"Ween, Women and Song"

Like Chocolate and Cheese, this duo's bizarre pop is a taste worth remembering

Even Mickey "Dean Ween" Melchiondo has his priorities. Sure, he's in Cleveland promoting a great new album. And he's gotta wrap up this phone interview, then bolt the palatial digs of the Westlake Hampton Inn to do a show. But so what? There's always Time to stop and smell the roses, no?

The hottest chick in the whole world is on TV right now," drools the self-named "Deaner" as he recounts the sunny exploits of some swimsuit supermodel under a waterfall. "You get on tour for a week or whatever, I dunno. Just the craving for sex, I mean, the morale just goes so far down."

Low-down morale and an insatiable libido have both manifested themselves beautifully on Chocolate and Cheese, Ween's second major-label effort, which Dean punningly refers to as the band's "bustin' out" album. He ain't kiddin'! C&C employs the sexiest, chestiest female model on a pop record cover since the Ohio Players hung up their fire hoses. In case anyone's interested, you can also open up that insert and see Ween under a waterfall, wet and smiling. Kathy Ireland and Rachel Hunter have nothing to worry about.

But it hasn't always been the glamorous rock life of touring and watching babes on hotel TV sets for these boys. Several years ago, Mickey and pal Aaron Freeman rechristened themselves "Dean" and "Gene" and proceeded to record more than 1,000 original songs on their Tascam Portastudio.

"We went through a really, really prolific time when we lived in The Pod," says Dean, referring to the farm in Solebury, Pennsylvania, where they lived and recorded for several years - Ween's Big Pink, if you will. "We just ripped the shit out. For every record that comes out, we complete about eight records. We don't release one-thousandth of the songs we write."

The first load of Ween dropped on an unsuspecting listening public was in 1990, the semiautobiographical God Ween Satan: The Oneness. As Dean tells it in Ween's 1990 self-penned bio, the demon god Boognish appeared to impressionable teens Gene and Dean and gave them a mission "to spread HIS name in THEIR world. God is sinless and humane, so is Satan, and Gene claims to hold the balance between the two." Quite different from your usual "Deke plays guitar and sings" bio, eh?

Ween followed that soul-wrenching treatise on "the duality of man" with The Pod, recorded purportedly while inhaling five cans of Scotchgard. If there was any justice in this world, Scotchgard would've been that tour's sponsor. But even bigger forces were at work.

Maybe it was the will of Boognish, but some A&R man at Elektra heard Ween's two loony indie releases and saw the next Nelson, or maybe the complete antithesis of Pearl Jam, a band Dean cares little about.

"Why is Pearl Jam the biggest band and they're politically and socially correct?" he wonders. "Why is there no band out there carrying the flag of drinking and partying and rock? Why is there no David Lee Roth and Van Halen, where it's all about drinking and getting laid?" Clearly, the Ween ones had their work cut out for them.

The band's first major-label effort for Elektra, Pure Guava, contained a sizable MTV hit with "Push Th' Little Daisies," a song which sounded as if the voice of Walter Brennan were sped up to resemble a Munchkin's wheeze. That platter had 18 other song titles you'd feel silly calling out requests for, like "Poop Ship Destroyer," "Touch My Tooter," "Reggaejunkiejew," and, of course, the lead-footed concert favorite, "Flies on My Dick."

As if to test Dean's 1990 claim that Ween fans were more loyal than any Dead Head, Guava's insert carried explicit instructions that the minions took to heart: "When Ween comes to your town, bring us hot meals. No more junk food, thanks."

Not since the Beatles said they liked jelly beans and got pelted with them onstage for a year has there been such a fanatic out-pouring of edibles for a band. "We get a lot of kids bringing us all kinds of shit," Dean laughs. "A lot of Mexican food, I've noticed." But that's not the only homemade goodie prepared for the band's consumption. "We get a lot of, like, overweight teenage dudes that try to turn us onto their shitty [four-track] cassettes," Dean moans.

No surprise there, since the fictitious Ween brothers are virtual poster boys for the "do-it-yourself" aesthetics of home recording. Excluding Springsteen's Nebraska, Ween's first three albums are probably the only in recent memory to be recorded exclusively on four tracks. In stark contrast, Chocolate and Cheese is the first time Ween has recorded an entire album with 24 tracks at its disposal. "We could really take shit over the top," notes Dean.

When Guava sold an impressive 100,000 copies, Ween used the incoming money to build a 24-track studio to record the follow-up, a more user-friendly album than any Ween has ever attempted before. "The main difference between this and all the other records is you can play any of these songs on wooden instruments. It's got more conventional song structures and shit."

