Ween is a rock duo formed in 1984 in New Hope, Pennsylvania when Mickey Melchiondo and Aaron Freeman met in a junior high school typing class. They christened themselves with the pseudonyms Dean Ween and Gene Ween respectively. Thousands of home recordings later, Ween collected a large underground fanbase.
Their earliest home recordings were anarchic and free-spirited, drawing on influences as far-reaching as the Beatles, Prince, Butthole Surfers, The Residents and the lo-fi punk movement. They self-released 4 cassettes in the late eighties; The Crucial Squeegie Lip, Axis: Bold As Boognish, The Live Brain Wedgie/WAD, and Prime 5. Around this time, Gene also released his own tape, Synthetic Socks, which featured Dean on a few songs. Ween, often compared in their early years to other offbeat artists such as Frank Zappa and They Might Be Giants, would always eschew such comparisons.
Ween was signed to Twin/Tone Records in 1989 and released their first album GodWeenSatan: The Oneness in the following year, a 26-track smorgasbord of genre jumping and wild, silly eclecticism. 1991's The Pod became a fast fan favorite, as the duo's use of drum machines, pitch-tweaked guitars & vocals and drug-laced humor became a trademark part of their sound. The Pod, according to Ween-lore, was written under the influence of Scotchgard, but was later disproven by Gene and Dean themselves as being "the most slime-bag thing we could think of". The contraption on the album cover is not a Scotchgard inhalation device, but a bong-like device use to send Marijuana directly to the the brain by use of nitrous oxide, which was said to leave the user intoxicated for days. The cover of The Pod resembles the cover of the 1988 Leonard Cohen album, The Best of Leonard Cohen, but with a head wearing the aformentioned gas mask bong in place of Cohen's.