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Weezer: One Name, Two Bands [3/3]

Monday, August 15, 2011

Cuomo, again, was not unaware of the risk he was taking. In an interview shortly before The Green Album’s release, he predicted it would “fail on a commercial level and also alienate our fans” (Regardie 58). He was wrong on the first count – the album’s pop leanings helped it to spawn a couple hit singles and go platinum – but indeed, Weezer’s die-hard fanbase was crestfallen. Yet crucially, they did not react quite like one might expect. Some abandoned the band for good, but most wound up rationalizing their disappointment in one way or another. A reviewer for Pitchfork, an online music magazine that carries the forward-thinking cultural cache that Rolling Stone did in the ‘60s and ‘70s, wrote the following of his experience listening to the lead single “Hash Pipe:”

I listened to the whole song, from beginning to end. And when it ended, I said no. I said no no no no no. No! Weezer! NO!! Where has Rivers Cuomo gone? What has he done? What has happened to Weezer?! WHERE ARE THE REAL WEEZER?!! My heart was broken. Really. (Owen)

The psychology behind this critic’s dramatic reaction is interesting, primarily because it suggests not that Weezer have become a bad band, but rather they have split from their former selves and are now a different entity altogether. The idea that this new, vapid Cuomo is one separate from the “real” Cuomo – the one who made Pinkerton – is a self-deluding defense mechanism employed to this day by a great many Weezer fan (and exploited, to an extent, by the band with their Memories Tour). At the time, some even managed to interpret empty love song clichés like “It’s all that I can do right now / I’ll make it up to you somehow” and the refrain of “Don’t Let Go” as veiled messages from Cuomo to his biggest fans, urging them not to lose faith in him before his true return. But for the most part, fans reacted like the author quoted above, not wanting to besmirch their perception of Cuomo the auteur; as Roach saw “the early development of a particular kind of secular devotion” (Goodall 12) in the English actor Thomas Betterton’s “royal” funeral, devoted Weezer fans began to imagine (consciously or otherwise) the old Cuomo had passed from this earth, allowing them to continue and even intensify their worship of him without second thought. The pop scholar automaton slickly stylized on the front cover of Green, then, simply must have been someone else altogether.

With this perceived split came that of Cuomo’s two oppositional legacies, the Body artistic and Body commercial. Despite his attempts at a textbook example of the “sell-out,” Cuomo’s fans and critics have not allowed the replication of his image to be so simple or singular. Though Cuomo largely refused to play more than one song from Pinkerton per concert for the better part of the ensuing decade, and though he has burrowed deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of crass commercialism (and subsequently scathing reviews) with Weezer’s albums, the critics and die-hard fanbase’s love for the band’s second album is so immense that it has all but made their ensuing seven LPs irrelevant. So while Cuomo occasionally scores a bona-fide FM pop hit with songs like 2005’s “Beverly Hills” (by Weezer) and 2010’s “Magic” (with the rapper B.O.B.), he can never escape the shadow of his 1996 self. Countless bands of the past 15 years have cited Pinkerton as a defining influence while deriding the band’s latest devolution; Weezer’s every mention in the press comes with a requisite in memoriam for their artistic integrity; and just last year, the album’s reissue averaged a perfect 100 on the popular criticism aggregator Metacritic, only the third ever to do so (along with the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street and the Clash’s London Calling). But above all else, his fans’ resilient dedication to Weezer in spite of his continued betrayal is what keeps this complex paradox alive: as the band’s drummer Pat Wilson said in 2005, “Basically, you have to hate Weezer to be a true fan” (Kelly).

Dealing with Duality: Semi-Social Interaction

It’s a heavy burden to carry, and Cuomo has reacted to his own split-identity in interesting ways. In 2001, he at first responded with venom, calling Pinkerton a “sick, diseased album” and the cult that had formed around it “the most painful thing in my life” (Ferguson). He would even go as far as to announce the titles of Pinkerton songs before playing one of his new pop songs on tour, much to the audience’s chagrin. But around the time he first realized these fans were not going to go away, he did something few true celebrities had ever before done: he broke the barrier between stage and crowd, those invisible walls of para-social interaction, and spoke to them. He asked them for advice.

In November of 2001, Cuomo initiated email correspondence with fans of his band he had found on the Internet – particularly the vocal ones who had complaints about Weezer’s recent change in direction. He set up dialogues via the band’s official webmaster Karl Koch, both to prevent his email from leaking to the public and to authenticate his identity, and sought honest feedback on the demo recordings he was posting to Weezer.Com on a daily basis – often with changes made based on fans’ responses to the previous batch. Koch later summarized Cuomo’s change of heart in noting, “He started to become interest in the hardcore fans’ points of view, and how their comments were remarkably similar to things a producer might say…It was [a way of] getting advice from people who had no financial interest in the subject, just artistic” (Sorenson). And while it is now commonplace, ten years later, for celebrities to “Friend” and “tweet” at individual fans, these interactions tend to be superficial and still para-social in nature (often a ploy to get more “Followers,” or online subscribers). Cuomo used the Internet and his webmaster as buffers, to an extent, but records of these exchanges show him to be a uniquely thoughtful and engaged conversant with his fans – he himself noted, in a post to a Weezer fan forum, that “no artist has incorporate[d] his fanbase…into his psyche like I have” (Sorenson). These dialogues fell somewhere between the first-order intimacy of a face-to-face conversation and the second-order, public intimacy of onstage banter with the crowd. For our purposes, we might call it “semi-social” interaction.

It was an experiment that didn’t last long. Cuomo, at first deliberately penitent (one email concludes, “The truth is, I, and most other musicians, need some sort of advising – be it from a manager, a girlfriend, or, in my case, an ex-fan…so as long as you’re willing to give the criticism, I’m willing to take it”), wound up hostile and inflammatory (posts to the Rivers Correspondence Board began to include renunciations of his previous work and promises of a “rap rock” album), before abandoning direct fan interaction entirely a few months later. 2002’s mindless Maladroit, at first conceived as a concession to the fans, wound up a further betrayal of them, and in a subsequent interview he dismissed the lot of them as “little bitches.” And yet even then, few of them dismissed him in return – after all, these were the words of a new Cuomo, not the noble artist who had faded somewhere into the depths of the late ‘90s.

The Truly Eternal: Art or Commerce?

Following that petty outburst in 2002, Cuomo decided to take a more passive approach and simply not talk about (or play more than the obligatory one or two songs per concert from) Pinkerton for the remainder of the following decade. But now that even he has come to accept the co-existence of his Body artistic and Body commercial, as evidenced by the Memories Tour and forthcoming archival releases like The Pinkerton Years diaries (running perpendicular to his frequent collaborations with the pop and corporate likes of Disney child stars, Ellen Degeneres, and State Farm auto insurance), one might wonder which of these two “eternal” bodies will truly endure.

