Weezer's 'Blue Album': Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating
facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows,
and more. We are your two power poppers of precision podcasting.
I'm Alex Hegel.

Speaker 3 (00:24):
There's sweater wearing savants of That's all I got.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
We've really done.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
We've done enough of these that I'm like, really, I'm
struggling with the alliteration bit. We might have to retire
that point. There's only so many ways to say trivia,
all right, I know, not that many different ways to
say trivia, minutia, fainality. I've been through, but I've been
through so many ye and I'm Jordan run Talk.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
And Jordan.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
Today we're talking about one of the defining albums of
the nineteen nineties, the slacker masterpiece that taught the world
heavy metal guitars could easily cozy up alongside the more
droll and quirky side of grunt and father figure induced depression.
That's right, folks, we're talking about Weezer's self titled debut
aka the Blue Album. This band is so funny to me,

(01:15):
and particularly this album. I'm not like a Weezer guy.
There are Weezer people out there, they are insane. I'm
not one of them. I think at some point when
people were like, yeah, there's like seven terrible Weezer albums,
but then when you get to the two good songs
on each one of those, then you're really cooking. I'm
like not interested. However, this album is a masterpiece. And
it's funny because when we were growing up, Weezer was

(01:39):
like the Islands in the Sun band, right, and Green
album come out, So that's the one where they re
teamed with Rick Okasik after self producing Pinkerton, So that's
why there hits on that record.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
But yeah, I and hash pipe.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
Whips, but like, yeah, I saw those videos and I
was like, Okay, this is a perfectly fine rock band.
And then someone played me their car the World has
turned and left me here, and I was like, oh,
this is genius. What is this and they're like this
is the first Weezer album, idiot. And then at some
point in the seventeen reissues that this album has had,

(02:14):
you know, I found one of the remasters and I
was like, oh, this thing sounds incredible.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
It's re oquay sic. Yeah, but it's we'll get into.

Speaker 2 (02:23):
The what they like. They're actual micing techniques and so forth.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
But yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
I mean, you know, and it's funny because like my
appreciation for them falls off a very steep cliff. It's
like Blue Album, top of the heap. I acknowledged that
Pinkerton has stuff going for it, but I never really
glommed onto it the same way. And then zero to
five percent interest in everything else that they've done.

Speaker 3 (02:46):
You I, I mean, I I feel like I always
invoke this on the show, and I'm getting self conscious
about doing so. But I've talked about how I didn't
really engage with a lot of pop culture or contemporary
pop culture as a kid.

Speaker 1 (02:59):
But I like Weezer.

Speaker 3 (03:00):
I mean they sung about sweaters and they had a
video that looked like the Happy Day set. Yeah, so
I was for a nicket night kid who went to
private school at this time and exclusively wore chinos and sweaters.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
I felt very seen.

Speaker 3 (03:14):
And Island and the Sun came out right when I
got my first guitar and I was trying to learn
to play, and I went on all those early tab sites.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
And good Lord. There were a lot of.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
Weezer guitar parts on those early tab sites and first
song I learned to playing guitar was Island in the
Sun could still nail the solo and somewhere there's a
tape of me and my best friend and I believe
his dad jamming in their basement to Island on the song.
So I always have a soft spot for Weezer, But yeah, no,

(03:45):
I agree with you. Weezer were the band that all
of my friends who actually liked rock and roll were into.
Because a lot of my friends in you know, ninety eight,
ninety nine, two thousand were into the you know, the
fred Durst of it all, and the ones of mine
that actually liked rock bands pre Strokes were really into Weezer,
and they were always trying to educate me more onto

(04:08):
I like the Blue album and I like the Green album.
They were always trying to get me into Pinkerton never
really stuck for me. But it's too raw for you,
it is, It's too scary. He also he also loves
the Beach Boys. He also loves my beloved beach Bolls. Yeah,
and so I mean beach Boys, happy Day sweaters and
I was always trying to look like the Beatles at

(04:28):
that time, and I had a haircut just like Rivers Cuomo.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
I mean it had a lot going. You had the
bolt Oh you did have the bolt cut? Seen it?

Speaker 2 (04:36):
Yeah? Wow?

Speaker 1 (04:39):
So really, you know, how could I band?

Speaker 2 (04:43):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (04:44):
Yeah, I don't have the same academic appreciation for them
as you do. As with most things we discussed, I mean,
this song Slap, that's like really the and it's it
is it's hard to listen now with ears of man
of our age.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
How insanely out of touch this sounded when it came out,
Oh my god, you know, like weeks was it months
after Kirka being killed himself? So we were in like
a leaderless, a rudderless grunge era, but probably like the
lunkheaded parts of it like Bush. I guess I don't
know when the first Bush album came out, but it

(05:22):
feels right to me to.

Speaker 1 (05:23):
Say that, Oh, that sounds about right to me.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
And to just get these massive guitars and also man
having Matt Sharp double the vocals in Falsetto for like
ninety percent of the record. Such a bizarre choice works perfectly,
is my opinion. I know it's a dividing one. But yeah,
what a bizarre breath of fresh air this must have
sounded like. And it's such a dumb roads diverging in

(05:49):
a wood moment, because we could have gotten like a
legion of amazing. We could have had like a power
pop renaissance in the mid nineties, and instead this idiot
country was like, let's do swing and third wave ska
instead and rap rock, oh yeah, and rap rock. Mustn't
forget rap rock. Yeah, man, Jesus Christ, we're dumb, dumb country.

(06:13):
You took a band who was obsessed with the cars
and flattened them out in favor of sca pick it up,
pick it up, pick it up, go yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
Torment you during band practice.

Speaker 3 (06:24):
By just doing that into any open mic, we could find.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
Okay, well, let's not dwell on that.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (06:32):
From Rivers Cromo's Father Issues to Spike Jones and a
Pack of Dogs, and the repeated influence of the Beach Boys,
as well as the elaborate audio collage that threatened to
tank the entire album. Here's everything you didn't know about
Weezer's Blue album. This one. I like to call Mark

(06:56):
Rothko's number sixty one a rusted Blue.

Speaker 1 (07:00):
That's one of the more high ends ones. Wow.

Speaker 3 (07:03):
Yeah, most of your headings are things like Crank and
the Hog or things like that.

Speaker 1 (07:07):
And this is come with rothka.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
Well, I googled famous blue paintings.

Speaker 1 (07:13):
Ah okay.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
So the Blue Album and most of Weezer is primarily
the works of the band's frontman, Rivers Cuomo. And since
most of Weezer's best work is based on whatever that
man's got rattled around inside of his skull, which I know,
don't envy, here's just what led up to the Blue
Album in Old Riversville.

Speaker 1 (07:38):
Cuomo was born on.

