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Posted by on Jul 11, 2013 in Music, Ted McLoof | 0 comments

#tbt: A Bridge On the Rivers Cuomo

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As a staunch maker of top five lists, I’m embarrassed to admit, during late-night music discussions, that I don’t have a favorite band. I haven’t had one for a long time, and I hold Weezer directly responsible for that. Weezer, truth told, was once my favorite band, and held that spot for a very, very long time, long after they’d released one, two, even three subpar-to-shitty albums. Loyalty does that—that’s what loyalty is, after all. But a band can only break your heart so many times before you become disillusioned, and abandon not only them but the entire enterprise of choosing a “favorite” anything, ever again. Usually, when I reluctantly mention my old soft spot to friends, they get quiet, as though I’ve mentioned a relative who’s recently died, and avoid eye contact. Telling people you were once a Weezer fanatic these days is like telling them you once got caught masturbating: there are worse things to be caught doing, but you don’t exactly enjoy announcing it to a roomful of people.

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was once a time when being a fan of Weezer was nothing to be ashamed of. Being a fan of Weezer in 1997 was like being a fan of Oasis in 1994—in other words, while it didn’t make you the coolest kid in your class, you could certainly throw on one of their t-shirts or play an album in the student lounge at school and no one could scoff at you, not reasonably, at least. Music aficionados understand this and appreciate it. I have a friend who writes for painfully-white-person-oriented-music-douche website Pitchfork, who’s defended me a time or two. And while Weezer’s debut album (dubbed “the Blue Album” by fans) has a lot to do with that, it’s really Pinkerton that I’d use in my own defense, because it would be hard for even the most determined musical bully to find anything about it to deride.

Blue came out in the summer of ’94, the summer my sister graduated from high school, a summer she was having a lot of her friends over to hang out and bullshit and listen to music. I was just a pup, eleven years old, not allowed to contribute to their conversations but certainly old enough to hang on the outskirts and rifle through the CDs they’d brought over. Blue’s cover appealed to me right away—a simple concept, the four band members standing in front of a cerulean background, looking anxious, like the last thing they wanted was to be in front of a camera. The music was great: loud, but not aggressive in the way the onslaught of grunge had been in the few years earlier, and even—owing to the album’s producer, the Cars’ Ric Ocasek—catchy and tuneful in spots. I wasn’t old enough to know what a lot of it meant (I had no idea who Buddy Holly was yet, and I wasn’t the kind of kid who played Dungeons & Dragons or read X-Men, so the references went straight over my head), but I knew I liked it, and I knew I wanted to hear more.

And I was lucky. In the mid-nineties, there were a lot of bands I could have fallen for, and nearly all of them weren’t worth my time or money. Alt-rock bands like Del Amitri, Fastball, Eagle Eye Cherry, the Wallflowers, Third Eye Blind, Marcy Playground, and Matchbox Twenty came out with a song, sometimes an entire album, worth listening to, but ultimately demonstrated their remarkably limited capacity for producing follow-ups that were even halfway listenable. In that context, Pinkerton was something of a miracle, a follow-up album that was even better than the debut.

Based (apparently) on an opera called Madame Butterfly, the album retains Rivers Cuomo’s knack for writing hooks, but does Blue one better by allowing bassist Matt Sharp to take a truly collaborative role. Ric Ocasek is gone, and with him the sunny melodies of their debut—the album, in fact, has no producer at all. Which is a good thing, I think: no modern commercial producer would ever allow the album to be as dark as it is. The first sound you hear is a symbol clanging, then a harpsichord that takes a few notes to figure out what tune it’s even trying to play, and then the first track, “Tired of Sex,” kicks in. The lyrics are a shock to the system for any fan of Blue, which was an album whose songs were about surfboards and sweaters (even “Say It Ain’t So”, Blue’s darkest track, sounds if anything out of place and kind of silly with its Dear Daddy’s, sandwiched as it is between “Surf Wax America” and “In the Garage”).

Pinkerton, on the other hand, is way serious in its tone. 90% of the songs are about Cuomo’s total inability to connect with anyone, his fear of being alone, his disillusionment with fame and music, his tendency to lapse into a fantasy world when reality doesn’t meet his expectations. “Pink Triangle” talks about his having fallen in love with a girl who turns out to be a lesbian, “Why Bother” has him giving up entirely (“Why bother/It’s gonna hurt me/It’s gonna kill when you desert me…”). There are innumerable mentions of Japanese girls (also a nod to Madame Butterfly) he’s met on tour (“God damn you half-Japanese girls…”), including “Across the Sea,” the album’s high point, which is also its nadir emotionally, in that it outlines Cuomo’s fantasy love affair with a Japanese school girl who wrote him a fan letter. The whole thing ends with “Butterfly,” maybe the weirdest outro for an album since the White Album’s “Revolution 9/Goodnight”: after a half an hour of raw-sounding garage rock, “Butterfly” has Cuomo singing over a simple acoustic guitar, sounding on the verge of tears, about a childhood memory.

Matt Sharp’s contribution to the album, and the band in general, can’t be understated here. He left after Pinkerton, after all (to create the Rentals, one of the seriously most underrated bands ever, period), and the band took something of a nosedive without him. Pinkerton is so heavy on bass that it—no lie—is the album from which I even learned what a bass guitar was. Not to discredit my enthusiasm, but for the sake of journalistic integrity I’ll admit that the first time I ever listened to Pinkerton I was both fourteen years old and high, in a friend’s basement, a friend who played bass guitar and had been trying to convince me of this instrument’s importance in many of the songs I loved. He put Pinkerton on and I felt like I couldn’t hear anything besides the bass behind the vocals—again, I was high, so take this revelation with a grain of salt—and I’d argue that was when my love of music first really, truly began, the day I understood not only how sound and melody worked but how all of the pieces of a song worked together to make something complex, intricate—beautiful.

I wrote an article on here a few months ago about The O.C., in which I tried to figure out the impetus of that series’ downfall, and came up short. Sadly, with Weezer, there are so many obvious reasons for why they started sucking that really you can just take your pick. Sharp’s departure? Sure. Cuomo’s going insane (he locked himself in his dorm at Harvard and painted it black, Brian Wilson-style)? You bet. Cuomo’s eventual regaining of his sanity, getting married, graduating, becoming happy and thus less angsty and thus having less to write about? Yup. Sure, the Green Album was a fair effort, reteaming them with Ocasek, and had a couple gems. Maladroit might be the only album in history where the title of the album and the review of it are synonymous. Everything after that got progressively worse, and now Weezer hosts a cruise every summer in an effort to recapture their old glory. Good luck.

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