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Intro

Friday, February 13, 2009

It’s a nice coincience that we get to discuss this track just around the time that MS posts his new interview with Weezer friend, webmaster and historian Karl Koch, because in truth, this kickstarter for the band’s quasi-official, live-recorded Summer Songs 2000 album is more the work of Koch than anyone actually in Weezer per se. In fact, it might as well be accredited to Koch’s sound collage project Karlophone, because that’s what this is. It samples perhaps almost exclusively from Brady Bunch dialogue and TV soundtrack, resulting in a whole lot of disorienting commotion and a bit of lower-school humor and narrative (the father’s voice is manipulated to say, “I don’t like girls…I like Greg.” His wife replies, “That isn’t right!” and so he concludes, “I don’t like Greg”). I’m really not sure what purpose it was meant to serve or what anyone in the band thought of it, since it feels rather pointless and doesn’t segue into “Modern Dukes” particularly well. The only thing ostensibly relating to Weezer or the songs on this slapdash, free download-only “album” is the beginning quotation, which ramblingly states, “With the way songs are nowadays, you can’t understand the words well enough to understand half of what they’re saying anyway” (paraphrase). This might be a reference to how it’s often hard to make out the lyrics on the songs that follow (or on either of the prior Weezer records, really), and how the band would also switch up lyrics almost every night to prevent the audience members from learning the words based off the previous night’s fan-made and Napster-distributed bootleg. But that hardly justifies its existence, or its awkward placement as track 1 on a disc otherwise full of hastily edited live recordings.

In all, it’s a pretty harmless tune that time has largely forgotten (hell, sometimes it seems like people have forgotten most of SS2K period!). Not particularly discussable nor interesting, though perhaps good for a onetime laugh.

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Longtime Sunshine

Thursday, February 5, 2009

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve put off writing this one for quite a while now. When it came up in the song randomizer, I knew there would be trouble. “Longtime Sunshine” is just one of those songs that is a real pain to do justice (ahem). In fact, I’m not quite sure it can be done.

For his part, Rivers Cuomo might agree. Evidence suggests that “Longtime Sunshine” has been weighing heavily upon his mind ever since he wrote and demoed it in January 1994, on a tape that included embryonic versions of other greats like “Tired of Sex,” “Susanne,” “Waiting On You,” “Why Bother?” and “Getchoo” (as band historian Karl Koch noted, “quite a crop!”). When it came time to start sequencing the never-completed Songs From The Black Hole rock opera, “Sunshine” was placed in the first iteration of Cuomo’s vision for the project, which is now referred to as “Tracklist 1.” While what Cuomo used for the mockup of the album was the original January ’94 demo, the tracklist also included a “Reprise” version, the origins of which are unclear. However, the rather personal and earthly matters discussed in the song’s lyrics don’t exactly jibe with The Black Hole‘s interstellar narrative arc, which apparently became obvious to Cuomo soon thereafter: the song was dropped from the project’s second draft, “Tracklist 2.”

So began a long history of “doesn’t quite fit” for the prodigal “Longtime Sunshine.” In August of 1995, Weezer entered NYC’s Electric Lady Studios for the first of their second album’s sessions. In conversation, Cuomo appeared still bent on the Black Hole concept, but actions spoke louder: the first songs that were laid down were done as they were originally and, as Koch put it, “no story, no theatrics, no characters.”

What happened in these sessions is rather fascinating — perhaps especially because no fan has ever heard any of it. First, Weezer laid tracks for “Waiting On You” and “Blast Off!,” then attempted the first ever full-band “Longtime Sunshine.” From there, they recorded a “special ‘coda’ version experiment” of “Sunshine,” which Koch described thusly:

This started as “Longtime Sunshine,” but after the first verse, lyrics from [“Waiting On You” and “Blast Off!,”] plus others [including] “Why Bother” were recorded on top of it to create a cool overlapping medley, with the different songs vocal parts meshing together. It was then mixed as a fade-out. I think Rivers was trying to emulate a technique used in classical music, where all the major elements of a musical piece are briefly recalled at the end.

In any event, it sure sounds like one hell of a closer for a hypothetical album. The band also did a second, “regular” take of “Longtime Sunshine” on September 6th. Shortly thereafter, Cuomo shipped off for his first term of Harvard, an experience that would put the final nail in Black Hole‘s coffin while also giving full birth to the Pinkerton concept. Although “Longtime Sunshine” fits Pinkerton‘s heart-on-sleeve template much better than that of the erstwhile space rock opera, it still would have had some trouble finding a way onto Pinkerton without disrupting its delicate and masterful flow — and so, away went “Sunshine,” gone away for another day.

That day wound up being roughly two years later, long after Pinkerton had come and gone. Cuomo was depressed by the record’s commercial failure, and began seeking ways to cheer himself up through his music. Most of the September 1997 tape that Cuomo recorded on his DA-88 in his Boston abode consisted of sketches for his upbeat and carefree alt.country sideproject, Homie. But, curiously, here “Longtime Sunshine” reappears, closing the eight song tape. While Cuomo played all the instruments on that string of demos, a rehearsal tape from that same fall of 1997 reveals that the full Homie band attempted “Longtime Sunshine,” done up with an extra dash of southern sun and country twang.

However, the Homie project soon disbanded as Cuomo’s fickle interests swayed back to resuscitating Weezer. No Homie version of “Longtime Sunshine” has surfaced and, as far as we know, this was the last time the song was seriously considered for a viable Cuomo project.

But then, there are little scraps of evidence that suggest the song never quite left his backburner. Most intriguing is a brief clip of Cuomo showing the tune to director Spike Jonze on the set of Weezer’s video shoot for Green single “Island In The Sun,” playing the piano-based song on an acoustic guitar (!). The clip (go to about 0:55) is brief and muddled, but the chorus (as well as the emotion in Cuomo’s delivery) is unmistakable — indeed, it’s a bit odd to see Cuomo, fully coifed in his most manufactured and stylized Green persona, performing one of the most emotional and personal lost gems in his entire life’s repertoire. But it remains very reassuring (and interesting) nevertheless, to see that this song was still on Cuomo’s mind as late as mid-2001.

Cuomo leaked his original demo to fans himself via the Internet around the same time, but his biggest stamp of approval came in late 2007, when that same familiar version was finally released on his first home demos compendium, Alone. Since he sums the song’s origin up quite nicely (and we rarely get Cuomo’s own in-depth analysis of a track), I’ll quote his liner notes here:

In the midst of struggling to make it as a rock star in Los Angeles, I started longing for the safety, peace, quiet, simplicity, and family structure of my New England childhood. I thought back to one of my favorite memories, lying in the bottom bunk, my brother in the top, in our bedroom in our farmhouse in Eastford, Connecticut, in the hot, hot, summer, 7, 8 p.m., sun still up, but having to go to sleep because it’s our bedtime, one of those big box fans blowing, and my parents, Ma and Steve, sitting at our bedside, singing an old hippie song to us, to calm us down and ease us into sleep, “May the Long Time Sun Shine Upon You.”

