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Weezer Nothing To Sneeze At
Author: Glenn Kenny (Daily News)
Published: September 23, 1994
West coast band Weezer's self-titled debut album was one of my summer's favorite things: tuneful, funny, mildly enigmatic and packed full of really loud guitars. Unless you've been boycotting MTV lately, you've seen the "Buzz Clip" for the band's single "Undone: The Sweater Song," the highlight of which features a pack of about 20 dogs running right past the band and paying them no mind. Cool effect, but Weezer bassist Matt Sharp says it wasn't supposed to turn out that way.
"The dogs were supposed to hang around, and be checking us and our equipment out. But they had about a million trainers at the shoot, so the dogs just ran to them."
Still, the effect's pretty cool, and so's the song. The band, which hits CBGB tonight (they'll be at Hoboken's Maxwell's tomorrow night) is not yet riding high on their chart-climbing album. In fact, they're still seeing the country from a van. "We bought the biggest one we could find," a fatigued-sounding Sharp recalls, "and it turned out to be a total lemon. The door fell off once, it breaks down and during rainstorms it leaks."
The who-ee-ooh-ee-ooh synths on the "Buddy Holly" track seem to bear the touch of producer Ric Ocasek, ex-Cars majordomo, but Sharp says Ocasek actually wanted to avoid the Cars-like riffs.
"He thought everybody would think it was his idea. But we insisted. We're all big fans of the first Cars album."
Does playing as part of the much bruited CMJ convention faze these guys? "I could give a shit about any of that," Sharp replies, warming the cockles of this writer's heart. "We just do what we do." Which is the way to do it.
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