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I Want To Take You Home Tonight

Saturday, February 27, 2010

It’s true that the dedicated Weezer addict (worse for your health than weed, but probably better than meth) will perk his or her ears at the chance to hear any new scrap of music from the band — the older the vintage, the greater the excitement — but this here demo sparked a much more fervent reaction than average. Much like a paleontologist discovering a new fossil, the geologic timeframe from which the song specimen originates is just as important to its proper evaluation as its quality, and the slight ambiguity surrounding the birth date of “I Want To Take You Home Tonight” led more than just a few folks to jump the gun.

Rivers Cuomo himself debuted “I Want To Take You Home…” on a radio show he was guest-DJing in November of 2008 (a taste test from Alone II, which was then due out in just a little more than a month), commenting on how he had written it “New Year’s Eve 2002.” From here arose the question of whether he meant the night upon which 2001 became 2002, or the one upon which 2002 became 2003. If it were the former, this would place the tune squarely in the middle of his anti-coherent Maladroit phrase, and in such a context, a relatively fleshed out song like “Take You Home” would’ve been an anomaly almost impossible to explain. Caught up in the heat of the moment, the general tide of opinion gave into the temptation of wishful thinking (one of the deadliest and most prevalent symptoms of a Weezer fan declining into hardcore addiction), and went with the former — in which case, “Take You Home” was a rare gem in a sea of pointed mediocrity, perhaps even a sign that Cuomo truly has always ferreted away the best of his songwriting material in the post-Pinkerton era.

This explosion of optimism only lasted for a few hours, soon deflated by some particularly reasonable and clear-headed individual who must have checked the 4 and 5 Star Demos list and the Catalog of Riffs to confirm that this was actually a tune written on the very last night of 2002 — not its very first morning — which meant that Cuomo was already in the early stages of rediscovering his muse. (A process that, while successful in spots, still led to Weezer’s worst reviewed album, 2005’s Make Believe.)

Tough noogies. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s actually more interesting that this song marks an early stage of abandoning Maladroit and finding the path towards Make Believe, because it sounds to me like a cross-section between those two aesthetics. The pile-driving riffs, strophic repetition, and wailing metal guitar solo are all distinctly of the Maladroit locality — and yet the long-phrased melodies and awkwardly direct lyrics of the verse, the wordless ooh-ooh chorus, the curveball bridge and the general flair for the epic are all the kind of stuff you might find in the cherts and shales of Make Believe. It’s as if Cuomo hadn’t yet fully abandoned the “fuck you” antagonism of the former, but was searching to deepen it with the more focused gestures and emotional strokes of the latter.

The product winds up being proof that an album halfway between these two aesthetics might have been more satisfying than either of them on their own: despite its flaws, “I Want To Take You Home Tonight” could have been a standout track on either record. It begins quite bravely: over a simple drum-machine beat, Cuomo shouts, “I want to take you home tonight / And lay you down beside the fire / I’ve never seen your face before / I probably won’t see you no more.” The melody is simple but adequate, while Cuomo’s tendency to hold the last syllable of every line for a whole note — “toniiiiight,” “fiiiiire,” “befooooore,” “moooore” — starts grating fast. It’s a pretty unwieldy way to start off a song, and the listener is left grasping for something more substantial.

Thankfully, a fucking heavy one-chord guitar line crashes into the mix, and it’s just enough to sustain the rest of the verse. And yet Cuomo belts, “I hope I find another girl / That thinks that I am lovely too / But they don’t make those kinds of girls / And so I cry from me to you,” and the song continues to teeter on the edge of failure. But then the chorus hits — a stack of double-tracked Cuomos in wordless, choral despair, embellished in the upper register by some “whoa-oh-oh” counterpoint and Pixies-style guitar decoration — and things begin to click. The pure emotion, here unencumbered by the song’s regrettable lyrical content, is a real respite, and works well enough that by the time the song falls back into the verse (bridged nicely by a venomous stab of Mala-noodling), it’s got enough momentum to blow through some more embarrassing rhymes without much pain. That high-strung second guitar layers in again halfway through, carrying the tune back into the winning chorus, and for a moment it seems like the mixed-bag of a song is just good enough to be remembered more fondly than not.

But just then the bridge drops, and for a moment you’re elevated into true Weezer nirvana — by way of desperate, romantic hell. “Don’t go, I want you to stay / I need you to stay / And hold me,” Cuomo begs, while his interior monologue pleads a “Don’t go, don’t go” mantra from the bed of vocals panned deep in the song’s backdrop. Cuomo’s lead line even peaks into a spine-tingling apex of falsetto at its tail end, which comes beautifully crashing down against the dramatic dissonance of a heavily flubbed chord change in the guitar riff. I’m hard-pressed to find a trace of Blue anywhere in this song, but I’ll be damned if this bridge isn’t shades of Pinkerton — and goddamn is it good. It’s the kind of unexpected money-shot bridge that Cuomo had forgotten how to write somewhere around the turn of the century, but was just beginning to recall in 2002 with songs like this one and “I Was Scared.”

It’s a tough act to follow, but that angsty, bleeding heart guitar solo — halfway between a Green vocal melody solo and one of Cuomo’s better Maladroit demon-exorcisers — cleans up nicely, and helps propel the listener through another one of those so-so verses. That drive pushes the song to its fantastic conclusion, a repetition of the title lyric surrounded by echoes, counterpoints and harmonies. Which makes me realize that, on the whole, the vocal arrangements of this song might be one way to connect this song to The Blue Album after all: aside from a few songs on Pinkerton, “Take You Home Tonight” might be the most complex vocal arrangement since the band’s 1994 debut (although the lyrics and melodies of those vocals clearly lack in comparison). To its credit, “Take You Home” actually does a fine job of setting up 1992 lost classic “The Purification of Water” on Alone II — and that’s saying something.

