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Pop fan alert!
Author: Dan Kening (The Plain Herald)
Published: November 15, 1996
Weezer's dropped the candy tunes for some male-macho despair
Weezer's Rivers Cuomo is the thinking person's rock star. The songwriter behind such clever garage-pop hits as "Buddy Holly" and "Undone (The Sweater Song)" from the Los Angeles band's two million selling 1994 album "Weezer," Cuomo is currently balancing the demands of rock stardom with undergrad classes at Harvard University.
Cuomo and Weezer, who play a sold out show Saturday at the Riviera Theatre in Chicago, are back with an ambitious new album, "Pinkerton," that ought to silence critics who dismissed the first album as nothing more than candy-coated "fluff." It also provides additional evidence that Cuomo, who studied the Beach Boys' music as a teen, is the Brian Wilson of his generation.
"Pinkerton's" 10 cuts form a song cycle chronicling the last two years of Cuomo's life. While it was a period that saw Weezer's star soaring professionally, it was also a period that Cuomo, 25, has described as coinciding with his struggling with "the shadier portion of my masculine side." The songs display a tortured soul struggling with conflicting emotions about love and sex and his own sense of identity.
"Being honest is the only way I know how to write songs," Cuomo said in a phone interview from his Vancouver hotel room. "It's not like I have any choice in the matter. And the only thing I know how to write about is my shortcomings."
Indeed, Cuomo is ruthlessly honest about himself and his foibles on "Pinkerton." The album opens with the ironic "Tired of Sex," in which Cuomo lists his recent conquests before asking, "Why can't I be making love come true?" On "Why Bother" he lists all the reasons not to get romantically involved: "Why bother, it's going to hurt me/It's gonna kill when you desert me."
"Getchoo" presents Cuomo as pretty much of a heel, while "The Good Life" is an ironic commentary on rock stardom. Bound to be controversial is "Pink Triangle," in which Cuomo falls in love with a lesbian: "Everyone's a little queer/Why can't she be a little straight?" The album ends with "Butterfly," in which after obtaining the object of his attentions, he gets cold feet and takes a hike.
"When I started writing these songs, I really wanted to do some thing with them other than a standard collection of pop songs," Cuomo said. "I was thinking of everything from musicals to song cycles. I tried a couple of different things and had to scrap them be cause they were too difficult."
"So what I ended up doing was going back to writing songs about myself. As I noticed that my life had a kind of dramatic curve to it I figured I would just put the songs on the album in the order I had written them to create a song cycle. And that in turn influenced how I wrote the rest of the songs."
Cuomo wrote the album's first four songs before Weezer's first album was released. Then came a year and a half of nonstop touring during which he wrote nothing at all. Finally, while taking time off from the band which also includes guitarist Brian Bell, bassist Matt Sharp and drummer Pat Wilson to attend Harvard, he began to write the bulk of "Pinkerton."
"My assumption was always that if I became a rock star, I would then be incredibly happy for the rest of my life," he said, "Of course, that never happens. You become isolated and realize that not only are you still lonely, if anything you're even more lonely."
Cuomo says his new songs also show the effects of an unusual childhood, growing up in an ashram in Connecticut with parents who were first practicing Buddhists and later Hindus.
"It affected my ability to accept the masculine parts of my personality," he said. "That environment was very feminist. I wasn't allowed to play with toy guns or play tackle football. Boys and girls were taught that they were the same, kind of sexless."
"So now that I'm in my twenties, I'm having to accept the tackle football and playing with guns urges in myself. And that's what I'm dealing with on this album, That's the story of 'Pinkerton.'"
It's anyone's guess how "Pinkerton" will rate with those who identify Weezer solely with the light hearted, award-winning video for the first album's "Buddy Holly," which featured the cast of "Happy Days." In fact, the standard rock critic rap on "Weezer" was that it was the product of a band barely out of the garage who wrote light weight, if catchy, tunes that appealed only to teens.
A similar review in Rolling Stone resulted in Cuomo rejecting a later interview request by the magazine. "With the first album, I was obsessed with the sound of great three-minute pop songs," he said. "So people just assumed there wasn't any substance to our songs. But I'll defend all those songs as having a lot of substance, even though they may sound like fluffy pop songs."
Despite a $2 million trademark infringement lawsuit against Weezer and their record company DGC Records by Pinkerton Inc., "Pinkerton" appears hit bound. The first single, "El Scorcho," is receiving major airplay, and its video is logging plenty of plays on MTV.
Just back from Japan, Weezer is on the road solidly until the end of the year and will return to the Chicago area Dec. 1 for Q-101's "Twisted III" Christmas concert at the Rosemont Horizon.
So is Rivers Cuomo feeling a bit more upbeat these days? "I just hope people don't listen to this album and think I'm completely sexist and misogynist in an evil way," he said. "I'm not really sinister - I'm more pathetic than anything, really."
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