View source for Boston Phoenix article - December 10, 2010

WEEZER: THE EARLY YEARS 
[[Rivers Cuomo|RIVERS CUOMO]] REFLECTS ON THE MAKING OF '[[Weezer (The Blue Album)|BLUE]]' AND ''[[Pinkerton|PINKERTON]]''
BY DANIEL BROCKMAN
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When Rivers Cuomo, [[Weezer]] wunderkind and [[Harvard]]-educated overachiever, sets his mind to something. he is nothing if not meticulous. Which means that Weezer's official output - eight albums in 18 years - belies the thousands of songs Cuomo has penned, only to deem them not worthy of official release. Also, when he speaks, it's with the cadence of one who's attempting to tighten the spigot on a torrent of internal thoughts. And when he's asked to discuss a subject as touchy as, say, the purported irony that attaches itself to all things Weezer, matters turn deadly serious "Look, I want to say this very clearly, because this is important." Pregnant pause. A few seconds later, with renewed purpose: "I never intended anything we did to be ironic, or be appreciated ironically, in any way. And I never intended to make fun of anybody. Everything I do, or that we do as a band, we mean sincerely."

What does it mean to "be appreciated ironically"? If that idea is confusing to you, or propounds a thought you've never pondered, then perhaps you were too old, too young, or too busy to have been wrapped up in the rich meta-culture of the 1990s from which Weezer sprang with the out-of-left-field success of their [[1994]] debut, ''Weezer''. (It's colloquially known as "The Blue Album," from its color, to distinguish it from two subsequent homonymous long-players, [[2001]]'s "[[Weezer (The Green Album)|The Green Album]]" and [[2008]]'s "[[Weezer (The Red Album)|The Red Album]].")

For the rest of us, however, the Three I's (irony, intention, and integrity) and how they pertained to pop culture, and in particular music culture, were the focus of countless late-night bullshit-ting sessions and chatroom flame wars throughout those heady pre-web, pre-Monicagate Clinton days. It came down to this: in the hangover period after the excesses of synth-wave hair-metal Day-Glo '80s [[MTV]] culture, a self-imposed quasi-Marxism swept over the land (and the [[Billboard]] charts), bolstered by the earnestness of R.E.M., [[Nirvana]], Pearl Jam, and a host of artists aiming to deflate the preening rock-star myths of prior generations. Popular musicians of the '90s and beyond, it seemed, would be plain old regular people like you and me, dressed down and expressing their feelings with out the overblown theatrics of yesteryear.

This reformation was ill timed for Cuomo, who in [[1990]] had left his family's Connecticut suburb to make it in LA with his prog-metal band, [[Avant Garde]]. After teasing his hair high and clocking count less hours on his best guitar-hero moves in the mirror, he discovered that he was hopelessly out of touch with what people wanted from a '90s rock star. "Throughout my formative years as a musician," he explains, "I drilled those postures and licks and body language into my system. And after years watching our elders in the spotlight, just as we were on the cusp of being of the age to enter that spotlight ourselves, we discovered that everything that we had learned, everything we had worked on, was suddenly the least cool thing possible. And so here I was, out here in LA with this enormous arsenal of moves and creative style, and that's all that I had to draw upon."

Well, it wasn't all he had to draw upon: the tepid reception he received for his prog-metaling sent Cuomo to the songwriting shed, and he emerged a few years later with a project that took his unusually wounded and forceful vocal style and powerful metal guitar chops and channeled them through tightly wound, sunny new-wave tunes that were winkingly self-depreciating yet still emotive and direct. He named the project Weezer (after a childhood nickname his father had given him), wore horn-rim glasses, sang about [[In the Garage|playing D&D]], made pop-culture-referencing videos, and rocked out in front of a [[Flying =W=|gigantic light-up "W"]] that was itself a take-off on the Van Halen logo.

With its unholy marriage of underdog humility and big, stadium-filling kicks, "The Blue Album" went triple platinum. But when fans guffawed at the lyrical references to [[Kiss]] and the unison guitar arpeggios, perhaps they missed the seriousness behind Cuomo's sleight of hand. "We found that there were things - gestures and whatnot - that the audience interpreted as 'ironic.' Like, you know, 'You can't possibly be 100 percent sincere about that lighted flying 'W' behind you!' But that kind of thing, those kinds of gestures, that's what we all grew up with. And we meant those things sincerely. But I guess people thought it was cool and funny because they thought we were being ironic."