And for as good an answer as there can be, one might look no further than that second set Weezer played in New York City last December, or any other city they’ve toured in their ongoing reunion as The Band That Made Pinkerton. As Cuomo concluded the set by his lonesome for the acoustic swansong “Butterfly,” a strange and wonderful new meaning became superimposed upon it, amplified by the rough harmony of some five thousand fans singing along. As Cuomo sadly reflects to his lover at the end of Pinkerton – “I told you I would return / When the robin makes his nest / But I ain’t never coming back…” – the mantra of “I’m sorry” that ends the evening begins to feel like an apology, both from Cuomo to his abused and faithful fans, and from those fans to Cuomo for never accepting the person he really did become. A communal chill resonated throughout the room, and as Cuomo rose his guitar in salute to the crowd with a knowing smile, it felt clear that this is the type of moment people remember, and write down. The other Weezer might wind up in somebody else’s Encyclopedia of Pop, perhaps featured as a footnote.

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Weezer: One Name, Two Bands [2/3]

Sunday, June 12, 2011

(Continued from the first installment.)

PINKERTON, AND THE BODY ARTISTIC

While at Harvard, Cuomo developed a fascination for the 1904 opera Madama Butterfly, seeing in Giacomo Puccini a master melodist and, in the rather despicable protagonist Lieutenant Pinkerton’s impregnation and abandonment of a Japanese lover, a prototype for the rock star cliché of bedding and leaving a girl in every city while on tour. His appreciation deepened for the immense vocal harmonies of Brian Wilson, especially on the Beach Boys’ baroque pop classic of 1966, Pet Sounds, as well as the raw and unapologetic assault of Nirvana’s 1993, pre-suicide swansong In Utero. These primary influences combined to create Pinkerton’s sonic palette, while the continued turmoil in Cuomo’s life informed the lyrics. Having been long acclimated to the warmer climes of California, the harsh Boston winter did little to cheer Cuomo, who was already crippled and cane-stricken by a rudimentary and very painful surgery to correct his lifelong leg length difference.

It was literally like having seven arrows lodged in your leg…for thirteen months. …I think physical pain, long-lasting physical pain like that, can really sweeten a work of art. So, I think it did have a big impact on that second album. And it affected me in school, because I was far less comfortable getting to know new people. I looked strange, and I was handicapped. (Crimson)

Indeed, the biggest problem Cuomo faced then was, as ever, his profound loneliness. Having spent considerable time in the press and on television with Weezer, he couldn’t understand why no one seemed to notice him on campus: “It got to the point where I was like, ‘Shit, doesn’t anyone want an autograph?” (Brunner) Likewise, he began yearning to again wield that shamanistic power of “collective effervescence,” of inspiring “ecstasy and swooning” in an adoring audience (Rojek 53, 56). Having finally risen to the level of fame he had coveted for most of his life, he was now stifled by his (largely self-wrought) inability to access any of the social rewards he felt to which he should have been entitled.

And so, the many confessions and personal details of Pinkerton are revealing to the point of embarrassment. In “El Scorcho,” a couple of lines are taken from one of his classmate’s essays that he peer-edited. He sings, with bewildered anguish, of falling in love with a lesbian on “Pink Triangle.”  The immaturely defensive and self-defeatist lyrics of “Why Bother?” include such crass gems as, “You got a look that made me think you’re cool / But it’s just sexual attraction / That’s all it is, so I’d rather keep whackin’.” And then there is “Across the Sea.”

Inspired by a letter Cuomo received from an 18-hear-old Japanese fan-girl during his darkest days at Harvard, “Across the Sea” is both the structural and emotional centerpiece of Pinkerton. If, as Rojek once wrote, the standard relationship between fans and celebrity “involve[s] unusually high levels of non-reciprocal emotional dependence, in which fans project intensely positive feelings onto…[and] participates in imaginary relations of intimacy with the celebrity” (Rojek 51), Cuomo here inverts the dynamic to troubling and uncomfortable extremes. Driven to depravity, he sings to the young girl in a rather lovely melody, “I wonder what clothes you wear to school / I wonder how you decorate your room / I wonder how you touch yourself, and curse myself for being across the sea.” As Rojek wrote of “the fan who suffers from obsessional-compulsive neurosis [and] is incapable of mentally recognizing the staged reciprocity between celebrities and audiences” (66), here is the celebrity who fails in that recognition just as profoundly.

Cuomo, however, did not lack the intelligence or self-awareness to recognize that Pinkerton was an abnormally – perhaps even disturbingly – honest record. As he wrote to his label and bandmates upon the record’s completion in 1996:

I’m really pleased and amazed to hear [on Pinkerton] my most confused feelings given form in such a faithful manner…There are some lyrics on the album that you might think are mean or sexist. …[but] I really wanted these songs to be an exploration of all the parts of myself that I was either afraid or embarrassed to think about before. You may be willing to forgive those lyrics if you see them as passing low points in a larger story, the story of the last two years of my life. And as you’re probably aware, these have been two very weird years.

Cuomo’s rationale did include one fatal flaw, however: he actually thought this music was going to be popular. To again quote Rojek, “the mass-media who build up celebrities are often unable to resist engineering their downfall” (79) – and with this album Cuomo made it quite easy for them. Cuomo claims that one of the bigger radio stations in America returned their copy of the album’s first single “El Scorcho,” calling it one of the worst songs the staff had ever heard. Rolling Stone’s review called the album “juvenile,” “deliberately corny,” “aimless” – and much to Cuomo’s chagrin, no doubt – “humorous” (O’Connor). SPIN lamented Weezer’s decision to forego the high-gloss production of their first album in favor of a rawer sound, and most of the band’s audience would wind up agreeing: in the Rolling Stone readers’ poll for 1996, Pinkerton was voted the second most disappointing album of the year.

Despite bassist Matt Sharp’s interview claim a year prior that Weezer were “the band that’s more prepared to fail than anyone ever” (Lowdown), Cuomo reacted to his descent in a way that corroborated Rojek’s observation, “Celebrities are perhaps among the most insecure people in our midst” (95). He quickly lost an element crucial to one’s success on the stage: confidence, or what Stephen Orgel once termed the “illusion of power” (Braudy 316). To return to Roach’s dichotomy of strength and vulnerability, this proved fatal: “Strength without vulnerability lacks dramatic interest, while vulnerability without strength is just disgusting” (Roach 565), and with Pinkerton, Cuomo had become too unguarded, too vulnerable, too deeply self-loathing for a rock star. And with Pinkerton’s failure, Cuomo became something of an alcoholic mess onstage, his drunken sway making it pathetically clear why he had previously stood so still during performances. In a review of a November 2nd show in San Francisco in 1996, a critic for Addicted to Noise wrote, “Keeping his gaze lowered toward the stage floor and swallowing beer three mouthfuls at a time, Cuomo almost seemed as if he was oblivious to the 2,000-plus fans.”

However, there was power to this music, however widely it was missed on first listen. Quite clearly, the raw distortion and pummeling guitars, the anguished wails, and the (at least perceived) audio verité of a tight band playing to its limits carried a very resonant force, as did the unusually deep and enduring prowess that Cuomo displayed in these loud rock songs of such subtle compositional complexity. This power was indeed essential to the cult of worship that began to gather around Pinkerton in the late ‘90s via word of mouth, as probably was the fact that it had initially failed: with this album, Cuomo was a man who had suffered immensely for his art, and then, when it came to sales, suffered proportionally for his honesty. It was the stuff of legend: once again, “Achilles was a more compelling hero because of his heel, not in spite of it” (Roach 565).