I borrowed the hook phrase from this song and set about writing my own song to capture my feelings of loss and longing. I wrote it on my mom’s piano when I was back in Connecticut at Christmas. My mom had a piano because I told her that the house seemed too quiet and I was worried about her living in silence, all alone after my step-dad left. So that is how “Longtime Sunshine” came to exist.

When I recorded this track, I had just bought a clarinet and figured out how to play a few notes. Because of my poor embouchure it sounds very much like a kazoo.

In a lot of ways — the clarinet, the quotation of another song, the conversational tone and barebone honesty — this song is a sort of a spiritual cousin for its later Pinkerton contemporary, “Across the Sea” (if you’re curious, the quotation in “Sea” is the melodic figure of the intro clarinet; take a quick listen to the beginning of the Beach Boys’ “You Still Believe In Me”). But while the climax of that song practically seethes unfulfilled hormones and brokenhearted frustration, “Longtime Sunshine” breathes a more melancholy air. Everything about its design feels open, organic. The slow, subtle build into the second verse feels like nature, a bright autumn afternoon the golden leaves and dark green grass of which seem to foreshadow the “east coast college with some history” where Cuomo would wind up a year and a half later. Though he pines for it here, the irony is that once it became a Harvard reality, it would only make him feel that much more miserable. And that hopeless longing is what makes this all ache and bruise so poignantly: the simple half-notes bassline that enters with the chorus, the McCartneyesque piano chords, the warm breeze clarinet solo that stutters inelegant beauty. Making the insight makes me feel like an over-analytical English professor, but the way it hobbles reminds me of the limp Cuomo once had, as due to his 1.75-inch leg length difference he had yet to get treated. It’s a painfully cute and helpless little clarinet, full of all the endearing inadequacy that, in various ways, made early Weezer’s work so relatable and emotionally resonant.

The drums enter, and Cuomo’s thinking of wood stoves and living rooms now. “Sometimes it doesn’t seem so bad; settle down with a good woman,” he sings, so unencumbered by the expressive restraints of a traditional pop rhyme scheme that it’s clear the thought of accessibility never once crossed Cuomo’s mind when he took the pen to this particular page. “Leave this lonely life behind,” he continues, snapping us out of his daydream and back into the pain and reality of the present. “Forever and ever.”

The second chorus is heaven — a comfortably cool cut of shade beneath a big New England oak tree. Cuomo opens the hi-hat, doubles the vocals, then triples them with the return of that tearjerking clarinet. It solos again, a little more eloquent this time, giving way to the bridge that encapsulates the driving force of the entire song:

Sometimes I wanna get in a car
Close my eyes and drive real fast
Keep on goin’ till I get someplace
Where I can truly rest.

What happens next is probably the most gorgeously simple climax of any Weezer song. It’s only a repetition of the chorus, an inobtrusive organ added behind it, Cuomo singing a little louder and higher than before. A second, slightly-off-the-beat Cuomo vocal adds in, the drums do some subtle fills, and then it all comes slowly to a picturesque stop. The piano descends, the sun sets, the clarinet waves goodbye.

In a sense, Cuomo is wise for never having released any Weezer or studio variation of this song. As previously noted, it would’ve disrupted Pinkerton‘s flow; and while it would’ve been the crown jewel of The Green Album several exponents over, that’d be precisely the problem: it’s just so much above and beyond the rest, it would have blown Weezer’s cover. (Which they did a good job of maintaining. Riding a wave of second coming hype and making the critics feel as though they had missed the point the last time around, Green fared quite nicely with the critics for a 28-minute CD  that essentially rehashed the same idea over the course of its brief runtime…Then again, when the last record you had to review was by Limp Bizkit…) There’s also the simple fact that, as it is, it’s pretty much perfect: perhaps more than any other song, Weezer’s hope of doing it justice in the studio was (and remains) pretty much nil. But now, thanks to the lovely Alone series, it has its place in the sun, beautiful little scars and all.

That said, it’s a damn shame the fans haven’t heard the other versions of the song in existence. The three Pinkerton recordings would be fascinating to hear, especially the “coda” version, which sounds like a mid-’90s Weezer fanboy’s wet dream. Then there’s the matter of the Homie “country version” demo and rehearsal tapes, perhaps the tapes of an unfinished Homie album, and whatever other versions may have been attempted down the road, considering Cuomo was playing it for people like Spike Jonze as late as 2001. My only prayer is that, when all is said and done, the =W= diehards crazy enough to read (or for chrissakes, write) this blog regularly get a chance to hear it all.

Filed in Alone, The Very Best | | Comments (113)

Hold Me

Monday, January 19, 2009

Shortly after midnight on March 6, 2003, Rivers Cuomo logged onto a Weezer fan forum to speak directly with his most dedicated acolytes. It might sound like a shocking move for a rock star and celebrity of his stature, but it was far from the first time he had done such a thing. Indeed, Cuomo had begun direct online correspondence with his fanbase as early as 2001, and continued making appearances on various Weezer boards throughout 2002’s rigorous tours and recording schedules. But, it was the first time he had made such a move in many months, and soon the Rivers Correspondence Board (an unofficial site that got its name after Cuomo’s first appearance) was alight with hurried and excited discussion once more. After all, Cuomo had come to share a song — freshly written and home-recorded just hours before.

The lo-fi, acoustic-and-vocals performance of “Hold Me” fit the song’s spirit quite nicely. Like its recording and performance here, it is a barebones, heart-on-sleeve song that is direct, unadorned and confessional. The simple guitar riff might be warmly familiar to listeners for any number of reasons — it’s the same progression as the (otherwise wildly different) Pinkerton rocker “Why Bother?,” or the fantastic Built To Spill song, “Strange” — and the lyrics are, in their entirety:

I am terrified of all things, frightened of the dark
I am.
You are taller than a mountain, deeper than the sea
You are.
Hold me
Take me with you ’cause I’m lonely
I was closer to you back then, I was happier
I was.
I am cold…

If viewed as the work of a man who once showed signs of masterful and eloquent lyricism, these could be viewed as an elementary disappointment. But as the first signs of life after 2001’s convey-belt, ad-lib love songs (The Green Album) and 2002’s aggressively nonsensical Maladroit, this kind of emotional straightforwardness might have sounded like something of a revelation — especially when sung so achingly, with such honesty. Not surprisingly, the board regulars responded very favorable, to which Cuomo was typically untrusting. (“i don’t believe those of you that say you like the song…those of you that actually do like the song will hate it in a week.”)

