12 Golden Country Greats

8.5/10

  One of the truly great things about Ween is the way in which they often confound expectations and challenge the listener.  After four albums of genre hopping and general weirdness you might have said to yourself now this is a band that might do just about anything.  Even so I, for one, was certainly not expecting them to follow up Chocolate and Cheese by going to Nashville and hiring renowned old school Nashville musicians and making an authentic sounding country album.

  I actually remember making a joke before this album was announced on a radio show I had in college about Ween playing country music.  My roommate had called up my show pretending to be a redneck and asking me to play some country music and I said I'd put on some Ween, seeing as how they were the furthest thing from country I could think of.  The joke turned out to be on me when this was the next album they released.

  Granted you could point towards Drifter in the Dark on Chocolate and Cheese as having a bit of a country vibe, but it doesn't even come close to the assault of fiddles and harmonica honky tonk piano and pedal steel guitar they unleash on this album.  Gene even sings in a normal voice on most of these songs and reveals he has a very nice natural vocal instrument.

  Now at the time this came out country was probably about my least favorite genre, so I had some difficulty getting into this.  I appreciated the audacity of Ween releasing an actual country album and I thought it was funny that they did it, but I had some trouble at first overcoming my own distaste for country music.  Consequently for awhile I would say this was my least liked and least listened to Ween album.

  But gradually I started to notice that I really liked some of the songs.  I Don't Want to Leave You on the Farm is a really pretty song in a straight-forward and not obviously jokey way.  Likewise Japanese Cowboy is a nice tune, even if it bears some melodic resemblance to Chariots of Fire, as Ween themselves have been quick to acknowledge.  I really enjoy I'm Holding You as well and think it really shows off Gene's natural voice.

  You know what else?  This album's pretty damn funny at times.  The random introduction of Mohammed Ali after other members of the band on Powder Blue is pretty hilarious.  I heard they had to remove it from later versions of the album due to legal reasons, which is a shame.  Elsewhere Mr. Richard Smoker and especially Piss Up a Rope provide the vulgar humor that let you know this is, in fact, a Ween album.

  Nowadays I can honestly say I enjoy listening to the whole album.  I also have to give props to Ween for not only doing the unexpected, but forcing me out of my comfort zone in the process.  Country still isn't my favorite genre, but they helped me to realize it's not all Toby Keith and Garth Brooks.  They've made me more appreciative of the old guard of country such as Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings and of course the titular golden country greats who served as the musicians on this album.  This is a band that really does love and respect the music that they're ostensibly sending up.  Who would've thought the obnoxious stoners responsible for God Ween Satan had it in them?  But even looking back at that album it becomes obvious that they really do like a wide range of music and that's why they genre hop so much.  They're not putting stuff down, they're celebrating it.  This is part of why I dig this band so much.

Chocolate and Cheese

9.0/10

  This is an incredibly strange album by any normal standards, but by Ween standards they were starting to sound kind of normal.  This is largely due to the production.  Whereas they had previously recorded at home on a 4-track cassette recorder, this album marks the first time they utilized a more "professional" recording studio.  I'm sure some hardcore fans of their early albums see this as a big sellout moment, and indeed this certainly marks a turning point in the sound of the band as all their future releases would see much cleaner production.  It's certainly a little easier on the ears for a newbie.

It's not as if they've thrown out everything that makes them Ween.  The silly humor, variety of voices and styles, and of course profanity is all still here.  And any album that has Spinal Meningitis and The HIV song on it can't really be called selling out to the mainstream.  They've moved away a little from the super whacked out druggy stuff in favor of genre hopping, although Candi remains as a throwback to their earlier days.  It's probably the weakest song on here though.

Overall the songwriting really does shine and they prove themselves adept at pulling off a multitude of styles from the opener Take Me Away, which sort of has a Tom Jones kind of vibe to it to the pseudo country feel of Drifter in the Dark.  Gener gets to really show off his vocal chops as he belts out Freedom of 76 in a smooth falsetto while Deaner demonstrates his guitar skills on the lengthy instrumental A Tear for Eddie.

I remember actually hearing Voodoo Lady on the radio a little bit when this came out!  The first time I heard it I didn't know who Ween was and I kind of didn't like it.  I never in a million years would have guessed at that point that I was listening to what would become one of my favorite bands.  And yes, I dig Voodoo Lady.  It's got a nice groove to it and that oogie oogie oogie oogie part is pretty catchy.

Baby Bitch is a pretty acoustic driven song with a fairly vicious message.  Good tune though.  And actually I can relate to it.  It even name checks Birthday Boy from God Ween Satan.  I don't know why, but I like when bands reference their own songs.  I'm easily amused sometimes, what can I say?

Spinal Meningitis Got Me Down was disturbing as hell and kind of terrifying the first time I heard it.  The vocal effect they use makes Gene sound like a creepy little kid and then the lyrics about "Am I gonna see God, Mommy?  Am I going to die?" are just downright creepy and kind of wrong.  But the thing is once you get past the initial shock and almost horror of it, there's a damn good song there.  When they get to the "Smile on mighty Jesus" chorus part, well that kicks ass.  I'm so desensitized to the main part now that I almost forget that if someone's unfamiliar with the band and you play that song around them they might think you're some kind of psycho.  But the thing is they're not making fun of people with spinal meningitis.  They're freaked out by it, too, and they're kind of conveying that feeling in musical form.

They tackle another disease in a slightly different way in the form of The HIV Song.  It's a bunch of cheerful almost carnival like music interspersed with a spoken word "AIDS" or "HIV."  It's that juxtaposition of wildly inappropriate music with a horrific disease that makes this track.

Elsewhere Roses Are Free is a cool song that Phish decided to cover for some reason and now a bunch of hippies think Ween is covering a Phish song.  I'm sure Phish does a perfectly fine rendition of it, but I'm not really a fan of hippie jam bands, so I'll stick with Ween's version.

My favorite song on here is probably What Deaner Was Talking About.  I've heard it said that it's kind of in the style of a Wings song and I can see that.  But it's just got a really fantastic melody.  It's a truly solid pop song that can stand up there with the best of them.  Whenever I meet people who think Ween are nothing but fart jokes and weird noise, this is one of the songs I play for them because it's catchy and pretty undeniably a great song.

Chocolate and Cheese isn't just an album with a lot of really good songs on it.  It's a fun album.  I like Radiohead as much as the next guy, but they really can't say that about any of their albums.  This is an album that just might convert you to Ween if you weren't convinced by their earlier, weirder ones.