.

THE GREEN ALBUM, AND THE BODY COMMERCIAL

During the time it took for Pinkerton to amass a fanbase of its own, however, Cuomo had turned the opposite way. Reflecting in 2008 on how he felt during the late ‘90s, he wrote, “I now blamed my love for classical music and large scale composition for the failure of Weezer’s second album. I perceived my interest in this field egotistical and pompous. What, was I too good for simple three minute pop songs that everyone loved? …I [had] deserved to fail” (Cuomo 7). The pop success that had eluded him became his obsession, and by the beginning of 1999, he had developed a fascinating approach to reconnecting with it:

I disciplined myself to write a steady stream of song-experiments, giving each a number, and keeping a log of my work called ‘The Catalog of Riffs.’ I analyzed a large number of writing methods, varying what seemed to be every possible facet of the process: the order of the steps (guitar, melody, lyric, beat, riff, etc.); the tempo; the feel; the level of distortion on the guitar; whether I was composing aloud or in my head; the time of day; my emotional state; whether I had eaten or not; the number of drinks I had imbibed, if any. My goal was to ascertain the one method by which I could write the best [potential hit] songs. (Cuomo 9)

By September of the following year, Cuomo had recorded 333 such experiments, often accompanied by methodical narratives like “Concept (IAEVC)-Incipit-Melody-Guitar-Develop-Tea” (“IAEVC” standing for “intellectually acquired emotionally volatile concept”). Most of these experiments were based around Cuomo’s Encyclopedia of Pop, a densely theoretical and analytical look at the biggest hit singles since modern pop music’s inception in the 1950s – a private volume he authored in hope that it would help him find the formula for the perfect pop song. This endeavor was a clearly conscious attempt to eliminate the distance between how he understood his music and the way the masses would understand them – or, as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would put it, these were attempts at “standardization and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system.”

In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s 1944 essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” provides an excellent window through which to understand Cuomo’s work at the turn of the century, from the “cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable [song] types” to the “ready-made clichés to be slotted anywhere” in the lyrics. The idea that the listener, upon hearing the first notes of a song, would be able to “guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does come” was an effect for which Cuomo purposely strived as he searched for “the formula, which replaces the work” (Adorno/Horkheimer 5). And then there’s the fact that “the idiom demands an astounding productive power, which it absorbs and squanders” (6) – of those three hundred-odd songs Cuomo wrote in a half year, critics would later come to agree that none of them could stand up, as art, to any one of the mere twenty songs Cuomo had previously released on the first two Weezer albums.

The end result for all this work, the 28-minutes-brief Green Album of 2001, was Pinkerton’s inverse: in response to that most personally invested of records, Cuomo had written what Rolling Stone dubbed “a monument to vagueness.” Not only were the songs generic and largely indistinguishable ‘50s pop song forms run through ‘90s guitars and amps, but also the production was compressed and normalized to the point of sterility. It typifies what the rock theorist Joe Carducci once described as “the sound of self-censorship with an ear toward radio play rather than performance, an adherence to hardened genre rather than music…promis[ing] breezy, no mess, frictionless fucking” (Carducci 342) – a sentiment echoed by Tiny Mix Tapes’ verdict on Green, which posited that “it sounds so polished [one] could dry-hump it for hours without feeling any friction” (Lin). Cuomo’s accomplishment with Pinkerton – which had, by 2001, enjoyed a complete and very favorable reappraisal in the press – could be viewed as what Adorno and Horkheimer associated with “the great artists…those who used style as a way of hardening themselves against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth.” But now he was orchestrating a betrayal of that concept, attempting to “embody a wholly flawless and perfect style” (Adorno/Horkheimer 8-9). Pinkerton’s growing legion of fervent fans, who had effectively financed Cuomo’s return to fame via Weezer’s officially reunion in the summer of 2000, were bound to be disappointed by Green.

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Weezer: One Name, Two Bands [1/3]

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

It’s a cold December’s night in 2010, and the crowd has grown impatient. Everyone in this New York City rock hall has been waiting at least a few hours for the headlining act; some of them have been waiting for more than a decade. After a couple of mediocre opening bands and a cloyingly corporate interlude from a couple of hosts from the radio station down the block, the lights go down and what looks like the main attraction steps to the stage.

The band is tight and energetic, running through some dozen hit songs bearing the vintage of 1994, 2009, and the many years inbetween. The short and nerdy frontman, bespectacled by his trademark pair of thick-rimmed gimmicks, jumps up and down, guides the crowd through a few giant sing-alongs, and spends a couple of songs with a wireless microphone deep in the midst of the thousands-strong throng. He’s engaging and the music is enjoyable, but both seem to try too hard, and the crowd knows it. This is a show most of them have paid to see at least once before, and though the applause is loud and appreciative when the band stalks offstage, it is not what they came to see.

Fifteen minutes later, the band returns – identical to how they appeared earlier, less the frontman. His stylish clothes are now replaced by a simple sweater and khakis (no glasses), the guitar he neglected for most of the previous set anchors him to the mic stand at the front and center of the stage, and his demeanor is much more sullen and shy than before. The band plays another full set of songs, the singer now commanding the room with a quiet, effortless grace that was absent from the exaggerated antics of before. The audience throbs, sweats, united in their adoration for and enchantment by the modest figure wailing and shredding onstage. There can be no mistaking it: this is a different band, and this is the moment the crowd has long awaited.

Both of these bands are popularly known as the Californian pop rock group Weezer, and the frontman of each is Rivers Cuomo. The occasion for this strange doubling was their “Memories Tour,” an ongoing nostalgia act that finds Weezer playing two sets per night: the first, a career-spanning “greatest hits” run of their radio hit material, and the second, a complete run through their highly (though only retrospectively) acclaimed album, 1996’s Pinkerton (on the second night: for the first, it’s 1994′s Blue Album). The show’s program could be seen as the first time Cuomo and company have seemingly acknowledged – and capitalized upon – the double life of their careers, the split-identity of their music. But it’s been a long and trying road towards this moment, for Cuomo and his fans alike – and to understand fully how they each got there, one needs to return to the starting point of Weezer’s long and strange saga.

ANTI-IT, AND THE BEGINNINGS OF A SPLIT

It was the summer of 1994, and Rivers Cuomo should have felt happy. Weezer had just scored their first radio hit with “Undone – The Sweater Song,” a recently added staple of Los Angeles’ influential KROQ FM playlist. Their second single, “Buddy Holly,” was about to be released along with its Happy Days throwback music video (complete with a cameo by Fonzy himself) that would propel their debut record, The Blue Album, to triple-platinum success. With his three bandmates, he was beginning his first-ever tour of the United States, met by rapturous fans of alt-rock in every city club along the way. It was the realization of a lifelong dream Cuomo began to pursue full-time after graduating from high school in 1986 (Luerssen 50), and one that he had managed to achieve by the age of 24.