Speaker 2 (07:39):
June thirteenth, nineteen seventy, in New York City. His father, Frank,
was a musician who played drums on the nineteen seventy
one album Odyssey of Isca by Wayne Shorter. Making his
second appearance on the pod after the Steely Dan Asia episode,
shouts to Wayne Shorter rip Yeah, yes, he is dead.
And there's a revealing dispute between his parents over the

(08:01):
source of his name. That's pretty illustrative of his entire deal. Supposedly,
River's mom, Beverly, christened him after the East and Hudson
Rivers bordering Manhattan, while his father later claimed that Rivers
was named after three prominent soccer players, Rivalino, Luigi Riva,
and Gihnny Rivera, all of whom were playing in the
nineteen seventy World Cup. Cromo was also born with one

(08:24):
leg shorter than the other and had to wear special shoes,
one with a lift, which he has described as just
one more reason that I wasn't as cool as everyone else.

Speaker 3 (08:32):
Oh this man guy, I mean not on one hand,
I get it, but he does seem to have a
very sizable chip on his shoulder.

Speaker 1 (08:40):
Is that. Yes, I think he's just like beaten down.

Speaker 2 (08:45):
He's a really fascinating guy and like I find, honestly
like the engagement with him and his personality like much
more interesting than the band, Like how he talks about
he has like a he I guess. At one point
there was an interview he was like, I have like
an obsession with planning things out right, So from my
Twitter account, I have like thousands of banked tweets that

(09:05):
I just wrote beforehand and like auto scheduled. And I
think so much of his pain is coming from this
like person with a deep inferiority complex and like dad
issues who grow up obsessed with like highly technical, aggressive
masculine music, trying to make like psyche plumbing sensitive guy

(09:30):
rock wow okay, and just being like cowed into inarticulateness
by the vastness of that enterprise. Well said, I over
intellectualized it enough.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
That makes a lot, Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 2 (09:45):
Well.

Speaker 3 (09:45):
River's family lived in Rochester, New York, at the city's
Zen Center until River's father, Frank, left in nineteen seventy
five at the Corney Rivers he saw his dad only
three times over the next twenty years, at ages seven, eleven,
and sixteen, and not again until nineteen ninety five, the
year when his airing of his feelings about the relationship

(10:07):
came out in Say it Ain't So Weezer song. Frank
meanwhile became a Pentecostal preacher. River's mother, Beverly, relocated to Yogaville, and,
noticing a theme here from Zen Center to Yogaville, an
ashram in Pumfret, Connecticut, and she married a guy named
Stephen Kitts, and young Rivers re christened himself Peter kits

(10:31):
Possibly you right because it was so close to the
name Peter Chris Kisses, drummer of whom Rivers was a
huge fan.

Speaker 1 (10:39):
Are you serious?

Speaker 2 (10:41):
No, but I would postulate it way to factored into it.

Speaker 3 (10:46):
Rivers told Magnet magazine in twenty fourteen it was a
very rural and agrarian environment. Only Rivers would describe where
he grew up as an agrarian environ.

Speaker 1 (10:57):
Wow, that's somebody who went to Harvard.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
I know we talk a lot about these VH one
like talking head as you bleep it every time, sucking
extravaganzas that populated our youth. But do you remember the
one when Mobi uses the word Insussians to describe Nirvana
and or Kurt Cobain and they pull up a chirn
with the definition of the word.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
Funestly, I think I kind of do remember this, Sash.

Speaker 3 (11:24):
I feel like Moby and Rivers are cut from the
same insufferably academic cloth.

Speaker 1 (11:29):
Well.

Speaker 2 (11:29):
I was just like, oh, so that's what happens, Because
as a kid who knew way too many, like ten
dollars words from reading and not speaking, I was like, Oh,
that's what happens.

Speaker 1 (11:39):
People make fun of you for.

Speaker 3 (11:40):
Just talking like that, and somebody in your school says
your mom gave birth to a dictionary.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
That's true.

Speaker 3 (11:48):
That's both something I would take as a compliment at
that age and also a very highly developed burn for
a third grader.

Speaker 1 (11:56):
Fifth grader.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yeah, I think that kid checked him up on Facebook.
But I hope he's dead.

Speaker 1 (12:02):
Just say he's dead, Okay.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
Shout out to Kolner An elementary school bully.

Speaker 3 (12:09):
Uh Yes, Rivers describing the place where he grew up
as an agrarian environment. I had chores like feeding ponies,
clearing weeds and gardening and cooking and cleaning, yoga, meditation
practice every day, and then some traditional academics and a
lot of self led creative projects. I couldn't imagine a
more nurturing, safe and supportive environment for a kid to

(12:30):
grow up in. And yet still he turned out like that.

Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah. Well, I mean he didn't see anyone in uh
he didn't have any social interaction with his like normal
children until the first time he's plopped into middle school,
which you know, I man, the more you learn about
this guy, were you're like, I'm surprised you made it as.

Speaker 1 (12:48):
Far as you did.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
Buddy's like you're the prototype for like a lone wolf
mass shooter. Basically is there.

Speaker 1 (12:55):
I'm sure we'll get to this later.

Speaker 3 (12:56):
I feel like we do sort of touch on it
on some lyrics to his songs.

Speaker 1 (13:00):
Is there anything you know a lot more about him
than I do?

Speaker 3 (13:02):
Is there anything problematic about Rivers?

Speaker 1 (13:07):
The women stuff?

Speaker 3 (13:08):
Yeah, okay, I guess we'll get more.

Speaker 1 (13:11):
We'll get to it. We'll get to it well.

Speaker 3 (13:14):
River's unique childhood meant that the first time he was
exposed to non ashram or Yogi lifestyle at the age
of eleven was when he entered public school for the
first time, as you just mentioned. But despite this, Rivers
was a member of the high school choir and performed
in a school production of Greece at one point. I
would love to have a tape of that if that's
on YouTube. And while growing up a medal kid, he

(13:36):
worshiped at the era appropriate altars of the aforementioned Kiss,
Iron Maiden, Slayer.

Speaker 1 (13:42):
And Judas Priest.

Speaker 3 (13:44):
That's an interesting marriage of theater kid and heavy metal kid.
I guess they're so far around the circle that they
almost touch. Consequently, one of his first bands was a
glam metal group called Avant Garde.

Speaker 1 (13:57):
Who he moved to La with in nineteen eighty nine.
At the age of nineteen.

Speaker 3 (14:01):
All five members of the band lived in the same
studio apartment, and Rivers was the lead guitarist, having no
designs on the front man position. He told Rolling Stone
in twenty nineteen, I could have seen myself in the NBA.

Speaker 1 (14:13):
As easily as being a lead singer in a metal band.

