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Simple Pages

Monday, November 23, 2009

Although “Simple Pages” is far from the ranks of Weezer’s universally detested, I have never understood the hatred some have for this particular little ditty from the second side of The Green Album.

Admittedly, it’s placement towards the latter end of a numbingly formulaic song set might mark the exact moment that people begin to tire of the unchanging guitar tone, repetitive progressions and rehashed lyrical tropes — a possibility supported by the fact that the next song on the record, “Glorious Day,” is probably the most hated on the album — but even then, I don’t really see it. The lyrics do seem a bit tepid and generic at first glance, joining the half of the album that is ostensibly about nothing in particular (“Hash Pipe,” “Crab,” “Smile,” “Glorious Day”), but after having spent some years with the song I think it’s one of the more effective compositions on the record. There’s a cool, split coherence to the verses that I really like…

Gimme some love, gimme some love, gimme some / I want you to know!
Gimme some love, gimme some love, sugar / That’s the wrong wrong way to go
Open your arms, open your arms honey, and come right back home to me
Gimme some love, gimme some love, sugar / That’s the wrong wrong way to be

Aside from simply being a series of consonants and vowels that sound nice together (especially when wedded to such an inanely catchy melody), this seems to be a song (perhaps subconsciously) about love, and — in lines about “The hard rock radio / Where they play tunes, where they play tunes, where they play riffs with the hard rock beat!” — rock’n’roll. And in that wonderfully concise, lifting bridge — “Give me something I can believe!” — there’s something to be said for how it all ties together: this is a song about finding transcendence, be it through a relationship or a great song you find on the radio. It’s got a very youthful heart beating behind its assaultive vocal rhythms; “Simple Pages” is indeed a teenage victory song. (Which does add up, considering Rivers Cuomo was but a young buck when he was most interested in hard rock; in fact, the lyrical reference and general semi-coherency could be considered a harbinger for what was to come on the following year’s Maladroit, although I think this song’s lyrics work much better than most of what’s on that record.)

Speaking of that bridge, Brian Bell’s orgasmic “OHH, BA-BY” backup vocal — a bit of a throwback to side one’s excellent “Photograph” — is perhaps my favorite little moment on Green. It’s got a sort of traipsing momentum that provides a real nice respite from the breathless verses, and sets up the vocal melody guitar solo perfectly. But unlike the adamantly strophic and repetitive structures of the rest of Green, the song is far from over now: Pat Wilson provides a few of his most animated drum rolls on the album, and halfway through what would be the concluding verse, Bell reappropriates the “gimme some love” lead yrics as a backup, while Cuomo dances in melodies far above. In a rare instance of counterpoint and duelling vocal melodies, we find the most musically complex movement of Green. Which doesn’t necesarily say much — but even when removed from the unchanging context of the album, it comes across as a nice little slice of pop/rock heaven.

The song was played with considerable regularity throughout the Green tours, and resurfaced in 2002 by the grace of the Hyper Extended Midget Tour’s randomized setlists, where it was only improved by a scorching new solo and some nice added harmonies from Bell. I certainly wouldn’t mind its return to the live set in 2010, but I understand why it hasn’t been played in years: the first couple seconds of the song are pratically identical to the band’s 2005 hit “Perfect Situation,” and even momentarily confusing the crowd would be a faux pas for the populist Cuomo of today.


Filed in The Grand Playlist, The Green Album | | Comments (33)

Hey Domingo!

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Weezer goes reggae. Who would’ve thought?

Thankfully the experiment was a brief one, limited to just this song — and as an experiment, it’s an interesting one. The Early Album 5 sessions were pretty curious: for the most part, it was a lazy extension of Rivers Cuomo’s largely uninspired, assembly line Maladroit-style writing, with most songs being a mere exercise in going through the motions. (Ex. “Mansion of Cardboard,” “I Don’t Want Your Lovin’” and the very unfortunate remake of “Superstar.”) But a few songs, for better or for worse, really attempted uncharted territory for the band — from “The Organ Player” to “Mo’ Beats” to “Sacrifice” — and “Hey Domingo!” is one of the more peculiar and outlandish of those aberrations. It’s hard to guess where Cuomo got the inspiration to take such a detour, but the end result is something that sounds a bit like a poor (white) man’s Bob Marley — or perhaps a cleaned up, buttoned-down, friendly pop/rock distillation of Rage Against the Machine. The pseudo-revolutionary bent of the lyrics, and the chorus — “Where is the rage?” — suggests that it might not be improbable, especially since that band had broken up just a couple years prior.