But, of course, it wasn’t what Cuomo had imagined. In fact, at a time when most would have been rejoicing, he found himself distraught — anguished, even. He had just written, recorded, and in May of 1994, released an album of what he thought were ten very sincere and heartfelt songs – but they had been thoroughly misunderstood. In his own words:

At that time I had an image of me and Weezer as the next Nirvana. That would make me the next Kurt Cobain. And we were going to be taken very seriously. Our A&R guys [from major label Geffen Records] took me out to lunch and said, ‘You realize people are going to think you’re really goofy and funny?’ And I was just stunned. I didn’t hear us that way at all. Take ‘The Sweater Song,’ for example – to me that was a song about depression. But they said, ‘No, people are going to think this is really fun and really funny.’ And they were right. (Steel)

Around the same time, Cuomo wrote in his journal and correspondence to friends of “the hell of rock stardom,” and “a great yearning for something more profound than pop music” (Cuomo 5). He also wrote extensively on the pains of touring and playing live, feeling a very Cobain-esque disdain for the falseness of “para-social interaction” (Rojek 52) – that illusory, second-order intimacy experienced between celebrity and audience, separated in the rock star’s case by the stage and its flank of venue security guards. As such, Cuomo typically withdrew from the crowd who had come to see him perform, opting not to move a muscle from the neck down (save his arms strumming the guitar) and often acknowledging his fans with little more than an impartial, almost vacant gaze.

Exactly what audiences found so captivating about Cuomo then, and now (through YouTube footage), is typically elusive. In some ways, it can be understood as what Jane Goodall calls the “supreme attribute,” or what Joseph Roach calls “It” – but It isn’t quite it, with Cuomo. On the one hand, “the easily perceived but hard-to-define quality possessed by abnormally interesting people” (Roach 555) certainly describes what Cuomo had – and if It is “the precondition of celebrity – its oxygen, its food” (556) then Cuomo, already the subject of MTV interviews and sold-out crowd adulation, ipso facto had It. The description from Roach’s article that most applies to Cuomo, however, is the possession of an “indefinable, intangible quality…[that] transforms even his deficiencies into assets” (557). Time would prove Cuomo to be a very genuinely awkward and socially inept person, and the stage transformed that personal failing into an entrancing presence. As Roach considers in the crucial balance of strength and vulnerability, “Achilles was a more compelling hero because of his heel, not in spite of it” (565).

But the onstage amplification of Cuomo’s social deficiency is the exact place where more traditional notions of It become misleading. The celebrity scholar Chris Rojek describes the “subjectivist” approach to understanding the popular performer as one who works via the audience’s perception of his “innate, ‘God-given’ gifts” – but Cuomo’s talents appeared to be unflatteringly human. Weezer’s brand of self-deprecating pop was never seen as “the Devil’s music,” as the American South understood the Blues in the 1930s (Rojek 68), the Beatles in the ‘60s or the hard rock and metal gods beyond – nor was it a case of the “supernatural powers” (Ibid.) supposedly wielded by experimental jazzmen like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. Cuomo wasn’t Godly, or anti-Godly – he was simply lonely. His skills of pop songcraft were picked up from long hours working as a record store clerk in Los Angeles, and studying the music of the Beach Boys and classical composers; his immense abilities as a guitarist were clearly the product of many a high school night spent alone with his KISS posters (a scene described in The Blue Album’s “In The Garage”).  Cuomo was a nerd, and his music was a product of that social sub-status, insofar that a rather phony genre was coined to describe the thick-rimmed-glasses aesthetic of his music: “geek rock.” Goodall says that with stage presence, “something beyond the natural is being evoked” – but Cuomo very much embodied the natural, the mundane. In his performances, there was none of Goodall’s concept of either “the dignitary” (the trained concession to “the social world [and] all its power-play”) or “the magus” (the untrained connection to the “wider cosmos” of the metaphysical beyond). Rather, by standing stock still onstage like a timid loser while singing songs about being a timid loser, Cuomo was embracing something that might be understood most accurately as Anti-It: stage presence via a genuine lack thereof. As is displayed in plain succession on the aforementioned Memories Tour, Cuomo’s natural Anti-It is far more effective in connecting with the audience than his later attempts at embracing It’s more traditional performative gestures (à la Mick Jagger or Lady GaGa).

Another way in which Cuomo inadvertently subverts traditional schema of celebrity theory is in the concept of the king’s two bodies. As explained by Ernst Kantorowicz in 1957, this duality refers to the way in which monarchs achieve immortality: beyond the Body natural, the physical personage that inevitably grows old and dies, there is the Body politic, which serves as the legacy that endures long after in the public memory. Cuomo, like any celebrity, likewise possesses the “physical and eternal” bodies both (Braudy 316) – but for him, the latter has come to inhabit simultaneously two contradictory poles: high art, and lowbrow product. This most unusual (and quite unintentional) feat, and the profound effect of cognitive dissonance it has had on many of Weezer’s fans, did not come to fruition until 2001, but was faintly visible even in 1994: there seemed to be a marked difference between how Cuomo presented himself onstage and in halting, Asperger’s-like interviews (a common feature of Cuomo profiles to this day feature comments on the painful silence that follow the interviewer’s questions, often lasting minutes at a time), and music critics’ perception of the band as a pop novelty act, as well as Cuomo’s grinning, gee-whiz affect alongside Fonzy in the spit-shined, mom-friendly “Buddy Holly” music video.

However, it wasn’t until 1996’s Pinkerton that the stage was set for Cuomo’s split between the Bodies artistic and commercial. With Weezer’s second album, Cuomo wanted to address everything that had made him feel so misunderstood in 1994: his desire to escape “the hell of rock stardom” found him enrolling at Harvard as an undergraduate for two semesters in 1995 and 1996, and his study of classical composition there would be his way to make something “more profound than pop music.” And this time, Cuomo would be so personal in his songwriting, so deliberately unfunny, that none could be mistaken. These songs were dead serious.

 

Part 1 of 3. Next Installment: Pinkerton and the Body Artistic.

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And now…

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

For something completely unexpected, TVS will be reanimating with an essay I recently wrote, titled, Weezer: One Name, Two Bands. It was written for a theater studies class, and so it is approached from an angle that might take some getting used to on the reader’s part, but I figured that if I have an online (and recently neglected) outlet for Weezer-related writing, I might as well put what I’ve got here. I think some of you will enjoy it.

It’s a long one, so I’ll post it in three installments. It’s going to take some reformatting to fit this blog format, so it’ll take a moment to get started, but you can safely expect episode one to go live sometime tonight.

See you soon,
-Soy (@soyrev)

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Butterfly

Monday, December 20, 2010

For my money, “Buttefly” might very well be the best thing Rivers Cuomo’s ever done. I usually vacillate between this one and “Only in Dreams” as Weezer’s definitive moment (and sometimes the defiantly great Red era outtake “Pig,” even), and at 8 minutes, “Dreams” has a bit of an inherent advantage — it is conspicuously epic, resoundingly conclusive, and masterfully beautiful. But “Butterfly” lacks only the first of those three descriptors, and might actually be better for it. As it sheds the the coarse, distorted cocoon of Pinkerton‘s first 9 tracks to make its gentle skyward escape, “Butterfly” is a song that achieves everything its shouted, amplified, cathartically immature predecessors do with just one guy playing one guitar and singing one voice. At a bit under 3 minutes in length, “Butterfly” is approximately as long as the overwhelming finale of “Dreams,” and — just like “Dreams” — it can send waves of chills through my body the whole way through, if I’m in the mood to let it.

