— Rivers Cuomo
that tension is what makes Weezer “the greatest band that ever lived.”
“It’s a four-way yin and yang,” he says. “If you take away the guy who listens to Gary Numan or the guy who listens to Dylan all day or the guy who listens to Japanese pop or the guy who listens to Mastodon, then it won’t sound the same.”
For all the platitudes about how bands are like families and even families go through rough patches, etc., even at the outset, Weezer were never about four pals piling into the van for kicks; they were careerist and commercially ambitious even in 1993, when careerism and commercial ambition were not in vogue.
“It’s the ‘music business,’ not the ‘music fun,’” says guitarist Brian Bell, 39, who joined Weezer midway through the recording of the first album and who doesn’t appear to have aged a day since. Perched in the sunroom of his Encino ranch house wearing a charcoal pinstripe blazer with a tear in the right armpit, the band’s lone remaining bachelor has seen enough low points and weird left turns to know that Make Believe was not really going to be the end—“It’s not the swan song Rivers wanted,” he says—and tried to assure Shriner of as much as the tour was winding down. Even so, it was clear to all that for the band to continue, they would have to change how they operated on a fundamental level.
“I think we’re the only band in the history of rock with a mission statement and a constitution,” Bell says. “The Constitution of the United States of Weezer was drafted over a year ago as a way of making sure we stay true to our goals, and it kept us focused in a way we’d never been before. We have to prove to ourselves that we’re still valid and that rock music is still valid.”
No one will divulge any specific tenets of this sacred parchment, but a major one seems to concern the division of labor. While Cuomo has always been the band’s de facto leader (and he admits he is publicly perceived as “the guy who wears glasses and is nerdy and whines a lot and is a control freak”), he was more than ready to share the burden. Everyone contributed songs and switched instruments, and the new album features two tracks that were neither written nor sung by Rivers Cuomo: Bell’s “Thought I Knew” and drummer Pat Wilson’s “Automatic.” A third, Cuomo’s uncharacteristically creepy “Cold, Dark World,” has Shriner on lead vocals.
This newfound equanimity was put to an early test: Rick Rubin, who’d produced Make Believe, once again offered his services. But after tracking only a handful of songs in early 2007, Rubin disappeared for reasons no one seems entirely clear on, nor particularly bitter about. “We didn’t necessarily want to stop working with him,” says Bell. “More like he stopped working with us.” (Rubin declined a request to be interviewed for this story.)
The unexpected change of plans did force the band to adapt on the fly, so they decamped to a theater, the Malibu Performing Arts Center near Cuomo’s house, to record on their own from July to September. A third session lasting ten days in February with Dublin-based producer Jacknife Lee, fresh off the recent R.E.M. album, proved so successful that Weezer have already locked him up for record number seven—very, very tentatively due for release in November 2009.
The members of Weezer, and certainly their ardent fan base, are quick to categorize each album as a reaction to what came previously—Make Believe was meant to correct the self-indulgence of 2002’s Maladroit, which was meant to be more experimental than the meat-and-potatoes Green Album, which was meant to reassure fans after the quirkiness of Pinkerton, which was meant to shake things up after the blockbuster debut. But put the band’s discography on shuffle for a casual listen, and the songs are all more similar than not. This hasn’t stopped people from heralding the Red Album as a return to übercatchy form. It’s this consistency that’s both allowed for Weezer’s continued success and made them easy to take for granted in a fickle, flavor-of-the-half-hour marketplace.
“I honestly don’t think that’s a problem,” says Luke Wood, who worked in Geffen’s marketing department during the Blue Album period and is now, as a top Interscope executive, the band’s most important champion. “They don’t chase trends, and I hope they get rewarded for that. We hear a great album
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with big hit songs, and how often do you get that? It’s honey for bees.”
“I would say we’re probably more popular now than ever,” says the Buffalo-bred Wilson, 39, who lives with his wife and their two kids in Canyon Lake, an hour south of L.A., “at least based on ticket sales. We’re neither here nor there; we have our own universe. We exist between matter and antimatter. Perhaps I’m naive, but I think it’s simple: If you just rock, people want the rock.”
As he’s been married for nearly all of Weezer’s lifespan, Wilson’s relative ease in mixing domestic tranquility with the insanity of life on the road is what ultimately proved to Cuomo that he might be able to do the same. “I never identified with the idea of ‘I wanna be in a band because I want chicks.’ The whole lifestyle part of it, I don’t get at all,” Wilson says. “I’ve never even seen cocaine. Ever.”
If the men of Weezer consider themselves impervious to seismic zeitgeist shifts, certainly some supporting evidence can be seen at Spin’s cover shoot on Venice Beach, where a quartet of tween girls (and their moms) excitedly take photos of the band. The Red Album’s first two singles, “Pork and Beans” and “Troublemaker,” effortlessly distill nose-thumbing teenage angst into undeniably hooky choruses. That they were crafted by a bunch of middle-age dudes in such a way that sounds honest, rather than pandering, is Weezer’s greatest trick.
“In its purest form, rock is about the struggles of adolescence, and there’s something about rock as an idea that illustrates that period of someone’s life,” says Interscope’s Wood. “I feel like Rivers hasn’t lost any sense of wonder about music or about its oppositional nature.”
As much as Cuomo considers himself removed from L.A.’s entertainment factory, he may actually be its most accomplished Method actor: In order to properly relate to the misfit teenager, he must be a misfit teenager.
T WAS ALWAYS WEIRD being a kid and singing along to these Kiss lyrics about womanizing and having no idea what they were talking about. Then listening to Slayer and not being into Satan myself.”
If the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ever presents an exhibit re-creating Rivers Cuomo’s childhood bedroom, it might not look markedly different from the approximately eight- by 12-foot guest cottage in his backyard.
Above the door hangs a wooden sign his older brother made in ninth grade: PETER’S ROOM. (Cuomo, who was raised on an ashram in Connecticut, went by the name Peter Kitts, after his stepfather, during his teenage years.) His old Kiss records are mounted on the walls in protective plastic sleeves, as is Odyssey of Iska, the LP by jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter on which his father, Frank, played drums. His dad’s old kit fills a third of the room. A few guitars hang from hooks; Cuomo takes down a particularly battered Fender.
“This was my first guitar,” he says, handing it over for inspection. A Kiss logo and an inverted cross are gouged into the head and the neck, respectively. This guitar, given to him some 25 years ago, has been set on fire repeatedly, but of all its battle scars, the rust-colored smudges above the pickups stand out. “I would bite my fingers when concentrating really hard,” he says. “That’s blood.”
Loose-leaf binders containing every song he’s ever written, organized by year, line shelves, but he’s particularly proud of his Nirvana notebook, in which he dissects their songs into patterns and formulas. For Cuomo, pop is always a riddle to be solved, something he idealizes even as he breaks it down to its mathematical essence. And his fascination with personal nostalgia is not relegated to fandom; Cuomo is in the midst of an self-excavation, mining artifacts from his past and interviewing people he knew more than 15 years ago. Some of the old demos and snapshots were included in last year’s Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo, but the real bounty will come with the memoir he’s shopping to publishers, which focuses on his life between 1992 to 1994. As he grows comfortable, finally, with his own stature and status, it also becomes clearer that of all the tribulations Cuomo has wrestled with in his songs and otherwise—spiritual unfulfillment,
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