Weezer

"Go away. We want a grunge band." If you ask Rivers Cuomo, he and his Weezer bandmates heard this line more than once, back when they were desperately chasing gigs around Los Angeles venues, mostly getting doors slammed in their faces instead. And yet the four of them already had songs like "The Sweater Song" or "Say It Ain't So" in their repertoire, stuff that would soon go on to wreak havoc with both critics and audiences alike.

But it was no use: these were the years straddling '92 and '93, and the world (the United States especially) was thirsty for grunge. Just picture the Weezer of that year. Take a good look at the legendary blue-background cover of "Weezer", if you're not already familiar with it. No flannel shirts, no jeans ripped at the knees, no wild manes of hair left to cascade savagely over the shoulders. Least of all scowling expressions oozing sensuality and torment. Instead: four dorky faces poking out of dreadful shirts nicked from their dads, paired with anonymous neutral-toned chinos.

Not to mention the music. Sure, the guitars were nicely distorted, but where was the anger? Where was that gift, or curse, call it what you will, for giving voice to a generation's anxieties? Even the most nihilistic, self-tormented grunger somehow still ended up churning out hits that carried, more or less intentionally, some kind of Gen X hang-up. Weezer couldn't have cared less about any of that: their songs gave up any pretense of universality and carried the weight of nothing at all. Instead, they grumbled ironically about some ex who was a total bitch, or a brother's car accident. These two themes alone make up a good three-quarters of the narrative on "Weezer", alongside, of course, spending the day cooped up in the garage rehearsing with your band. In short, the exact opposite of what the market was asking for. At least on the surface, because it goes without saying that grunge and Weezer's noisy power pop were really two sides of the same coin, two opposite reactions to the same restlessness.

It was simply the wrong moment, nothing more and nothing less. But with the songs Cuomo and the others had on their hands, it was only a matter of time and finding the right production strategy before their melodies and their overwhelming irreverence exploded across every radio station and TV screen in the world; almost like a liberating reaction to the gloom of bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, whose overbearing presence on MTV would soon be counterbalanced by the brilliant lightness of the videos crafted by Spike Jonze.

Indeed, once they started landing dates around California's alternative clubs, Weezer's name began buzzing persistently in the right circles. Before long, on June 25, 1993, they signed with Geffen. By that point the band already had numerous songs under their belt, with many more in the works. It was a period of great creativity for the four of them, as well as strong confidence in their own abilities, so much so that they pushed to self-produce their debut. That indulgence, however, they would only get to enjoy with their next album, "Pinkerton", since the California label vetoed the idea and forced Rivers Cuomo to pick a producer from a shortlist of names.

The choice, a truly fortunate one, fell on Rick Ocasek of the Cars, a band whose early records Weezer presumably preferred over the synthetic revolution enacted from “Heartbeat City” onward. Drawing on his vast experience, the veteran of Boston new wave not only left an indelible mark on several songs from the “Blue Album”, where his touch is utterly unmistakable (just think of the spry, peppery keyboards sparkling through the verses of “Buddy Holly”), but also brought into the studio (Electric Lady Studios in New York) techniques and discipline the band had never encountered before. For instance, Cuomo and bassist Matt Sharp were made to study and drill relentlessly in the Barbershop Quartet technique. Thanks to all that practice, Sharp was soon able to double Cuomo's choruses with harmonies pitched an octave higher, a device that would become one of the band's trademarks. Ocasek also talked the guitarists into swapping their neck pickups for bridge pickups, a trick that would give the riffs their extra brightness.

The recording sessions were far from easy, so much so that the band went into the studio with one lineup and came out with another: partly for that reason, and partly for personal reasons (his wife-to-be was expecting a baby), guitarist Jason Cropper left the group midway through the recordings. Jason was soon replaced by Brian Bell (the band's current guitarist), though according to Ocasek himself, Bell's actual contribution to the record was minimal, since it was Cuomo who re-recorded all of Cropper's guitar parts, in a single day.