Speaking of that record, the detailed anecdote Cuomo provides for the inspiration of “Take You Home” gives this song special significance. Essentially, Cuomo planned on flying solo to a Los Angeles rave headlined by DJ Paul Van Dyk to ring in the New Year, but found himself feeling sad, lonely, and ever contemplative of his musical career: wondering “how to write songs, what kinds of songs I should write, and whether or not my new songs were worse than my old songs.” Sitting on the curb and writing his ruminations in a pocket journal, Cuomo observed, “People love to dance, sure — and people like to rock. But everyone loves to feel the primal scream of song emanate from their chest, their lungs…I have to lead these people. I have to remind them how to sing.”

Just then, with cinematic timing, a New Year’s reveler recognized Cuomo on the street, accosted him to shout “SAY IT AIN’T SOOO-OOHWHOAOH-OH” in his face, then disappeared. Cuomo cited this moment in his notebook as a turning point, noting the very real fact that ‘A thousand “Keep Fishin’s” does not equal one “Say It Ain’t So.’”

It’s funny, then, that when Cuomo returned to his hotel room and picked up his acoustic guitar just minutes later, “I Want To Take You Home” was the first product of this hard-earned lesson. Ironically, this little epiphany of his — though grounded in a qualitative sentiment that would have made any Weezer fan nod in emphatic agreement — was tempered by his unfortunate conclusion, “That money-moment of belting from the chest is what I’m all about…If I don’t have that – I don’t have anything…It’s almost as if each artist really just represents ONE gesture. Whatever ornaments surround that gesture, the fact remains that there is ONLY one gesture that is important.” Indeed, “Say It Ain’t So” is at least 1000x the song that “Keep Fishin’” is, and the chest-belting chorus might be the emotional core and central impact of the song — but the fact remains that it would be nothing without the supportive “ornamentation” that Cuomo dismissed as inessential on this New Year’s Eve. The Al-Green-soul-meets-classical-beauty of the song’s opening guitar progression, the breathtaking falsetto harmonies of the verses, the overall perfection of the lyric sheet, the added guitar fills in the second chorus (and the mushroom-cloud swell of feedback that introduces it), the emotional swell of the bridge and the cathartic release of that brilliant guitar solo — ALL of these elements are essential to making “Say It Ain’t So” not only one of Weezer’s most enduring songs, but indeed one of the 1990s’. Remove any one of them, and the song would suffer fatally for it. Strip it down to its chorus and some verses as brittle and awkward as those of “Take You Home Tonight” and you’d have a song scarcely better than…well, “Take You Home Tonight.”

So that’s the great irony here, and one of the biggest creative roadblocks for post-2000 Weezer: Cuomo takes a step or two forward, only to take one or two behind (and maybe a couple to the side, for the hell of it). The Cuomo of the ’90s seemed to understand the import of a song’s overall sonic and lyrical construction, whereas the Cuomo of the ’00s seems dead-set on believing that there has to be one simple answer — “the money-moment of belting from the chest,” for example — and that once the answer has been found, it must be pursued to the utmost extreme (until it is proven that this answer is actually a false solution, is discarded, and the search for the next contender continues). Hence, we get a song FULL of chest-belting moments (and little else), a sword by which it both lives (the chorus, the bridge) and dies (the verses inbetween).

I wonder if that New Year’s reveler was sober enough to remember that he had sung a line of his favorite Weezer song to Rivers Cuomo himself the morning after. And I wonder whether or not, upon hearing the many belting choruses of Make Believe a few years later, he realized that his brief comment to Cuomo single-handedly defined one of the main aesthetic features of that entire album.

Filed in Alone II, The Grand Playlist | | Comments (19)

Paperface

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Looking at the original lyric sheet for the pre-Blue Album song “Paperface” is a pretty rare (and funny) treat. There is an aborted attempt at a verse that begins, “I played the game / I was all right / For a while / I didn’t fight,” which Rivers Cuomo scribbled over with an emphatic “CRAP” (made slightly ironic in hindsight, since those kind of lyrics aren’t too uncommon in his latter day songwriting). And there is what wound up becoming the song’s second verse, an autobiographical story of learning that it pays to be a fake in the competitive push-and-pull of Los Angeles — to “wear a paper face,” so to speak, which presents Cuomo with some struggles of authenticity (“How am I supposed to sing with this thing in my way?”). There are also two interesting marginal notes, a list labeled “Weezer” that was either meant to be a setlist or some early contenders for album material (notably including the unheard and fantastically titled “Spiderbitch”), as well as a note that says, “It sounds like something I heard before in a Spike Lee movie.”

The latter note probably isn’t a reference to this song, ’cause “Paperface” is a genuine slab of that angriest of white dude musics, punk rock. In fact, Weezer — then with Jason Cropper on guitar and backing vocals instead of his soon-to-be-replacement Brian Bell — have never attacked a recording with quite such unbridled energy ever again after the 1992 recording on the Kitchen Tapes demo. The guitars come surging right out the gates, and the larynx-lacerating scream that Cuomo and Cropper share moments later is more intense, primal, and unleashed than anything else ever to bear the Weezer name. Cuomo also indulges in a rare moment of third-person storytelling during that frantic first verse, crafting a thrilling vibe also unique in the band’s catalog before or since:

Amy Moore blew her top
Stole a car, shot a cop
Sped away — 2000 miles
Didn’t stop until she hit New Orleans
That’s all right
There’s just one thing…
Her wedding ring, or anything
She left behind, forgot to pack
How the hell is she gonna get it back!?

