Free Ween's Chocolate and Cheese (33 1/3) by Hank Shteamer Page B

Ween, and there always has been.”
    The lyrics grew out of an article that Melchiondo stumbled across:
    I was at home with my wife, who was my girlfriend back then, and we read a thing in the newspaper about this guy who was a retired city doctor and he opened up a health clinic in the Ozark Mountains or the Blue Ridge Mountains or somewhere. This was, like, West Virginia, and he was treating these backwoods people that didn’t have access to any kind of health care. And one of his hillbilly patients referred to spinal meningitisas “Smile on, mighty Jesus,” and so I came up with the idea from that.
    As Melchiondo recalls, the disturbing subject matter didn’t sit well with Ween’s label:
    When we handed the record in to Elektra, [they] got back to us and they tried to hang it on the head of publicity. They said, [
imitating two-faced corporate-speak
] “Listen, guys, this is a great record. It’s such a great record. It’s the best record ever.” All this bullshit, you know. “We’re all so excited about it. Everyone at the company is talking about it. But, I gotta tell you, the girl at publicity thinks that no one is gonna be able to get past ‘Spinal Meningitis’ being the second song. They’re gonna put on the record, and it’s a tragedy, because all they’re gonna be able to think about is this song, because it’s so creepy and it’s so weird and you have to move it somewhere else in the sequence — it can’t be second.” And we were like, “Fuck you!” That was our response; it was like, “No way, the sequence is great — it stays.”
    Record label friction and message-board comments aside, Freeman doesn’t recall getting any flak for the song. He offers the following anecdote as evidence to the contrary:
    I remember after the record had come out, a bunch of seriously ill people came by in a special van with nurses to see our soundcheck. Mickey and I were convincedof course that they were somehow protesting our song. I think our road manager mustered the courage to ask how these wheeled, bedded, seriously ill people were doing and they had said thanks for letting them come and see a band that “was able to talk about being sick openly and for making them laugh.” I still was eating my pants and never spoke to them.
“Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?” (Track 8 of 16)
    “Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?” is another song that looks at disease from an innocent perspective, but it’s far more whimsical than “Spinal Meningitis.” As the title suggests, the track is basically an extended plea for assistance: The simple-minded narrator’s pony has taken ill, and he could use a hand. Ween uses unexpected lyrical twists to wring humor out of this potentially troubling scenario. The speaker catalogs the animal’s various symptoms — “He’s chewin’ bark and not the leaves”; “He coughed up snot in the driveway” — and constantly returns to the same, more-or-less nonsensical conclusion: “I think it’s his lung.”
    Musically, the song definitely points to the ambition of late Ween. The verses employ a laid-back smooth-rock groove, featuring jangly guitar, a sinuous bass part, a sparkly keyboard line and tasteful drum fills executed by Melchiondo on a real kit. As with “Freedom of ’76,” you can picture a full band cutting the song live despite thefact that the track was constructed piecemeal. The song’s structure is ambitious as well, especially the surprisingly complex multipart bridge section. A washy interlude heavy on the synthesized chimes points directly to the lush psychedelia Ween would explore on subsequent albums. Then Melchiondo takes a jazz-inflected solo, which climaxes in an oddly dramatic ascending figure. Despite its brief length, the track exhibits the arty, borderline-proggy feel that the band would begin to explore more fully on
The Mollusk
.
    Weiss sees the song as a compositional breakthrough for Freeman and Melchiondo:
    Maybe they’d