Speaker 2 (14:16):
That was just like unthinkable. Yeah, and you know, they
were just victims of bad timing. It was not a
good time to be an aspiring hair metal band in LA.
The scene reached peak saturation in the late eighties and
quickly I think found its biggest export in Guns n'
Roses and then later on like Poison, But the specter
of grunge was already holding up its rusted scythe to

(14:39):
the throat of the hair metal genre as a whole. Also,
I find this hilarious Cuomo. I think before like regular college,
he enrolled at the Guitar Institute of Technology, which is
a for profit college in LA that I think is
now just the Musicians Institute, and it is just like
the place that produced like every hair metal band Shredder

(15:02):
of the eighties. Jennifer Batton, who is Michael Jackson's lead guitarist.
The guys in Steel Panther. I think some of the
guys who were in the Mars Vault like session players.
It just teaches you how to shred. But sadly he
flunked out. So Avant Garde was renamed Zoom, which is funny.
So he got into g t but he basically he

(15:25):
said I couldn't bring myself to get into diligent student
mode and was basically expelled. He said, I was thinking
of myself as a lead guitar player, thinking that faster
harmonic minor scales equals better, which is true, thinking that
I could move out to La with Avant Garde and
we were just going to be huge rock stars. Then
seeing one band member after another leave abandoned me and

(15:48):
not being able to hold it together or put it
back together. And then he had two back to back breakups,
which frustrated metal guitarist to again loan tudo profile like
frustrated metal guitarist, two bad breakups, and instead he started
working at a Tower Records, Yes, which was his inflection point.

Speaker 3 (16:07):
Not only a Tower Records, well, he was the Tower
Records on Sunset right. There's like a documentary about that
plays a very famous La Landmark, right.

Speaker 1 (16:14):
I believe so I don't care about La Well.

Speaker 3 (16:19):
I believe that to be true. In fact, my brother
recently told me that's true. So I'm gonna take that
as gospel. He's a big weezerhead. Oh oh oh god,
I'm sorry. You should have told me that beforehand. Man,
Why Well, I don't know. I'll probably say something mean
at some point.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
No, okay.

Speaker 3 (16:38):
And also, in addition to working at Tower Records, he
met Weezer drummer Pat Wilson through a coworker at this store,
and the job meant that Rivers could expand his palate
beyond a strict diet of shred metal and into the
occasional eighties pop.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
Like Madonna, which he had a weakness for. I love that,
and this is something that I love about him too.

Speaker 3 (16:57):
I also don't have sophisticated taye in music, like We've
talked about this in the Britney Spears Cross Road episode,
Like I have this deep underside of Probably the contemporary
music that I love the most right now is probably
like pop, like I love Olivia Rudrigo, I love I
want Rihanna to come back with a new album. It's

(17:18):
been eight years, so I like that about him.

Speaker 2 (17:21):
I just think it's funny how all the guys in
Weezer have like the most boring names ever except for
Rivers Cuomo. Yeah, their drummer is named Patrick Wilson, which
makes him the most second famous Patrick Wilson, after the
movie star Brian Bell, Matt Sharp, Scott Schriner. Now, like
just white guy names.

Speaker 1 (17:41):
I had it.

Speaker 2 (17:42):
I kept writing this and confusing Brian's with Matts, and
I know, I'm sure they all have very distinct and
wonderful personalities. But you're in a band with a guy
named Rivers Cuomo and you're all just you should have
picked different names, guys, go forget someone call it call
you snake or maybe he does or the cat ringo.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
I mean, controversial.

Speaker 3 (18:13):
Point, especially considering I'm discussing my favorite human being non
family category on the planet, Joni Mitchell. No, Paul McCartney
is like not a very famous sounding name, you know
what I mean.

Speaker 2 (18:25):
McCartney though it has like a swing to it, a
r it rings, but it's not.

Speaker 3 (18:29):
Like Freddie Mercury or like Brian May even or like, no,
there's a great name, Like that's a great name. Yeah,
Robert Plant even even though it kind of lands with
a thud.

Speaker 2 (18:43):
Someone who's not white and British.

Speaker 3 (18:45):
British, Right, you're right, you're right, Elvis Presley, that's your
famous name.

Speaker 2 (18:52):
Well, I mean yeah, but even like rock star names like,
I do have to you know, what I do have
to say is that No, I'm going to take this back.
I thought gave Rossdale was a good British name, and
I was wrong. It sounds like an American rock star name. No,
it sounds like a poncey little private school pratt.

Speaker 3 (19:09):
Those are some great, great English insults right there, though.

Speaker 2 (19:14):
I'm very so the guy cheated on Gwen Stefani so like.

Speaker 1 (19:19):
Dips right wing.

Speaker 2 (19:23):
Oh yeah, And that is what happens with women from
Orange County, especially women who were into third wave ska
and pop punk. They all start out as like cool
punk rock chicks, and then they end up as conservative
women married to country people or guys who wish they
were country people. It's the natural evolution of things.

Speaker 1 (19:40):
Are there any other examples?

Speaker 2 (19:42):
No? Moving on, I'm sure. I'm sure probably everyone who
dated someone in a ska band in Fis County, every
single woman who ever knew in the biblical sense. A
SKA musician has become like a raging conservative, and I
can't blame them for that.

Speaker 1 (20:04):
Being that close to Disneyland, man, what the hell are
you talking about? So Rivers.

Speaker 3 (20:08):
He's working on Tower Records, and it broadens his musical
diet into you know, things that are in the charts,
like eighties pop, like Madonna. He would later say, At first,
I just could not get into other music. It sounded
like garbage to me. Velvet Underground Pet Sounds was reissued
around that time, Thirteenth Floor, Elevators, Pixies, Sonic Youth. It

(20:31):
all sounded like noise. I thought none of this is catchy,
but I came to love.

Speaker 1 (20:37):
It all now. I don't understand how I missed it.

Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah, and again, to be clear, he was avoiding all
this stuff in favor of like Dawkin, right, Okay, all
the Dawkin whips.

Speaker 1 (20:49):
Yeah, you do love Dawkin, I do.

Speaker 3 (20:51):
Another current release that made it impact on him was
Nirvana's Bleach and specifically the song Silver. He recalled thinking
this is so beautiful to me, and I identify with
it so much. Hearing him sing about mom and dad
and Grandpa Joe. These personal family issues and a really heartbreaking,
kind of innocent, childlike way over these straightforward chords and
a major key. Then the distortion kicks in and he

(21:15):
starts screaming.

Speaker 1 (21:16):
I would imagine that.

Speaker 3 (21:17):
Would have a big impact on writing something like say
it Ain't so about his dad?

Speaker 1 (21:21):
Right read on.

Speaker 3 (21:27):
Cuomo and Pat with Patrick Patrick pals That's correct.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
Got The actor.