In any case, he spoke of “cobbling a band together” and recording a “rock version” later that day. He would instead re-emerge that night with the offensively bad “I Don’t Want Your Lovin’,” as if to keep people from getting their hopes too high. But, true to his word, he reappeared a few days later with a 100-second clip of an electrified, full-band version of “Hold Me” fresh from the studio. His distribution of this version would mark the final time Cuomo has, insofar as we know, communicated directly with fans by means of a message board.

The so called “electric clip” is quite nice. It begins with the song’s emotional climax: a burning heart guitar solo (that does sound a little improvised and unfinished), followed by Cuomo’s repetition of the song’s emotional core, “Hold me / Take me with you ’cause I’m lonely.” His vocal performance is a little lacking, but gets the idea across well enough; notably, this is the only version of the song to conclude the way it does here, with Cuomo repeating the word “lonely” before it all collapses into a wash of feedback (perhaps the closest thing to Pinkerton that fans had heard since, well, Pinkerton). As Cuomo noted on the board, it’s also interesting because it’s one of the few “Weezer” recordings that is hardly Weezer at all: Cuomo, Scott Shriner on bass, and “3 other dudes” taking care of the rest. Brian Bell was doing his own thing at the time, but Cuomo notes that he’d probably be back soon (“this guitar player was GREAT though”). Pat Wilson’s absence was not mentioned, perhaps still a sore subject since Wilson had a few months prior told Cuomo to get back in touch with what he loves about music before he gets back in touch with his drummer.

On that note, “Hold Me” sounds like an attempt to do just that, although not entirely self-directed or successful. This was one of the first “songwriting experiments” Rick Rubin had given Cuomo (he would go on to produce the subsequent album, Make Believe), and his influence is very apparent. As Cuomo himself noted on the board:

rick hates @#%$. he loves extremely simple, emotionally direct words.
bring it on.
there’s hope for me yet.
thank frickin’ god.

For all that hopefulness, though, Cuomo figured he didn’t quite hit the mark with “Hold Me.” At one moment he decides that it is “definitely gay,” but still “cool.” The next, he takes a more self-deprecating analysis of the song, and an interesting look into his own muse: “well, i know [‘Hold Me’] isn’t great, but it doesn’t totally blow. i need to get more of that romantic longing back in the melody…hopefully i’ll write some more satisfying choruses that will stand on their own. *sigh*”

This quotation is interesting for a couple of reasons. First of all, he identifies the broad, winding melodies of old school Weezer as “romantic longing,” and goes on to state that it “only happens when i’m infatuated with a girl,” and that he can’t see that happening anytime since he is “so totally over girls” by this point — an interesting insight into the beginnings of his Vispassana meditation and celibacy. Secondly, his final appraisal of the song is that it “doesn’t totally blow” but that it needs revision, when it wound up appearing on an album two years later in more or less the exact same lyrical structure and form.

As it is, the album version is pretty similar to the demo Cuomo had improvised a couple years earlier: the progression is the same, albeit sped up a few BPM, and the lyrics remain exactly the same excepting the addition of a couplet to the second verse (“You are fading further from me / Why don’t you come home to me?”). The band makes numerous key revisions and additions, however, including a weeping lead riff that cuts through the explosive chorus (a nice touch that is a bit dulled by the crunched mix), and a little guitar countermelody on the second verse that beautifully gives way to a “ooohhh ooohhh” backing vocal chant that Cuomo would soon cite as one of his favorite moments on any Weezer album. The bridge also gets a serious lift, a grand moment of arena rock glory par excellence — and one that segues into one of the best (harmonic!!) Cuomo guitar solos since the mid-’90s, full of all the “romantic longing” that he wanted so much from the song’s earlier versions. From there, the song roars powerfully to its conclusion, a winsome fade into a sad and lonely whimper. It’s remarkable how much the song has evolved, considering that from a skeletal perspective, all the core elements of the song remain intact.

Without question, this is one of the best start-to-finish songs on Make Believe, and quite arguably the entire post-’90s Weezer canon. It remains compromised in some ways (the stifling mix, the sterile compression), but is executed well enough for the true spirit and quality of the song to shine through nevertheless. Thank frickin’ God.

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The Sister Song

Monday, January 12, 2009

One of the hundreds of tunes that Rivers Cuomo wrote in 2000, “The Sister Song” is one of the few from the era to have been placed on the semi-official live document, Summer Songs 2000, a document of the touring period named in the album’s title. It finds itself an interesting intersect of the many musical identities Cuomo was then trying to negotiate: the confessional honesty and personal lyrics of the now increasingly-maligned Pinkerton, the structural formulaism of the upcoming Green Album, and the stoned angst and paranoia of that album’s quick follow-up, Maladroit. It should be no surprise, then, that the result is a bit of a mixed bag.

The dark tone and feedbacked self-hatred from the intro certainly recall a lite version of the band’s 1996 classic, as Cuomo cryptically intones, “Fleas, and games, and hundred dollar bills / Lies, and pain, and nauseating pills.” But it’s a bit disappointing when the winning melody and lyrical promise of the chorus begins, “Why am I so hung up on your sister,” only to degrade rather unbelievably into the next line: “Why am I so hung up on your mom?” By the next couplet — “I thought that I would never even miss her / I thought that I would never use the bong” — whatever empathy and intrigue the song had established collapses outright. “I wonder how you touch yourself, and curse myself / For being across the sea” is chilling because it is so vividly desperate, pathetic, and almost frighteningly relatable; what’s going on here is chilling only insofar that it’s embarrassing and kind of repugnant. Whatever morning-after regrets and shame Cuomo had from the Pinkerton experience would be better placed on a song like this one, or perhaps its not-too-distant cousin, “Slob.”

By the time we hit the second verse, it’s like seeing the half-baked coherency of Maladroit bubbling to shape in a crystal ball (or some bong water). “Thieves, and pain, and jagged-color tears / Still remain and cover up the years” has to be one of the basest thoughts to ever come out of this brilliant mind. The bridge is also a total tossaway, though the concluding “never lose my mind” nicely ties in with the insanity themes of other songs from the era, such as “My Brain” and “Mad Kow.” Then those barbed duelling solos enter, and it really makes you wish that the band had given this song enough sober thought to reap the untapped potential here — even if Green-mode Rivers insists on cutting the segment short before it can go where it wants to, it has the makings of a damn fine moment. Likewise, Pat Wilson’s drum work from there to the conclusion deserves recognition, as does Brian Bell for his impassioned backups.