Predictably, the earliest version we have of the song (6/29/02) is the best. I like the pretty, echoey guitar on the intro, and the vocal melody of the verse is pretty good. All that upstroked guitar is funny to hear in a Weezer song that isn’t “Say It Ain’t So” — but it much more closely reminds me of “Burndt Jamb,” in that it’s a song that finds some unusual inspiration for the verses, but can’t resist the urge to indulge in a more typically Weezer rockout on the chorus. The solo is probably the best part of the bargain, especially when Pat Wilson rolls in on the drums and introduces some nice (albeit unfinished) backup vocals from Brian Bell. On 7/02/02, the band overdubbed some horribly superfluous (and often off-key) piano and organ by that one session guy whose name I can never be assed to remember; and a couple weeks later, on 7/16, they wisely deleted those from the recording, though a cursory listen reveals no other differences on my part.

So musically, it’s a surprisingly competent chameleon act  — but the comically shite platitudes and unimaginative sloganeering of the lyrics really put a crap taste in my mouth. “One million people congregatin’ / Fillin’ up bodega streets,” “one voice united for the purpose,” “solidarity is nice” — it’s as if Cuomo 1) decided to write a reggae song, 2) deduced that most reggae songs have usually had a political intent, 3) remembered he’s wisely never written a political song because he’s got nothing to say there, and 4) forced it anyway. In a catalogue of songs that contains its fair share of insincere songs and lyrical bullshit, “Hey Domingo!” is about as phony as it gets.

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Fall Together

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

I do have moments I love on Maladroit, like ‘Falling For You.’
—Brian Bell, Alternative Press cover story, 2005

Of course, as the interviewer quickly points out in his article, “Falling For You” has nothing to do with Maladroit, and is rather a key moment in the band’s much-lauded Pinkerton album. A telling Freudian slip, to be sure, but what the AP author fails to note is that Bell really means “Fall Together” — a song that he describes as, “Really powerful – the band’s tight, and we’re playing riffs. It [could] have been an album of that. Instead, I’m a bit confused when I hear it…”

To his credit, Bell is right — “Fall Together,” while it’s no “Falling For You” (which is unfair; very few things are), is one of the few instances where Rivers Cuomo’s attempted blend of ’80s arena metal and more traditional Weezer pop/rock actually kind of works. In a sequence of piecemeal construction, the elements of the song drop into place like Legos: Pat Wilson’s dirty drumbeat bleeds seamlessly into Bell’s biting guitar snarl, to which Scott Shriner soon adds a seismic, spatially expanding bass lick. Cuomo saunters into the track with a surprisingly convincing, sleazy swagger, providing a semi-coherent lyric that actually adds to the track’s mise-en-scène. The chorus makes the least sense — in its entirety, “Streamline / Mainline / Fall together, get up” — but sounds pretty badass over Bell and Shiner’s bed of backing vocal “ahhhs.” Finding time to fit in a positively evil-sounding guitar solo, the song is in and out in 2 minutes flat, stating its simple idea quite eloquently then moving on. It’s a concise and efficient stab of dark, teeth-gnashing rock.

A comment about the end of the song, and then the beginning: the outro “yeahs” clearly take production and arrangement cues from Nirvana (think the “hey!” post-chorus to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”), but depending on my mood I can’t really determine if it sounds legitimately Cobain, or Cobain-as-seen-through-Fred-Durst — either way, it’s the one part of the song that grates with me. It’s also interesting how the first three words of the song are “We go together,” just like another Maladroit-era tune of that very name, but the two songs couldn’t be more different in terms of their tone. (“We Go Together” is the better of the two, though — and that’s for sure.)

This song was played at least a bit on every tour from Maladroit‘s release up through 2005, but there’s really only a couple of variations worth noting: first and foremost, the official DVD compendium Video Capture Device documents an acoustic guitar-and-bass backstage jam between Cuomo and Shriner that’s pretty cool, despite being rough around the edges and falling apart during the solo. Shriner also wound up taking the lead vocal for this song during its 2005 setlist appearances, and he did quite a fine job of it. It has not been played in any format on the more recent tours.