As the energy builds through the verse and into the narrative’s wry punchline, Cropper appears in the last couplet with some scream-shouted echoes that are pitch perfect (marking another distinction this performance has: Cropper vocals that actually fit!). The chorus offers no answer to that concluding question, but only the insane, blood vessel-bursting refrain: “PAPERFACE!!!! PAPERFACE!!!!” Fortunately, it sounds fucking great.

And so does that early Weezer acoustic arpeggiation that introduces the second verse (the same as the one originally written in Cuomo’s notebook), just before the electric comes roaring in with a pickscrape to tear the thing to shreds. The chorus reappears, twice as long as before, leading into a fantastic bridge that could make for a pretty good swing progression (if they slowed it down a few dozen BPM) but winds up collapsing on itself in an exhausted heap.

And this is where things really click. The acoustic reappears — this time shouldering the progression while a clean-cut electric moseys a melody around it — and Cuomo repeats the first verse half as fast as he did before. While the frenetic energy of the song’s opening made the mid-line pauses sound as though Cuomo was fighting to breathe through the bedlam, now he savors every moment of it, as if telling some sad bluesy tale almost too hard to believe. (I’d say it sounds like he’s the new east coast boy trying to fit in with the guitar-slingers in some Nashville bar, if it weren’t for what sounds like crickets in the background — so we’ll have to settle for a Nashville porch instead.) The bass, drums, and a third guitar add in for dramatic emphasis halfway through, but soon Cuomo loses control of the thing again, as the rhythm speeds up, Cropper challenging him with those scratchy back-up vocals of his. The chorus explodes once again, even more brutal than before, Cuomo testing out his vocal stamina as Cropper barks like a rabid dog and either of them pushes one of those wailing electrics into its death throes. It’s an intoxicating, lose-your-shit-or-protect-your-neck moshpit moment up until the very last chord.

This version — finally released in 2004 as a bonus track on the Deluxe Edition reissue of Blue — is a real winner, and the one song “Getchoo” has to answer to in the raw rock power department. But in 2007 we got to hear this song in another, earlier light on Rivers Cuomo’s Alone II compilation — that of its original home demo. (Curiously, this was issued as “Paper Face,” with an added space.) For the most part, it’s a similar arrangement, but performed with a beat machine and some truly fuzz-smothered guitars. The tempo just barely lacks the velocity it needs to work, though, and everything here — from Cuomo’s vocal to the beat machine — sounds tentative and unsure. There’s also a different (and seriously cheesy) bridge that features awkwardly melodramatic lyrics — “Let’s see what you have got inside / Underneath your paperface” — and some very deep-voiced counterpoint in the backing vocals, an effect that was never repeated in Cuomo’s recorded history outside of maybe “The World Has Turned And Left Me Here.” The bridge is far from the best part of the Kitchen Tapes version, but the one here just doesn’t fit lyrically or musically, and really weighs things down — especially when the bridge is reprised as the song’s anticlimactic outro. But to his credit, I don’t think Cuomo included it on Alone II for its quality, but rather its humor. My favorite part is his hilarious vocal intro to the song, in which he acknowledges the performance’s shit quality by bragging that it’s a scratch track.

Oh, I nearly forgot to mention that a new recording of this song was included on 2008’s Not Alone DVD. It’s an acoustic performance (not sure if Cuomo’s playing the guitar, but it’s got a surprisingly Brazilian bossa nova swing to it), which is interesting for a moment but ultimately ruined by an absolutely bizarre rendering of the chorus. It’s neat to hear Cuomo choose to revisit this song a decade and a half later, but this take is even worse than the original demo.

In short: wanna brush up on your Weezer archaeology and hear some strange little curiosities? Check out the solo Cuomo variations. Wanna get whiplash the fun way? Crank the Kitchen Tape.

Filed in Alone II, Bonus Tracks, Not Alone, Pre-Blue, The Very Best | | Comments (37)

The Story Of My Life

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

For years, “The Story Of My Life” was one of just several hundred unheard and unknown songs from one of Weezer’s many dark-age periods of apparent inactivity — one of the diehard fanbase’s favorite topics of speculation and obsession. This one comes from the period between 2002’s Maladroit and 2005’s Make Believe. It was a period rife with consistently delayed album release dates, breakup rumors, bustlings about a potential acoustic-only album that would find Weezer doing stripped down takes on previously released tunes while also focusing on new material, and a rotating lineup of folks not normally associated with the group (an uninterested Pat Wilson took a break from the band, leaving Josh Freese to have his first crack at the band’s drumstool; and Rivers Cuomo even did a quick and dirty jam session with the members of Sloan).

Even if most would agree that this protracted period of endless writing, recording, and soul-searching produced a very underwhelming album — Make Believe remains the band’s worst-reviewed disc — it is nevertheless one of the times in the band’s life in which fans are most interested. There are many reasons for that, but mainly because the unfinished scraps and ideas that have trickled out hint at a massive potential that the resultant album fell far of fulfilling. One such unfinished product is “The Story Of My Life,” an acoustic rehearsal demo curiously released as a preorder bonus track to 2009’s Raditude (an album that, perhaps not coincidentally, features the drumming of Freese). Although the recording history reveals this recording is from 10/05/03 (unless the 9/07/03 song “The Story” happens to be the same tune), we don’t know what the band’s intentions for it were: as official band historian Karl Koch has noted, the acoustic sessions at Rod Cervera’s studio that ended just a couple months prior (August 2003) were intended for that aborted acoustic album project, but we don’t know whether these Office sessions were also intended for that record or if they marked the beginnings of demos for the record that would become Make Believe.