There are many unofficial bootlegs of this song in circualtion as well, some of which capture the song’s syntactical promise even better than the “official” cut. It’s also worth noting that Cuomo’s decision to edit out the first instance of the bridge from the final mix spares us from one of his most annoying post-Pinkerton habits (using the bridge at least twice in damn neary *every* song), but also excludes a powerful guitar rockout that surged the band and its crowd into the second verse. Worth tracking down if you like the SS2K version enough to care.

If the Recording History tells no lies, it appears that this song never made it to a real studio session. It did, however, briefly have the alternate title of “Your Sister.”

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Everybody Get Dangerous

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

In more ways than one, “Everybody Get Dangerous” was the first song from The Red Album that Weezer fans heard. Enterprising fans managed to snag a glimpse of the song from a scene in the flop comedy flick 21, where a brief clip of the song is buried on a distant radio in a poker club. The song was uncovered in March of ’08 — a couple of months before the incomplete, 8-song leak of the album would occur.

As such, this scratchy little snippet had plenty of time to be thoroughly dissected and debated. Discernible was a stupid party rock hook par excellence — some particularly adept listeners were able to discern the sound of guitarist Brian Bell singing lead vocals — and the beginning of a Rivers-sung bridge that mentions a “guardian angel.” Fans were sharply divided about whether or not the clip boded well for the song: some thought it could be an enjoyable track if executed well, while others were disappointed in the lack of emotional depth this tune hinted for Red. A couple months later, it was one of the first songs (along with “Troublemaker”) from the album to leak on the albumsix.com forums and beyond. And truth be told, even the brief clip from 21 couldn’t have forecasted what “Get Dangerous” wound up being in its final form.

It all begins with the sound of an engine roaring, glass breaking, some young voices shouting — not so much a cinematic moment as one that sounds like it was directly sampled from some bloated summer-teen blockbuster. A two-bit, Chilli Peppers funk riff enters — which was apparently refined with the help of drummer Pat Wilson, after his complaint in the studio that the song was not sounding nearly “dangerous” enough — as does Cuomo’s barely-three-note lead vocal, beginning rather unbelievably: “When I was younger / I used to go and tip cows for fun, yeah / Actually, I didn’t do that / Because I didn’t want the cows to be sad.” Even then, it’s not the most awkward thing about the first verse: the band actually manages to straight-facedly use a stock sample of someone scratching a vinyl record as a transition.

From there, Cuomo relinquishes the lead to Bell for the chorus — a repetition of the song’s title — while he takes to the mix’s backdrop, chanting “booyah!” every other measure. It’s kind of like the chorus to EMF’s “Unbelievable” after not exercising for a decade and a half. As it turns out, “Dangerous” features some of the most personal lyrics Cuomo’s allowed onto a record in a long time — it’s a recollection of what he and his delinquent friends used to do for fun as teenagers in rural Connecticut, and “everybody get dangerous” used to be their battle cry. Perhaps “booyah” was another one, which makes me wonder if the catchphrase even existed in the mid-to-late-’80s — but just as “it really happened!” fails to justify using the cow anecdote above as actual lyrics, “booyah” has no real place in a Weezer song, or probably any good song by anyone at all (I’d be interested to hear some counterexamples in the comments!). The 21 mix of this song evidently lacked Cuomo’s regrettable interjection, and was all the better for it.

The second verse and chorus are more of the same, but from there, something interesting happens: the “guardian angel” bridge. It’s a moment wherein the point of the song really takes shape and begins to produce something compelling: “We should’ve died a long time ago,” Cuomo realizes, shaking his head at his young self’s wreckless exploits with awe. And then, in a clever moment of the present catching up to him, Cuomo asks in harmony: “What will we say when our kids come to us / And ask with a smile on their faces / ‘Hey dad! My friends bought some new ninja swords! / Is it cool if we slash up this place?'”

I enjoy this moment because it hints at the kind of lyrics I wouldn’t mind from Cuomo at this point. A reflection on how to negotiate letting your kids do what you know you did at your age (even if it was bad) is a pretty mature topic to be discussing in song — certainly a lot better than “Who needs stupid books? / They are for petty crooks.” It’s more than just a little bit touching, too…Especially segueing into the rather pretty wordless bridge, which serves as the eye-of-the-storm highlight of the tune even despite can’t-be-intentional sour harmonies and voice cracks. There’s even a moment in there that feels like classic Weezer, when Bell repeats in a child-like voice and a winning countermelody,”Is it cool if we slash up this place?” But then it’s back to that botched chorus, followed by a 30-second outro that features some commanding rolls from Wilson and some truly bizarre yelps and yowls from the band that momentarily intrigue, but winds up going nowhere. The song ends on a fadeout.

Sadly, “Get Dangerous” never made it to the one place I think it could really thrive: the live stage. Even though it’s a nice-but-misguided attempt from Cuomo to bare his soul on record a little more, it winds up being no more than an empty party jam — one that could really benefit from some cool stage lights and explosive pyrotechnics on the chorus. Besides, it’s a pretty competent reappropriation of the old “Smells Like Teen Spirit” riff, which is always a good way to get a crowd moving. This is one of a few songs on Red that I wish had remained strictly live staples, to be saved for the eventual in-concert DVD release — but I suppose you can’t have that if the band shies away from ever playing it.

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Hey M’Darlin’

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Good to finally get another song to discuss from Rivers Cuomo’s 1997 sideproject, Homie. Like “Hot Tub,” Cuomo demoed the song years before resuscitating it for his “goofball country” outlet — in fact, this one was written as early as 1991, the same year Cuomo wrote wildly different songs like “The Answer Man” and “The World Has Turned And Left Me Here.” Perhaps there was something about the Californian summer that inspired him to write something a little more southern, something with a little more twang and drawl. Unfortunately, it looks like we may never get to hear that version of the tune — which was then called “I’m Your Man” — or the Boston demo that Cuomo recorded on his DA-88 in September of 1997. The Homie rehearsal tape made later that year contained another version of “Darlin'” that likely involved guitarist Kevin Stevenson, bassist Drew Parsons and drummer Fred Eltringham, but has also yet to surface. Parsons and Eltringham played on the unreleased Homie album that band historian Karl Koch claims was recorded later that year, but that project remained unmixed and has to date been misplaced. Cuomo himself has even contradicted Koch’s word, claiming that only drums were ever recorded for the project — perhaps he’s just chosen to forget it, seeing how his faith in just about anything he wrote from Pinkerton up through The Green Album has always been scarce.