In the early '90s, irony went part and parcel with a rock culture that was obsessed with the idea of not trying hard. The ubiquity of the terms "slacker" and "loser" in songs and movies let the world know that alt-culture not only didn't need to try hard, it didn't need to impress anyone with appearing to work hard, either. Cuomo, by contrast, was (and remains) a fastidious musical craftsman. "There was an incredible amount of thought put into the details of our style on our first album. In a way, the record sounds somewhat simplistic and innocent, but that's all very calculated. You only need to go back a year or two before that record to hear the kind of music I was making to see what an act of restraint that first album was."

The restraint he speaks of is found more in the process than in the emotion conveyed by the songs themselves: much of "The Blue Album" speaks of torment, whether it's the paranoid jealousy of "[[No One Else]]" or the apocalyptic heartbreak of "[[Say It Ain't So]]." If the slickness and pop sheen of {{PN|Ric Ocasek}} production made "The Blue Album" an irony magnet for a music-listening public increasingly unsure of what was sincere and what was meant to be ironic, Cuomo set out on the band's next record to ensure that, this time, everyone would know he wasn't kidding around.

Weezer's current tour is titled "[[Memories Tour|Memories]]," ostensibly after the [[Memories|lead single]] off [[2010]]'s ''[[Hurley]]'' ([[Epitaph Records|Epitaph]]). The title is also a nod to the tour's conceit, a spate of two-night stands where the band bang through their debut the first night and their sophomore outing, [[1996]]'s ''Pinkerton'', the second. This is an oddly nostalgic move for Weezer, given their extreme recent prolixity. This fall alone has seen the release of two albums of new material (''Hurley'' and last month's odds-and-sods ''[[Death to False Metal]]''), as well as a deluxe ''Pinkerton'' reissue and there's a new platter on the launching pad for [[2011]]. But it makes sense when you consider the unusual place Pinkerton has in the band's career and in the story of '90s rock in general.

Pinkerton was a straight-up bomb: the singles "[[El Scorcho]]" and "[[The Good Life]]" tanked on radio, and the album was both a commercial failure and critically reviled. The band broke up soon after, and by the late '90s, Weezer seemed destined to be just one of many on the alt-rock discard pile. All these years later, Cuomo himself is still stymied by the album's initial reception. "I was surprised. I think I was holding, in my mind, a number of possible outcomes for the record before it came out. Like, you know, maybe it'll be a failure and sell half as many as our first record. Or maybe this is gonna catapult us to legend status and I'll be viewed as this genius songwriter/frontman guy. But I don't think that any where in my range of possibilities did I imagine that it would actually sell only 10 percent of what the first album sold, and then would be voted second-worst album of the year by [[Rolling Stone]] and immediately fall off the Billboard charts."

The album's reception affected Cuomo, and as the band languished in uncertainty, he was open about the outright embarrassment that Pinkerton had caused him. He had conceived it as a rock opera based on his newly conceived love of Puccini's ''[[Madama Butterfly]]'', but the end result was less arch and more painfully honest and scarred, dealing with the guilt and loneliness he felt as a rock star seeking anonymity, among other things. (Cuomo entered Harvard in [[1995]]; eventually, in 2006, he got a BA in English.) Over time, though, he's warmed to the album-it's come to mean more than the band's big misstep. "To me, I can hear, on ''Pinkerton'', that the heart of the tracks, the origin of the songs, is just me and an acoustic guitar, so the songs really hold together as just a guy singing and strumming. Instead of some of the later stuff we've done, where things are built up track by track. In curating the recent reissue, I spent a lot of time listening to the record and some of the sessions from '95 and '96, and I was just hit with how complete and beautiful it sounds, to me."

Cuomo hasn't been alone in rediscovering ''Pinkerton'' in hindsight. While he was holed up in Boston writing song after discarded song, a new generation of Weezer fans was drawn to the band's albatross album, which in the ensuing years had come to be seen as a kind of blueprint for the nascent emo movement. The drumbeat became too loud for Cuomo and the band to ignore; they emerged from hibernation with 2001's ''Weezer'' ("The Green Album"). Since then, Cuomo has rarely suffered from writer's block: Weezer have managed to put out a new release every few years and maintain a high profile and generally preserve their status as a successful and influential modern rock band in an era where such a thing has become rarer and rarer.

Even though they've had huge hits that have far eclipsed the success of any single from the first two albums (notably "[[Hash Pipe]]" from "The Green Album," "[[Dope Nose]]" off [[2002]]'s ''[[Maladroit]]'', "[[Beverly Hills]]" from [[2005]]'s ''[[Make Believe]]'', and "[[Pork and Beans]]" from '08's "The Red Album," all four of which made Billboard's Top 10), fans continue to clamor for "The Blue Album" and ''Pinkerton''. That could have something to do with the general critical reception of the later material. ''Make Believe'' was Weezer's biggest-selling album when it was released, but it was eviscerated by the press as incoherent and juvenile.