Filed in Maladroit, The Grand Playlist | | Comments (44)

Oh Lisa

Friday, November 6, 2009

Without question, “Oh Lisa” is the worst product of the Green Album era. As one of two tracks on the flipside to the “Island In The Sun” single (paired with the relatively benign “Always”), it is in some ways difficult to distinguish from its many contemporaries — the opening lyrical couplet is a rehash of a line in “Simple Pages,” and the guitar intro sounds quite like almost anything else Rivers Cuomo was writing during this period. But its own unique ugliness comes to the fore rather quickly: a lyric like “I’m wanting to / I wanna do you” is unforgivable (especially when it’s the chorus) and it has one of the weakest melodies in a period of great ones. The fact that the song is 3 minutes long despite revealing all it has to offer in its first 40 seconds doesn’t help, either. And Cuomo’s half-hearted performance here as the snotty brat vocalist is also offensive, making this perhaps the most blatant (and unfortunate) Green Day imitation of the several Cuomo attempted for his big commercial comeback.

If I had to find at least one vague redeeming element of this song, I would have to admit that I love the lyric “Taking stock of feelings stored” dearly — on paper, there’s something very poetic and elegant about it. In the context of this glossy-gross punkout, though, it might as well not even be there.

Credit to the band, though, for knowing not to put this one on the album. Anyone know if this stinker was ever played live?

Filed in Studio B-Sides, The Very Worst | | Comments (36)

Mr. Taxman

Monday, November 2, 2009

Interestingly, this Maladroit outtake was actually written in late 2000, somewhere inbetween Rivers Cuomo’s shift from Green Album writing to what was coming next: the last song before it that we have on the COR is Green sugar cookie “Knock-Down Drag-Out” and eventual Maladroit single “Keep Fishin’.” It was attempted a couple of times during demo stages for the former album, but neither of those takes has surfaced; the first of the three versions we have was done in December of ’01, already somewhat deep into Maladroit proceedings and a total seachange away from where Cuomo and the band were when he first wrote the song just a little over a year prior. The band had a new bassist, renewed stardom, and an increasingly impersonalized sonic aesthetic that would soon make the anti-personal Green sound almost confessional.

For its part, “Mr. Taxman” in its earliest version — the aforementioned 12/01 take — sounds like a blend between Green and Maladroit sounds. There are the heavily layered guitars and poptastic “doo doo doo”-style backups of the former, but also the lyrical nonsense and incoherency of the latter: the song’s nadir is probably the segment that goes, “Mr. Taxman, can you hear me? / ‘Cause I know that you got one, too / Tell your jockstrap, ‘Don’t you talk back’ / But it’s still got a hold on you.” Just what kind of taxman is this guy, Cuolmes?

Still, in this early form it’s decently likable. If you’ve ever subjected yourself to marathon Maladroit session listenings, this one’s probably stuck out as a sort of diamond in the rough (albeit a scraped one). The solo’s pretty nice. It definitely has the ’50s-songwriting-via-’90s-aesthetic thing that Cuomo was going for with much of his 2000 writing, an attempt at being both classic and modern that doesn’t nearly reach its theoretical potential (especially coming from this guy!) but still makes for an agreeable listen. A couple takes from the following month (early 2002, up in here) don’t fare quite as well, as the band regrettably Maladroits up the thing even further — where’d those fun backups go?

The melody’s quite fine any way you slice it though, which raises the question of where it might be from. As Cuomo was getting into his Maladroit phase he was becoming more and more shameless in pilfering the annals of rock history: Maladroit is Weezer’s plagiarism album just as much as it is their “rawk” album. Personally, I think Cuomo nicked some serious melodic inspiration (and a good deal of the hook itself) from the chorus of Tommy Roe’s 1963 hit “Everybody.” There’s an obvious connection between that song’s beginning lyric, “Everybody, everybody” and Cuomo’s initiating “Everybody, love your body” that goes beyond the obvious lyrical overlaps…The potential theft certainly isn’t the most egregious or problematic of the era, not by a longshot, but I’m pretty certain it’s there nonetheless. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cuomo encountered this song during his late ’90s/early ’00s pop studies in his pursuit of the perfect single, or as a Beach Boys superfan: the Brian Wilson pet project American Spring, which features him backing and producing (in the most traditional of senses: “here’s the songs, girls, you just sing ’em!”) his wife Marilyn and her sister, whose self-titled album has a rather nice version of the Roe hit as well.

