Ween's Chocolate and Cheese (33 1/3) Read Free Page B

come to the studio. That was
in
the contract. Because those guys just started coming up with shit. “How ’bout if they never come to the studio? Steve’s fine but I don’t want him coming to the studio. Can we put that in the contract?” And the lawyer would be like, “Sure.” And all that stuff ended up flying. And the money was significant — it wasn’t, like, millions of dollars, but it was hundreds of thousands per record for records thatwere to be judged not on artistic merit but on technical quality only, and the standard for technical quality was, in fact,
Pure Guava
, a 4-track record. So, their whole career, they could’ve made 4-track records and collected checks for $350,000. That was the joke: I think we got $200,000 for licensing
Pure Guava
, and that record cost them about $42 to make.
    Andrew Weiss stresses how unprecedented this all was. “No major label had ever put out a record recorded on a 4-track, except maybe [Bruce Springsteen’s]
Nebraska
,” he notes. “But obviously [
Nebraska
] didn’t sound Scotchguard. It didn’t wear its 4-track on its sleeve like
Pure Guava
does. So that was kind of a coup because they got all this dough for doing a record on a 4-track that cost, like, $100 to make, and that was probably all spent on pizza and weed.”
    The Elektra arrangement may have seemed like winning the stoner’s lottery, but to Dave Ayers, it was also emblematic of a unique era in the music industry. He’s quick to praise the shrewd instincts of Ralbovsky and Bob Krasnow, Elektra’s president at the time of Ween’s signing and an industry veteran who had previously worked with left-field visionaries such as Captain Beefheart, Sun Ra and Love’s Arthur Lee. “Steve was the odd and crucial link that could make something like
Pure Guava
happen,” says Ayers. “And Krasnow was as weird a guy in his own way. He had a very eclectic roster of real artists at a time when it was becoming quickly out of fashion to do that. The timing had to be right on something like that.”
    The timing clearly was right, and the 4-track-via-major-label mode of
Pure Guava
struck a chord beyond the underground. In 1993, Freeman and Melchiondo appeared as guests on
The Jane Pratt Show
, a daytime talk program hosted by the founder of
Sassy
and
Jane
magazines. Introducing the band as part of a “Homemade Media Festival,” Pratt played up the duo’s use of cheap gear, introducing them as “a band called Ween, that actually records on a portable 4-track system.” During an interview segment, Melchiondo portrayed Ween’s devotion to simple technology as both a badge of honor and a sort of truth serum:
    Pratt: Why do you guys use that relatively low-tech recording system, as opposed to, like, going into a studio the way most bands do?
    Melchiondo: I think it started out ’cause it was all we could afford really. And when you’re in the studio, you’re recording on the clock, and an hour of studio time plus the cost of the engineer is really more than your average, whatever, 16-year-old kid can afford, so …
    Pratt: But you actually like the sound that you get that way, right?
    Melchiondo: Yeah, sure; it sounds great.
    Pratt: What do you prefer about it? You like sort of a more low-tech sound anyway, or …?
    Melchiondo: No, I think when you only have four tracks to record on, you have to write better songs, ’cause you can’t do much production … [
laughs
]
    The duo goes on to offer an unmistakably brown yet undeniably beautiful version of one such song, the smooth soul number “Freedom of ’76,” which would end up on
Chocolate and Cheese
in a much more fleshed-out form. A DAT machine onstage churns out a plodding funk beat, over which Melchiondo strums jazzy chords, while Freeman shows off a supple, Prince-like falsetto. The pair’s easy virtuosity and comfort onstage constrasts starkly with their makeshift setup and disheveled appearance. (“This was filmed early in the morning and we were