Speaker 3 (21:33):
Started a band called Fuzz, which unfortunately fizzled out after
a few shows. Fuzz then morphed into a short lived
group called this is one of the worst early early
band names I have ever heard, sixty Wrong Sausages, which
featured Rivers Tower Records coworker Pat Finn on bass and

(21:55):
another friend of Pat Finn's, Jason Cropper on guitar, related
to Steve Cropper of.

Speaker 1 (22:01):
Musclache of Stacks.

Speaker 3 (22:04):
They broke up, unfortunately after just a single gig at
the Phoenix Theater and Pedaluma on Thanksgiving weekend nineteen ninety one. Petaluma.
That sounds like a punchline, you know what I mean?
It sounds yeah, it's the name.

Speaker 2 (22:18):
It's just one of those like it's like a Bay
Area bedroom community.

Speaker 1 (22:21):
At this point, it just sounds like one of those things.

Speaker 3 (22:23):
It sounds like, you know, Chattanooga chu Chuo, like taking
the taking, the taking, the p train, the Pedaloma. I
don't know, it just just seems like something that somebody
would be waving a scar around and singing about.

Speaker 1 (22:35):
Petaluma. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:37):
I mean, that's the entirety of California, right, It's like
built on the bones of you know, a bunch of
migrant workers, robber barons, and everything's only like two hundred
years old. Like this in state is brand new by
comparison to like Massachusetts, So why are we talking about Pedaluma?

Speaker 1 (22:55):
Finished the side side sigh.

Speaker 3 (22:59):
Rivers was so so disturbed by the succession of events
that he decided he was gonna write fifty songs before
he play live with a band again.

Speaker 2 (23:09):
But don't worry, kids, he only got to around thirty.
It sounds like the songs weren't the problem, it was
the bands. But okay, whatever, that's what happens when you
have no interpersonal skills. I'm just gonna focus on me
and he enrolled at Santa Monica College and started cranking
out demos, and allegedly he also recorded an entire unreleased

(23:30):
vegetarian themed rap album under the name veget Terrorists around
this time, which is I think the only thing that
gives sixty wrong sausages a run for its money.

Speaker 1 (23:45):
That's bad.

Speaker 3 (23:46):
That's a terrible ma name. So is this making the
rounds on YouTube or anything?

Speaker 2 (23:50):
No, I don't think so. According to Weezerpedia, which has
been like just a real, a real godsend writing this episode,
it's never seen the light.

Speaker 1 (24:01):
Of day he's waiting for.

Speaker 2 (24:05):
There is apparently a song called Black Fur in the
Hour of Chaos, which I assume means it is like
an anti fur industry thing. But that is a riff
on a public enemy song called Black Steel in the
Hour of Chaos. So maybe it's better that we don't
actually have to hear that.

Speaker 3 (24:26):
Yeah that sounds awful, Yeah yeah, Cuemo told Rolling Stone
in two thousand and nine. The Sweater song was the
first Weezer song I ever wrote. Back in nineteen ninety one,
I was trying to write a Velvet Underground type song
because I was super into them, and I came up
with that guitar riff. It wasn't until years after I
wrote it that I realized it's almost a complete ripoff

(24:47):
of Welcome Home. Sanitarium by Metallica. It just perfectly encapsulates Weezer.
To me, you're trying to be cool like Velvet Underground,
but your metal roots just pumped through unconsciously.

Speaker 1 (24:58):
That's great.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
Drummer Pat Wilson recalled in John D. Lewson's book River's
Edge the Weavers the Weezer story. Just read that out
loud for the first time. It was so bad.

Speaker 1 (25:09):
I love that.

Speaker 2 (25:12):
You'll never step in the same river twice. The Weezer story.
Many Rivers to cross. Wow, the tale of Weezer. I
could do this all day.

Speaker 1 (25:23):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
Rivers said, Look, we're gonna write fifty songs and then
we're gonna have our first rehearsal. As mentioned earlier, they
got to around thirty. My name is Jonas dates back
to around this time. Samoth Wortles turned and left me
here other stuff that would make it onto albums later
and Wilson sent some of Rivers demos to his old roommate,
bassist Matt Sharp, and I love this story. It's super cute.

(25:44):
Matt Sharp became obsessed with this band. He had moved
to the Bay Area and immediately moved back to la
and like appointed himself the guy who would make Weezer happen.
He told Rolling Stone. I thought, I'm doing this no
matter what has to be done to make it happen.
We're on this journe together. And this was a needed
shot in the arm for Cuomo, who recalled I think

(26:04):
Matt called me and said, you're a genius. I'm going
to be a bass player. We're going to be a band.
It confirmed all my greatest hopes for myself. Tremendous phrase.
Knowing he felt so strongly about the songs was all
the confidence I need. Another needed confidence boost came from
rivers quasi girlfriend at the time, Jennifer Chiba, who looms

(26:26):
large in the Weezer lore, and she introduced him to
bands like Lou Barlow's post Dinosaur Junior or concurrently with
Dinosaur Junior project, Sebido, and the Flaming Lips. And she
also crucially encouraged him to cut his hair because at
this point I think he was still rotting like extremely
long metal head or mullet hair. Yeah, and Cuomo had

(26:47):
actually done so well at Santa Monica that he'd gotten
a lucrative postgrad offer from UC Berkeley, so he gave
sharp like a year. He was like, ye, break this
band in a year, or I'm gonna go enroll at
UC Berkeley, which is hilarious and basically Sharp achieved this

(27:08):
by telling Rivers like, hey, forget about metal and grunge.
Our new thing is the Beach Boys.

Speaker 1 (27:13):
Hell yeah, see this is why I love these guys.

Speaker 2 (27:17):
Yeah, but Loud, Oh sorry that I forgot to even
finished the most crucial part of the pitch. Let's be
like the Beach Boys. But Loud sold.

Speaker 1 (27:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (27:27):
Now we're going to talk about a major day in
Weezer Lore March nineteenth, nineteen ninety two. Not only did
the band play their first ever gig at Raji's on
Hollywood Boulevard as a last minute opener for wait for it,
Keanu Reeves Band Dog Star, but they also got their name.

(27:48):
This occurred while on a phone call with the booker
for that very gig. Rivers would later say, I kept
harassing this guy Casey at Raji's in Hollywood to give
us a gig. Finally, one day he called and said,
the opening band for Keanu Reeves Band Dog Stars just canceled.
Do you guys want to play? And I said yes,
And so he said what do you guys called. We

(28:09):
didn't have a name yet, so I told them we
were called Weezer, which was my dad's nickname for me.
When I told the guys, hey, guess what we're called Weezer,
they weren't super excited about it. Interesting, I never really
thought it, because I've definitely heard the story before, but
I've never really thought about the implications of naming your
band the nickname from your estranged father.

