent attitude toward their native environment. The
Pure Guava
track “Pumpin’ 4 the Man,” chronicling Melchiondo’s thankless gig as a gas-station attendant, doubles as an antipatriotic dis:

So read ’em up and stick ’em

Pump that fucker good

Some woman down on Main Street needs a jump

Get your fingers outta your ass

And pump some faggot’s gas

And think about how bad New Hope sucks

Yet Ween has long taken pride in the fact that they’re not a big-city band. Despite its proximity to New York City — only about a 90-minute drive — New Hope still feels like a rustic haven. Thus, it’s served as the perfect home base for Freeman and Melchiondo, artists intent on reaching a broad audience while at the same time retaining their trademark eccentricity. “We always just tried to avoid going to New York for anything that had to do with the band,” says Melchiondo, reflecting on the decision to shoot the
Chocolate and Cheese
portraits near New Hope. “We just found it was a lot less stressful to do things
down here. We’ve always done our interviews down here; we shot some videos down here. Our photo shoots are always done down here. It’s kind of parallel with everything we do: We just do it down here, at home.”

Beyond capturing the band at home, the photos depict a typical day in the life of Ween circa
Chocolate and Cheese
. “[Danny Clinch] came down and said, ‘What do you normally do?’” recalls Melchiondo. “We were just fishing a lot back then. And I had a big old Coupe deVille back then; I remember driving around and he was taking pictures of us with that, just around our farmhouse that we lived in at the time.” Freeman paints a similar picture of the shoot: “We had started working with our good friend Danny Clinch at the time and he loves to be in his subjects’ natural settings. I remember having a great day fishing with Mickey and Danny, and by the day’s end, [we] had the insert cover.”

As Clinch describes it, he was happy to follow the duo’s lead:

They basically gave me a tour of what they did all the time in their free time out there, and a lot of it was obviously music and fishing. So they took me on this little motorboat. I just threw all my gear in the boat and they went out and they were like, “Oh, we catch all sorts of fish out here. We’ll have such a great time!” And throughout the whole day, we didn’t catch anything and finally we caught this little perch or something. It was classic. But you know, to spend the day with those guys fishing was just a blast.

Melchiondo contradicts Clinch’s account, claiming to have caught “something like 100 fish” during the shoot, but nevertheless, the fishing photos introduced a theme that would become a crucial aspect of Ween lore. In the years since
Chocolate and Cheese
, Melchiondo has been very vocal about his love for the sport, and today he oversees both a fishing tour-guide service and an online fishing program,
Brownie Troop, F.S.
, which chronicles his expeditions around the New Hope area and beyond. “I remember that time being when Mickey had really started into his life passion of fishing,” says Freeman. “He had bought some crappy boat and was constantly fishing smallmouth bass out of the Delaware river.” When describing his favorite type of fishing (surf fishing) in a 2008
Jersey Beat
interview, Melchiondo replied, “I find it to be the most relaxing and rewarding thing on earth, bordering on spiritual.” The fishing photos inside
Chocolate and Cheese
definitely jibe with this description. Freeman and Melchiondo have often opted for comedy in their press photos and videos, striking goofy poses or otherwise clowning, but in Clinch’s fishing portraits they each appear to be relishing a quiet, contemplative moment in the wilderness.

The waterfall photo is more lighthearted, with Freeman mugging and Melchiondo flashing a huge grin. Like the fishing portraits, though, it serves to flaunt the natural beauty of Ween’s Bucks County home base. “We went up to this place called Ringing Rocks, which is, like, a state park way upriver here from New Hope on
the Delaware, and there was a waterfall in that park,” explains Melchiondo. “[Danny] had taken like 8 million photographs of us, and we stood under the waterfall and he snapped a Polaroid of it and we ended up using the Polaroid. Of all the thousands of pictures that he took, he had to keep the little negative from the Polaroid, and we used that on the CD and on the poster.” Clinch credits the medium for the shot’s casual feel. “Oftentimes when you’re shooting a Polaroid, I find as a photographer that I tell [my subjects], ‘Oh, this is just a Polaroid,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s a Polaroid, it doesn’t really matter,’” he says. “And then they’re more relaxed or they’ll joke around or they’ll be like, ‘If I do this, I’ll be able to see it in 30 seconds,’ and they’ll do something silly. So it’s a good tool for that.” Freeman deems the shot “one of the best pictures of Ween ever taken” and points out that a poster of the image still hangs in the New Hope nightclub John and Peter’s.