Filed in Outtakes | | Comments (27)

Buddy Holly

Sunday, October 25, 2009

“Undone — The Sweater Song” was the first Weezer song to capture the imagination of the alt-rock nation (and in 1994, it really did have enough of a set perimeter and population to be called a “nation”), but “Buddy Holly” was the first to make the band pop superstars. And though the infallible melody and charming pop cultural lyrics played their part, it’d be hard to contest the fact that it was the Happy Days-themed music video — one of the greatest of all time — that put the song over the top. Likewise, it also happened to boost Jonze’s career into the stratosphere, and like Weezer, he’s entered a new league of mainstream popularity that at the time would’ve seemed impossible: as Weezer gets ready to release its own attempt at a hypercommercial blockbuster, Raditude, Mr. Jonze is tearing up the box office with his feature-length motion picture Where The Wild Things Are.

But that’s all in the distant future. For now, in 1994, there is The Blue Album, and there is its crown jewel single “Buddy Holly,” and boy is it ever something. In the first 8 seconds alone, a series of remarkable trademarks are established: first, there are those chugging, heavily down-stroked rhythm guitars; Rivers Cuomo’s geeky faux-rap parody that comes with a smile in the brilliant form of the opening couplet, “What’s with these homies dissin’ my girl? / Why do they gotta front?” — sung in a melody so damn good that it transcends the kitsch entirely; and that striking little synth lick  that had folks asking Weezer “where’d the keyboards go?” as late as seven years later.

Four quick lines — all in just under fifteen seconds — and with a warm little swell of feedback, we’re into the pre-chorus, a heavenly sweet swirl of “woo-hoos,” more winning melodies, a bright and tasteful little guitar lead, and a rising falsetto line — “and that’s for ahh-all time!” — so perfect that the band could never quite recreate it live. And in just another 15 seconds, we find ourselves propelled into that immortal chorus: “Oo-wee-oo, I look just like Buddy Holly! / Oh-oh, and you’re Mary Tyler Moore / I don’t care what they say about us anyway / I don’t care about that!” You can *hear* the grin spread ear-to-ear on Cuomo’s face, and the vocal melody is so special, has such a goshdarn sway to it, that it makes the moment immensely danceable all by itself.

And then a little thing happens between a harmony of the synthesizer and the lead guitar that in 2001 we’d call a “melody solo” (ex. The Green Album), but here it’s not a solo at all, just another little piece of ear candy to carry us happily into the second verse. Things continue as so wonderfully expected (albeit with the notes of the little synth interjection switched up), but in extending the chorus by two bars Cuomo leads us into the thrillingly onomatopoetic bridge — “Bang! Bang! / Knock on the door! / Another bang bang, you’re down on the floor!” — amidst a sugar rush of falsetto backups and hip-shaking stabs of distorted harmonics (just controlled and sugarcoated enough so that even your mom could rock out to them). Cuomo concludes with a great big melodic shout — a reflection of the giddy joy he felt in realizing how damn good of a song he had written here, no doubt — which is lovingly doubled by an electric lead that segues seamlessly into one of the most astutely melodic and economical solos in the entire Weezer discography, capped by a squealing arc that reaches towards the heavens before landing back into Pat Wilson’s crash cymbal, Cuomo walking into the final chorus as if he came in on a cloud. The song concludes with a liberating repetition from the opinions, judgments and ‘disses’ of others — “I don’t care about that!” — with the icing-on-the-cake handclaps layering in, and that’s a fucking wrap. Who needs the the 3-and-a-half minute single? This is pop perfection in 2:40.

It’s also worth noting that while the power of this song is universal, Cuomo did not sacrifice personal detail, intelligence or musical quality in its crafting. On the personal tip, the little line “your tongue is twisted, your eyes are slit” could mean any number of things (most obviously, “you’re a mess, girl”), but is also a sly reference to what will become an increasingly obvious motif in Cuomo’s love songs — his Mary Tyler Moore is, against all odds, an Asian chick.

It makes Cuomo’s recent comments about sacrificing personal detail — turning a song kernel about how he loves his daughter into a song about bagging a girl who may or may not be legal (“I’m Your Daddy”) — seem a bit odd. The Cuomo of ’94 had no problem marrying the personal and the popular into one, so why, fifteen years later, is he convinced it has to be one or the other? Food for thought, at the least.

