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Back to the good life
Author: Mike Bell (Fast Forward Weekly)
Published: July 10, 1997
How I Spent My Summer Vacation by Rivers Cuomo.
I don't remember. Buy the album.
The End.
Take away the two hugely successful CDs and the constant touring, and set it in an exclusive Florida resort where he and his pals work as horny, young bus boys, and Rivers Cuomo's summer would make a great old-school teen T&A; flick. Booze, drugs and wacky antics all facilitating the ultimate university student goal of gettin' it on.
Studying for a degree in English, Cuomo looks forward to touring and experiencing the spoils of rock 'n' roll the way most of his classmates would anticipate an orgiastic Fort Lauderdale kegger.
"I'm having the most fun of my life and I'm paying for it with my health and my sanity," the hedonist says quite wearily. "I'm just having fun - totally wasted every night, sex every night and usually something really insane happens every night."
"Most of the year I'm in school and it's so boring then I come out on the road for summer vacation and I just go crazy. It's like a pressure cooker that builds up all year and then just explodes when it gets a chance."
Weezer's frontman and his three bandmates are getting their opportunity to bust loose again thanks to their sophomore effort Pinkerton which was released at the end of last year. The album, which is even catchier and more concise than their self-titled debut, plays like Cuomo's journal and chronicles the 'holiday' that the band ventured upon when their Captain America power pop songs like "Buddy Holly" and "Undone - The Sweater Song" hit it big all over the world.
"The songs are in the order that I wrote them so you can follow along and see how my attitudes are changing as I experienced rock stardom," Cuomo laughs.
It's his hormonic attitude towards the tenderer gender which gets the most treatment in his current batch of songs. "I'm a pig, I'm a dog / So 'scuse me if I drool," Cuomo grins in "The Good Life" and then he proceeds to illustrate his point - from the opening track "Tired of Sex" which lists a different woman for every day of the week ("Thursday night I'm makin' Denise / Friday night I'm makin' Sharise / Saturday night I'm makin' Louise..."), to the final poignantly deceptive track "Butterfly" in which he again calls himself a dog and apologizes to a lover (or lovers) for killing her trust and love in him by lying and deserting her.
But the remorse Cuomo shows is negligible in the large scheme of things. More telling of his attitude is the song "Across the Sea" which contrasts an innocent pigeon-English fan letter from an 18-year-old Japanese girl in the first stanza (Cuomo actually shares royalties with the girl) with the songwriter's own lascivious fantasies.
"That shows you what I think about my female fans," he jokes. "They're wondering about what my favorite food is and I'm thinking about them naked and touching themselves.
"I think a lot of women resent the way that I behave on tour. I'm not willing to hide the fact [that I'm out for sex]. I'm really blunt about it."
But those who believe in the power of karma can rest assured that for every notch "El Scorcho" has on his love gun, there are still women out there prepared to fight the good fight for their sisters who have succumbed to his charms. Quite literally.
In fact, as we carry out the interview Cuomo is nursing some bumps and bruises from an altercation the night before. Seems an old female acquaintance from his grade school days took exception to something he said when he took her backstage and introduced her to the rest of the band. What exactly it was that set her off, Cuomo can't quite remember.
"You know what though, I'm sure I deserved it for something - I'm a smartass and I'm always getting in trouble," he admits.
"This chick was huge... she was six feet tall, she was a dancer in high school and she just threw me against the wall and down on the ground and just started kicking me in the ribs with big boots on.
"I had just gotten totally baked in the parking lot so I was just in the mood to flow with what ever was happening, even if it was my own destruction. I am hurting today. It took all of my crew to drag her out. It was pretty amazing and stuff like that happens every night.
"Every night something crazy happens," he reiterates. "I don't know what it's going to be in Calgary...."
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