Once you get to a certain size and age as a band, it’s inevitable that you start making mistakes. A dozen million record sales and well over 15 years on the odometer definitely qualifies. And as the discography burgeons, with all its offshoots into outtakes, demos, and other strata of availability, the severity of a […]
I’ve already spent some time explaining why the Red Album b-sides were such a letdown, so I won’t belabor the point here. But it suffices to say that with “Love My Way,” once again some very incomplete fraction of the band covered a good song poorly — in this case, drummer Pat Wilson does a […]
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 […]
The next song on the list is another short one, so I might as well bang this one out tonight, too. This December 2002 cover gives us a neat little insight into what Rivers Cuomo was listening to at the time: the 2001 solo record from Nina Gordon, a saccharine pop departure from her more […]
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
We could stay up all night counting the Beach Boys references in Rivers Cuomo’s work. And depending on how things go, we might even conclude that Weezer’s Blue debut can be interpreted as, at least in one sense, a sort of alt-rock/Gen X homage to the golden California boys who, by the time Cuomo discovered […]
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 […]
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
“The Weight” was written and recorded by The Band in 1968. It served as a modest debut hit, peaking at #63 on the US charts, but saw incremental success when covered by other artists. Jackie DeShannon took it to #55 that same year, Diana Ross & The Supremes collaborated with The Temptations to hit #46 […]
Rivers Cuomo loves Nirvana. He was in fact so inspired by their breakthrough hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (and the rest of Nevermind) that he wrote about the experience of first hearing it on 2008’s nostaglic Red Album cut “Heart Songs.” (Kurt Cobain also got a reference in the original version of the brilliant Blue b-side […]
Not exactly sure what the deal with this “song” is, but it’s dated 1994 and is apparently from an interview. It is, as its “title” suggests, a jingle for a southwestern automechanics chain called Chief Auto Parts (which, according to its Wiki, merged with AutoZone in 1998). I would guess this song was an improvised […]
Monday, September 22, 2008
What a disappointment the Red Album b-sides were. For the first time since The Green Album, fans were promised a series of outtakes and bonus cuts through a slew of singles and special deals. The Deluxe Edition graced us with four (excellent) extra tracks from the Red sessions; various iTunes pre-order and “buy full album” shenanigans were […]