As this song has been played ad infinitum ever since (and even before) it became one of the band’s all-time most recognizable hits, there are almost too many performances and versions to note. But here are a few that come to mind:

On 2007’s Alone: The Home Recordings Of Rivers Cuomo, fans got a chance to examine this song in an embyronic, solo Cuomo demo state. The rhythm of the song is slowed down to an almost mentally damaged pace, Cuomo’s young voice straining to fit the tempo and sounding rather disabled in this process. It’s interesting to hear, though, how early he had all the pieces in place — albeit at the wrong speed, and with a slightly extended solo plus a fun little bit of tambourine on the chorus. I remember that Karl notes in the Recording History that there were other early versions of “Buddy Holly” that were even more painfully slow, but I find it hard to fathom. It would be interesting to hear from a historical standpoint though, much like this rough and early take.

The song became so emblematic of the Weezer sound and image that it has enjoyed performances at many tapings and special sessions long past the Blue era. There’s a 1995 Paris Black session version that is pretty fantastic; a 1997 Y100 Acoustic Sonic Session take that is certainly worth a hear, although the band cheats and sneaks in that famous synthesizer; a 2005 AOL Sessions version that commemorates the horribly melodramatic, faux-metal intro that they regrettably starting using to introduce the song as early as 2000 and took until 2008 to die — which adds a worthless and cheesy thirty seconds to the beginning of the song, and ruins the first fifteen seconds of the song proper; etcetera, etcetera.

Two other noteworthy instances of the “Holly:” the 2008 semi-release (really, who could find a copy of this thing?) Not Alone, which documented Cuomo’s pre-2000 and rarities-focused live hootenanny collaboration with about 200 fans in a California record store,  featured the song in both of release formats (DVD and CD EP), though the performance is predictably sloppy and not worth more than one curious inquiry. And although it’s not officially Weezer/Cuomo-related at all, the UC Berkeley Marching Band did a show in September of 2001 that included miniature covers of a small handful of Weezer tunes that are worth being remembered simply because of how fantastic they are — and the take of “Buddy Holly” is pure big band bombast, really showing just how classic and durable that melody is. I wonder if Cuomo’s heard it.


Filed in A-Sides, Alone, Not Alone, The Blue Album, The Very Best | | Comments (118)

Possibilities

Monday, September 28, 2009

A 120-second hemorrhage of sub-Green Day derivative-derivative pop punk puke, this putrid piece of shit may not be the worst Weezer song ever released, but it’s certainly the least listenable. Beyond that I won’t even bother to acknowledge this song with sonic description, and the lyrics are total nonsense too, as evidenced by its original jibberish title, “Gone To Stay.” (A concept the song itself makes no effort to clarify or justify.) It’s just so, so bad.

Before The Red Album, there existed only two Weezer album songs never played live by the band or, most likely, anyone else. Mercifully (and tellingly), “Possibilities” is one of them.

Filed in Maladroit, The Very Worst | | Comments (140)

Too Late To Try

Monday, September 28, 2009

Written dead in the midst of the Summer Songs 2000 period, this was one of the lucky Rivers Cuomo compositions from the 150-odd he wrote that year to make it into the band’s comeback tour setlists — and the subsequent semi-official live MP3 album released to commemorate these songs. (Only three of the fourteen ever saw eventual release on studio albums.)

We have a few versions of this song, the definitive being the official live SS2K cut, from which Karl Koch trimmed a post-chorus under direction from Cuomo. It begins with a guitar tone unlike any other in the Weezer catalogue (any help, guitarists?), which sounds like a rather repetitive (one-chord?) riff that’s being modulated by a pedal effect — which seems to get, of all things, a kind of cheesy pop-punk effect. It’s a pretty cool contrast, though, when Cuomo cuts above the distorted sludge with a winning vocal melody that’s clear as a bell: “I don’t wanna die / Even if I have to / I just want to live a long long time.”

Pat Wilson counts off and the band surges into the fray all together, and from there “Too Late To Try” becomes the most autobiographical and self-referential song the band had ever performed (until “Heart Songs” came along) — it’s a Weezer song about being in Weezer. As goes the chorus: “I see the game to which I belong / Time to sing our happy songs / Wouldn’t it be a cruel joke if it’s too late to try?” From at least a historical perspective, it’s the quintessential SS2K anthem, wherein Cuomo realizes that this band is his calling, dusts off his Buddy Holly spex and gets in the van.