So what’s that leave us with? A hiss-drenched tape of Homie’s first show, 11/4/97 at the Middle East venue in Boston. That said, it remains pretty easy to hear the details of most everything in the composition. A sudden drumroll propels us directly into the opening chorus, Cuomo and Stevenson partaking in some lovely down home harmonies on the title lyric. From there, we go into a spitfire verse unlike anything else from the early Weezer period in both its strange lyrical bent and its amelodic construction: “Well the little man came and sat down on my knee / Picked my nose and said ‘what’s up!’ / Well the big man came and sat me down on his knee / Picked his nose and said ‘heads up!'” Cuomo raps over a three-note riff that could’ve been inspired by the vocal melody from “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.” The pre-chorus is an effective transition into a very pretty tune, as Cuomo sings, “Got no clothes! / No candy treats / I’ll be damned if I am the candy man / But baby got me down on my knees.” This takes us back into the chorus, and the song repeats this cycle before breaking into an awesome call-and-response solo between a bright keyboard figure and one gritty, wranglin’ rodeo lick of guitar.

It’s very rare that I’ll take a moment to mention a cover of a Weezer-related song in these pages, but albumsix.com forum member Runnersdialzero deserves much credit for his brilliant studio version of this song. It’s a very faithful version that liberates the listener from the poor quality of the live Homie bootleg, and Runners’ expert performance does the trick so nicely that it would *almost* be acceptable were we to never hear a clearer version of this song from Cuomo himself. The drums are tight and punchy, the keyboard soundfont seems to match the one Homie used that night perfectly, the guitar solo is a carbon copy of Stevenson’s, and Runners might even do those chorus harmonies better than the band could have. It’s a marvel to hear, and I do hope someone drops a link in the comments section so that the uninitiated might be able to enjoy.

But to conclude with Cuomo: this is, like the dirty minimalism of “Lover In The Snow” or the misogynistic white-boy funk of “Hot Tub,” further evidence that Cuomo was experimenting with the many different shapes and facets of his muse long before the outspokenly eclectic stylings of The Red Album, and with far greater success. This one is remarkable not only for its quality as a song, but also for the fact that nothing else like it exists in the Weezer/Cuomo discography. Songs From the Black Hole get all the hype, but a quick and dirty release of the old Homie record might be even more worthwhile.

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Worry Rock

Monday, December 8, 2008

I’ve always found it funny how Green Day has played such a large (if largely unrecognized) role in the lore of Weezer. Most blatant is Rivers Cuomo’s choice to namecheck the band in the second verse of “El Scorcho” — “I asked you to go to the Green Day concert / You said you never heard of them / How cool is that!?” — which might seem a bit esoteric, or maybe just an example of Cuomo giving props to one of his colleagues in the mid-90s alt.rock nation. But a leaked essay from Cuomo’s fall ’04 term at Harvard reveals an anecdote from the Blue tour that reveals that the reference to the pop-punk phenoms may have a place in Pinkerton‘s pantheon of personal effects:

When I first became successful, I never had physical relations with fans. Even when women came to my hotel room, sometimes ten or fifteen at a time, I never made a move. The women would forget that I was there and talk excitedly amongst themselves, often about other bands, as they raided the mini-bar. “Isn’t Green Day great??” one would ask, cracking open her tenth Heineken. “Omigod, yeah, and the lead singer’s soooo cute!!” I would just lie in bed until I fell asleep, alone.
—Rivers Cuomo, “A Mad and Furious Master,” 10/18/04

While Weezer’s 1994 debut album would go on to sell several millions of copies, Green Day’s Dookie — which came out just a few months before Weezer’s Blue Album — rocketed the trio into an entirely different stratosphere of superstardom (to date, it has sold over 15 million copies worldwide). As  the band became an omnipresent rock’n’roll sensation, insofar that Cuomo couldn’t escape them among *his* own groupies, it must have been hard for him not to get a bit jealous. This puts the “El Scorcho” vignette into a whole new light: Cuomo, knowing firsthand how much girls love Green Day, asks his crush to go to their concert with him, knowing there’s no way he’ll be turned down. But, to Cuomo’s astonishment, his love interest has never even heard of Green Day — how cool is that!? Cuomo must have been very relieved to know that this particular lass was not going to run her mouth about that dreamy Billie Joe as soon as he got her into the bedroom.

But “El Scorcho,” for all its witty pop culture references (Public Enemy gets one, too), still failed miserably as a single, as did the long maligned album that it represented. Cuomo chalked another one up for ole Billie and knew the score, taking to the old “can’t beat em…” adage: for the next few years, while Pinkerton steadily accrued itself a young legion of fervent supporters, Cuomo embarked to shed his operatic, intricate writing style in favor of the more repetitive, strophic rockers that were then dominating arenas worldwide.

Cuomo would later cite Oasis and Nirvana as his main templates during this period, but Green Day’s influence is written all over The Green Album. Sly (perhaps even unintentional) references to the band abound, from the pop-punk proto-Green sketches of the Summer Songs 2000 to the titles of album track  “Glorious Day” and b-side “Brightening Day,” from the mid-album “Knock-Down Drag-Out” (which directly nicks its title lyric from a Green Day song) to the bright green cover of the record itself. We could go on all day — but the bottom line is, the gambit worked brilliantly (at least from a commercial standpoint), as the record went on to go platinum and reestablish the band as pop rock mainstays (though the hits, “Hash Pipe” and “Island In The Sun,” actually represent the greatest deviation from the record’s pop-punk paradgm). For a time, the record even managed to be a smash with the critics: a 73 on Metacritic isn’t bad for 28 minutes of overproduced, no-frills guitar pop.

If the reference in “El Scorcho” foreshadowed Cuomo’s eventual worship at the alter of Green Day, this cover of “Worry Rock” — donated to 2003’s A Different Shade of Green tribute album — was the confirmation after the fact. It’s a bit of a concession from Cuomo himself: the “knocked down, dragged out fight” in “Worry Rock” is where he got his “knock-down drag-out war.”

Here, he more than atones for the petty theft. But instead of beating Armstrong at his own game, Cuomo levels the playing field by adhering to a style that one would seldom associate with either icon’s respective band. The airy, beautifully produced arrangement is a rare acoustic studio recording in the band’s repertoire, translating the samey guitars and bombastic amps of Green Day’s by-the-numbers original into lithe, pliant strings, spry steel hollow-bodies and minimalist, roomy percussion. Cuomo turns in a heart-on-sleeve vocal performance that Armstrong failed to achieve in favor of his faux-Brit punk affectations, and even changes the operative word of the “edgy” piss-take in the refrain — “fucked without a kiss again” — to a pining “hugged.” Lo, the inner beauty of what was once some mid-album filler rises elegantly to the surface.

The song came at a strange time in the band’s history, during the ’03 era wherein the members of Weezer sifted in and out of the picture among a rotating cast of session musicians from Geffen’s rolodex. As such, I’m not exactly sure who plays what on this performance, something that Karl Koch’s Recording History does little to illuminate. In addition, MTV.Com reported— exactly one day before this cover was recorded at Rod Cervera’s studio — that the band was soon hitting the recording booth to do a series of covers, and possibly some reworked Weezer songs (Cuomo cited Maladroit cuts “Slave” and “December” as possibilities, plus “maybe some old songs”).

