Details article - January 1995
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"Life in the fast lane" article COCAINE. CHICKS. LIMOUSINES. FOR THE FOUR OF us who make up Weezer—Pat, Matt, Brian, and I—these adolescent dreams are finally coming true. Sort of. Actually, there hasn’t been much cocaine at all yet. Outside of Pat’s occasional self-administration of Mylanta, our rock ‘n’ roll drug experiences have been pretty limited. This does not jibe with our understanding of record-business protocol. Where are the label reps bribing program directors and hyping up the band with record-company drugs? As for the limos and private jets, we prefer a more realistic means of traveling great distances: a van. It would be no exaggeration to say that our van really, really sucks. The radio shuts itself off if we drive below twenty miles an hour. The sunroof leaks buckets in the rain. The air-conditioning refuses to function and the solid black exterior serves as a giant solar panel, ensuring a minimum temperature of 115 degrees in the summer. (We’re hoping the solar-panel effect will continue to keep us warm through the winter, since the heater also does not work.) In spite of these minor criticisms, this van is our home and we’ve come to love it. At first we called it the Enforcer, but after an essential part of the chassis fell out the very first time we tried to drive uphill, we felt that Betsy was a more appropriate name. One day, in a random fit of malice, Matt shot Betsy in the radiator grills with a squirt gun. After fifteen seconds of ominous rumbling, a green bubbling froth was ejaculated from her grills. So Betsy was rendered immobile—again—and we were stranded in exciting Winnemucca, Nevada, with nothing to do but gamble. Every day, we traveling rock musicians get something called a per diem, which is Latin for "twenty-dollar bill." This is what we use to buy good, magazines, and Mylanta. I had saved up a considerable portion of my per diems and was hoping to buy a pair of shoes upon returning to L.A. Unfortunately, I lost all my money that day to Winnemucca’s slot machines. Matt, on the other hand, who’d gotten us stranded there in the first place, won roughly the same amount that I lost. Gambling is only one of the many exciting pastimes we enjoy as rock stars on the road. We also find ourselves playing more videos games than was previously thought humanly possible. Video games are similar to slot machines in that you drop quarters into them, press little colored buttons, and walk out four to six hours later with far less money than you came in with. Our current favorite video game is NBA Jam, which all four of us can play simultaneously, venting our van-related frustrations by utilizing the Turbo Running and Super Slam-Dunking buttons. There’s not a lot of strategy involved. Interviews, an essential activity for every rock star, are a total disappointment. As a thirteen-year-old, I thought I would love talking to the press, giving my opinions and imparting some insight into my "artistic process" (if a thirteen-year-old can have such a thing). As it turns out, interviews basically consist of answering questions. "what was it like working with Ric?" (our producer) and "Did you get to meet Paulina?" (our producer’s wife). This has been going on three times a day, every day, for the six months that our album has been out. Only the foreign interviews are any fun, because they take everything I say completely seriously. This can be dangerous. For example, when I say that my biggest influence is Mick Mars of Motley Crue, I mean that in a less than literal sense. Sometimes I wonder how confused the European masses will be when they read the results of my 5:00 A.M. phoner with Jorgen Van der Boom of the Danish rock rag Super-Klang! Photo shoots, on the other hand, can be a lot of fun if (a) you don’t have any fresh zits and (b) you enjoy being told to jump up and down on a bed or to press your face against a window or to stand on a phone book so you’ll appear as tall as your bandmates. One of the best things about touring with Weezer is getting to know all the strange and exciting parts of the country I’d normally avoid at all costs. Recently, for example, we passed through Ashland, Oregon, which for no apparent reason is the Shakespearean capital of the world. Here it is not uncommon to run into small groups of men wearing tights, playing lutes, and singing “My mistress mine, where are you roaming?” Oh yeah—playing live rock shows is also part of being in a Touring Rock Band, albeit a small part. We’ve done it all, from playing Berkeley Square in front of a grand total of zero (0) paying customers, to rocking huge festivals alongside such great bands as Kansas and Loverboy. These big concerts come close to matching my adolescent dream idea;: thousands of screaming fans, legions of mutant homicidal bouncers, and an impressive wall of Marshall stacks. There are, however, a lot of things thrown at us while we’re performing: shoes, stuffed animals, sweaters... I haven’t quite figured out if this is a sign of affection or a sign that we should stop playing and quickly leave. Perhaps