Read Ween's Chocolate and Cheese (33 1/3) for Free Online Page A

were writing and recording, but it was just a continuation ofwhat we had been doing in high school and junior high, except that now we were living together and we were able to do it all the time. But looking back to when we were doing [
Chocolate and Cheese
], we kind of circled the wagons and had more of a work ethic when we were getting together. ’Cause it was something that was still very important to us. It was kind of like the main central thing in our lives. So when we got together, I think we were kind of overdoing it, like, “No, we don’t have enough good songs,” or, “We need more.”
    And when we were doing
The Pod
and
Pure Guava
, a lot of the reason there was no anxiety when those records were coming out is ’cause we did them at home, so we had a year before we even knew that an album was coming out to get acquainted and comfortable. They were just these songs that we had done at home, and we’d been living with for a long time, until we had enough to call it a record. We could get feedback from friends and people for months and months and months before ultimately putting the stuff out in public. It was a very different mindset from working on
Chocolate and Cheese
, and all the records after that. Yeah, I think we overachieved for the five years after we didn’t live together. We probably worked more often. It was like, “Okay, Aaron and I are recording today.” He’d come over to my house; I’d go over to his house. Like I said, I think our work ethic improved because that time had to be sacred to write.
    This process of “He’d come over to my house; I’d goover to his house” yielded 4-track versions of many of the songs that would end up on
Chocolate and Cheese
, but unlike in the past, these demos were treated as merely a blueprint for the final product. The band eventually reworked their initial scribbles into full-fledged paintings, a process that Melchiondo cites as a significant departure from Ween’s working method on
The Pod
and
Pure Guava
:
    We weren’t in the habit of doing demos for songs and then re-recording them. Our typical thing was there’s one version of it and that’s the version that’s on the record.
Chocolate and Cheese
was more rooting through the best of 50 or 60 songs, whittling it down and recording, like, 25 of them and leaving nine or ten off the record. It was a lot more structured and a lot more methodical than what we usually do, which is quantity not quality: Do a song as fast as you can and then do another one.
    As Andrew Weiss puts it, “We decided to step it up.” Dave Ayers stressed that this was an entirely internal decision: “The stepped-up production — more conventional, state-of-the-art multitracking — that part of it was a conversation, but it was more like, ‘Here’s what we wanna do — does the Elektra deal provide us with the up-front money to do it?’ It wasn’t like Elektra asked for a more hi-fi record. I think honestly they could’ve kept delivering
Pure Guava
and everybody would’ve been thrilled.”
    But Ween was intent on trying something a little different this time around. The first step was finding a facility. Given that Ween was by this point a major-label act, it’s conceivable that they could have sought out a fully outfitted studio, but instead Freeman, Melchiondo and Weiss chose to stay local and hands-on. “We went around and we found this office park in Pennington, New Jersey,” recalls Weiss. “We rented the spot, just one big open space, up on the second floor. There were phone jacks all over the walls, so obviously it had been some telemarketing thing or something.”
    Melchiondo’s memories of the space paint a similarly antiseptic picture. “Yeah, Andrew found the spot,” he says. “It was in this office park, like if you were going to get a check-up or somethin’. Except you walk in and in one building it was a dentist and directly next door was Ween making a record, every day and every night at