“We might do them acoustically or with an orchestra,” Cuomo said at the time. While we never heard of this project again, “Worry Rock” is clearly the lone (surfaced) artifact from this period. And yet, it bests the vast majority of Weezer’s work in the new millennium across the board, from arrangement to performance to production (which slays the mixes of Make Believe, Maladroit and The Green Album, while also giving The Red Album a run for its money). It certainly makes me want to hear more.

The band’s 1997 version of the Pixies’ “Velouria” is often hailed as Weezer’s greatest cover, and the fans might not be wrong on that one. But as breathtaking as that recording is, it gains considerable currency from the strength of the original it does little to re-imagine. And while I do think Weezer made an incremental improvement over their indie rock heroes with that particular triumph, here Cuomo takes a song and completely transforms it, re-envisions it, brings it new life (or, in this case, life for the first time). “Worry Rock” is more in line with what a truly great cover should be, and that’s exactly what it is.

[Special thanks to temporary TVS Research Assistants ohjonas and BrokenBeatenDown for their archival help with this post.]

Filed in Covers, Misc., The Very Best | | Comments (66)

Only In Dreams

Monday, December 1, 2008

Where to begin?

“Only In Dreams” isn’t one of the best Weezer songs so much as it is one of the best songs. It contains what is, in my opinion, one of the greatest passages of guitar work in the history of music. It is, in many ways, the perfect synthesis of the young Rivers Cuomo’s myriad influences. It is by far the longest entry in the Weezer discography, and not a second of it is wasted time. It is 8 minutes of calculated, unbridled perfection.

Indeed, perfectly symmetrical (and symmetrically perfect), the song begins as it ends: that bassline. Somehow, merely listening to that lone instrument and that simple melody for the first time — whether you’ve taken a look at the track length or not — you know you are in for something epic, something truly special. It’s a bit hard to make sense of, since if The Blue Album never happened and I wrote that bassline tomorrow, it wouldn’t be anything more than a pretty cool little riff. Somehow, in this context, even before Pat Wilson’s simple cymbal count-off, it is imbued with a certain majesty and promise that simply can’t be explained. It is beauty incarnate.

Things only get better from there. After one repetition, Wilson enters as mentioned above, followed by a plaintive, aching little progression on the acoustic guitar (a distinctly Blue tradition; looking at the list of songs that use the technique — “My Name Is Jonas,” “The World Has Turned And Left Me Here,” “In The Garage,” “Paperface,” “Mykel & Carli,” — one wonders why Weezer hasn’t properly used the acoustic in the context of a predominantly electric song ever since). In a moment of masterful subtlety, four little harmonic notes played through an amplifier seem to symbolize a small epiphany, like the narrator snapping to consciousness and beginning to gather his thoughts. True, in a way, the song’s piecemeal construction — one element appearing after the other, from bass to cymbal to guitar to snare, like a picture slowly coming into focus — neatly evokes the transient sensation of a dream, or perhaps one’s gradual recollection of one the following morning. Something about the very motion of that hypnotic bass, the way it undulates up and down, mimics the motion of the mind at rest, gently drifting between REM and the depths of slow-wave sleep.

Another element enters our dreamscape: the electric melody that follows that four-note epiphany lilts and sways with a morose limp, somehow resigned and hopeful at the same time. It sounds pensive and alone, but heartfelt and sincere in spite of the sad odds it’s against — like the too-nice wallflower serving time along the periphery of his classmates’ fondly crystallizing memories.

Of course, the narration enters, full of the pained longing that the cinematic introduction served to foreshadow: “You can’t resist her / She’s in your bones.” In a lovely moment of Wilsonian harmony, Matt Sharp chimes in with that indelible falsetto — “She is your marrow, and your ride home” — thus deepening the high school subtext of the song before it even arises explicitly. A brief pause ensues, the guitar harmonics reappear, and our sad protagonist clears his mind once more.

The vocals truly are astounding on these verses. Cuomo’s lead is melodically sound, but subdued — not like the cough syrup molasses that coats the vocals of The Green Album, but like that of a shy young romantic disappointed by yet another fruitless night out. In the background, Sharp’s aforementioned doubling is truly sublime, but there are a number of other touches that are just as ethereal: that angelic echo, “in the air;” the double-tracked, octave’d Cuomo carrying us into the chorus; the counterpoint of the “pretty toenails” backing vocal at the end of the 2nd verse. It may not quite be the best vocal arrangement in the Weezer canon, but it might just be the most subtle and sparely beautiful.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here: that first chorus, however inevitable it may have been (even with Weezer’s first album, it must have been obvious that this was a band that could never resist the chorus rockout), still manages to take you to a higher place, that swelling rush of feedback bridging the gap between the illusory verse and the harsh reality of the refrain. “Only in dreams / We see what it means / Reach out our hands / Hold onto hers,” Cuomo intones, a little firmer than before. “But when we wake / It’s all been erased” — a great betrayal of expectations that set the template for lyrical themes echoed in “Why Bother?” and “Crazy One” — “And so it seems / Only in dreams.” Ending as it begins; perfectly symmetrical, symmetrically perfect.

“You walk up to her,” Cuomo gently croons, back in the peaceful respite of dreamland. “Ask her to dance.” And then, just like the fear of getting rejected, of feeling the sting, a small, atmospheric wave of feedback hums in the distance, conjuring the hazy boundaries of a dream as much as it does nervous regret. But the girl replies that she “might take a chance” — she even calls us “baby!” — and the feeling subsides. Those little guitar harmonics appear once more, like a smile of grateful relief.

Sadly, without even quite realizing it yet, there are signs that this just can’t be real: the girl’s floating in the air as she dances with us, defying the laws of gravity. The atmospheric feedback returns, but we are so pleased with the pretty delusion in our arms that it doesn’t even sound that threatening anymore, actually kinda nice. Likewise, the morose little limp we had when we entered the dancehall reappears, the same notes as before but now more of a slow-dance sway than a slumped head staring at its feet. Things seem to have really turned around — it pays to be outgoing after all, doesn’t it?

Now, before that feedback we had come to trust rips our world apart with a second shot of reality-infused distortion, allow me to recap: What has transpired up to this point is sheer, unfettered brilliance. It is gorgeous, it is flawless, it affects us in a remarkably complex way that we can’t properly analyze until we sit down and really think about it, but still understand on an implicit level from the very first listen. Reflecting on the fact that this song was written by a 21-year-old — and recorded in its complete form by a 23-year-old, with one drummer and one bassist (remember, Brian Bell plays no guitar on Blue) — is absolutely incomprehensible, and further evidence that, had Cuomo focused on exploring this territory in greater detail, he truly could have been our generation’s Brian Wilson. Wilson recorded Pet Sounds when he was 23, and to be frank, “Dreams” is no less a marvel than any one of those songs (with the exception of the infallible “God Only Knows,” which really can’t be compared against anything), even with the acknowledged handicap that this song bears in being recorded three decades later. There’s just so much going on here, it’s so rich and evocative and poignant on so many levels. It is songwriting at its absolute best — and it only gets better from here.