Regardless, as far as just another name on a list of titles goes, “The Story Of My Life” is unassuming — surrounding songs with names as obtuse as “Ghosttown Life,” “Sun Off the Sea,” and “I’m Afraid (Lost Bread Crumbs)” seem to suggest much more interesting pieces. And yet, despite having apparently only been considered long enough for a single take, “The Story Of My Life” is a true gem.

The elegiac acoustic progression and haunting hummed melody that begin the song set the scene nicely for a tune of despair, and what might be the most legitimately “emo” lyrics Cuomo has ever written. In a rather beautiful melody filled with enjambed pauses (sort of like that of “Island In The Sun“), he begins: “You and me don’t / hang together / All we say is” — and here, Brian Bell adds in with a perfectly wan harmony — “Pleasant weather.” The chorus is just as direct: “Listen to me, if you have the time / I’m all alone in the story of my life / Nobody cares if I live or I die / I thought that you should know / Some people never know / I hope you never go away.”

It’s simple stuff, almost to the point of being amateurish — and that, when considered with the supremely melodramatic lyrics, is what I mean when I say this is about as emo a thing as Cuomo’s ever written (especially considering he’s a man in his mid-30s here). Judging by the lyric sheet, this could easily have been the second or third song written by a kid somewhere between 8th and 11th grade — which, judging by dreck like “I Don’t Want Your Lovin’,” is a perspective Cuomo (sometimes eerily) embraced during this period. But where the (pre?)adolescent lyrics of “Lovin’” couple with similarly trite music to a laughable degree, “The Story” bespeaks Cuomo’s maturity as a tunesmith: the melody, progression, and harmonies are all lovely, lovely things. Simple, too, but just right — as with that descending minor figure, lightly touched by subtle arpeggiations, that appears beneath the “you should know” post-chorus. Moreover, Cuomo and Bell’s vocals are delivered with believable emotion (something the predecessor Maladroit almost completely lacked, and the successor Make Believe frequently struggled with) — and that’s what makes the whole thing work.

The (curiously electric) guitar solo doesn’t hurt, either, as it spins longing circles around the heavy-heart downstrokes of the acoustic progression, however half-buried in this rough demo mix it may be. And the gutting outro — a wailed, anti-meditative mantra of, “I’m all alone!” — does everything it has to eliminate any residual doubt about Cuomo’s sincerity in this song.

Coupled along with other winners from the era like “I Was Scared,” “I Can Love” and “It’s Easy,” a song like “The Story Of My Life” indeed thickens the plot surrounding that 2003-2004 dark age in Weezer history. It’s enough to make a guy salivate for the forthcoming Odds & Ends compilation, even if he knows that alone can’t possibly sate his appetite.

Filed in Bonus Tracks, Demos, The Grand Playlist | | Comments (26)

Smile

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Although The Green Album is almost universally considered Weezer’s strongest offering of the past decade — some fans even ascribe it the “classic” status usually reserved for the band’s first two albums — there remains a consensus that the record is a bit of a missed opportunity. In 2002, not even a year removed from the record’s release, Rivers Cuomo himself wrote an email to Weezer fan Ridd Sorenson with the following thought:

Do you think it’s possible that the songs on Green are actually really good and that we just choked in the studio? I mean, not just me, but all four of us in Weezer. I feel like if we had managed to attack the songs with more conviction, people wouldn’t have noticed the things like impersonal lyrics or repetitive song structures as much.

It’s a bit crass of Cuomo to have chalked the blame up to “all four of us in Weezer” since Green is the Weezer album over which he asserted the most dictatorial control, but his concerns here ring true: simply put, the pointedly undercooked and dashed-off vibe of the album compromises the immense potential of its material. “Hash Pipe,” “Island In The Sun,” “Photograph” and “Knock-Down Drag-Out” are about as fleshed-out as they need to be, but there’s a definite sense of the incomplete and undeveloped in the other six tracks on the record (and not in an artful, Kafkan sense). It’s no coincidence that most Weezer fans can agree that until the fourth or fifth attentive listen of the record, about half of the tunes are hard to distinguish from one another.

For my money, “Smile” is the song that most embodies this deepest flaw in the album’s design. It is perhaps the standout melody on an album full of truly great ones, wedded to a chord progression to match; the lyrics, although a little obtuse (more on that later), are befitting and quite gorgeous; and the double-Cuomo, stadium-reverbed harmonies provide an epic majesty to the song’s delivery. But the arrangement is characterized by the same overdriven guitars, buried bass presence and barely-interesting drumming as is the rest of the record — and the super-compressed production quality is just as flat and sterile. It’s a beautiful song, but it feels like it’s smothering itself in the trappings of Green, which would explain why it takes much longer to enter the listener’s consciousness as a highlight track before, say, “Island In The Sun” or “Photograph” — though I would argue that the potential wrapped inside of “Smile” is much greater than that of either of those songs.

To wit? Well, we have two examples. The first comes from this montage of footage from the recording of The Green Album:

The clip is an odd and entertaining one (it’s very endearing to see the band acting like a bunch of teenagers at the sunset of their twenties, as if getting the last of their adolescent giggles out), but fast forward to the 7:15 mark and you’ll be treated to a rather muffled take of Cuomo playing “Smile” by his lonesome on the piano (an instrument that makes not one appearance on Green). Because of the atmospherics of the room, it’s instrumental as far as we can hear for the most of its duration, but the true beauty of those chord changes comes to light when you shear away all the chugging guitars and vacuum-sealed compression. At around 7:44 you can hear Cuomo singing very beautifully, and as he shifts into the bridge I hear a resemblance to “Hey Jude” that would otherwise be completely undetectable in the song. It’s a very moving little clip, and one that makes me hope that a pared down recording of this song exists in some form or another — and that we might eventually get to hear it.

