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top volume.”
    “I remember the place was an emptied out telemarketers office on the second floor of some rat bag industrial complex,” recalls Freeman. “I think we were the only ones occupying the space at the time — if we weren’t than we were soon to be.”
    Steve Ralbvosky emphasizes the makeshift nature of the endeavor: “
Chocolate and Cheese
was the first time that they did it with so-called pro gear, but it was gear that they had chosen and put together in a rented space. So they sort of made their own home studio.”
    Drummer Claude Coleman, who played on several
Chocolate and Cheese
tracks and would later join Ween asthe band’s permanent live drummer, retains fond memories of the space. “It was just this large room totally crammed with gear, haphazardly strewn about everywhere, just like drum machines and pedals and stuff like that,” he recalls. “And in the middle of it all was this gigantic console with Andrew Weiss behind it, and shit just strewn everywhere. It was just a real fun, real free way to make music.” Coleman also remembers being impressed by the working chemistry shared by Freeman, Melchiondo and Weiss:
    There was an amazing synergy. Everyone seemed like an extension of the same hand, a finger off of the same hand or something. The three of them have been working together like that for a while, and I think by that time they were starting to hit a really neat stride, almost on a telepathic level. Everything just flowed: The songs came in; they figured out what to do, recorded them, listened to the playbacks and kind of made decisions where to go from there. It was pretty easy.
    Just as Freeman and Melchiondo had disciplined themselves during the writing and demoing process, the pair and Weiss adhered to a tight recording schedule at the Pennington office park. “We worked every day,” says Melchiondo. “I think it was like noon to dinner time. Sometimes we’d have dinner there and work through the night.”
    Predictably, the noise level was an immediate and constant problem. “Right next door, on the other side of thewall, which we found out was paper thin, was Comcast or something,” Weiss explains. “The first thing we did was set up the drum kit and start playing, and we could hear the phone ringing next door, so we realized that there was an issue with the walls.” It didn’t take long for said issue to come to a head. “One day, the neighbor, to get revenge, put speakers up against the wall and turned rock ’n’ roll radio up as loud as it could go and left, thinking they were gonna blast us out,” says Melchiondo. “But we had much louder equipment, so we just won the volume battle.”
    Sound pollution wasn’t the band’s only offense. Melchiondo elaborates:
    We came in there and we just amassed mountains of trash. And it was all just beer bottles, booze bottles, pizza boxes and Chinese food containers, so it was, like, the most rancid stench in the whole world. Finally we got the idea to clean it out, and we took it and we literally filled the next door neighbor’s Dumpster with it. So when they came in, their Dumpster was overflowing with our shit. And we dumped our fan mail in there too. So they were able to figure out really quickly by looking in the trash who had done it. It was in the first few weeks we were there, so a bad vibe was established really fast. It got to the point where I felt really uncomfortable every time I parked my car. I walked as fast as I could to the door with my head down, till I got to safety and locked the door behind me.
“Really time-intensive for not much”: The shift to digital
    Amid waging war with their neighbors, Freeman, Melchiondo and Weiss were grappling with various technical hurdles. Many of these stemmed from the fact that
Chocolate and Cheese
was the first Ween album to make use of digital recording, specifically a VHS-tape-based format called ADAT, which Weiss used in tandem with a computer. Today’s digital