a bum leg, a broken home, sexual identity—perhaps none tortures him more than a lone tonsorial choice made 15 years ago.
“The whole Weezer aesthetic was a negation of everything I’d stood for,” Cuomo says, now sitting in his den. A map of the world covers one wall; pillows are clustered in the corner for meditation. “I was a passionate metalhead. I told my mom I was never going to cut my hair, and then right before the Blue Album photos were taken, I did and was a completely new person.” He opens a Tupperware bin and wistfully sifts through a tangle of studded wristbands and belts and dingy bandannas from his glam days. “I was playing guitar in a band that sounded like Queensrÿche, then I made this sudden about-face that made a lot of people mad. I had a sinking feeling that it was so against my grain, but as it turns out, the repressed instincts from those times have surfaced in different ways.”
Those ways have never been more apparent than on the Red Album—no fewer than four of its ten songs tackle the subject of rockness explicitly and self-reflexively. An artist who categorizes his default authorial voice as “emo complainer guy,”
Rivers Cuomo is fully embracing and even tweaking his quixotic public image for lyrical fodder. Rollicking album-opener “ Troublemaker” boasts, “I’m gonna be a star and people will crane necks / To get a glimpse of me and see if I am having sex,” while “Pork and Beans” wonders aloud whether enlisting Timbaland might help make the song a hit. “Heart Songs” shows its love in more obvious fashion, rattling off a laundry list of inspirational pop songs that misattributes the remake of “I Think We’re Alone Now” to Debbie Gibson, rather than Tiffany. (“It was a mistake, but I decided to leave it in there,” Cuomo says. “I hope they don’t take it the wrong way—maybe they had problems like that back in the ’80s, with people not being able to distinguish them.”)
But the album’s centerpiece is the cheekily grandiose “Greatest Man (Variations on a Shaker Hymn),” which tackles rock megalomania in the only way that makes sense: by exploding the sonic kitchen-sinkism of “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “A Quick One, While He’s Away” to its logical, po-mo extreme. (It’s hard to imagine the celibate, Make Believe Scrambling to self-flagellating Cuomo of make the early delivering couplets like “You try to play cool bird special like you just don’t care / But soon I’ll be playin’ in your underwear” or “I got the money, and I got the fame / And you got the hots to ride on my plane.”) Yet when asked if he thinks these songs are indeed reflective of a new outlook on his rock stardom, or on rock stardom in general, the man who spent, like, six pages deconstructing “Rape Me” seems surprised that anyone would give the context of his lyrics that sort of consideration. He pauses carefully and thoughtfully before answering even the simplest of questions, but he chews on this one an extra while.
“I don’t know,” he finally says. “From a creativity standpoint, I wanted to change who I am in the song….Being a rock star has meant many different things over the last 14 years. This is not what I was thinking of when I was in bed at night dreaming about being in Kiss; this is chill. In my 20s, I remember thinking, ‘Man, I’m a rock star, I should be living the life.’ I’d push myself, but it’s just not in my constitution. Maybe that’s why we’re still around.”
EEZER GATHER, along with their manager, Dan Field, at a photo studio in Venice, staring at four potential Red Album covers on a laptop screen.
A final selection was due yesterday, but they’re not even close, so they’re soliciting opinions from anyone they can find. The photos were taken in October, before the sessions with Jacknife Lee, “so we wouldn’t have to make the decision last minute,” Cuomo deadpans. If the band does have a control freak in it, it’d be good if he stepped forward now.
Bell prefers the version with the band sitting, his legs stretching way into the foreground. Cuomo (and, as it turns out, the label) prefers the one in which he sports a black cowboy hat, a western shirt, and what appears to be a beer gut. A
third features the four members frolicking in the ocean. The fourth has the guys clad in white surrounded by an angelic burst of light and is, as Cuomo says, “the one people seem to hate the least.”
For all the talk of shifting industry paradigms, Weezer revel in their conventional approach. And while the band and the label were definitely at loggerheads when Cuomo circumvented the brass to mail out advance copies of Maladroit himself or to let fans select the track list, they’re simpatico now. They need each other.
“You know, Trent Reznor says he’s doing it without a label now, but he still has a bunch of people working for him,” says Bell. “I feel lucky that there’s a company that believes in our music and will promote it, and I believe that gives us an advantage. You need someone to have a plan. And all the young people I know in bands, they still want to get signed. It gives a sense of worth, it’s something your parents can understand.”
“The whole indie way of seeing things felt like a cliché to us at that point,” Cuomo says of the band’s early days. “We were like, ‘No, we’re going to sign to a major, we’re gonna do this as corporately as possible.’ That, to us, felt rebellious.” Nor does Cuomo feel intimidated by a landscape that’s changed drastically since. “I bet we could do it all over again—start a new band, hide our identities, figure out the right moves, and make it all over again. Sounds like a dare.”
The band’s immediate plans after the album’s June release are typically murky. Bell thinks he’s heard rumblings of shows in Japan later in
the summer. But if collabo-crazy Cuomo’s vision for the next Weezer tour comes to fruition, they won’t be the ones doing the rocking out.
“I’d love to do really small shows, a few hundred people seated in the round, and the stage is loaded with all kinds of instruments and furniture and people hang out onstage and join in,” Cuomo says. “Like a hootenanny. It’s gonna be nuts.”
But isn’t he chomping at the bit to get out there and further indulge his inner rock star? The roaring, adoring crowd? The lights and the hubbub? All that crap?
Cuomo pauses. And then shrugs.
“I’m not much of a bit-chomper,” he says. “But I’m sure it’s gonna be killer.”
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MORE AT SPIN.COM For exclusive interviews and behind-the-scenes footage from our cover shoot, go to spin.com/weezer-video
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