Another example is a cover by the Japanese band Sumrus, which can be found on the Across the Sea tribute album. If you can get by the absolutely awful accent of the lead singer (“Oben tha door and let stuff come down / Ober tha warl you’re spinnin’ lound ‘n louw…”) and appreciate the brilliance of the arrangement, the fact that Weezer practically murdered this song’s potential in the studio becomes difficult to deny. The ethereal quality and slow build of the first minute is breathtaking — from angelic clean arpeggios to overlaid acoustic harmonies, feedback squall and sinewy bass, the song evokes a perfect blend between Weezer and Jesus and the Mary Chain before the drums even enter. The lovely brief instrumental break, the orgasmic Pinkerton shredding of the guitar solo, and the quiet piano outro are all relatively obvious moves, but they’re fucking perfect for the song, and if Weezer had spent the couple extra days they would’ve needed to come up with arrangements like these for this and the other five blatantly undercooked songs on Green, we would have had an album truly worthy of “classic” status. A take on this version performed with the mastery of a clear-headed Weezer and the beauty (and, erm, enunciation) of a Cuomo lead vocal would be absolutely stunning.

The MP3 of “Smile” as covered by Sumrus, for a limited time only!

I’d be remiss in not mentioning a few of the other versions of this song floating around out there. First of all, there’s an “Early Green Album Leak” version of “Smile” that goes by its original title “Inside A Smile.” But the title isn’t the only thing that’s longer, as it reveals that the concise 2:39 of the officially released version was once 3:21 — though I think the band were wise to trim the recording down to its essentials. Also noteworthy is that the album version lyrics of “Standing there deep in front of you / Take a look inbetween my eyes” was formerly “Standing there in the ocean blue / Take a look deep within my eyes,” and I can’t quite decide which I prefer: I like the obtuse quality to “deep in front of you” (what’s “deep in front of you” mean, exactly?), but the dream-like associations of standing “in the ocean blue” — while a little cliched — are quite nice, and do fit that epic/majestic vibe of the recording I mentioned earlier. Perhaps it would’ve been nice to have both on the record, alternating between the two, but that’s a point almost too minor to fuss over.

The band also posted several live versions of this song on their official website during the Extended Hyper Midget Tour of 2002, including the one from their appearance on HBO’s Reverb program. The solo’s slightly improved, it’s nice to hear Brian Bell on the harmony instead of a second Cuomo, Pat Wilson’s drums are a little more alive and it’s cool to have more bass presence, even if it’s Scott Shriner playing the thing and not Mikey Welsh. There’s also a pretty funny 12/02/01 take that begins with Cuomo asking the crowd for requests, and replying to the unintelligible din of screams with a simple, “Cool. This is probably not what you want to hear” — very typical of his Maladroit asshole phase (as is the directionless solo). Lastly, I have a performance from what I believe is a 2005 tour, in which guitarist Bell inexplicably takes to lead vocals and the piano for a rather cheesy, wanking performance that is far from the beautiful sound of Cuomo rehearsing it on piano some four or five years prior.

Lastly, I can’t get out of this post without mentioning the popular fan theory that this song is at least partially about oral sex. Lines like “The way you wanna wrap me up / Inside a smile” and especially “Water me, girl, and let me ease the drought” (really, what other context would that second one make sense in?) lend the claim some legitimacy…Making such a pretty ballad into a hidden ode to fellatio might be unprecedented in the Weezer canon, but it’s not something I’d put past the mischievous Cuomo of the early aughts. (For a blunter insight into this theory, listen carefully to the line “Your fine face I can’t take” and think of what it might be commonly misheard as…)

Filed in The Grand Playlist, The Green Album | | Comments (38)

Your Room

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

This song first surfaced during an SnS demo sessions dated 9/6/01 (bassist Scott Shriner’s first recordings with Weezer, if I’m not mistaken), and appeared many more times on the way to Maladroit, the album it failed to make. It was played with some regularity on the band’s Extended Hyper Midget Tour of late 2001, four instances of which were posted to the band’s official website as free downloads. From there, six studio demo versions of the song from the Mala sessions were released that same way, dated between 12/20/01 and 1/12/02.

For all the time that apparently was spent on it, it’s remarkable just how little “Your Room” developed or improved in its life as a Weezer song. Not that it was much of a song to begin with: it’s essentially two minutes of circular, destinationless riff-rock that has two haphazard vocal sections that we might as well call “the chorus” (they’re identical). Some versions are a little bit better than others, though the differences are largely immaterial — though if someone were to threaten violence in forcing me to listen to this song, I’d probably choose the 12/08/01 live take or the 12/20/01 studio version.

You’re coming up worlds away
There’s nothing that I can say
And all of these games you play
Will lead you to your room

That’s the lyric sheet in it’s entirety, and while I found a lonely comment on this song on SongMeanings by some guy convinced that this is a song about a girl who cheats, it clearly means fuck-all — whether you’re the listener or Rivers Cuomo himself. As for this here chorus section, the way the second line creates some tension with the chord progression (especially as Brian Bell parenthetically echoes, “I can say”) is a nice little musical moment that is just about the song’s sole redeeming factor in my book — far from sufficient for me to ever seek it out, but that moment would be one that could fit nicely in the context of a “real” (better, finished) song.

“Your Room” in a nutshell? Not good, not awful, and no real reason to exist.