The song’s lyrical thread ends after the repeat of the chorus, so let’s take this time to address the interesting subject of Cuomo’s choice to pluralize here: instead of “you see it what it means,” we see; instead of “your hands,” we reach with “ours.” The girl is left singular — “hold onto hers,” not theirs — so it’s not meant to broaden the scope of the narrative to a group, or anything like that. So, why? Of course, that’s a question that only Cuomo can answer definitively, I think it’s meant to further convey the indistinct physics of the dream world. Similarly, it could be a separation of the dream identity and the “real life” identity, and bringing those two identities together for a moment: this may all be transpiring in a dream (where else?), but the conscious Cuomo wants that girl just as badly as his dreaming self. The desire, the loneliness, the longing — be it real or imagined, physical or dreamed, it all stems from the same source.

This duality — the dreaming identity and the conscious identity — come together most clearly right after the second chorus concludes, when the dreamscape verse instrumentation returns, but Cuomo continues to chant the harsh reality (“only in dreams”) above, as if it’s being realized truly for the first time, like recognizing that this *is* a dream in and of itself. If there’s any merit to that insight, then the anguished, effusive repetition of the chorus — now distilled simply to those three titular words, shouted over and over — is a moment of violent lucidity. Here the lyrical thread of the song ends, but the narrative thread does not.

In the three and a half minutes that follow, neither Cuomo nor his bandmates utter a single word, letting an extended musical passage speak for itself in a brave decision that the band has not had the guts (or perhaps even interest)  to make in the decade and a half since. Once the refrained rage subsides, we are left once again with that bassline, a dreamy cycle of notes oscillating above like the sparkle and glow of stars falling along the black night. That once-foreboding guitar feedback is recast as a gentle reprieve, sighing in the distance with a sound like whales crying.

At 5:20, there is a change: quiet waves of guitar begin to build strength like a flowing tide, gently bruising layer after layer. The bass begins to quicken its pace, as does Wilson’s devotion to the ride cymbal, the guitars getting louder and louder still. That graceful manipulation of feedback rises in and out, crushing endlessly as the guitar harmonies around it grow denser and more euphonic by the moment. The cymbal begins to crash, the entire sonic front becoming almost impossible to penetrate or resist, now all consuming — it’s a sound you could drown in, an expanse as wide and deep as the ocean itself.

The guitars refuse, rising above the weight in growing numbers before a snare fill and one truly liberating cymbal crash set us free, soaring headlong into a six-string sea of euphoria. Wilson’s attacking the drums like a madman, with a fervor that, for all Pinkerton‘s might and power, he would never again come close to matching, Rivers against Rivers against Rivers, shredding the necks of a thousand guitars into a million splinters, the metalhead shut-in from Connecticut’s finest and most glorious moment of fret-burning self-actualization, honoring and murdering his childhood idols in a 45-second bout of epic guitar heroics as good as anybody’s. If you are left without hairs standing on end, you are hairless; if your heart doesn’t skip a beat, it didn’t have a pulse to begin with.

****

Since I mentioned earlier the number of creative inputs this song had, it would be regrettable not to explore a few of them. Lyrically, the second verse of OID in particular harkens back to the old Phil Spector song originally made famous by the Crystals, “Then I Kissed Her,” which begins, “Well I walked up to her and I asked her if she wanted to dance / She looked awful nice, and so I hoped she might take a chance.” One would imagine that the cover by heavy Blue Album inspirations the Beach Boys would have been where Cuomo picked this one up, but the man himself later insisted that it was KISS’ version that had inspired him (considering adolescent Cuomo loved KISS before young man Cuomo loved the Beach Boys, this does make sense). The embryonic Kitchen Tape demo of this song (released on The Blue Album Deluxe, clocking in at a relatively trim 5:48) reveals that there was also a very Pixies/Nirvana influence on the quiet/loud structure of the song (check out the Cobain-mimicry going on during the final chorus; speaking of that version, it has a very beautiful guitar outro that needs to be heard, although the tune still feels a bit neutered without its grand conclusion). Lastly a sly tip-off in 2008’s “Heart Songs” suggests that Debbie Gibson’s old hit single “Only In My Dreams” may have loosely inspired the root concept behind Cuomo’s song.

Then again, Cuomo can’t always be trusted: during his fan-hating Maladroit phase, he maintained that the “Dreams” bassline was a direct rip-off of the bass from the Chi-Lites “Have You Seen Her,” which not only sounds ridiculous on paper, but also when you compare the songs head-to-head (similarities: zero). This point segues nicely into Weezer’s unfortunate 2001/2002 devaluation of OID, during which point Cuomo erroneously claimed (in direct message board correspondence with fans) that the band “hated” OID upon its completion, but “couldn’t find any other songs to take its place” (which, even then, fans knew enough to tell was a total fib). In the summer of ’01, Cuomo and company bastardized the song by only playing the “solo” segment of the song (that is, the instrumental last few minutes of it), which unwittingly served as an apt (and fucking sacrilegious) metaphor for one of Maladroit‘s biggest failings (its resolutely contextless “rawk”). 2002 versions saw a return of the “full” song, but were hardly any better: then-newby bassist Scott Shriner was apparently given free rein with improvisation and the effects pedal for this song, and he butchered it mercilessly night after night. Sorry, guys: you don’t fucking mess with that bassline.

Thankfully, OID seems to have come back into favor with the band. Brian Bell — who I sincerely doubt even remotely appreciated the “artistic license” the band was taking with the song in the early ’00s — when asked what his favorite Weezer song during 2008’s Troublemaker Tour, first thought of “Only In Dreams.” Sadly, the band has not performed it since those misguided performances in ’02; one hopes they bring this song back to finally do it justice again the next time they hit the road.

And by the way, if you haven’t scoped it: this is essential viewing.

Filed in Bonus Tracks, The Blue Album, The Very Best | | Comments (122)

Crazy One

Thursday, November 27, 2008

“Crazy One” was perhaps the pleasantest surprise of Rivers Cuomo’s first-ever home demos compendium, Alone. Dated 1998, smack in the middle of that mysterious period of Weezer inactivity between Pinkerton‘s implosion (1997) and the band’s triumphant “reunion tour” (2000), “Crazy One” was tough to predict. 1997 was the year of Cuomo’s alt-country side-project Homie and experimental solo band compositions, the last time we would hear Cuomo’s adventurous side for nearly a decade. 1999 was more elusive, but songs like “Island In The Sun,” “Always” and “New Joint” showed that by this point Cuomo’s intense de-personalization process had taken hold, auguring 2001’s The Green Album. But 1998 was a question mark all its own: Weezer fans had never heard any of the hundred-odd compositions written during that lost year.