Speaker 1 (28:35):
Yeah. Super weird. That's a lot to unpack, Huh.

Speaker 2 (28:39):
It's like naming your band Old Yeller or something.

Speaker 1 (28:43):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (28:45):
Hey, everyone, We're Lenny from of Mice and Men, just
like famous sad stories.

Speaker 3 (28:54):
Adding to the moment, the band also obtained their longtime
headquarters on Amherst Cuomo and Sharp moved in with friend
Justin Fisher after convincing the landlords that they were a
group of UCLA film students and emphatically not a noisy
rock band. The focal point of the house quickly became
the garage, which was promptly transformed into a rehearsal space

(29:17):
and be decked with posters that would define the blue
albums in the garage. What follow up next was a
period of slogging it out in La among the detritus
of the hair metal scene and the grunge Explosion, which
a band full of guys who looked like record store
clerk's playing high volume power pop wasn't the most natural
fit for drummer. Pat Wilson wound up living in a

(29:39):
garage with no running water, where he probably recalled the
rolling stone in a bag, not even a bucket, not
even a box, a bag.

Speaker 2 (29:51):
He seems like a weird guy. When Brian Bell joined
right after they fired Jason, he said that the he
went and met Rivers at the hotel and rivers first
word to him, He's like, you're going to need to
grow mustache to be in this band. We're all gonna
have mustaches, and Brin Belt was like really, Rivers was like, no,

(30:13):
but grow it anyway. And then he went to introduce
himself to Pat Wilson, and Pat Wilson was moved, like,
had his pants down and was mooning him as he
came in the door. Ah, weird band.

Speaker 3 (30:24):
You were ahead of our band. I'm sort of surprised
you didn't make us well. You you asked us to
wear like Hawaiian shirts, yeah, or like striped shirts.

Speaker 2 (30:32):
That was like five years into the band when I
was like, everyone just start wearing Hawaiian shirts.

Speaker 1 (30:36):
And we did. And it was good.

Speaker 3 (30:39):
Yeah, in the biblical sense it was good. Not in
the biblical We did not just to everyone listening. We
did not know each other in the biblical sense.

Speaker 1 (30:48):
No, what the hell are you doing now? The bag
left off.

Speaker 3 (30:53):
In the meanwhile, Cuemo doubled down on his ultimatum to
his bassist. He said, you get us, could deal in
nine months, or I'm going back to school.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
Damn.

Speaker 2 (31:04):
Things were easier back then.

Speaker 1 (31:05):
Ah. Consequently, by November, Weezer.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
Had recorded a demo that made it into the hands
of Todd Sullivan, an A and R guy Geffen, which
became the lone major label to show interest in Weezer,
although they did have some biddings from a number of indies.
After securing a deal with the Geffen subsidiary DGC in
nineteen ninety three, Weezer planned to act as their own
producers and recorded their longtime home on Amherst Avenue in

(31:30):
the Sawtel district of La their cozy garage had been
where they cut a number of demos, and consequently bassist
Matt Sharp said in November nineteen ninety four interview. Our
first thought was that we should do it in our
own element and have nothing be different, and make it
as little of an experience as possible. Do it in
LA and we'll produce ourselves and get an engineer. We
like to do it that way, but the Geffen A

(31:51):
and R team had bigger ideas and urged the band
to hire an established name to oversee the sessions. Cuomo
happened to be in a supermarket where he overheard the
Cars All Time Great, one of the greatest songs of
all time. Just what I needed, he explained. On the
worst podcast name I've ever heard in my life. I
think it's music or guitar themed, hosted by Chris Shifflett,
called Shred with Shifty, mostly because I remember the lead

(32:15):
singer of crazy Town's name was Shifty shell Shock, so
that's all I can think of now.

Speaker 1 (32:19):
Oh wow.

Speaker 2 (32:21):
So anyway, he told Shifty, I was like, Yeah, that's
kind of what I want the Weezer record to sound like,
So let's get that guy. The record company was really
pushing us to work with the producer, Cuomo told their
biographer Larsen, and so we figured, I don't know how
you pronounced that guy's name, Lewison. Lewison works for me,
So we figured that if we had to have somebody
in the studio with us, it might as well just

(32:42):
be someone who writes good songs. And the Car's first
record just rules. That's Matt Sharp speaking. We got into
the early Cars thing and began to notice a musical
similarity between us and them. Our use of chords, downstrokes,
and melodies shows the same economy and tightness as a
Cars song. Buddy Holly is not that far off from
just what I needed. Lucky for the fledgling band, the

(33:03):
feeling was mutual. I got their tapes from Geffen Records
when I was out in LA working another project. Cars
songwriter and producer Rick Okasik told Magnet in twenty fourteen,
I listened to it in the car and I just
thought it was phenomenal. Having no idea what they looked like,
I thought they were a heavy metal band that had
really good melodies. Okaysick was in town working on Bad
Brains God of Love album and decided to visit Weezer

(33:25):
at their rehearsal space. Hilarious and fascinating footnote to Okay
six careers that he was the Bad Brains producer. Bad Brands,
for those of you who are not aware, are the
most virtuosic hardcore punk band out of the eighties. They
were a bunch of African American gentlemen who grew up
steeped in reggae and then became jazz fusion dorks listening
to like Weather Report and Return Forever and then found

(33:48):
the Ramones like after that and were like, I didn't know,
but we can do this, yeah, yeah, And so they
were like they like late seventies too, like early eighties,
and they were like, yeah, we can, we can do this,
and we'll just make it Shred and Rick Okaseik produced
their album Rock for Light, and I guess was still

(34:08):
hanging out with him into the early nineties, which is
just amazing. The record company called us up and said,
Rick's coming to your rehearsal today. Matt Sharp said in
July nineteen ninety four interview, we were like, yeah, right,
he's coming to our rehearsal. But that day our drummer
Pat saw him in a guitar store and he goes,
oh my god, maybe he is coming in anticipation of
Okay Sick's arrival, Weezer made a special addition to their repertoire.

(34:32):
We had prepared a cover of just what I needed first.
Weezer guitarist Jason Cropper remembered, you know, sort of just
goofing around and honoring him at the same time, and
Okay Sick later admitted that he found their impromptu tribute
quote pretty cute. Okay Sick must have been so scary.
He's like six five ninety pounds, looks like the grim Reaper,
always wearing sunglasses.

Speaker 3 (34:53):
He may have been scary, but he was pretty laid back,
and he quickly allayed any fears that the BAM may
have had about handing over the producer role to an outsider.
He says in River's Edge. My impression was just that
they should be recorded the way they were. I didn't
want to tamper with it much. He did, however, have
one suggestion, a not bad one. Get out of the garage.