Filed in Demos | | Comments (22)

Let It All Hang Out

Monday, January 25, 2010

Weezer’s career is one that lends itself to unexpected twists and turns: buttoned-down, multi-platinum power pop band of ‘94 goes for raw, rock’n'roll catharsis in ‘96; result tanks in every way imaginable, band goes off the radar for four straight years, widely presumed dead; ‘96 album meanwhile winds up amassing one of the most fervent cult followings in music history despite silence from band, inspiring their belated return; ‘01 comeback album is a slick and vacuum-sealed pop record that is in fact the exact opposite of what that cult following wants from the band, in turn trades much of cult fanbase for a platinum record’s worth of new mainstream fans; band re-embraces die-hard fans in following recording sessions by seeking their advice on everything from vocal performance to guitar solo melody, only to wind up making their least fan-pleasing record of all time; shortly thereafter forges a deeper love-hate relationship with those same fans and promises a new schedule of constant touring and one new album per year, but instead sinks back into anonymity for another 3 years before releasing ‘05 album with most obviously (and successfully) commercial-leaning single yet; etc, etc, etc.

Still, 2009’s Raditude represents the point at which many lifelong Weezer taboos became commonplace. Rivers Cuomo, always fixated exclusively on whatever he’s most recently written, began plunging into the vast archives of his own unreleased demos to resuscitate songs dated as old as 1997 for fresh recording. Cuomo, usually averse to collaboration, finally embraced co-wriitng — but instead of with the songwriters in his own band, he chose to work with name-brand pop stars and songwriters. Cuomo even finally made good on his 2002 threat for there to be real, honest-to-goodness rapping on a Weezer album — and yet instead of Cuomo himself, it’s the world’s biggest rapper contributing the flow and rhymes.

“Let It All Hang Out” is a strange crossroads of many of these firsts. Cuomo recently mentioned in an interview that the song’s main guitar lick is one he found on an old demo recording — lending strong support to the fan theory that part of this song is recycled from an unreleased 1999 composition also called “Let It All Hang Out.” And while the finished track does feature the talents of a rather popular rapper, it’s not in the form of a guest spot — rather, pop rap producer/former Kriss Kross manager Jermaine Dupri contributed the lyrics for the song, which accounts for the painfully awkward (and frankly unnecessary) name-dropping of none other than Jay-Z. (Dupri says he was drawn to Weezer in 1994 with “Buddy Holly,” because despite being a rock band, they were “singing about the kind of thing you’d hear on a rap record” — so it’s no coincidence that this marks the second time in Weezer history that the term “homie” appears in song.)

Other than that, though, I have quite the fondness for this athemic slab of big, dumb party rock. That wailing riff that introduces the song lends itself to air-guitaring, and the pummeling riffs, stuttered lyrics and simple man’s drawl of the verse remind of Everclear (good Everclear). The palm-muted guitar that layers in halfway through the verse is an obvious move, but still gets my hands back on my imaginary fretboard just the same. The chorus is a delight too, a great big sugar rush of heavy guitars, arena rock drumming courtesy of Josh Freese, and a real shouter of a singalong melody from Cuomo. The lyrics are simple as hell — “Tonight I’m leaving all my worries and my problems in the house / I’m goin’ out with my homies and we’re gonna let it / Gonna let it / All hang out, let it all hang out / It’s the last day of the weekend, boy, I need some release!” — but, like the simple riffs and stomping drum fills, it’s relatable in a made-for-the-masses kind of way.

Then there’s that bridge, which is a real test of good taste: over some neanderthalic chord changes, Cuomo shouts (with nary a melody for the words), “Me and JD, chillin’ in the shack! / Sharin’ Chiclets, from the same pack! / 180-proof Vitamin Water! / Energy flavor! / Take us to your daughter!” What’s more is a gaggle of girls from the local coffee shop (no shit) make an appearance to echo the lyrics of the build back into the chorus, sounding kind of like a mix between the annoying bitch on “Beverly Hills” and the children’s choir that Passion Pit have made into their indentured servants. The two name-brand name-drops (wonder if Cuomo got a kickback for that), the Dupri reference, the deeply out-of-character embrace of alcoholic escapism and the skirt-chasing of women half Cuomo’s age and well out of his marital vow bounds (Pinkerton did the whole creepy sexual frustration thing with elegance, damn it) all threaten to drive the average Weezer fan into a spasm of self-inflicted blows to the head — and yet I find this section the most infectious bit of the whole damn farce, tempted to shout along as if it’s something I actually give half a care about. Spiked Vitamin Water and crappy chewing gum ain’t my thing, I assure you — but there’s some kind of shit-stupid, stubborn self-belief going on in this track that actually makes it all work well enough to achieve its (rather modest) goals.

In the end, this is not what I want from Weezer in 2009 (or any year), and I’m well aware that this is not a lick different (or better) than the stupid party rock jams I used to bang in the car when Family Force 5’s debut album came out. But this is what Cuomo wants to do right now, apparently, and I have to say I like this a lot more than Cuomo being a loathsome asshole on something like “Space Rock,” or Cuomo feigning insightfulness on a crusty turd a la “We Are All On Drugs.” Hell, even for, say, one of Make Believe’s better tracks (“Peace,” “Hold Me“) I’m bound to listen to this one way more in the long run, because it actually goes for something completely unique in the Weezer canon and pretty much pulls it off. Consider it a litmus test: if you’re the type of person who can check his cred at the door, crank the fucking volume and sustain a little bit of whiplash in the name of having a good time, then you’ll be more than down to “Hang Out.” And if you aren’t that type of person — say, you’re the kind that despises this song as it represents the sort of hellish, ultra sell-out inversion of everything central to the Weezer you once loved, or maybe you just hate the thing on a strictly musical basis — well, then  I expect you to report to the comments section of this post immediately.