“Butterfly” is the perfect quiet-after-the-storm for one of the most raucous albums in rock history, the inversely spare denouement to the album’s aesthetic and literal centerpiece, “Across the Sea.” It’s inevitably disappointing to imagine Pinkerton ending in any other way, and it’s interesting to think that for a time Cuomo did (with the grand, though much lesser, “Longtime Sunshine“) — though I doubt he could’ve called the record Pinkerton if he did. Though scholars are still searching for evidence of the Puccini-quoted melodies that Cuomo has claimed are scattered throughout his own song suite, “Butterfly” is the one place where Madama Butterfly‘s presence is most clearly felt. Butterfly, Puccini’s 1904 opera, ends with naval lieutenant Pinkerton forever leaving behind his secret love in Japan, Cio-Cio San, as he makes his final return to his American life and family. Pinkerton ends with our own Pinkerton (Cuomo himself, on page and in life) making the same reluctant betrayal of the love he’s finally found after so much pained searching (the miserable morning-after regret that follows a starlit night of love and confusion called “Falling For You“). In a lot of ways, it’s a progression from the adolescent angst that makes all previous Weezer songs so vital: “Across the Sea” is fantasizing about a girl too young to have without hurting, “Only in Dreams” is a prom night too perfect to exist, “In the Garage” is being too lonely to even find someone with whom to play Dungeons & Dragons. “Butterfly” cuts down on the self-pity but none of the self-loathing, lucidly aware that the pain he is about to inflict on her and himself is entirely his own doing; it is painfully honest and confessional, so much so that recording engineer David Fridmann felt compelled to ask Cuomo if he really wanted to say it on record. But even then, it’s not one bit more mature than those other songs — you can tell as much in the second verse, when he sings pettily, “If I’m a dog then you’re a bitch,” but even more plainly so in those gorgeously awful last three lines, when it is quietly revealed that Cuomo is singing this song to himself, not to the poor girl. “I did what my body told me to / I didn’t mean to do you harm” isn’t an insincere apology, it’s not an apology — the bastard is just rationalizing his mistake for his own conscience’s sake. The real apology comes later, at the very end, and that’s one for not having the guts to apologize. You can tell he means that one.

This song has been performed a number of ways by Cuomo and company, and improbably enough, they’re all brilliant. In the early ’00s, Weezer had a remarkable knack for misinterpreting their own classics (the godawful extended intro for “Buddy Holly” was just the most common; the worst was probably newbie Scott Shriner’s effects-pedal smothering and improvisational dance-upon-corpsing of “Only in Dreams” and its bass spine). But somehow, the full-band jam take on “Butterfly” actually came off: I’ve heard many slight variations across a number of bootlegs, and some worked better than others, but they all worked, and that’s something of a great achievement, considering their common features include rather active drumming, free-range bass roaming (ably introduced by Mikey Welsh, not Shriner, interestingly enough), echoic electric guitars, and twice as many “I’m sorrys” as the recorded version. Probably the best take is the one that wound up officially released on the b-side of “Beverly Hills” in 2005. This strange pairing of songs continued with the placement of “Butterfly” in what was otherwise probably the Raditude era’s pivotal nadir, the 2009 AOL sessions, this gorgeously simple and understated epic following the likes of Chamillionaire ruining the one redeeming moment of “Can’t Stop Partying,” and Kenny fucking G flute-shitting all over a song about banging teenage girls in the Palermo’s men’s room. Here “Butterfly” had harp instead of guitar, and Cuomo stood in place and sang instead of shouting around like a rhesus ape, and it was lovely.

My absolute favorite performance, though, was probably the one that took place this past weekend in New York City. The band was just finishing up the local leg of its Memories tour, in which they play a greatest hits setlist and then one of their first two albums on succesive evenings. Blue was fantastic but Pinkerton was uniformly superior (just like the records), and after years of air-guitaring and -drumming and bad-singing along with friends in the car, finally getting to shout and jump and do it all with thousands of perfect strangers felt like something of a lifetime accomplishment. But it was “Butterfly” (with that minimal tom-tom beat played by Karl Koch, just like on the record) that gave us the chance to calm down and really soak it all in — an opportunity to think not what these songs have meant for us, but what they’ve meant for Cuomo. Back in the late ’90s, when it seemed the man had all but disappeared, fans interpreted the last three lines of “Butterfly” as a goodbye to music. Now, in the late ’00s, it could just as tenably be read as an apology from Cuomo, having returned but not once having really seemed like himself, for the music he has made since. But all those several thousands of us could now stand in place and sing and really try to hit all the notes, not for ourselves as we did loud and free on “The Good Life” and “El Scorcho,” but for Cuomo. As he finished amidst great applause, warmth in his eyes and a small smile as he stood holding his acoustic high in triumph before a sea of hand-symbols representing the band he’s fronted mostly just in name for so long, you could really sense that he gets it, he got it in ’96, and he never honestly forgot it. Cuomo’s just always wanted to be loved, and when Pinkerton didn’t go over so well he simply tried to find what he needed from a different audience; meanwhile, we who love Pinkerton and have wanted to love him for it have grown as an audience, and for a night we could each give each other exactly what had been missing from this record’s history for so long. I waited nearly a decade for that one moment, and I’m not sorry.

Filed in Live B-Sides, Pinkerton, The Very Best | | Comments (21)

Blowin’ My Stack

Monday, October 18, 2010

Tonight, on Teenage Victory Songs, we will be going over some of the reasons why “Blowin’ My Stack” is a modern Weezer classic. You are invited to download it and listen first, or read along as you go.