Like most tunes of the era, though, there’s a certain angst and bitterness about the whole affair: this thing is a “game” to him, and that’s the kind of thinking that’s a little more in line with the Cuomo of the Pinkerton era, the one who wanted to give up rock’n’roll by his thirties to become a classical composer. Isn’t it a cruel irony, then, that Pinkerton — his most ambitious and ingeniously composed work — was a commercial disaster, that his studies of classical composition at Harvard left him feeling unfulfilled (or perhaps just terrified), and here he is, four years later, touring clubs and trying his damnedest to write “the perfect pop song?” That sounds like something of a trifling to someone who was dreaming of conservatories not long ago, and these “happy songs” Cuomo has written and come to sing are not only actually self-deprecating in nature —  Cuomo’s now self-deprecating about *singing* them, even. This is coming from the same side of Cuomo that arrogantly “tells the world to fuck itself” in another SS2K staple, “My Brain.”

The second verse echoes this sentiment with perfect teenage inelegance: “I don’t wanna grow / Even if it’s good growth / I just want to stay just like this.” The Cuomo who, in a 1997 interview, predicted a darker and more experimental turn in Weezer’s future output is long dead, replaced by an aging young man who has resigned himself to the pop music pursuits of the kind of song he’s now singing this very moment. Forget creative development, “even if it’s good growth” — a sad and prophetic sentiment from a man who, a decade after this song, would team up with radio pop songwriters in an attempt to appeal to a demographic roughly 1/3 the age of any given member of his band.

There’s that anxiety that’s so typical of the era, too: what if it’s “too late to try?” Maybe Weezer’s moment passed with the mid-’90s, when Cuomo already enjoyed mass commercial success with The Blue Album. I recently posited that commercial validation was once an important but very secondary concern for Cuomo as a songwriter, and that even he was surprised by how much a lack of that validation stung when Pinkerton bombed — and from there, it became something of an obsession that went on to trump all other aspects and considerations of his craft. The anxiety and regression from that pain is very palpable in this song, itself a rather neatly packaged and concise pop tune (albeit, perhaps even better for the purposes of this song, one that could never be a hit). “I see a comfortable place to rest / Time to get this shit off my chest!”

And look! An early prototype for the play-it-safe verse melody guitar solo that would come to be a hallmark for the FM radio love letter that is The Green Album. Indeed, this was all part of a greater process of creative simplification and streamlining that would soon provide Cuomo at least a taste of the success for which he longed.

I quite like the outro: over that same intro riff and a wash of nasty feedback, Cuomo and Mikey Welsh harmonize the title lyric while Brian Bell echoes it as a simple counterpoint. With a little more development, this could have turned into a cool round-robin arrangement, a bit along the lines of the breakdown in “Surf Wax America.” But then again, it’s exactly that kind of base-level creativity and development from which Cuomo was trying to recede.

A note on alternate versions: There’s an “unofficial” live bootleg of this song floating around that finds the band playing it a few BPM slower (they were wise to release the fast one), an “unedited” version of the official take that doesn’t omit that first post-chorus (wonder how that one surfaced), and an in-studio demo that also seems to be a bit slower than it ought to be. The production values are no better than the live take, though, and Cuomo’s vocals are actually shakier, so it’s not a particularly worthwhile listen.

Filed in Demos, Summer Songs 2000, The Grand Playlist | | Comments (21)

Mansion Of Cardboard

Friday, September 25, 2009

Maladroit outtake “So Low” was far from a great song to begin with, but when the band rewrote and re-attempted the song as “Mansion of Cardboard” for what is known as the Early Album 5 sessions (essentially, an early and abortive run of recordings in 2002 for what eventually became 2005’s Make Believe), it could only go downhill.

One of the defining features of this mostly-faceless batch o’ tunes is Rivers Cuomo’s first real, focused experiments with third-person storytelling in song. The band’s first three albums primarily deal with his experiences with and desires for women — be they real or imagined — and even Maladroit, which tried to skirt the issue of subject matter entirely, still found Cuomo singing more about “I” and “my” than anything else. Here, Cuomo tries to get outside himself for a moment, and turns “So Low” — another song about Cuomo’s longings for a girl — into a weird anthem for the proudly homeless. It should be no big surprise that it doesn’t really work.

Keeping the prior song’s bland musical foundation intact, the lyrics blunder through several clumsy lines and (rather gross) images: “Thoughts arise / Fear is doubt / Bearing through / Giving smell,” “Overcoat / Old wool cap / Leather gloves / Hide the fat,” and the hatefully bad refrain, “Stand back! The old man’s snoring heavy / Down underneath the bridge he’s got his mansion of cardboard slats / And it’s enough,” to name just a few.

