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they don't get no respect
Author: Dan Epstein (Los Angeles Reader)
Published: November 18, 1994
- weezer battles hipsters, frat boys, and bad reviews in its quest for perfect pop
"Sign my muscle, dude! Come on, just sign it!" It's afternoon at the Roxy, and Weezer bassist Matt Sharp is passing the time before sound check by expounding upon the joys of playing for college audiences. Flexing his right arm in irritation of the frat-bay salute that's been a common greeting throughout the band's tour with college rockers Live, Sharp shakes his dyed head in wonder and disgust. "It's a nightmare," he groans.
Guitarist Brian Bell also has a hard time understanding Weezer's new fan demographic. "These people who hated me in high school are all asking for my autograph, and that's real weird. These guys come up and 'Hey, man, you guys were great!' and punch me in the arm. Big, sweaty guys wanna give me a hug ..." His voice trails off, but the revulsion is apparent in his eyes.
If the very idea of the painfully gaunt Bell, who is probably a few steak sandwiches shy of 120 pounds, squirming in the enthusiastic embrace of "big, ugly, sweaty white frat boys" sounds odd, check out the rest of the Weezer story. Already a fixture on MTV with the video for "Undone - The Sweater Song," and a steady seller nationwide with their self-titled debut album, Sharp, Bell, singer-songwriter-guitarist Rivers Cuomo, and drummer Patrick Wilson comprise a band that, a little more than a year ago, couldn't get arrested. Not that stardom was ever on their agenda.
"We never wanted to push ourselves," says Sharp, pawing through the pre-show deli spread in search of a cheese slice. "All the clubs would say, 'You've got to advertise.' We said, 'We're just gonna play - if people like it, they can get into it.' And nobody did!"
Formed two and a half years ago in Hollywood by then-roommates Sharp, Cuomo, and Wilson, Weezer had problems fitting into the L.A. music scene from the start. Slagged as a "Pixies ripoff" by uncomprehending members of the "alternative" crowd, Weezer had plenty of opportunity to develop a healthy persecution complex while simultaneously honing its songs and its sound. "All those Los Feliz people were nagging on us," recalls Sharp. "We would go out of our way to piss them off."
Take a certain show at Al's Bar, for example: "We were doing it with That Dog, Dogstar [now Charles Brown Superstar], and Waldo the Dog-Faced Boy. We knew That Dog, but everybody else hated us. What we decided to do was all wear these matching blue-and-white-striped short-sleeved shirts, really super Beach Boys; we'd tuck the shirts in, we'd smile the whole time, and we wouldn't move. That's what we did the whole set, in front of this incredibly ultra-hip audience, just going, 'Ha ha! We know you hate us! We know you hate us!' And they didn't even get it that we were fucking with them."
Bell, a guitarist with the now-defunct Carnival Art during Weezer's formative period - he joined during the recording of Weezer - was a fan of the band at least partly because of its outcast status.
"I was turned on to Weezer because the lack of people that were into them," he remembers. "So many fucking noise bands were coming out, and it was just making me sick."
After Weezer spent about nine months doing depressing local gigs ("We played the shittiest clubs, because we wanted to play"), label reps began to appear at shows in rapidly increasing numbers. "A few label people showed up," says Sharp, "and then it just kinda went 'boom!'" With the phenomenal success of Nevermind in 1991, A&R weasels everywhere were hot on the trail of the "next Nirvana"; to the untrained eye and ear, Weezer must have fit the bill. Both hands featured sloppily dressed young guys with loud guitars and short, intense lead singers (although Cuomo's stage presence is much more Avenging Nebbish than Kurt Cobain's Little Boy Lost). And, with the wind blowing the right way, the four-chord sway of "Undone" does bear a slight similarity to "Smells Like Teen Spirit." A small scramble to sign the band ensued, with the David Geffen Company coming up victorious.
"I think everybody was afraid of losing their jobs, basically," notes Sharp with a wry grin. "Pretty much any major label will just sign you on the whim that maybe [the record] will take off," adds Bell, and Sharp almost chokes on his cheese sandwich in his rush to concur. "I would absolutely say that they had no clue that our record would do this well. They were just like, 'OK, we'll put it out and see what happens.'"
Weezer's debut was originally to have been recorded in Los Angeles, with band acquaintance Paul DuGray,[sic] but Geffen "suggested" that the guys get an "outside opinion," so Cuomo and Sharp grudgingly ransacked their record collections in search of an appropriate producer. The proverbial lightbulb went off over Cuomo's head as he remembered the Cars record sitting on his turntable. "He had the Greatest Hits album," recalls Sharp, "and he'd been listening to 'Just What I Needed.' He said, "Do you realize that this is really similar to us?'"
Evidently, Cars frontman Ric Ocasek also recognized some sort of common ground; within two days of receiving the demo tape, Ocasek showed up at Weezer's rehearsal space, making Sharp so nervous that "my knees were getting seriously weak." Though an intimidatingly tall figure, Ocasek turned out to be an affable, soft-spoken gent determined to provide Weezer with the production he felt they deserved. The boys themselves were not so sure.
"He just pursued us," recalls Sharp. "We said, 'We're probably not going to do it with you, we just want to do it here, and we don't want [the experience] to be too weird." Ocasek wouldn't take no for an answer, "so Rivers and I had tons of meetings with him, going to the studio where he was mixing his record, trying to get relaxed about the whole thing. Then we had to meet his wife [supermodel Paulina Porizkova], and so we're completely fucking nervous again. Ric just said, "Come to New York - it'll be an experience.'"
Nerves notwithstanding, Weezer is a pretty impressive debut. Smartly produced by Ocasek, fat, dry blasts of guitar punctuate perfect pop songs like "Buddy Holly," "No One Else," and "Surf Wax America, while "My Name Is Jonas" and "Holiday" are rocking sea chanteys, the likes of which haven't been heard since Hüsker Du's "She Floated Away." The album even comes with a swell pair of alienation anthems, "The World Has Turned and Left Me Here" and "In the Garage," the latter featuring choice references to Dungeons & Dragons and Cuomo's perfect couplet: I've got my posters on the wall/My favorite rock group Kiss/I've got Ace Frehley/I've got Peter Criss.
Cuomo's idiosyncratic wordplay, coupled with his seeming reluctance to do interviews, has fostered some confusion in the press about his "concept." A recent profile in Rolling Stone described Weezer as treading "the line between gimmick and straight-forward rock and roll," a rather glib assessment that rankles Sharp. "I think that's crap; [Rivers's lyrics] sometimes come off as kind of goofy, but I don't think we're gimmicky at all. I mean, people tell me that They Might Be Giants are a novelty band - I think they write amazing songs." The album reviews haven't been overwhelmingly positive, either, with most critics zeroing in on the band's wise-ass "slacker" image or the mere presence of Ocasek. "Somebody did call us 'Stone Temple Pavement,' though," laughs Bell.
With or without the kindness of strangers, the rock machine that is Weezer continues to roll on. (Until recently, when Rivers's throat infection caused the band to sit out some dates on the Live tour.) Headlining at the Roxy, the boys tore through their setlist with all the single-minded intensity of a starving man gnawing a ribeye; the all-ages crowd (all ages from twenty down to about ten, it seemed) loved every second of it. Now that the Weezer guys travel by tour bus and have prepubescent girls screaming their names at in-store appearances, what does the future hold? Swiss chalets? World domination? "I'd like both [Cars keyboardist] Greg Hawkes and Gary Numan to play on the next record," says Sharp, dead serious. "That's my dream combo, to have those two people playing keys." All those Los Feliz people are gonna love it.
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