1. Starting a song about blowing out your amp with a riff played through…well, a blown-out amp. Nice little way to get a song started, and it combines with the acoustic guitar to make for a really nice texture during the verses.
2. “Woe is me” — with a sense of humor, for once! Can’t remember the last time a Weezer song charmed me so well with an opening line.
3. The just-below-a-shout vocal harmonies: “A mighty long time!” “But you don’t know why!” Reminds me of the early ’90s classic “Chess.” And, speaking of which…
4. This song reminds me of “Chess” in a lot of ways, actually. There’s the lyrics about mundane day-to-day life, and the struggle to transcend it (in “Chess,” Cuomo offers the second person “you” a paint brush; here, he leads by example in turning up the volume on his amp). There’s a similarity I hear in the confidently strummed acoustic, too.
5. The extended verses. Too often nowadays Rivers is content to simply bide his time during the verse before the big chorus ear candy (“Tripping Down the Freeway,” “Pork and Beans”), but here he really gets in the groove, opening up some breathing room for himself to actually say something, and the band to actually do something interesting (I like the little syncopated fills Pat Wilson adds).
6. Speaking of big chorus ear candy: holy shit! The layered guitars and cathartic shouts really have an air of pop euphoria to them. It sounds happy, it is happy, it is infectiously so. It makes me feel good.
7. Second verse: “You’re so scared! (So scared!) / So scared! (So scared!) / …And I’m scared too!” Adorable (relatable!) sentiment, amplified in effect by a great melody and a harmony to match. Can’t help but smile.
8. When was the last time you heard a Cuomo song that actually added something noticeable to the chorus? The little background vocal addition in the second chorus is such a great touch.
9. First half of the solo is some fire. Cuomo’s shredding in a way I done never heard him shred before (is this the kind of ass-kicking he was hoping to achieve on Maladroit?), and the band’s grooving hard behind him. Meanwhile, I air guitar enthusiastically from a distance…
10. But that’s just the first half! Wilson lets fly a drum roll, and now we’re in halftime breakdown territory — but Cuomo’s still going! First time I heard this part, especially when that second guitar (Brian Bell?) kicks in for a moment, I could scarcely believe it. Taken as a whole, this has to be my favorite Weezer solo since…I don’t know, that 2002 Toronto boot of “O Girlfriend?”
11. That bass-heavy bridge, suddenly all melancholy and introspective. “I’m too tired to fight” — nice emotional depth added to the song, and a nice little expansion on the message of the song too (Cuomo hates the daily grind but, like everyone else, is too worn down to fight it — thank God he’s got the guitar, right?).|
12. At this point in the song, the rhythm section is awarded a gold medal. Wilson’s given free rein to indulge in some subtlety for once (I love the tantalizing way he refrains from any cymbal crashes for such a lengthy stretch), and Scott Shriner’s nimble fretwork gives him an equally rare opportunity to flex his chops a bit (to great benefit of the listener, no less). Bell’s little atmospheric guitar touches here are award-worthy, as well.
13. Speaking of Cuomo classics (or near-classics), this whole bridge moment reminds me of 1992′s “Lemonade” — the way in which what sounds like such a simple and happy pop song breaks down into something a little more forlorn, for a time. And frankly, I think “Stack” does it even better.
14. Then everthing builds back up — dare I invoke the spirit of “The Good Life,” here? Dare I do: it’s the only Weezer song I can think of that has such an ass-kicking solo that suddenly breaks down into such an extended beautiful one, and then a build back into the song’s main structure. Granted, of course, “The Good Life” is a much superior song — but only because it reaches further (for example: any song that attempts slide guitar glory, and achieves it, is a winner). “Stack” delivers, albeit with slightly less ambitious intent.
15. At the end of the buildup, a well-placed and entirely justified pickscrape! A rarity in any song by anyone.
16. Final chorus fakeout: new riff drops, Cuomo screams like hell, screams like hell again, and then we are delivered back into pop chorus heaven.
17. Cool device in and of itself, but seriously, that scream is one of the best Cuomo’s ever laid to tape. Damn!
18. Final chorus! Once again, a bit different from the first two. My only gripe here (and with the entire song) is that I wish the “blowin’ my stack” gang vocals in the background were a little higher in the mix, but what a small gripe that is indeed.
19. Cuomo’s last “stack” shout. Yes.
20. The little drum roll and guitar hit at the end. Indeed, this sounds like a BAND playing, not a song being constructed piece-by-piece. A really good band, too!

Really, I can’t imagine the last time a Cuomo POP song made me feel this happy just to sing and dance along. Perhaps “Photograph” — but even “Photograph” doesn’t have anything like the solo, breakdown, or build that “Stack” does.

My impression is that this is the sound of a 2000s Cuomo tune penned with the sensibilities of the ’90s Cuomo we all know and love. It’s got that same pop flair that “Tripping Down the Freeway” and “The Other Way” do, but it’s just executed with so much more creativity, life, and attention to detail in the mix. It’s made all the more impressive by knowing that — aside from some small recent additions (that scream, for example; who knew Cuomo could pull that off past 40?) — this song was one of some dozen or so almost-finished leftovers from 2005′s notoriously hollow Make Believe, along with other winsome tunes like “I’m A Robot” and the surprisingly good new(er) version of “I Don’t Want Your Loving.” What else we missin’ out on from these sessions, fellas?

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Superfriend

Thursday, October 7, 2010

I hesitate to call any one lost Weezer song “the one that got away,” because there are so many: Green era demos like “No Way” and “Burning Sun,” the Make Believe version of “Love is the Answer” (later desecrated by Raditude trendchasing and Sugar Ray’s Sugar Rayness) and other tantalizing outtakes of ’05 like “Last Chance” and “You’re the One,” pretty much the entirety of Rivers Cuomo’s Homie project and various ’97/’98 compositions, and on. All of these have been heard in some fragmentary form or another, and yet the promising full picture to which they allude remains unreleased, uncirculated, just out of reach. One of the biggest reasons so many die-hard Weezer fans remain is because the band’s vault of lost gems looms so large.

“Superfriend” has long been such an artifact, and in some ways it’s one that’s simply unrecoverable. It was first mentioned to fans as a part of the incompleted rock opera Songs from the Black Hole, Cuomo’s original vision for Weezer’s second album and something of a very rough first draft for what became Pinkerton. Though the details of the song lean heavily on contextual detail from that scrapped project’s storyline, it was essentially written as a duet between two of the main characters, Jonas (Cuomo) and Laurel (to be voiced by Rachel Haden of the band called “that dog.”). Jonas is in something of a sexual relationship with Laurel, but he denies her love as she is little more to him than a “superfriend” — or”friend with benefits,” in high school parlance.

Die-hards began pining for “Superfriend” as soon as its origins were revealed, on the basis of it being a key piece of what some fans irrationally believed was a young Cuomo’s answer to Brian Wilson’s unfinished SMiLE opus (the main difference being that Wilson had almost completed recording SMiLE by the time he abandoned it in 1967, whereas Cuomo hadn’t even passed the writing/demoing phase when he ditched Black Hole). Audible details of the song first surfaced in 2004 on Weezer’s Video Capture Device DVD, which included spotty and patchy footage of the band recording a rough take during Pinkerton studio sessions — as well as a brief clip of Cuomo playing a classical arrangement of the vocal melody on an acoustic guitar.

The inconclusive footage gave glimpse enough for fans to conclude that “Superfriend” was indeed a lost classic worthy of its vaunted era, but it wasn’t until the 2007 release of Rivers’ Alone home demos compilation that fans could get a closer look. The juvenile charm of this embryonic version is indeed something of a treasure, but it still left most wanting more: Cuomo’s drumming is particularly sloppy, his falsetto background vocals (meant to represent the female lead vocal) sound like sour milk, and it lacked the dramatic key change climax heard in the VCD clip. It was clear that this take was a dashed-off demo that the Cuomo of ’95 would’ve never imagined being officially released, and did little to sate fans’ desire for the full band picture.

With the deluxe edition re-release of Pinkerton less than a month away, it’s now clear that such a thing no longer exists — if it ever did. In gleaning the archives for outtakes, band historian Karl Koch discovered that the ’96 full band recording seems to have been erased long ago. And even if it were to be uncovered in some unlikely place, it’s a very rough and incomplete rehearsal run-through, far from the glory of a finished and fully produced Cuomo-Haden duet.

