The Pod

The album was recorded on two tapes made by Ween from January to October 1990, at the Pod on Van Sant Road in Solebury Township, Pennsylvania. The tapes were titled the Bilboa tape and the Big Timmy Wasserman tape. Both tapes contain not only demo versions of songs on the album, but many outtakes not used on any album or tracks used on future albums. The Pod, according to Ween lore, was written under the influence of Scotchgard. However, when their fans began huffing Scotchgard, it was refuted by Gene Ween and Dean Ween themselves as being "the most slime-bag thing we could think of". The Pod has since been remastered and reissued by Elektra Records, after the relative success of Ween albums such as Pure Guava (1992) and Chocolate and Cheese (1994). Shimmy Disc released a vinyl version in 1991. The Pod is Ween's longest studio album.

All of the songs have a murky, sludgy quality to them, due to being recorded on a Tascam four-track cassette recorder, and many of the vocals are manipulated in strange ways. The album contains bizarre lyrical content, often attributed to the fact that Dean and Gene both came down with cases of mononucleosis during the recording of the album, as well as their notorious relationship with huffing. The song "Alone" borrows the guitar riff/melody from Robyn Hitchcock's "The Bones in the Ground".

The album takes its name from the band's apartment where the album was recorded, which the band nicknamed "The Pod". The album's cover art is a takeoff of the 1975 The Best of Leonard Cohen cover; Ween simply positioned a photo of part-time bassist Mean Ween's head (wearing a "nitrous oxide powered bong" which is sometimes mistaken for a "Scotchgard bong") over Cohen's cover art, and altered the title text and other graphics. The copy of the Leonard Cohen record that Ween used had purportedly belonged to Dean Ween's mother, Eileen Ween.

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[3]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[4]
Spin Alternative Record Guide	5/10[5]

In 1993, the album was named one of the 20 best albums of 1992 by Spin.[6] Aphex Twin named it one of his 10 favorite albums of all time (making it one of 2 Ween albums on the list, the other being Pure Guava).[7] In a 1999 review of the album, The Stranger called it "excellent" and wrote that "someday, classical music students will write dissertations on The Pod."[8]

• "The Stallion (Pt. 1)" was not listed on the covers of original Shimmy Disc (CD, tape, double vinyl) releases, although the song is present as track #5.

From the Shimmy-Disc CD:

"Recorded by Dean and Gene Ween on a Tascam four-track cassette recorder between January and October 1990. All songs recorded at the Pod, where we lived for a year and 10 months (with our cat Mandee). The Pod was scenically located on Van Sant Road in Solebury Township, Pennsylvania. Our apartment was a haven for flies because it sits in the middle of a horse farm. In the time this album was completed, we filled up 3,600 hours of tape, and inhaled 5 cans of Scotchgard. This album was then produced and mixed by Andrew Weiss (our pal) at the Zion House of Flesh, Hopewell, New Jersey. Straight to DAT Mang. Mean Ween played the bass on "Alone" and that's him on the cover doin' up some Scotchguard powered bongs. We got evicted on October 1, 1991. But Dave Ayers says he's gonna help us out. Cover and art designs by Logarithms."

Ween

• Dean Ween - guitar, vocals, engineer
• Gene Ween - vocals, engineer

Additional musicians

• Mean Ween - bass on "Alone"
• Ween - art direction
• Howie Weinberg - remastering
• Andrew Weiss - producer, mixing