Sonically at least, it’s perhaps unsurprising that “Crazy One” lies at the midpoint between the experimental leanings of Cuomo ’97 and the increasingly cold songcraft machine that was Cuomo ’99. On the one hand, it’s just another post-Pinkerton exercise in strophic composition, another attempt at meticulous and practiced repetition (per Cuomo’s overthought analysis of more instinctual songwriters like Kurt Cobain and Noel Gallagher), this time communicated through a classic ’50s pop syntax (verse-verse-bridge; repeat). On the other, the production is a revelation: the endlessly layered guitars, subdued drums and dreamy, multi-tracked vocals owe as much to Phil Spector’s wall of sound techniques (and songwriting sensibilities) as they do to ’90s shoegaze rock.

Then there are the lyrics, which seem so unremarkable that one would have a hard time imagining they’re remotely personal — and yet, Cuomo insists. Evidently, it’s about a girl he was seeing at the time, and whom he jilted in the hopes that she’d come back begging for him. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t quite go according to plan, and Cuomo was left in his bedroom to pine and regret. Fair enough – but lyrics like, “Baby doll / I’m still afraid of it all / I’m hoping that you will call / I wanna see you again” seem all too much like a Brill Building case study to truly come from the heart. But then there’s that sniffle at the beginning of the song, which Cuomo refers to in the liner notes as a “whimper,” and the fact that it’s a pretty lovely song either way – so I can’t say I much care either way.

As for the refrain – “A friend to tender friend / A heart to tender heart / A love that never ends / A love that never starts” – some have noted a family resemblance to Sebadoh’s “Soul and Fire,” which also contains the “heart to tender heart” lyric, as well as many of the same rhymes (“heart / apart / friend / end”). Given that Cuomo made extensive research into this kind of critical darling rock when crafting Pinkerton, the possibility of deliberate reference or subconscious appropriation seems plausible, especially given Cuomo’s track record with rehashed lyrics and riffs. In this case, it could only be a plus.

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

Crab

Monday, November 24, 2008

“Crab” is arguably the worst song on 2001’s The Green Album. As such, for a time many fans considered it the worst song Weezer had ever released. This impression outlasted its tenability (which expired by the next year’s Maladroit), though for most, Green‘s value has appreciated to a point where even its slightest cut is a fan favorite.

Whatever Green lacks in dynamics, it makes up for with a pointed lack of dynamics. It is, like The Blue Album or Pinkerton, a remarkably focused record. But while those two albums boast variations on perfection for their 10-track runtimes, Green expends itself on mathematical, unrelenting homogeneity. If Blue is grass-fed, open-range brilliance, Green is pasteurized attention to detail. As it turns out – and as no (understandably) disappointed fan could have guessed back in 2001 – that ages pretty well.

Granted, Green isn’t entirely monotone: “Island in the Sun” is one of the great melancholy summer songs of all time, and “Hash Pipe” makes the majority of the endless Maladroit sessions seem all for naught — it’s the best the band has ever done in reconciling the grace of a Beatles-worthy melody with metal’s cynical sneer.

“Crab” is not one of those deviations. Musically, it’s as formulaic as most else on Green (perhaps with a little more of a bite), but irritates a bit per its use of a corny flange pedal and gratuitous lead vocal delay. Then there’s the matter of the  lyrics, which stand as the most extreme example of Cuomo’s anti-personal writing approach in the Green era. As he recently explained to Pitchfork:

[With Green] I was writing songs literally. I was writing lyrics without having any subject in my mind. They were words coming out of my mouth; I didn’t know where they were coming from.

Lines like “Crab if you need it / She put her knickers on,” and “No, crab at the booty / T’ain’t gonna do no good” (or maybe that’s “taint”…;_;) certainly sound meaningless, and foreshadow the nonsense to come on Maladroit (most of Green‘s free association is drawn from love song cliches, which usually makes them easier to parse). But there is a bit of admirable storytelling going on here between the dada details – particularly in the lines “She said she’s feeling lonely / And I say that’s okay / She won’t be coming back ’round here, no way,” which have a kind of bluesman concision to them. The song also features some of Pat Wilson’s best (i.e., most liberated) drumming on the album, and the dark sound and sentiment are a nice counterbalance to brighter moments like “Knock-Down Drag-Out” and “Photograph.” It’s not hard to hear why this was bassist [2015 update: and dearly departed rock god] Mikey Welsh’s favorite Weezer song he ever got to record.

Interestingly, while the officially released version clocks in at 2:35, the early leak of The Green Album reveals in hindsight that “Crab” used to be one verse longer (trimming it down must have been part of the last-minute slimming of the album — generally a great call, as it is here). There’s also a live version that was (inscrutably) the first track on a special French promo CD that also included a live “Don’t Let Go” and a non-remix remix of “Always,” as band historian Karl Koch explains:

this cd was originally intended to be packaged with the Green Album in France, as a special bonus cd shrinkwrapped to the main CD. Apparently the French record company decided the promotion wasn’t necessary due to the Green Albums success in France, and the idea was scrapped. However, a small amount of the actual promo cd [was] in fact pressed. The live songs are from the Extended Midget Tour, the Always ‘remix’ is the same mix as the b-side found elsewhere.

This live “Crab” take features a better solo, a drum count-off that might have rickrolled a few audience members into thinking they’d get to hear “Tired Of Sex,” as well as Brian Bell and Scott Shriner on backing vocals, if only be necessity (Cuomo insisted on singing all the vocal parts in the studio). Cuomo also fumbles with his guitar for a bit afterwards and, in typical Mala-asshole mode, complains that “our [guitar] tech is determined to ruin me.”

In conclusion, here are two funny quotes about to “Crab.” The first one is from the 2006 Fan Interview with Rivers, featuring our very own commenter, Gumbytom:

Is there any meaning at all behind Crab? (If so, what is it?)
—Gumby Tom [sic]
Columbus, Ohio

A heterosexual guys [sic] sexual frustration with a particular girl.
—Rivers Cuomo

And then, this botched bit of stage banter, with Spinal Tap self-parody:

You thought the crab would at the booty…er, do…you good. But it t’ain’t! Know what I’m saying?
—Cuomo-san, 5/23/02, Club Zepp (Osaka, Japan)

Filed in Live B-Sides, The Grand Playlist, The Green Album | | Comments (69)