That leaves us with the unfortunately shambolic demo — which, despite the shortcomings, gives a plenty fine sense of what the song was meant to be. It’s a disarmingly personal and juvenile song, perhaps even uncomfortably so (opening lines: “What the hell am I doing, thinking with my willy? / Knowing I don’t love her / I tell her no / Then kiss her toes…”), something that the Black Hole opera’s character construct couldn’t hide even if it were in place. The melody’s absolutely wonderful, though, and the chorus’ teen angst appropriation of the “rain, rain go away” nursery rhyme (“pain, pain go away” — of course) actually works, against all odds. The counterpoint in the second verse is absolutely botched by Cuomo’s lazy falsetto attempt, but it hints at what might’ve been a very nice touch.

If anything, that’s the way “Superfriend” might well be “the one that got away.” While songs like “You’re the One” or “Rosemary” were completed in some form and will likely surface someday, the best that can be said for “Superfriend” is that it’s a good sketch of what was to be a great song.

Filed in Alone, Outtakes, Songs From The Black Hole, The Grand Playlist | | Comments (35)

Hurley review for Slant

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Check out my hot-off-the-press review of Hurley for Slant. If you wanna be a doll, retweets and Facebook linkings can easily be done just beneath the album cover. 8-)

Hope to get a new TVS post up soon, but in the meantime, there’s a couple doses of track-by-track Hurley commentary below…

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Run Away

Friday, September 3, 2010

Seeing how I did the knee-jerk reaction thing for one of Hurley’s lesser tracks (the unfortunate first single/opener, “Memories”), I thought I’d do something similar for one of the new album’s best. (Two relevant parentheticals, first: though I still deem it a negligible tune, “Memories” does fare a bit better in the context of the record than as a standalone. Also, while I discussed “Memories” within the span of a couple listens/minutes, I’ve given this one a little more time and space to dry.)

The song is the first on Side Two: “Run Away.” As with other recent victories like “Pig,” “Run Over By a Truck,” and “The Underdogs,” this song doesn’t merely succeed, but does so in a way I could’ve scantly imagined hearing from Weezer (as an album track rather than an outtake, no less!). I hear, compacted into its concise few minutes, very clear traces of subterranean ‘90s heroes like Daniel Johnston, Guided By Voices, Built to Spill, and the like-minded – implemented with an impressively shifting palette that’s rare in Rivers Cuomo’s work (the closest analog I can think of is “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived,” and that’s more of a patchwork exercise in genre distinctions than a song, per se). The lyrics seem a bit weak on paper but work nicely in context (a more typically Cuomo trait), fitting the bill for a good description others have used for Hurley’s lyric sheet: like a slightly more poetic, far more successful Make Believe (lots of melodramatics, here). The music takes a slight turn for the predictable when Cuomo very self-consciously channels the Pinkerton aesthetic in the bridge (kinda like how that Pet Sounds percussion seems to turn up on a song or two of every Brian Wilson album, now), but he pulls it off pretty nicely, and – well, there are much worse things one could complain about, no?

The song begins with another fanboy dream come true: Cuomo singing alone at his piano, lo-fi as fuckall, clearly sourced from some scratchy home demo (a la “Broken Arrows” or “I Admire You So Much”). Really does sound like Dan Johnston to me, and one of his better moments – before Weezer dramatically segues the arrangement into a pretty wonderful verse, cut on wiry Doug Martsch guitars (the lyrics have a touch of classic Built to Spill, too: “When I’m lookin’ at the night sky, I can see my soul / I see the little lights flashin’ at each other up above”). The ooh-ooh pre-chorus has a flair of ‘50s rock’n’roll to it (in the vocal melody, too), and the transition back out of the chorus is where I hear that mid-period GBV (the guitar arpeggios, from the playing to the production, really call to mind Doug Gillard on the Ric Ocasek-produced Do The Collapse album). Cuomo’s vocal, like much of Hurley, sounds more unhinged and emotive than it has in years (that “nah!” before the second verse is worth more than he knows) — it’s a great thing to hear at last. Cuomo winds up doing the Pinkerton throwback, then builds into a one-word refrain that feels like it simply gives up rather than finishes the song proper. It definitely could’ve gone somewhere else, but the sudden collapse ably fits the tune’s mood and sentiment.

Of the majority I’ve heard, I’d be willing to venture that “Run Away” is the second best offering Hurley has to offer. Writing that out makes me feel a bit less excited about the record than I did a moment ago (it’s roughly on par with or better than what I’d say is second best track from the past few – “Tripping Down the Freeway,” “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived,” “The Other Way”), but the distinction here is that this record has at least three songs that are almost as good as this one (plus, again, one that’s even better), which is more than I can say about any of the ’00s records with the exception of Green. So if Hurley manages to keep pace with this standard (roughly…I know I hate “Memories,” and “Where’s My Sex?” sounds like it’ll be a true disaster), it should have no trouble being overall the fourth best Weezer album. Perhaps a pretty darn close fourth.

Still, “Run Away” is emblematic, for me, of Hurley’s limitations as an album. First and foremost, while “Run Away” features some of the best ideas Weezer’s put on record in a decade, they’re not all Weezer’s. It’s hard to know how much to credit Cuomo for a good song when part of the songwriting credit goes to a skilled and proven peer in the industry: Ryan Adams, in “Run Away’s” case. Hearsay (/wishful thinking?) from other fans have led me to believe that all the musical ideas in this song are Cuomo’s whereas Adams’ main contribution was merely telling Cuomo to place together ideas from two then-unrelated song scraps (first of all, probably untrue; second of all, essential to the finished product’s charm), but I don’t have a source for that. And not coincidentally, the one song I’d place above it is a co-write, as is the first song I’d place below it – all done with genuinely respectable and well-known musicians (well-aged legend Mac Davis, whose claim to fame is having written for Elvis Presley — and Dan Wilson of Semisonic, about whom I know little but esteem solely for the classic “Closing Time”). Which suggests a couple obvious things…including the fact that Cuomo really ought to stop “writing” with “artists” like Aly & AJ, already.

(Quick aside: in addition to being a not-really-Cuomo-Cuomo composition, this is likewise a not-really-Weezer-Weezer recording. Cuomo sings and drums, Adams plays lead guitar and bass, and I’d have to see the credits to know but it seems like some of the band was made absent from these particular proceedings. The end result sounds great, so I don’t particularly care, but it’s something worth noting for what’s billed as a Weezer song.)

Green, on the other hand, is solely the work of Cuomo at his most dictatorial (and Weezer at their most fearfully compliant) – which, if nothing else, means we know who to credit and fault. Which brings to mind the point that Green’s also a faultless record, both in that it’s ironed and spitshined to the point of near lifelessness (bad) and that there’s not a bad moment on it (good). Great, in fact – what it largely lacks in excitement, it ably compensates with reliability and the last batch of perfect melodies (and harmonies) ever cranked out by the Cuomachine. There’s not an embarrassing thing about it, whereas Hurley boasts “Where’s My Sex” (of which I’ve only heard a brief clip, though it was a particularly Fred Durst brief clip) and a couple other tracks that may yet be cringeworthy, as well as a meme-joke of an album cover that should’ve been an impetus to come up with a new title rather than to settle on this one (yes, these things matter – compare that to the immaculate, Mikey-complemented style of the Green sleeves). In the end, I’m optimistic that Hurley will be a solid #4 and might even signal a promising change in the winds of Weezer, yet unfailingly skeptical that this could surpass or even match Album Number Three (chronological and qualitative).