One thing that invariably pisses me off about this song, though, is the fuckawful mix. Someone recently brought to my attention (entirely coincidentally!) a clip of this song being played in Rock Band, for which tracks tend to be remixed to make each individual element shine through much clearer (since the kids are supposed to be playing along on their plastic instruments, of course). And indeed, each and every element is far more audible in this version of the mix, including an awesome lead guitar line that layers into the second half of the chorus (COMPLETELY and very regrettably buried in the mix on the album) and a great harmony line from Cuomo that further improves the chorus. The bridge sounds miles better too, and I think the progression actually might be a little bit different! Dear Weezer: release this version of the song — and “Rock Band”-style mixes of all of the records you’ve released this past decade!(Just make sure to skip on the fake audience track and the power-up sound effects.)

Filed in Raditude, The Grand Playlist | | Comments (53)

How Long

Friday, January 22, 2010

Some may complain ad nauseum about Raditude’s unprecedentedly pop-minded leanings, but Maladroit outtake “How Long” is proof that the idea of Top 40 pop/rock has produced far worse things in the mind of Rivers Cuomo. I have six versions of this song in my iTunes, dated between 12/19/01 and 1/09/02, and while there’s some variation in backing vocals and the guitar solo here and there, in any form it is one of the most offensive tunes in the Weezer catalogue. This is grating, in-your-face mall punk a la Good Charlotte or Yellowcard, and it really is amazing just how much everything here unabashedly blows, from one-dimensional lyrics like “Two plus two, me and you / Strolling down the avenue” — which isn’t even coherent, if you pause to think about it — to the unimaginative riffs, structure and arrangement. I’m listening to the fifth version I have of the song right now, and the pain I have come to associate with that opening guitar lead line is nigh unbearable. What’s scariest about this fucking thing, though, is that unlike certain Maladroit scraps — “Serendipity,” “Change the World” — there is a very obvious degree of effort and ambition in this song, and given the insulting worthlessness of the final product, that realization is a strange and haunting one. Perhaps someone has something interesting to say about “How Long” in the comments, but personally, I cannot bear to think of this one any longer.

Filed in Demos, The Very Worst | | Comments (46)

I Was Scared

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

When “I Was Scared” first leaked with the rest of Rivers Cuomo’s Alone II home demo volume in 2008, there was a fair amount of speculation revolving around how this song — an apology set to lyrics — might have been written for Mikey Welsh. Welsh was a bassist who, to paraphrase a 2005 Alternative Press Weez feature, joined the band when few would have dared (circa 1998, the “dark ages” of Cuomo’s songwriting and career) and was forcibly ejected in 2001, when Weezer weren’t at all a bad band to be (fresh off the platinum comeback Green Album). The long and the short of it is that Welsh had dwindled deep into an addiction to hard drugs and had lost enough weight to compromise his ability to continue; he checked into a rehab facility in Boston and the band moved on without him. Scott Shriner was named a temporary bassist for the second half of 2001, but the band never offered Welsh his place back and Shriner went on to become the third and final bassist for Weezer. Welsh’s comments on exactly how Cuomo explained his severance rationale to him have been strictly off-record, but the reporter who wrote that same AP cover feature has said it is “more fucked-up and insensitive than [one] could possibly imagine.”

As tends to be the case, the fans’ speculation proved unfounded: Cuomo’s Alone II liner notes specify how, after a Vispassana meditation retreat in 2003, he felt compelled to write a song about an incident in high school wherein he sheepishly allowed his brother Leaves to get beaten up by a gang of bullies. This had apparently caused Cuomo a level of subconscious guilt for some 15-or-so years, which he finally exorcised in writing this buoyant pop tune.

It’s an interesting one: the song’s opening bassline falls somewhere between the Pixies and blink-182, and the first verse is largely spoken word — which, bolstered by the occasional half-buried falsetto embellishment and an upper-register harmonic chord on the electric guitar, actually works. Delivered in a conversational and confessional tone, the lyrics work wonderfully:

Listen to me, I’ve got to clear the air
There’s something I’ve held way down deep inside all these years
You always were a friend
You always trusted me
But now I must admit that I was not trustworthy

“Air” and “years,” “me” and “trustworthy” — actually some neat rhymes there! The chorus does the predictable Weezer power-pop-explosion thing, but is floated by an impassioned delivery on the lead vocals (“I was scared! I was terrified!” — kind of like “First I was afraid, I was petrified,” now that I think about it…) and a nice wall of “ahh-ahh” backing vocal chords. The post-chorus 180 into a miniature 4-bar guitar solo is a nice surprise, too.

The song’s best moment is a surprise even greater, though: after the second chorus, the song scales into an absolutely magnificent bridge, building against the cascading weight of downstroked guitars, lush backing vocal counterpoint, and a lead vocal that not only drips with emotion — “Though I loved you, I was so afraid” — but makes a soaring, spine-tingling reach into a nigh-falsetto melody. The song itself is quite solid, but this brilliant moment — only slightly hampered by Cuomo’s subpar drum skills — is one of the best to come from his pen and heart ever since Geffen declared Pinkerton a lost cause.

The song’s mostly done all it does by then, though the last verse is no slouch: there’s a very cool, dramatically out-of-key guitar chord that comes halfway through, and Cuomo’s awkward, rushed-to-fit-in-the-meter promise that “I might get my ass beat, my throat slit, and my fingers hacked / But I’ll never miss another chance to watch my brother’s back, and I got yours!” is not only adorable but also the kind of heart-on-sleeve honesty and informality that once colored some of his best lyrics. The song rocks and rolls to a triumphant conclusion and we feel that Cuomo is all the better for it.