For this reason, Chocolate and Cheese resembles nothing so much as a K-tel album gone terribly, terribly wrong. If Ween sounds like a completely different band on each of its 16 tracks, Dean says it was not a conscious decision.

"We're not trying to parody anyone - that's so far from what we try to do. When we write a song, we do whatever it takes to get the most out of it. None of this shit. occurs to us until we've put the record out and start doing interviews and people say, 'Ah, this sounds like 16 different bands.' We're really inside the music, so I don't feel we're donning disguises."

For a band that vari-speeds its vocals as much as Ween does, comparisons to Prince are inevitable. The Weenmen are big fans, given to performing "Purple Rain" in live shows when the mood strikes them. "Roses Are Free" and "Freedom of "76" are just two of Ween's latest Prince pastiches, but try imagining the Purple One deliriously exclaiming "Boys II Men are picking up the beat" or "Eat plenty of lasagna until you've had your fill." Or picture the Grateful Dead getting off its collective ass to cover Ween's Dead sound-alike "Don't Shit Where You Eat"!

When it's suggested that the album's first single, "I Can't Put My Finger on It," sorta sounds like Nilsson's "Put the Lime in the Coconut," Dean laughs, appreciating the comparison to something he actually likes. "Somehow, 'Finger' has always reminded me of 'I Put a Spell on You, but like the Turkish version. Fuck it. We'd kill ourselves if we thought about all this shit."

Ween's predilection for acting on pure (or, more likely, impure) instinct has led them to be misinterpreted more than once.

The Ween entourage picture on the inside of Pure Guava featured a pregnant woman brandishing a bottle of Jack Daniel's. That was good for a sack of angry letters, as was the rap satire "Reggaejunkiejew." One week into promoting Chocolate and Cheese, Ween is already meeting Smell the Glove-like resistance to its titillating cover. It's been banned in a couple of store chains for revealing the bottom half of a woman's breast.

"To put half-dressed women on an album cover and get banned, it's really fucked up," gripes Dean. "This woman, the editor of some newspaper up in Oregon, sent the CD back to Elektra with this long letter. She said she would never listen to it or write about us because she is a woman in the entertainment industry and it's people like us that are giving this derogatory image of women and blah, blah, blah. She can bend over and fuck her own ass for all I care. I wanted to send her the record back with a picture of my dick covered in blue cheese. Does that make it any better? It's not derogatory towards women now."

Given the politically correct atmosphere that seems to circle anything connected with humor these days, Dean is initially reluctant to describe the inspiration behind "The HIV Song." This ditty essentially consists of a nasally voice shouting out "AIDS!" and "HIV!" over the most cheerful carnival music this side of Ladmo the Clown.

"AIDS is the most fucked-up, serious thing there is out there," agrees Dean. "By saying nothing about it, we're actually saying more than anybody could say. People just have to listen to it, and they have to question themselves. 'Is this supposed to be funny or heavy; what does this say about AIDS?' And it just sorta kicks people in the ass. It's probably the most perfect song we've ever done in that way.

"The idea for the song came about when we were downtown with our friends in New Hope, where we live. On the weekend, it's out of control with fuckin' tourists-there's all these people on boats and jet skis and water skis. All these people with their kids eating ice cream cones, going on horse rides. And my friend goes, 'Man, look at all this fuckin' shit. I just want to get a mega-phone and just go, "AIDS! HIV! DEATH! CRACK! WAR!"" We had this happy music and decided we could make our statement, our only statement socially or politically. that we've ever made. Because we hate poli-tics in music. There's no place for it as far as we're concerned."

Time will tell if Chocolate and Cheese catapults Ween into becoming the next Counting Crows. Dean believes that he and Gene have delivered an album that every-one can enjoy. Everybody. "Kids our age, skater punks and punk-rockers, biker dudes, my mom, some secretary woman."

Until superstardom makes extracurricular activities impossible, Dean and Gene will continue to wile away their non-Ween hours playing in a 12-piece band named Echoes. "We get gigs opening up for bands and all we play is Pink Floyd's 'Echoes.' One band. One song. The most solid concept in the world, right? 'Crazy Diamond' is our next band," he laughs, but shrugs off the urge to form a band named In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida. "That's a pretty complicated song."

As for the future of his main band, Dean believes that the best Ween is still to come.

"A lot of the really hard-core Ween kids know that we have a lot of [already recorded] stuff, and they're always asking us about it. I want to put out a box set someday, but I don't want to be looking back on our career yet, because most people don't know who the fuck we are anyway."

Ween is scheduled to perform on Wednesday, November 16, at Boston's in Tempe. Showtime is 8 p.m.