"Low-Fi Rockers"

Two guys pushed the wrong buttons on a tape recorder - and kept on doing it. Now they have a cult following.

AT a white-frame house named Brookridge Farm, in bucolic Bucks County, Pa., the dialogue went like this:

Mickey: "Hey, man, we got offered the Shad Festival two days ago!"
George: "You're kidding!"
Mickey: "No, totally!"
George: "Oh, we should do it!"
Mickey: "Totally. It's April 25, and Aaron and I might be on tour, but we might not either. The guy talked to me the other day, he's like, he wants us to do it fully."
George: "I was there last year and saw Combo Holiday."
Mickey: "I'll find out, like, tomorrow if we're going to be away or not. But that would be full-on."
George: "Awesome."

Mickey is Mickey Melchiondo, 22; he's also known as Dean Ween, one-half of the underground duo Ween. His partner is Aaron Freeman, 23, alias Gene Ween. George is a buddy. Since Ween made its first album in 1988, it has risen from a rumor to a cottage industry to a cult. The two men are community-college dropouts and former gas-pump attendants whose low-budget, do-it-yourself songs crammed onto albums and overflowing onto private cassettes unveil the soul of young suburban slackers: flippant, horny, aimless, ironic.

Until recently, Mr. Freeman lived at Brookridge Farm. His old room still holds a lone conga drum and an unfurled sleeping bag. But Mr. Melchiondo is visiting the farm because he also plays in a loose, 10-piece aggregation called Echoes, along with George, who lives there. The group's entire repertory is an extended version of Pink Floyd's trippy 1971 song "Echoes."

Ween (a combination of "wuss" and "penis," the duo says) has been recording songs since 1985, when its members were in junior high school in New Hope, Pa., where Mr. Melchiondo still lives. Mr. Freeman discovered that if he pushed the play and record buttons simultaneously on his father's tape recorder, the tape would speed up and on playback, his voice would come out deep and distorted. "I thought that was the coolest thing I'd ever seen in my life," he said. Mr. Melchiondo was a kindred spirit, and they started putting together songs on home equipment.

"Right toward the end of high school, 11th or 12th grade, there was probably a time when we did more than a song a day," Mr. Freeman said. "We'd be sitting there with a big joint, smoking and recording," Mr. Melchiondo said.

While they were pumping out songs, they didn't harbor much show-business ambition. "We never have tried to do anything, ever," Mr. Melchiondo said. "We didn't do anything to get signed. We've never even tried to get a gig, ever."

A FRIEND booked them to play at the City Gardens club in Trenton; then came three independent-label albums ("Live Brain Wedgie," "God Ween Satan" and "The Pod"), culled from the vast Ween tape catalogue, and last year, the release of "Pure Guava" on the Elektra label. 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.

"Next to the ping-pong table there were, like, seven hats, and our hair was so long we couldn't play, and all of our friends' hair was that long, so whenever you played, you had to put on a stupid hat."

"Neither of us liked to clean," Mr. Freeman said, "so we just never cleaned. The dish situation was really bad. We'd never throw out our bottles because we had good intentions of recycling them someday, so we had this whole closetful of old bottles with a little beer in the bottom of each one and fruit flies coming up around them."

"We didn't take showers," Mr. Melchiondo said, "because of the mold problem. There were no clean towels. And it's not like there was soap or shampoo anyway. We used to sleep over at our girlfriends' houses whenever we could."

BY the time we moved out of the Pod," Mr. Freeman said, "Mick was working but I wasn't. It wasn't fair for him to pay the rent but not me, so neither of us paid the rent. So eventually we moved out of there, and when we had enough money, we paid."

Driving toward the river from Trenton carries Ween through old haunts. "We used to smash everything," Mr. Melchiondo said. "Pumpkins, Christmas things, Santa Clauses, nativity scenes, mailboxes, garbage cans. We had Tuesday night trash mash, because that was trash night."

"Once I ripped all the lights off this Christmas tree," Mr. Freeman said, "and it turned out to be the chief of police's house. I hid, though, and got away. And if you ever saw a really cutesy mailbox on a little country road, like a mailbox made to look like a house, you'd have to get M-80's and blow the thing completely up. That was just a given."

"But once I turned 18," Mr. Melchiondo said, "when you could go to jail for it, 1 stopped doing everything."

Mr. Freeman's new home is the upper floor of a Victorian house in Stockton, N.J., overlooking a church and a foreign-car repair garage. The CD shelves are filled; LP's lean neatly against the wall. Bosworth, a tiger cat, sidled up for attention. "He bites," Mr. Freeman warned, but too late; Bosworth had already chomped an inch-long gouge in the visitor's hand. "He bites really good," Mr. Melchiondo said.

Mr. Melchiondo's place had more of a Pod-like disarray. The floor of the music room was cluttered with guitars, LP's and an unplugged four-track portable recording studio. There were posters of Madonna and Iron Maiden, CD's in racks and a violin-shaped Beatle bass on a stand. In one corner was a milk crate full of resealable plastic bags with cassettes inside. Each bag had a handwritten label -"The Caprice Classic Tape," "The Big Timmy Wasserman Tape," "The Scraping the Palm for Guava Tape" - and a date. And each included 20 to 50 original songs: Ween's musical archive, more than a thou-sand songs. It seems they're not slackers after all.

"We can crank," Mr. Melchiondo said. "If we never made another song, we could keep releasing records forever."

"The songs are there," Mr. Freeman said. "But it's not a work ethic."