The Ocasek treatment was fairly invasive, but it brought the band to a state of remarkable form and, more importantly, to a dazzling, distinctive sound, built on guitars that gleam brightly yet are always ready to turn feral in gloriously distorted riffs. Take the single “Say It Ain't So”, whose verses are carried by a faint guitar riff whose strings, when lightly plucked, seem to twinkle like Christmas lights, only to morph, come the chorus, into a snarling beast. Just as entertaining as many of the other backstories behind Cuomo's songs are the facts behind the third single pulled from the “Blue Album”. Written after the music was already finished, the lyrics of “Say It Ain't So” (which initially amounted to just one line containing the title) tell of the day Rivers came home from school to find a bottle of beer in the fridge and, fearing that his mother's marriage to his stepfather might collapse because of alcoholism, just as had happened with his father, went through something of a nervous breakdown. Echoed to varying degrees in nearly every track on the album, the Barbershop Quartet-style trick is the magic ingredient of the extraordinary, melancholy power ballad “The World Has Turned And Left Me Here”, where Sharp mimics Cuomo throughout the song, lending it a wry, ironic aftertaste.

Discussing the first two singles pulled from “Weezer” without mentioning their legendary music videos, directed by Spike Jonze, would do a disservice to two little masterpieces that made the fortune of both the band and the director in equal measure. After all, we're right in the middle of the MTV golden age, a moment in history when a good video could earn a band the coveted heavy rotation and, with it, an enormous amount of exposure. For “Undone – The Sweater Song”, a song that, according to Cuomo and the emo arpeggio that opens it, is supposed to be sad but that everyone finds hilarious, Jonze opted for a very minimal staging. The band, duly set up in front of a blue screen, would perform the song sped up while surrounded by a pack of stray dogs. Once the footage was slowed down, Jonze achieved a disorienting effect: the band playing the song at the right tempo while moving in slow motion. It was the very first music video the band ever shot, chosen because, out of the twenty or so pitched to Geffen, it was the only one with a plot that didn't involve an actual sweater.

Just as simple is the idea behind the video for “Buddy Holly”, arguably Weezer's biggest hit, which shows the band performing on the original set of the Arnold's Drive-In from “Happy Days”. Between original footage from the show, a cameo from Al Molinaro aka Al Delvecchio, and vintage costumes, the video is a burst of joy and nostalgia, just like the song it's meant to accompany. And we owe this one to Rick Ocasek too, who had to fight to convince Cuomo to include the track on the album at all, since the singer considered it too cheesy for the record's overall mood. So, if good old Rick hadn't been so stubborn, an entire generation of thirty- and forty-somethings would have been spared the embarrassment of belting out, at least once, at karaoke or a tipsy birthday party, that “Oo-ee-oo / I look just like Buddy Holly / Oh-oh / And you're Mary Tyler Moore”. But we thirty- and forty-somethings enjoy a bit of embarrassment now and then.

Opened by a trademark harmonica line (a hallmark of very early Weezer), “In the Garage” is a full-blown nerd manifesto from the band, who in a funny, faintly romantic lyric link a rock band (themselves) to a background made up of comic books, endless games of “Dungeons & Dragons”, an unhealthy obsession with Kiss, and so on and so forth. As if things weren't already crooked enough for a rock record released in the thick of the grunge era, we should also mention the subject of the opening track (“My Name Is Jonas”), probably the only song in history to deal with insurance troubles (those of Rivers's brother after a nasty car accident).

Closing out the album is its longest track (and the longest of Weezer's career), “Only in Dreams”. Eight minutes of epic alternative rock built around a hypnotic, deep bassline from Sharp, half of it spent building tension before the cathartic final solo (probably the best Cuomo has ever played), which lets loose all the anger and latent frustration accumulated up to that point.

Quadruple platinum at home, “Weezer” earned Cuomo and co. the status of global rock stars, a situation they fully enjoyed for a couple of years, girls, excess and all. Something soon broke, though, and how could it not, given the geeky nature of the four of them. What came out of it was a follow-up (“Pinkerton”) that, recorded without the filter of an experienced producer like Ocasek, stands as the equal and opposite reaction to the “Blue Album”. A shrieked, guitar-stripped record that oozes anger from every pore, winking at the most abrasive Pixies and at emo. But that's another story.

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10/03/2019