(35:16):
I talked them into coming to New York and recording
an Electric Lady. I thought it would be inspiring, get
out of this garage and into what's on the short
list of the most iconic studios and yeah, Rick Bill, Okay, Yeah,
I guess. Another reason Okaysik wanted to go to New
York was that his then wife Paulina Poritzkova, the supermodel,

(35:37):
was pregnant with the couple's first son at the time,
so he wanted to be close to her as well.
So the night before the band decamped to New York
City to record at Electric Lady Studios, they did one
last thing in their garage. They raged, specifically at August seventh,
nineteen ninety three. Carl Koch aka the Fifth Wheezer, later
wrote of this magical evening in the garage right before

(35:59):
they left for New York. The excitement and giddiness was
tangible and erupted into a going away bash. Needless to say,
the party stretched into the weeest of hours. We were
awoken after about forty five minutes sleep by dgc's David
Geffen Record Companies Denise McDonald, who picked us up in
label exec Tom Zutto's range Rover and took our ragged

(36:21):
forms to Lax.

Speaker 1 (36:23):
I think Carl Koch is like the band diarist if
I recall, Yeah, he's just like.

Speaker 2 (36:27):
One of their buddies, in like their historian. I like
he like works behind the scenes, but he's also like
in the street. He's also heard on Blue album. Oh right,
it's just kind of a man. That's their man Friday,
which is why I referred him as the fifth Weezer,
the fifth Weeze.

Speaker 3 (36:46):
One of the label representatives, Denise McDonald, took great care
to step over unconscious figures asleep on the lawn. Their departure,
mercifully wasn't delayed by the discovery that the residences won
and only toilet have them pulverized at some point during
the night, and presumably Pat Wilson was like, I got

(37:07):
a bag, only been used a few times.

Speaker 2 (37:12):
As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with
more too much information after these messages, Wow, okay, So
spend some time routining the band at a New York

(37:34):
rehearsal studio. He told their biographer, I had them in
a pre production for at least a week, trimming it down.
I wanted it to be a concise record that had
a focal point. They attempted fifteen songs during these early sessions,
including the ten that made the final cut. Michael and
Carly became one of the most famous of these. It
was re recorded in its official forum, but you can
hear the demos on one of the Insane Long Blue

(37:57):
album reissues. We will get to that. It's very sad.

Speaker 3 (38:03):
When they hit the hollid halls of Electric Lady Rivers
was suitably cowed. He told the La Times this year.
I was beside myself.

Speaker 1 (38:14):
Because I knew Kiss had recorded there. Na Hendricks. Kiss
was the one that he named dropped. I remember going
to the.

Speaker 3 (38:23):
Bathroom for the first time thinking Ace Freeley sat on
this toilet that I'm about to sit on. Honestly, I
did that when I went to Village Vanguard and thought
about everybody old famous asses that had shot up. I
think I took a picture of it and sent it
to you. If I recall you did I did?

Speaker 1 (38:39):
Okay good. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
The bandon Okasik put some outlines in place for the album.
There was to be no reverb, the guitars were to
play only downstrokes Wow, there would be no effects pedals used.
He asked them to switch to their guitars bridge pickups,
which gives generally a brighter, more troubly sound than the
neck and the band also gained access to Okay six

(39:03):
collection of vintage guitars, among them a few less pulled
Junior Specials and a red sixties Fender Jaguar. There's been
a lot of debate amongst Weezer nerds about which guitar
actually tracked the album because Rivers is famous for a
blue stratocaster like a Franken Caster that he has, but
Jason Cropper had a red stratocaster that people often think

(39:24):
is on the record, but it is I believe has
been settled to be mostly okay, six guitars. Uh, this
is my favorite bit about how they did this record.
They tracked everything by keeping the gain, which is like
the the input level that's going into an amplifier, right,
Like it's it's essentially how you turn the signal that's

(39:46):
going into something.

Speaker 1 (39:48):
Up until he gets distorted or something there.

Speaker 2 (39:53):
Well, Sue, I mean, god, how do I explain this?
On amplifiers and most audio equipment, there's gain and then
there's master volume.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
Right, Gain just.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
Increases the input of whatever you're putting into the device.
Master volume takes that signal and turns it up. And yeah,
and the just the actual volume of what you're hearing,
the way that those old tube Bamps worked was that
they had a really interesting relationship between gain and volume
because of the relationship between the power tubes that were

(40:26):
driving the amplifire, so you could what they did on
this record was crank the gain, so you get that chewy,
like thick crunch distortion out of it. But then they
actually set the master volume very very low, so you're
getting all of that tone, but it's not out of control.
And then you're playing with you know, downstrokes. There's no reverbs,

(40:47):
so it's all that distortion, but very crisp and like controlled.

Speaker 3 (40:51):
I mean the sound that I'm thinking of, I mean,
I'm nowhere near as technical about this as you are,
but think of the opening to Buddy Holly, just that just.

Speaker 1 (41:00):
That big wall of guitars strumming.

Speaker 3 (41:02):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (41:03):
And it's fascinating what they did, how they thought of it,
you know. And this is one of their engineer. The
engineers on Blue Album guy named Chris Shaw. He said
there was one overriding concept to the album, the idea
that the guitars and the bass were one huge ten
string instrument. There's very few songs on the record that
actually have a bassline that drifts away from what the
guitar is doing, so everything was in this lock step

(41:26):
to create these big walls of hugely distorted sound. And
another thing that they did that I thought was really
interesting that I only learned about on This is what
it's They called an inverted power chord, but that's just
an overly over complicated way of talking about a power
chord was introduced by I think link Ray, oh maybe,

(41:48):
but it gained prominence in the fifties, right because like
when people started cranking their amps in the fifties, link
Ray and Dave Davies on you really got me and
creating the kind of template for guitar distortion. One of
the things that they found it got really muddy really
quick when you were using traditional chords or like what
they call cowboy chords down at the bottom of the neck,
or even bar chords thicker up. So they simplified all

(42:10):
of that by having chords that only had a root,
a fifth, and an octave, which are the most consonant
intervals you can have in the Western tempered scale because
they don't introduce the same harmonic inconsistencies into the waveform
that a third does. Anyway, you play a power chord
with essentially just three fingers or even two on a guitar.

(42:32):
And Weezer's thing that they did on this album was
instead of playing power chords on the bottom string, the
thickest string of the guitar, the lowest one, the lowe
like Tony Eomi did in Sabbath, all the power chords
are played on the low e string to make it
just sound lower at all times. So what they did
was they would play these power chords on the A string,
which is the second lowest string, and then just bar

(42:55):
the note under it on the E string. So basically
you have a chord that's just two fifths and two roots.
It is just basically the non musical nerd explanation for
this is it makes the chords sound thicker and louder. Anyway,
I don't know that's cool. Probably didn't come across well.
And then they just decided to mix it all super loud.