Taken together, the fishing photos and the Ringing Rocks portrait represent an important step away from the band’s self-presentation during the
Pure Guava
period. The inner sleeve of that album contains an arresting fold-out full-color portrait of Freeman, Melchiondo and a motley assortment of friends and associates on the porch of Freeman’s residence at the time, the pastoral Brookridge Farm. The tableaux teems with odd activity: A pregnant woman holds her belly with one hand and a bottle of Jack Daniels in the other; a burly, bearded man clutches a plastic baby doll; on the far right stands future Ween drummer Claude Coleman, propping himself up
with a garden hoe; from the balcony hangs a crumpled American flag. The rest of the shot is filled out with all manner of punks and neohippies. Overall the photo imparts a decadent and idyllic vibe, illustrating a commune built around drugs, booze and general abandon. Freeman and Melchiondo are present in the photo, but they’re in no way featured — they come off as just two more chilled-out revelers.

The clear message here is that at this time, there was no dividing line between life and art for the brothers Ween. You can picture the pair getting high and recording a few songs on the 4-track, before making their way out to the porch to rejoin the perpetual party. Freeman’s firsthand account confirms this impression:

I had moved to a large farmhouse called Brookridge Farm with a couple buddies of mine. It was on endless acres of beautiful Lambertville countryside and I had my own floor of the place. I remember having a 4-track set up there in my room and recording constantly. This is where most of
Chocolate and Cheese
was written. The farmhouse was always host to a flux of girlfriends, musicians, drugs, etc. It was an incredible place to be in your early twenties and was never short of inspiration. I did a lot of kissing, dancing and vomiting in those days. It was awesome.

However, things were changing for the band during the
Chocolate and Cheese
era. In setting up shop in a rented space and re-recording material originally mocked-up
at home on the 4-track, Freeman and Melchiondo embraced a new kind of professionalism. A project that once seemed like a direct reflection of Freeman and Melchiondo’s earthy, hard-partying lifestyle — which, as the
Pure Guava
photo suggests, remained the norm even after they had landed a major-label deal — gradually became something more sequestered. This, it seems, was the trade-off Ween had to accept in order to move beyond their charming yet rudimentary early work. An upgrade in method meant both a step out into the world, toward a more tidy, accessible sound, and a step away from Ween’s core community. It may seem overanalytical, but it’s hard not to read the difference between the crowded, colorful shot in
Pure Guava
and the austere, solitary, black-and-white portraits in
Chocolate and Cheese
as the difference between early and mid-period Ween — a pictorial illustration of the band’s budding maturity. Ween, in other words, was becoming a career as opposed to a pastime.

Thankfully, as we’ve seen, Ween’s evolution was both subtle and gradual.
Chocolate and Cheese
is no tedious “grown-up” statement; it features moments that are every bit as challenging and disturbing as Ween’s brownest 4-track-era material.

As if to drive this point home, the
Chocolate and Cheese
package includes one unequivocal curveball. On the CD face, laid over a puke-green background, is a drawing of a hand with an extended middle finger — a graphic that, according to Dave Ayers, adorned the band’s backstage laminates for some time. It’s tempting to read the image
any number of ways: as a we’re-still-here “fuck you” to those who had underestimated Ween upon their initial MTV emergence, or as a knock against those who might consider
Chocolate and Cheese
’s slicker sound quality as a sell-out. But when asked about it, Melchiondo quickly dismisses the idea that the middle finger is targeted at anyone in particular. “Yeah, not a lot of thought went into that kind of stuff,” he says. “It’s like, ‘What do we put on the disc?’ I guess it’s just punk rock or something. It doesn’t really have a lot of meaning — it’s just ‘Fuck you,’ you know? There’s not a lot of ways to really interpret it.” Chuckling, he continues, “A good part of Ween’s philosophy is ‘Fuck you,’ you know? Any good band, that should comprise a bit of the message.”

In a strict sense, Butthead was dead wrong when he prophesied that Ween had no future, but in another way, maybe he wasn’t so off-base. After all, the Gene and Dean Ween of
Pure Guava
— postadolescent stoners crouched over their 4-track — did, in fact, have to go. Ween fans (not to mention Melchiondo himself) may have grown attached to the band’s underdog charm, but in order to progress, to let their increasingly accomplished material really shine, the brothers Ween had to shed some of their DIY values. It was time, in other words, for the scribbles to become paintings. On
Chocolate and Cheese
, Ween took their first crucial steps in that direction.