Ween at 40, Chocolate and Cheese at 30

Ween's turbulent anniversary is highlighted by an expansion of their pivotal 1994 album filled with unreleased songs from the time.

"This isn't something you can quit. This is a life sentence."—Dean Ween, 2012

Nobody intentionally enters a lifelong pact at the age of 14 but that's the fate of Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo, the duo respectively known to the world as Gene and Dean Ween. Sometime around 1984, the pair met in a junior high typing class. They were chalk and cheese: a geek and a jock, eventually bonding over music. Soon, the trading of punk and new wave records escalated to the pair recording original music after school, tapes that sowed the seeds of Ween.

Ween are in the midst of commemorating the fortieth anniversary of their formation, an observance that is stopping just short of a celebration. Earlier this year, they pulled the plug on their spring tour, citing Dean Ween's need to "step away from performing live in order to preserve my mental and spiritual well being, and instead focus on myself and loved ones." Last week, with just three shows under their belt, the band scrapped the remainder of their West Coast tour, giving no specific reason for the cancellation, although Gene Ween offered on Twitter, "know that I'm perfectly fine and just as disappointed."

Communications from the Ween camp tend toward the opaque in recent history. Dean Ween did a significant promotional push for 2018's rock2, the second album by the Dean Ween Group—a band basically consisting of everybody from Ween, save Gene—then receded from the internet. Melchiondo's prolific posting contributed to the rift that led to Freeman's decision to "end his musical relationship with Ween" in 2012. Irked by Dean releasing the demos for their 2003 album Quebec online, Gene severed ties entirely, announcing his departure to the public without giving his longtime colleague warning.

Melchiondo and Freeman mended fences a few years later, reuniting in 2016 and then regularly embarking on tours until this day. The missing element in this revival is new music, an absence that's starting to become conspicuous due to Freeman not releasing a solo album since 2014 and Melchiondo putting the Dean Ween Group on ice after rock2. Into this gap arrives the 30th Anniversary edition of Chocolate and Cheese, an expansion containing a full album's worth of unreleased material—effectively the first new Ween album in 17 years.

Some of the songs on the bonus disc have circulated as bootlegs, some have not. All date from the period between Pure Guava—the band's first major label album, one recorded on a home four-track—and Chocolate and Cheese, a time where Ween grew increasingly assured and ambitious. No longer sharing a domicile, Melchiondo and Freeman continued to write the way they did as teenagers (and would through the last proper Ween album, La Cucaracha): they wrote to tape, chasing their ideas to absurd conclusions. This can mean there aren't great differences between the handful of demos on the bonus disc and the finished album. The exception is "Take Me Away," whose demo incarnation feels constrained by its electronic percussion; on the album, it's swings and struts thanks to the addition of Claude Coleman, the drummer who helped usher in Ween's transformation from lo-fi pranksters to an adept live out capable of bewitching audiences weaned on jam bands.

Ween's induction into the jam band circuit came through Phish, fellow Elektra Recording artists who saw a kindred spirit in these weirdos from New Hope, Pennsylvania. Phish worked "Roses Are Free"—a roundabout tribute to Prince's psychedelic era that's the catchiest tune on Chocolate and Cheese—into their set lists, a move that eventually earned Ween a new audience that they maintain until this day. Having witnessed Ween on the original Chocolate and Cheese tour and on a reunion jaunt in 2017, I have to say the difference in crowds is striking. Back in 1994, the audience was filled with alt-rock misfits, while the 2017 attendees seemed to only care about Ween, to the point that they invented their own dorky dances to setlist staples. 

Those 2017 Ween concerts were excellent and, from all reports, the recent shows were good too. Long ago, the band learned how to play to an audience expecting deep cuts on shifting setlists, plus they always showed an inclination to stretch their songs beyond their limits (the official live set Paintin' the Town Brown contains a version of "Vallejo" from 1994 that spills out over the course of a half an hour). This Chocolate and Cheese reissue does put into perspective what's missing from modern Ween: there's no longer a sense of discovery in this music. Even if this bonus disc contains songs recorded many years ago, they date from a time when Melchiondo and Freeman made it all up on the spot. Maybe they'd wind up with a chintzy instrumental ("Crappy Anniversary Jimmy"), maybe they'd indulge in a scuzzy blues grind ("Dirty Money")—there was no telling quite what's next. That unpredictability is heightened on the bonus material thanks to the narcotic vocal rumble of "I Got It" and the eerie tone poem "Church Fire," both providing unnerving discordant notes otherwise absent on the finished album. 

In his (too brief) liner notes, Melchiondo cracks "keeping with Ween tradition, Aaron and I probably picked all the wrong songs, mixed them, and now here they are." While nothing here could be easily swapped for a song on Chocolate and Cheese, the bonus disc does contain its own internal logic, along with a number of strong additions to Ween's official catalog: "Warm Socks" is charming off-kilter pop in the vein of "Roses are Free," "Stop, Look, Listen (And Learn)" carries a sense of churning menace and "Junkie Boy" works itself up into a froth with Gene relishing such turns of phrase as "Babbling synonyms from the book of Faust." Any of these tunes would brighten a modern set list—and they did haul out "Dirty Money" in 2023—but there's a kinetic electricity to these quasi lo-fi productions that the accomplished live outfit can't replicate. Surely, that's just part of growing up—what was once effortless in youth may now be out of reach—but in a year where Ween is plagued with personal troubles, it's nice to have a reminder of how invigorating their eccentricity can be.