(43:18):
Their template was the guitars on Radioheads Creep, so they
were like, the guitars must be as loud or louder
than this relative to the mix Creep precated.

Speaker 1 (43:29):
Blahh, I guess it must doesn't creep ninety two.

Speaker 2 (43:33):
They were one of the Bends by ninety five.

Speaker 1 (43:35):
That's true.

Speaker 3 (43:37):
All that said, there's still one thing that got away
from them during the recording The Accursed Human Element. Guitarist
Jason Cropper from the band's days as sixty Wrong Sausage Is,
How dare you keep making me say that, claims he
was fired by the band during recording because of his
relationship with his then girlfriend now ex wife.

Speaker 1 (43:57):
Who was unpopular with his bandmates.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
I mean poor woman. Yeah, honestly, Oh I know.

Speaker 3 (44:03):
Carrokoch later told Magnet magazine Jason had a girlfriend back
in LA and one day she called him and said, oh,
I'm pregnant. And from that day onward, Jason's personality became
really intense and frantic and no kidding, he wasn't handling
it well. A couple times the band would pull him
aside and be like, are you okay? Are you sure
you can do this? And he always said he was fine,

(44:25):
but then twenty minutes later he'd be up on the
roof of Electric Ladies screaming or something. The final straw
was when defining Cuomo's no girlfriends who were recording at
the studio rule ooh, Jason Cropper's girlfriend flew to New
York unannounced with no place to stay.

Speaker 1 (44:42):
I think the band were all staying in one place,
if I recall, I think they.

Speaker 2 (44:46):
Were in a hotel.

Speaker 3 (44:47):
Yeah, yeah, This all came to a very predictable head.
Treper Cuomo felt that Cropper was about to leave Weezer anyway,
so they figured they just beat him to the punch
and remove him before the release of their debut, and
according to Cropper, at one point Rivers told them he
could not allow him to jeopardize the work and ask
them to leave on the day the first mix of

(45:08):
the record was completed. In fact, and the bitterness lasted
for several decades but has since faded. In twenty fourteen,
Cropper admitted that Rivers had made the right decision.

Speaker 2 (45:19):
There's a theme in this band. It hasn't continued for
a while. Fortunately they've hung under the same stable, I
should say. But I think both Matt Sharp and Jason
have said before time healed all wounds that they were like.
Rivers will say that I left, but I was fired,
So I think Matt Sharp was too busy with his

(45:39):
side project among other things. But like, yeah, I mean,
you're working with an autodid act with dad issues, so
get what you pay.

Speaker 1 (45:49):
For and then Asiah Complex I would guess.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
But yeah, I mean they've both come out of the
other end pretty sanguine about it, which is nice. I guess,
no long standing bitterness unless they signed papers. Oh, they
definitely signed papers. I mean there was definitely. I think
at one point either Cropper or Sharp made reference to
an Nda. Oh yeah. It is fascinating, like when you

(46:17):
get to this era of band, when you know there
was real money being thrown around and then you would
have to incorporate the band and like the band becomes
a business and then you can pull people on and
off the payroll.

Speaker 1 (46:28):
You know.

Speaker 2 (46:29):
The whole machinery of these bands is so fascinating to
me because, like I know, Motley Crue has like fired
their guitarist and are denying him credit. Bon Jovi is
famously like ruled by John with an iron fist, And
it's all this stuff that people don't really think about
when they think about like, oh, yeah, you're gonna have
like we're gonna.

Speaker 1 (46:49):
Have a band.

Speaker 2 (46:49):
It's gonna be like a street gang and we're gonna
be cool and play music. And it's like no, there
will be a lot of paperwork, and then you will
have to deal with someone's health insurance, and then you
will be put in the position of firing them at
some point. So enjoy next time you're getting together with
your pals and dreaming with guitars.

Speaker 3 (47:07):
What was I saying, Well, this is after the departure
of Jason Cropp with a guitarist. This left a very
guitar heavy band without a second guitarist slash backing vocalist.

Speaker 1 (47:17):
So we's a recruited a guy named Brian Bell just in.

Speaker 3 (47:20):
Time for him to add vocals to the Blue album,
but there was no time for him to learn the
guitar parts and re record them, so Rivers took it
upon himself to do that. Rerick Okaesik told Rolling Stone
in twenty fourteen, after it was completely recorded, Rivers came
in and said, I'm firing the guitar player and I'm
going to do all his guitar parts over.

Speaker 1 (47:41):
I said, you can't do that, but he did in
one take.

Speaker 2 (47:50):
Yeah, dumb talented guitarist man. And you hear it. I mean,
I don't think we've really gotten to that. We will
when we get to the songs, but.

Speaker 1 (47:59):
You hear it.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
He admirably tamped a lot of his chops down, but
he's still in corks a few.

Speaker 1 (48:07):
That's nuts.

Speaker 2 (48:08):
Uh yeah, Okay, good segue. Now we're going to talk
about the songs.

Speaker 1 (48:11):
Album opener.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
My name is Jonas was described by Cuomo to his
biographer Leursen as explaining how quote the plan is reaming
us all well said, especially my brother, Cuoma's younger brother
birth name.

Speaker 1 (48:28):
Leaves pause for applause. Birth name leaves this thing on.

Speaker 2 (48:40):
Yeah, was seriously injured in a September nineteen ninety two
car accident while attending Oberlin because of course he was,
and he submitted a claim for recovery cost, but his
insurance refused to pay because the accident had occurred in
his friend's car. Leaves aka James filed a lawsuit against
his insurance provider and was presumably laughed out of court

(49:00):
when he showed no he lost.

Speaker 1 (49:03):
Yeah, insurance sucks, dude. This is where the Cuomo genius comes.

Speaker 2 (49:06):
In, though he matched this up with Lois Lowry's nineteen
ninety three dystopian ya novel The Giver, which centers around
a twelve year old named Jonas. Throughout the course of
the book, Jonas uses a sled, and in River's brain
he thought I had a childhood's sled, and the name
of my childhood sled was Weepill, weep heel. So when

(49:29):
he says the thing that I've never under at the
top of the second verse, when he's like, my name
is Wheetpill, that's the name of Rivers Cooma's childhood sled,
which he inserted ended the song because the song already
had a reference to the giver.

Speaker 1 (49:44):
Are we clear? Is there a Rosebud Citizen Kine connection
here too with this?

Speaker 2 (49:49):
I didn't get into that. No, I don't think so.
The nimble, fingerpicked intro Jason Cropper worked out for the
song earned him his Soul Weezer compositional credit, which I
think is interesting.

Speaker 1 (50:00):
Ah, we touched on this earlier.

