Amplifier article - July 2002

Print interview with Rivers Cuomo
Publication	Amplifier
Published	July 2002
Interviewer	Eliot Wilder
Interviewee	Rivers Cuomo
Title	Weezer - The Voice of a Maladroit Generation
Format	Print
External link	Archived on Internet Archive
References	See where this article is referenced on Weezerpedia

Weezer - The Voice of a Maladroit Generation Author: Eliot Wilder (Amplifier) Published: July 2002 Things you think you are finished with come back only when you need them, if and only if, when and only when. Like the dollar you thought you'd spent but that turned up in your jacket when you needed subway fare. Like a box of treasured letters you'd misplaced but was under the bed waiting to be rediscovered. Like an extremely personal album you once made that no one initially gave two shits about but went on to insinuate itself with an entire sect of emotionally dispossessed kids. If a thing comes back, it comes back, if and only if, when and only when, you need it. Never a group to do its thing in what might be considered a normal manner, Weezer has built a career out of confounding the expectation of both its record companies and its fans. Wait five years to release a third album - which just happens to have the same title as the first, just the color scheme differs - and then release the fourth not even a year later. Send out tracks from that uncompleted fourth album to radio stations throughout the country, which the group did earlier this year, only to have those songs uploaded onto Web sites and subsequently downloaded by fans (and bootleggers) - pissing off a record company, Interscope, in the process. Mostly, play a style of unfashionable guitar pop and wear unfashionable threads - black horn-rim glasses, rumpled sweatshirts and, currently, a scraggly beard - and yet somehow be considered hip. Hip enough that a battalion of up-and-coming guitar pop bands with names like the Get Up Kids, Jimmy Eat World and Nerf Herder would ape your basic style to forge what's come to be called emo - melancholic music for the young Sylvia Plaths and Holden Caulfields of the world. Emo is one of those tags that, like most labels, is abstract and not easy to define, mostly because its meaning depends upon whom you ask. Like most labels, it attempts to capture the essence of a thing - in this case, expressing difficult emotions - when a thing, because it is constantly evolving, cannot be captured. And like most labels, it becomes passe the moment it goes into widespread circulation. That's certainly the case now that Time magazine, a bastion of mainstream American culture, recently ran a feature on the movement, appointing Dashboard Confessional's Chris Carrabba as its poster boy. But if Chris Carrabba is emo's "it" boy, then Rivers Cuomo - he of the aforementioned black horn-rim glasses, rumpled sweatshirts and scraggly beard - is emo's prized elder statesman. Because it is his band Weezer that, unwittingly, has caused the phenomenon. Many Rivers to Cross Cuomo got into music at 13 when he picked up the guitar and "immediately started a Kiss cover band with my brother and my friends," he says in a voice that is measured and with a wit that is dry. Why Kiss? "Rock and Roll Over was the one rock record I just happened to get. I grew up on a very isolated Hindu commune in upstate Connecticut where there was no real contact with popular culture. But somehow that album found its way into the commune. I've pretty much based the rest of my life around that record." What may sound like a quip is none too far off the mark, for Cuomo's style incorporates the god-almighty monster riff - sometimes several, sometimes more than several - in a single song. What distinguishes his hook-heavy, as opposed to sludge-heavy, tunes are a disarming geekiness and quirky, heartfelt lyrics, which create a curious tension. "There's always been that conflict," Cuomo relates, "between the desire to just rock out and the desire to not embarrass oneself." Moving from the backwoods of Connecticut to the urban bustle of Hollywood opened up Cuomo's tastes, especially after landing a gig at Tower Records. Goodbye Quiet Riot, Judas Priest and Slayer, hello Pixies, Sonic Youth and Jane's Addiction. By his own admission he had been something of a "second-rate heavy metal guy," not one who particularly fit the '70s mane-swinging image or the this-one-goes-up-to-11 mentality, and the new music he was hearing spurred him to create something original. "When my metal band imploded and metal itself didn't seem very relevant anymore," he recalls, "I locked myself away with an acoustic guitar and started writing my own songs." By 1992 Cuomo - along with Brian Bell on guitar, Matt Sharp on bass and Patrick Wilson on drums - had formed Weezer and by '94 the band was inked by Geffen. "We were all stoked about being able to put out an album, although we were trying to tell ourselves that just because you get a record deal doesn't mean you're going to have any kind of success at all - and most likely you are going to fail miserably. We were always looking on the dark side of things." But bright days were ahead, at least for a time. After being signed, the group released its Ric Ocasek-produced, self-titled debut, a record that, because of its blue graphics, is called "The Blue Album." The songs were chunky, fun and fuzzy, with tunes like "Undone (The Sweater Song)" and "Say It Ain't So" propelling the record onto the charts. But what really put it on top were a series of clever videos, the most memorable of which was "Buddy Holly." Directed by future filmmaker Spike Jonze, it found the band digitally stitched into a scene from the sitcom Happy Days, performing at Al's while the Fonz gave them a thumbs up. Cuomo himself is bit hazy on that period of the band ("I've done very little meditating on the past - I'm so focused on moving forward"), but he becomes animated at the mention of meeting one of his childhood icons during the making of "Buddy Holly." "It's fucking Al! It was the guy you grew up seeing on TV!" Out of the Blue "The Blue Album" wound up multi-platinum, a major sin for young upstarts that want to be taken seriously, and a backlash soon followed. Cuomo, feeling the sting, retreated from music, enrolling for a time at Harvard. "I had no plan, no direction," he admits. One depressively bitter Boston winter was enough to send him packing back to the hairdryer hot Santa Anas of Los Angeles and with his band mates recorded the dark and dirty Pinkerton. Self-produced and with Cuomo now firmly in