As much as he loves ''Pinkerton'', Cuomo does not entirely understand this phenomenon. "It does feel like there are different types of fans out there who prefer different sides of the band. We played the [[Weezer concert: 08/29/2010|Reading]] and [[Weezer concert: 08/28/2010|Leeds]] festivals in the UK a few months ago, and 'The Blue Album' and ''Pinkerton'' just didn't mean as much to the '90s generation over there as they did here. We play to 50,000 people at a festival like that, and 99 percent of them have never heard ''Pinkerton''! But then we do shows like on this current tour, and we play to a few thousand people who don't care for 'Beverly Hills' but they know every word to ''Pinkerton''."

In the end, maybe it comes back to the irony thing - maybe fans who developed their musical attitudes from '90s indie rock can't like something unless they perceive that it's been rejected by the mainstream. Cuomo himself seems unconcerned. "I've never been about discarding the entirety of music's past in the hopes of coming up with some exciting new revolutionary sound or style. A lot of my peers were always trying to come up with the next shocking sound, and that just wasn't me at all. I just want..." - he pauses, again searching for just the right phrase, until it comes to him. "I guess I just want everything I do to be unique and original, and I want to make it interesting for myself. I guess that says it all."

'''WEEZER Orpheum Theatre, 1 Hamilton Place, Boston | December 14-15 @ 7:30 pm | $17-563.50 617.679.0810'''

<big>River's Edge</big><br>
<small>PRE-WEEZER: THE METAL YEARS</small>

So much of the tension in Weezer's aesthetic derives from the way Rivers Cuomo keeps taking his shred-metal background and forcing it into a sunny pop-punk package. That's also the key to the band's general air of self-depreciation. To understand Weezer, at some level you have to familiarize yourself with Cuomo's pre-Weezer band, Avant Garde "You have to understand. I grew up in Connecticut and was part of a progressive-metal scene." he explains. "Our songs were eight or nine minutes long, with time and key changes and harmonized guitar solos and medieval-themed lyrics. So I had a very, uh, broad palette of techniques, and 99 percent of it got cut out by the time we finished the first Weezer record."

In many ways, Weezer as a concept was a reaction to Avant Garde's reception. "Right after high school," Cuomo continues, "I moved from Connecticut to LA with this metal band. And I assumed that because we were so technically proficient, we should therefore become incredibly successful and popular, merely because of our technique. It wasn't until we got to Hollywood and started getting feedback from people in the clubs and people in the industry that we realized that no one in the audience cared about the technique, how fast you could play, etc. They were interested in something called 'songs,' and 'hooks.' And we panicked - we scrambled, and very quickly tried to reinvent ourselves."

Anyone who knew any local metal bands (of whatever home town) at the dawn of the 90s remembers this part all too well, as the teased hair was brought down to earth and bands changed their metal names to something monosyllabic and meaningless. Avant Garde became Zoom, and Cuomo started projects called [[Fuzz]] and [[60 Wrong Sausages]] in LA. Meanwhile, his day job at Tower Records introduced him to non-metal influences like [[the Pixies]] and Nirvana. It was a time of mass metal repression.

"We were definitely trying to rid ourselves of metal, because we just thought it was silly." he recalls of Weezer's early days. "During the band's first year of existence. [[Matt Sharp|Matt]] [Sharp, bassist and founding member who left after ''Pinkerton'' to focus on his other band, [[the Rentals]]] and I lived in this house with some other like-minded friends, and we couldn't stop reminiscing about our metal days. It was driving us crazy, because whenever we saw each other, we'd just start going like. 'Oh yeah, remember Saxon?,' and stuff like that. So we started this thing called the Metal Jar, which was just a jar with a slot in the lid, and whenever anyone mentioned anything about metal, they'd have to put a quarter in the jar. And it added up! I don't remember what we did with it, but there was a lot of money in there! So we had this almost irresistible urge to laugh about how extremely silly our belief in metal was, especially as teenagers."

The truth, though, is that once a metal-head. always a metalhead: there are bread-crumb clues in every Weezer album that a shredhead is behind it all. "Oh yeah, I can definitely hear it," Cuomo acknowledges. "Even on 'The Blue Album, I hear those [[Metallica]] guitars. For example, take a look at 'Undone (The Sweater Song) and compare it to 'Welcome Home (Sanitarium)' by Metallica [from [[Pre-1991|1986]]'s ''Master of Puppets''). Seriously, check those two out side by side and you'll be surprised!"