Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese (2011)

This title from the 33-1/3 series had some surprises for me. First, it’s an album and even band I knew little about going in—had not even heard of the album. Then it turned out my old college paper editor, Dave Ayers, who has gone on to an impressive career in the industry, is heavily involved. He signed Ween to Twin/Tone in the early ‘90s or so and was the band’s manager still for this 1994 album. Other bands he’s associated with include the Jayhawks, Soul Asylum, Babes in Toyland, the Uncle Tupelo / Wilco / Son Volt axis, Helmet, Sparklehorse, Vic Chesnutt, the Jesus Lizard, and Robbie Williams, among others, not to mention working closely with Yoko Ono on her 1995 album Rising. Good going, Dave! And Ween. I was only dimly aware of them as some kind of smarty-pants lo-fi act. As it turns out, that is accurate, but Chocolate and Cheese is a transitional album, when the two principals—Gene Ween (Aaron Freeman) and Dean Ween (Mickey Melchiondo)—started to make more conscious use of studio technology and became a kind of psychedelic landmark jam band act. The first thing that impressed me about the album, in fact—and it’s a pretty good album—was the high production values and general levels of musicality. Hal Shteamer wrote this book about it. I don’t know the name but he put in a lot of years at Rolling Stone (“senior editor”) and elsewhere. He’s also a musician. The book seems solid to me, bearing in mind I am a total Ween neophyte. But I took Shteamer as pretty good getting me up to speed. I’ve learned Gene and Dean don’t like the comparison, but they remind me a lot of early-‘70s Frank Zappa, the period after the Turtles vocalists had come on board. An unusual point in this book is that, in the song-by-song rundown, Shteamer discusses them out of sequencing order, writing, “Rather than discuss the songs in their actual running order, I’ve chosen a sequence that seemed most relevant to the themes dealt with in this book.” Does that mean they are stack-ranked? Is 1994 when digital programmability took over? It didn’t work for me perhaps because all things Ween are still so new to me. For the most part, these books are intended for fans who have already absorbed most of the basics, such as opinions about each of the 16 tracks on the 55-minute album. It might be the right call on Shteamer’s part. I must say I also appreciated that he spent some time and research effort on the arresting Chocolate and Cheese cover art. How in the world did it take me 30 years to get to Ween?

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.