charge of the songwriting duties, the album met with critical jabs (Rolling Stone anointed it the Worst Album of 1996) and public indifference. After a tour in '97, Sharp left to pursue the Rentals, a side project that had already released one album and would eventually put out a second. Wilson created his own band called Special Goodness and Bell had the Space Twins. Once more, it appeared as if Weezer was a done deal. Fini. Over. Well, not quite. Because a peculiar and unexpected thing happened during the band's hiatus: through word of mouth Pinkerton was becoming popular with a new generation of kids that embraced its themes of dislocation and despair. Unbeknownst to even the band itself, an audience was growing and a groundswell was building. "I'm not a big fan of groundswell," Cuomo says now with a laugh. "I prefer massive success!" He continued: "I know everyone thinks I hate Pinkerton, but I've been listening to it lately and it's pretty cool. I sang really well on it - very emotionally." It would be quite a few years before Weezer would realize the influence Pinkerton was having and to finally release a new record. But it was not wasted time. "I wouldn't characterize it as a down period," Cuomo reflects. "I was focused on learning about music, and that meant I couldn't be out and about. I studied lots and lots of CDs, really analyzed them. I took tons of notes and I wrote songs every day." Then, as the millennium approached, Cuomo caught wind of the sensation being caused by his crummy-album-that-nobody-wanted. "My friends came to me in '99 and told me about this emo scene that was rising up and that somehow Weezer had been an inspiration. I said, 'What bands are you talking about?' They'd tell me their names and I'd say, 'I've never heard of any of this stuff.'" Cuomo still finds it difficult to see the correlation between his band and, say, Saves the Day. "I guess there is some connection. We play electric guitars. We're white. We're male. And we don't rap." Emboldened, the band reunited yet again - this time with Mikey Welsh on bass for the departed Sharp. It was not exactly an easy process of rediscovery, with members of the group going so far as to describe the experience as joyless. But gradually this Weezer found its legs. "At the beginning of 2000 I started coming up with some decent songs and we began rehearsing again. It was going well so we jumped on the Warped Tour out here on the West Coast. Due in large part to the positive reception that we got, our confidence started to come back and we just kept touring, and by the end of the year we felt good enough to make a record." Green Light That record, issued in May 2001 and entitled Weezer (or referred to by fans as "The Green Album" because of its, well, green graphics), was, for a band that had been out of the pubic eye for a pop-music eternity, a surprise hit. Or was it? "Every possible eventuality had been played out in my mind," Cuomo says, "so that when we came back and had great success I'd imagined that happening. It didn't seem like that much of a shock. It's like, well, of course." Weezer had returned. "The Green Album" entered the Billboard charts at No. 4. "Island in the Sun" and "Hash Pipe" were all over the radio and MTV. And all this happened despite the record being mostly light and airy, nearly the opposite of anything that could be classified as emo. "If there's one underlining theme on the album," Cuomo confides, "it's that I didn't want to have good lyrics. I just wanted to have Noel Gallagher-type words; whatever rhymes, whatever comes off the top of my head. It's pretty much the opposite of Pinkerton, in which I was so feverishly trying to explain what I was obsessing about in literal terms. That was a very egocentric album. On 'The Green Album' I wanted to obliterate my ego, just have meaningless, fluff lyrics. The words were total stream of consciousness, and looking back they're very related to the tone of the music. I would come up with the music first and that would somehow direct the meaning of the lyrics." A year later - with Scott Shriner on bass, replacing Welsh who had vanished during last summer's tour only to resurface in a psych ward, after which he joined the band the Kickovers - comes the new Maladroit. The title, which means awkward or inept, would seem to be a comment on the band's nerdy appeal. If it's to be believed, Cuomo claims that "it has no particular significance. We polled our fans on Weezer.com for some suggestions for a title and I went through them all - and maladroit stuck out because it sounded cool and metal." A Million Weezer Fans Can't Be Wrong Through the group's Web site, fans also had a large amount of input into shaping Maladroit's songs, making the process of production a very interactive experience for all. "We would post MP3s of our daily progress every night and they [the fans] would critique them, and I would go in the next day and try out some of their suggestions. It was very specific advice from Weezer experts - people that know the most about us, more so than any producer." Weezer, the people's band? "I don't know about that," Cuomo says. "Most of my fans hate me. But I do like to cherry-pick all their cool ideas." Overall, Cuomo, who seems to be his own harshest critic, is pleased with Maladroit. "I think it's great. It has tons of personality coming from all four of us - that's something I value. The songs are well-constructed little pop songs but still they have some wicked riffs in them." And overall, Cuomo has begrudgingly accepted the fact that many in the cult of emo turn to him to articulate their tribulations and trials. "Maybe it's because they are having similar thoughts in their heads and they want someone to articulate them in a song. It doesn't make me feel comfortable, but in a weird sort of way I'm honoured that anyone thinks that I could represent them and express their thoughts and feelings." A fifth album - on which, according to Cuomo, Weezer, in a break with tradition, raps - is being written and recorded and is already scheduled for release early next year. After so long in a Weezerless world, the band appears to be making up for lost time. "There doesn't seem to be any reason to wait around," Cuomo says, sounding like a man who has returned from a dark night of the soul prepared to face whatever the day may bring. Unquestionably, Weezer is far from a done deal. Fini. Over. As if to prove once again that things you think you are finished with come back only when you need them, if and only if, when and only when.