All four albums were made with primitive two-track and four-track cassette recorders. As a result, Ween's music sounds casual and unadorned; instruments tend toward low fidelity, and voices pop up at various speeds, exaggeratedly low or chirpy. The songs have titles and sentiments like "I Smoke Some Grass," "Don't Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy)" and "Can U Taste the Waste?" Between albums, the band members keep making cassettes; they have completed two more since "Pure Guava" was released.

Ween now tours the circuit of alternative-rock clubs, where it is known not just for its tunes but for asking concert audiences to "bring us hot meals." On the "Pure Guava" album, there's an additional request: "No more junk food, thanks."

Yet, Ween cuisine meant junk food when the duo showed a visitor around their home turf, which stretches from Trenton, where their manager and fan club are based, to New Hope. Mr. Freeman, who lives in Stockton, N.J., and Mr. Melchiondo live just four miles apart, separated by the Delaware River. The first stop was the Casino Restaurant, home of the Casino Dog, a hot dog with cooked peppers and potatoes. "They assume mustard on it -- that's the best part," Mr. Melchiondo said. They order two each. "The second one's hard, but you've got to get it because the first one isn't enough," he continued. "By the end of the second one, you just tear off the peppers and eat them. Our stomachs are going to hurt soon."

Ween had already recorded a song that day, called "Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?" Mr. Freeman had to visit a carpet store to make good on a bounced check, inadvertently written on a closed account. Then, he and Mr. Melchiondo took their visitor along some old favorite back roads and to their current apartments. "Just don't make it out like we're Bill and Ted, or 'Wayne's World,' " Mr. Melchiondo said. "We're not like Wayne and Garth sitting on the couch. That's really tired."

Ween's mythos is based not on a fictional public-access television show but on an apartment they used to share and called the Pod, where they recorded the songs for their most recent albums. "That place was truly, like, pretty gross," Mr. Melchiondo said. "If you have the image of a bachelor's apartment and what a pigpen it is, the Pod was like 150,000 times that.

"The apartment was a perfect square broken up into little square rooms, with a ping-pong table in the kitchen blocking off everything so you'd have to shimmy past it. We probably would have moved out sooner if it wasn't for the ping-pong table. We'd play marathon games that would last all day and night, as long as 10 CDs. When we left, the walls were all destroyed.