Cuomo’s best third-person sketch from the lot is without a doubt “The Organ Player,” which I’d say succeeds because the topic is a little closer to home for Cuomo than the vagabond life. But this one, like so many others from the wisely-scrapped ’02 sessions, is better left forgotten.

Filed in Early Album 5 | | Comments (10)

December

Thursday, September 24, 2009

I don’t think it’s unfair to say that, as a general rule, the closer is the most sincere and genuine song on any given Weezer album. (The only possible exception I can think of is The Blue Album‘s “Only In Dreams,” if only because it must compete with “Say It Ain’t So”) Which, for the band’s post-2000 albums, presents a bit of a conundrum: all four (soon to be five) of these records are contrived in one way or another, and it’s the shortcomings that typify their respective albums that compromise that closing attempt at sincerity. The Green Album was, as it is put in the best Rolling Stone article ever published about Weezer, “a monument to vagueness,” the context of which lightly smothers the gorgeous song that is “O Girlfriend” just as much as its flat mix and creative self-restraint does; Make Believe‘s “Haunt You Every Day,” though a lesser song, suffered for similar reasons, such as that record’s overcalculations in general; and “The Angel and The One,” a song that can go toe-to-toe with a great portion of the band’s best material, feels unfulfilled by its fate being placed on Red, serving as a brilliant final thought to a brilliant album that never came to be.

Of all these closers, though, “December” is the weakest of the pack by considerable distance, and will likely go down as the worst final track ever placed on a Weezer album. Like all too much of Maladroit, the song reeks of the underdeveloped, the tossed off, the half-baked. But unlike songs like “Burndt Jamb” and “American Gigolo,” which revel in their laziness, “December” makes the mistake of trying to follow in the tradition of its album-closing predecessors. The result feels forced and unconvincing, like a high school kid bullshitting his way through an English class poetry assignment.

Lyrically, the song steals its “Only love” refrain from The Who’s “Love Reign O’er Me” without shame (theft is Maladroit‘s biggest overaching concept), which is employed in some lines that are barely passable, and some lines that simply aren’t: “Only love / Can inspire / Soggy lungs / To breathe fire” has to be one of the worst lyrics Cuomo’s ever bothered to release, not least of all because it sounds like he’s singing about bronchitis. Pneumonia, maybe.

And speaking of phlegm, the guitars are really thick and turgid on this song, in a bad way. It’s almost laborious to hear, the way it trudges so heavily along. Scott Shriner’s animated bassline fails to give the song any buoyancy, Brian Bell’s “ooh-ooh” backups seem to get stuck in the general mire of things, and Pat Wilson’s overcompensating beat makes a decent effort but winds up as ineffectual as anything else. The bridge — “It’s only natural / The moon is just half full / We give our best away” — is the most congested passage, which makes the duelling solo that follows feel like such a respite: freeing the arrangement from the weight of that mucky rhyhtm guitar, you can really inhale and appreciate one of the few places (the guitar solo) that Maladroit regularly excels. Other than that, though, it’s slim pickings with this song.

Examining the Maladroit sessions closely, it seems the band tried many small changes and edits to this song before finally settling on this version, but those variations (for the most part, Bell struggly to find something interesting to do with the background vocals) aren’t particularly worthwhile. The only noteworthy alternate studio recording of this song that I can find is that of the 6/13/01 BBC Demos, not least of all because it features previous Weezer bassist Mikey Welsh on the low-end. Wilson loosens things up with a loungey, ride cymbal-centric drumbeat; it seems that before the guitars soured into the rancid chords of the album version, they were a light and airy arpeggiation; Cuomo’s crap lyrics are no different, but their delivery feels less contrived, and are occasionally doubled by Welsh’s best falsetto/Matt Sharp impression. Of course, a lackluster song shines in few (if any) contexts, and it still fails to impress, but this relaxed early take seems to be the Weezer diehard’s preference, and it isn’t hard to hear why. If not for the inarticulate shift into awkward bridge rock-out, this version could float by as harmlessly as a bedside lullaby.

As an aside: Sometimes songs like these work a little better in a live setting, but my 7/26/02 boot from Philadelphia doesn’t offer many improvements. One wonders why Shriner was compelled to indulge in a one-man, two-note jam as the rest of the band exited the stage — but that’s probably the most interesting part of the performance. (Say what you will about closing with a cover song, “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” is a LOT better than exiting with “December!”)

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