Filed in Hurley, The Grand Playlist | | Comments (81)

Mrs. Young

Saturday, August 14, 2010

When Rivers Cuomo opened up Weezer’s songwriting (and lead microphone) to his three bandmates on 2008′s Red Album, it struck both critics and fans as a surprising move from such a typically autocratic frontman. But the gesture was not nearly as unprecedented as Cuomo’s even more recent enthusiasm for collaborating on Weezer songs with outside songwriters, friends, and people of all walks of life — a la Raditude and Hurley. History has shown that Cuomo has been at least somewhat sympathetic to the idea of his bandmates stepping into the =W= limelight: scattered glimpses into the band’s demo troves from the early aughts show that guitarist Brian Bell was pitching material for 2005′s Make Believe (the lovely “It’s Easy,” the otherwise “Rat Race”), and Weezer even played live a song or two each by Bell and drummer Pat Wilson during their adventurous 2002 tour behind Maladroit. And though they remain unheard like virtually all material of the era, four Bell tunes were regularly rehearsed by Weezer at practices in 1998, though Cuomo (whose writer’s block had spurred Bell to bring forth the songs) balked at the suggestion of recording them as a demo for the band. And though Cuomo handled much of the writing and sings lead on the songs, three of The Blue Album‘s songs feature backing tracks largely composed by Wilson.

But before any of that, Cuomo collaborated with original Weezer bassist Matt Sharp on a song called “Mrs. Young.” Likely inspired by Cuomo’s recent composition “Jamie” (indeed, an early version of Sharps’s song is listed in the Recording History as “Jamie II”), it was written as an ode to Jamie Young, the band’s lawyer at the time of their signing to major label Geffen Records. Sharp approached Cuomo with a mostly-finished draft of the song in May of ’93 for help with a couple sections and vocal harmonies, which Cuomo provided — his voice can be heard on the demo, if not perhaps his playing too. However, it was mostly Sharp’s tune, and one for which he sang lead — and seeing how there were at one point serious plans to release it as a b-side for an indie “Jamie” single (scrapped when the band finalized their thoroughly restrictive contract with Geffen), “Mrs. Young” would have been the first officially released Weezer song for which Cuomo took the back seat as early as 1994.

Looking back, it’s a dang shame that didn’t happen. “Mrs. Young” is a great song — perhaps Sharp’s all-time best — and one that is, against considerable odds, actually worthy of the “classic Weezer” period from which it hails. Sharp’s warm and melodic voice has never sounded better, in my opinion, and there’s a charming magic to when that first Cuomo-harmonized, softly strummed chorus swells into an instrumental breeze of harmonicas and guitars. Things get a little predictable when the trademark Weez crunch amp comes in at the two-minute mark — though to be fair, they’d probably just discovered the sound back then — and it sounds great, making room for a fantastic little solo and the song’s heartfelt final stretch. It’s no “Jamie,” but it comes surprisingly close.

Like “Jamie,” though, there’s no way this song could’ve fit on Blue, let alone Pinkerton — but had Cuomo at least been open to the idea of letting other band members write for Weezer on a b-side basis (or, as we see with Wilson’s case on Blue, as co-writers), perhaps things would’ve turned out a little differently. I can imagine Sharp perhaps not starting his own Rentals project, or at least being satisfied enough with his creative role in Weezer as not to leave it (or be discontented enough to act so troublesome that the band had little choice but to give him the boot — whatever was the case). Bell’s knack for songwriting is hard to deny, and with Cuomo’s help (especially one as focused and clear-headed as was his mid-’90s self), I think some great songs could have come from the partnership. And Wilson’s contributions to songs like “My Name Is Jonas” and “Surf Wax America” (hell, even an old scrap like “Lemonade”) have shown that his collaborations with Cuomo can be immensely fruitful. And while Bell’s best work has been his own (Cuomo’s never collaborated with him, ridiculously — Bell’s abortive rewrite of “Private Message” doesn’t count!), I don’t think Sharp’s ever done better than this one on his own, and with the exception of 2008′s solid “Automatic,” Wilson’s solo contributions to the Weezer name have been forgettable at best (2002′s “Reason to Worry” and “The Story Is Wrong,” last year’s “In The Mall”). Had the band seriously explored the possibility of collaboration earlier (at least during the Pinkerton fallout), I think we’d be looking at a different — and perhaps likely — kind of Weezer today.

In any event, the post-1993 life of “Mrs. Young” has been pretty interesting. Once it became apparent that Cuomo was content to leave the song behind, Sharp erased his bandmate’s contributions and rewrote it as “Please Let That Be You” — changing it from a lo-fi, autumnal reminiscence to a nightlit electro-pop ballad (the chorus lyrics left virtually unaltered). It’s a bit of a downgrade, for sure — I feel like Sharp’s sad robot routine in the verses feel a bit forced — but it’s still pretty damn catchy, and one of the highlights of his solo project’s debut album Return of the Rentals. From there “Mrs. Young” seemed largely forgotten, however, eventually turning up on the Rentals’ 2001 fan club-only collection, Excellent Stocking Stuffer — which might well have been the first time the original Sharp and Cuomo demo surfaced to the public, now that I think about it.

But thankfully, the story doesn’t quite end there. Instead, at a now-legendary Matt Sharp solo acoustic show in February of 2005 at Cal State Fullerton, during which he was joined for a few concluding songs with Cuomo — marking the first time the two had performed together since Sharp’s last gig with Weezer in 1997. In order, they played an appropriately heavy-hearted take on “Mrs. Young” (Sharp changing the opening lyric, “Since you called yesterday, I have felt so swell,” to “like hell”), a new mostly-Matt song they had recently collaborated on called “Time Song,” and the Blue staples “Say It Ain’t So” and “Undone – The Sweater Song.” The performance of “Mrs. Young” is a little sloppy, from both Cuomo’s apparent lack of preparation (reading from sheet music) and Sharp being in sentimental singer-songwriter mode, but it’s quite moving nevertheless — especially in its lovely bridge (“stand by my side, always be true”). The two Blue songs sounded great (Sharp’s improvised 2pac quotation at the beginning of “Undone” is classic), and “Time Song” shows the outlines of a song better than at least 90% of anything each of them had have released with their own projects since ’97. It all made Sharp’s little aside about how they had been working on new material for a record genuinely exciting — but any hope for that was soon quelled when Weezer’s Make Believe came out and proved to be something entirely different than what most fans had wanted, and any news of a Cuomo and Sharp collaboration subsequently withered and blew away. The two have unfortunately never played together again, the last place they were seen together at all being Cuomo’s wedding in 2006.


Filed in Demos, Pre-Blue, The Very Best | | Comments (36)