the single most remarkable day of the entire Weezer Experience was when we shot the video for "Undone—The Sweater Song." This was not a day we were looking forward to. Until they put our video into Buzz Bin, we all hated MTV. It seems like a shame to confine a song to one interpretation. For example, I’ll never hear Aerosmith’s "Cryin'" again without thinking about that lame chick bungee-jumping off the bridge. But our single was "shooting up the charts" and the record company thought it would be a "smash" if it had a video. We reluctantly assented under the condition that there not be one sweater, or anything resembling a sweater, anywhere in the video. The video department solicited “treatments” from at least twenty-five directors and sent us their ideas on a computer-printed scroll that stretched at least eight times around the considerable girth of Besty. And every single idea featured—you guessed it—a sweater. Whether we were playing in a sweater factory, knitting a gigantic sweater, or blowing up a sweater with five megatons of TNT, every director has his or her own vision of the great sweater. Nauseated, we almost gave up on doing a video—until we got a call from the messiah of videomaking, Spike Jonze. We hastily agreed upon a vague plan involving a blue room, a pack of dogs, and a couple of guys hanging upside down from the ceiling. That vague plan ended up costing us $60,000. Somehow, Spike took a video with no editing, no cast, and no set to speak of, and gave it a budget I would have thought purchased major explosions, extraordinarily beautiful women, and Hammer-like choreography. But no, we got an empty warehouse and a pack of dogs. Apparently $60,000 is only an average price for a video these days. When we started shooting, I had that terrible feeling of regret that only comes when one sees dollar signs floating uncontrollably skyward. Everything was going wrong. First of all, in order to achieve the slow-motion effect that makes the video so dreamy, we had to perform the song twice as fast as normal. This also means we had to sing like the Chipmunks. The cameraman had to run around the set twice as fast as it appears he did, while wearing the immense apparatus known as the Steadicam. Following him were a number of assistants, and behind them, Spike, yelling commands at the cameraman, the lighting guy, and me. The cameraman was yelling commands at the assistants, who were in turn yelling at each other. And then the dogs ran in. At double speed. Across the set from the dogs were the trainers, all yelling at the dogs. “Buffy! Scrappy! Here, Buffy! Good doggy!” The dogs got so confused by all the screaming and the monitors blasting the Chipmunks version of “The Sweater Song” that they turned around and ran directly away from the band. The trainers, in an amazing display of ignorance, told us we had to turn down our instruments because we were “scaring Scrappy.” So we pretended to turn down the instruments (which weren’t even plugged in) and continued on. Well, after playing “The Sweater Song” twenty times in a row at high speed, singing along in our best Chipmunks voices, with the cameraman, Spike, the assistants, and the dogs all running around us yelling and barking and charging us $60,000, it started to get a little depressing. In an act of great symbolism, one of the cute little dogs sauntered up and took a crap on Pat’s bass drum pedal. The dog’s trainer apologized profusely, but something snapped inside us. A dog had crapped on our $60,000 video. From that point on, our lip-synching wasn’t quite as accurate. Matt would make time out from playing bass to snap his fingers or to sit down. Despite the importance everyone placed on it, we didn’t care about our video anymore. We saw it not as a significant work of art depicting the anguish of Generation X, but as it truly is: a piece of dog shit. As you can see, being a rock star is all we thought it would be as thirteen-year-olds and much, much more. Even so, I have a few closing words of advice for the young rock-star-to-be. Be prepared for a lot of Taco Bell. Mylanta figures big in your future. Buy a Walkman to block out the nonsensical ramblings of your brain-dead vanmates, and advise them to do the same. Get used to writing letters, because you wont be able to afford phone calls when you get lonely. And you will get lonely. Sure you’ll meet two hundred people every night, but you’ll talk to each of them for approximately thirty seconds, and the conversation will generally consist of you answering the question “What was it like working with Ric?” And then you’ll be alone in your motel room or on somebody’s crusty floor with their crusty dog licking your face all night. Or you’ll be in the van, trying to kill the nine hours it takes to get to the next city, whichever city it is. This is life on the road, it’s not all cocaine, chicks, and limos. Rivers Cuomo is the lead singer of Weezer, who are visiting your town soon. |
Gallery
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Weezine Issue 1 - Winter 1994, page seven
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Weezine Issue 1 - Winter 1994, page eight