Why this song didn’t make the cut for Make Believe is hard to say — it is, at least in this form, a far more convincing apology song than the version of “Pardon Me” that we all know, and seems to be very poppy and accessible while also retaining a lot of character and musical complexity. In any case, its placement on Alone II is something to celebrate, and in my opinion, is proof that Vispassana really breathed fresh creative life into Cuomo rather than drained it of him. The only thing it leaves me wanting is an Alone III and an apology song that is, in fact, for Welsh — I think you know he deserves it, Cuolmes.

Filed in Alone II, The Grand Playlist | | Comments (42)

It’s Easy

Monday, January 18, 2010

Folksy, simple, and all around a very nice little ditty written and sung by Weezer guitarist Brian Bell. Although this song was released as a bonus track for The Red Album (the official coming-out party of Bell, bassist Scott Shriner, and drummer Pat Wilson as lead vocalists on a Weezer record), the performance here is actually culled from one of the many acoustic demo sessions held for 2005’s Make Believe. Apparently per the urging of band archivist Karl Koch himself, “It’s Easy” belatedly became one of the few pre-Red examples we have of non-Rivers Cuomo songs being pitched and seriously considered for Weezer (joining the ranks of Bell’s “Yellow Camaro,” Wilson’s “Reason to Worry” and “The Story Is Wrong,” and original bassist Matt Sharp’s Blue-era ”Mrs. Young”).

As the only recording we have of it (and evidently the best one there is), “It’s Easy” is a breezy acoustic jam built on a couple acoustic guitars and an acoustic bass. It’s a very warm and organic arrangement, with a beguiling little run up and down the fretboard at the end of the progression. Bell’s Tennessee boy lead vocal fits the bill perfectly, especially with such breezy and agreeable lyrics: “Let’s not be mean to each other / There’s no need for name-callin’ / There’s no need for chain-ballin’ / Let’s be nice, babe, it won’t kill us.” Hard to argue with that, especially with Shriner and Cuomo harmonizing behind him oh-so-fine.

The chorus finds Bell catching his girl in a lie, placing the song in league with his Red Album cut “Thought I Knew” — which many Weezer fans grumbled was far inferior to “It’s Easy,” as Weezer fans are wont to do. I see where they’re coming from, but considering that “Thought I Knew” sounded quite nice in demo form as well, perhaps it’s best that we never got an arrangement of “Easy” with laser drums and million-dollarproduction.

But surprisingly enough, Weezer might have agreed in retrospect: for the band’s 2008 AOL Sessions in support of Red, “It’s Easy” got an airing instead of “Thought I Knew.” It’s a nice performance that trades in a few of the demo cut’s harmonies for the luxury of having Rivers beneath a beret and behind a cocktail drumkit. Bell plays even more into the victimized chorus with a new couplet: “All this time we could have got along / Instead we bitch and moan, you done me wrong!”

Oh, and Wilson’s extended guitar solo is a nice added touch. The band seems to enjoy playing it quite a bit, so perhaps it really is a shame this tune wound up being pushed into the margins.

Filed in Bonus Tracks, Demos, The Grand Playlist | | Comments (20)

The Bomb

Friday, January 15, 2010

Rivers Cuomo’s home demo cover of “The Bomb” ain’t much to revisit, but it sure is interesting for a single listen. First of all, this is a pre-Blue era cover of an Ice Cube song, of all things — the closing track from his 1990 West Coast rap magnum opus AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted.

That alone tells us a lot: we know Cuomo’s influences of the time heavily leaned in the direction of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, his ’80s metal heroes, a bit of classical and the then-contemporary grunge explosion (which, as this was recorded Fall 1992, was in full effect). In the Alone liner notes Cuomo recalls how he and his original bassist Matt Sharp tried to avoid traces of any “funky” influence in Weezer, being of the opinion that white bands should avoid trying to sound like black musicians at all costs — but the fact that he was interested enough in early gangsta rap to record a cover of this song is significant, not only suggesting that in those days Cuomo had a wider palette than was readily apparent, but also foreshadowing the future integration of hip-hop influences in Weezer’s music. (If this blog had footnote capabilities I would use one here to mention two faults in Sharp and Cuomo’s logic: the first being the fact that rock’n'roll itself, although a predominantly white genre for the past few decades at that point, was originally one of black invention; and the second being that very palpable traces of soul and even the usptroked guitars of reggae dominate the verse of “Say It Ain’t So,” one of the best songs Cuomo has ever written. Oh, footnotes; if only…)

Ahem. As for the cover itself, it takes some pretty interesting liberties with the source material. Cuomo chops down the 3:25 runtime of the original to a paltry 1:18, and distills the Bomb Squad production team’s heavily layered collage of samples into a spare mess of sloppy drumming, a rumbling one-note bassline, some squiggly synths and a severely cracked-out funk guitar solo. And of course, there’s Cuomo’s rap delivery, which boldly attempts to flow at a pace considerably faster than that of Ice Cube himself. The end result sounds a bit like an early Beastie Boys demo, with some punk rock DIY aesthetic and Cobainesque screams tossed in for the hell of it. A kind of audio purgatory, if you pause to evaluate it, but a compelling curiosity nevertheless.

In short, “The Bomb” is the kind of personal Cuomo ephemera that represents the lighter side of the Alone series — and while it’s not something likely to garner repeat rotations, it’s definitely an artifact worth preserving.

Filed in Alone, Covers | | Comments (6)