Speaker 2 (50:01):
But the other than he's like jarring enthusiasm for the
project and also just performing. I mean, it's hilarious seeing
clips around this time because it's like motion literally motionless,
Rivers Cuomo singing and Matt Sharp just like leaping around
in the background doing Pete Townsend windmills on his bass
while singing falsetto vocals. But those falsetto vocals make him

(50:25):
I think the secret MVP of this record. He had
never really sung lead before joining the band, and then
they decided they were gonna do this Beach Boys thing,
and rather than it's such a genius idiot move, rather
than learn actual harmonies, they were like, oh, just do
everything an octave up, like singing your falsetto, and so
they were just And it's really funny hearing it evolved

(50:47):
because like on some of the early demos, he's kind
of it. They're they're almost it's like the band, there's
like a really loose like they're singing Unison but not really.
And then by the time they made it to Blue album,
he's just like locked in Simon and Garfunkle style to
rivers vocal melodies. I always think it's the funniest thing
in saying so when he's like, like, that's that is

(51:12):
such a hard series of pitches to hit in a
falsetto register is would you almost say that it's like
the vocal equivalent of the power chords.

Speaker 1 (51:19):
I guess it's just actives never mind, Ah, yeah, sort of.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
Yeah, I mean your traditional vocal blend is probably like
a fifth and a third. Yeah, Uh, in some kind
of inversion, he told the blog perfect sound forever. Somewhere
in there is the desire to want to be like
Smokey Robinson. Ah, a part of me that never ceases
to enjoy singing in a sort of Southern falsetto voice.
It reminds me of an old Southern woman. It's always

(51:44):
a joy. That was actually how my vocal teacher in
New York taught me. That told me to think of
a falsetter. He's like, you know, you just gotta think
like you're an old, sassy black lady. Really, yeah, here's
a weird guy.

Speaker 1 (51:57):
Well.

Speaker 3 (51:57):
The second song on the record, no One Else, is
supposedly written about one of Cuomo's ex girlfriends, a woman
named Petra, and Uh. We touched on this at the
top of the episode. As you write, let's just say,
if it wasn't intended as a prescient indictment of in
cell culture, it's such.

Speaker 1 (52:17):
It wasn't. I don't think so. It's pretty bad.

Speaker 3 (52:20):
The songs chorus, I want a girl who will laugh
for no one else When I'm away, she puts her
makeup on the shelf when I'm away, she never leaves
the house is basically the calling card of creepy return
to tradition men's rights guys on Twitter these days?

Speaker 1 (52:37):
Have you seen those guys?

Speaker 2 (52:38):
Like I always, oh, so you okay, I think just
through like some of the lefties that I follow, they
dunk on these guys.

Speaker 1 (52:45):
But they're all dudes who have like Roman.

Speaker 2 (52:47):
Statues as their profile picture, and they are constantly like
advocating like, you know, we just need to return to
the tradition of like the nuclear family unit, and like
my wife will you know, raise chicken on a farm
and our kids will have one hundred percent green and
pure food. And then like trad wife culture. Content has
become a thing. So there's like Instagram influencers who are

(53:09):
like these beautiful women but like dressed like the Amish,
or in like high end Jivanci, like handmaking cocoa crispies
for their children, and they all talk like this where
they're like, oh, you know, my wife shouldn't wear makeup
in public, like that's just for me. You know, it's
as a whole insane. I can't believe you haven't bumped

(53:31):
into any of it. They're all called like Western man
inspiration or like you know, musings of Aurelius and then
it'll just be a guy being like, yeah, I want
my wife to be like super hot, but not for
anyone just like me. We're gonna have like six kids
and we're gonna raise EMUs and live on a farm.

Speaker 1 (53:50):
And what's the Rome connection.

Speaker 2 (53:54):
I think they just think that, like the Roman like
intellectual and war culture contributions is like the ideal state
of I guess Western civilization, and think it needs to
be like, yes, the return art with a V in
place of the U. Return to tradition is like the

(54:17):
calling card.

Speaker 1 (54:18):
Huh, yeah, I haven't come across that in that form.

Speaker 2 (54:23):
I'll send you some stuff.

Speaker 1 (54:24):
Yeah, please. Quollo would only get worse and weirder in.

Speaker 3 (54:31):
This vein on Pinkerton, the band's sophomore record, Would you
like to elaborate more on that?

Speaker 2 (54:36):
Well, sure, you know. There's the line damn you half
Japanese girls do it to me all the time. There's
the song pink Triangle, which is entirely about a man
being in love with a lesbian, which was admittedly a
theme at the time Chasing Amy had come out in
a hilarious Rivers twist. He later found out that the
woman that he was writing the song about was not

(54:57):
actually a lesbian and was simply an LGBTQ ally, But yeah,
pincertain is the weird one. I mean, there's that letter
across the sea where I think he the one across
the sea where he's talking about Uh yeah, he got
a letter from like a Japanese fan and like like
started fixating on her. Tired of sex is all about

(55:20):
like all the passionless sex he had on the Blue
album tour. But it's all very like creepy orientalist stuff.
It's just like, yeah, it's like a straight white. That
guy had a thing for Japanese culture via I must
always add puccini. Yeah, I mean, well, I don't even
know how you're gonna edit this together to make continuity.

(55:41):
But at some point Rivers became obsessed with musical theater
and like cats and Andreloyd Weber stuff. I don't know
if it was specifically Angeloyd Webber, but it was like
he became obsessed with like big, grandiose things and he
mandated that he he was like, I'm gonna practice piano
three hours a day, so he brought a piano like
a digital keyboard on one of their all I think

(56:01):
all their tours up until Pinkerton and would just like
lock himself in a room playing piano. And so the
follow up to Blue album as You As You Once,
where it was destined to be a rock opera set
in space called Songs from the Black Hole, And at
some point he gave that up as a fixation and

(56:22):
got onto Madam Butterfly by Puccini, And so Pinkerton is
a character from Madam a Butterfly, and that whole opera
is viewed as this sort of orientalist view of like
how straight white men view the Japanese women as like
fragile but still sensual. And so when you get like

(56:43):
a metalhead, like a deeply insecure, nerdy metalhead glombing onto that,
it's basically like proto web culture.

Speaker 1 (56:51):
You're familiar with the term web I'm not no, but
I don't like the sound of this.

Speaker 2 (56:56):
It's a derogatory term for people like white guys who
were super inm anime and manga. It's like, I think
it comes from a Japanese word for like nerdy white
guy who is into.

Speaker 1 (57:07):
Hang on.

Speaker 2 (57:08):
Yeah, mostly derogatory slang for a person who's obsessed with
Japanese culture. I was not a Japanese word.

Speaker 1 (57:14):
I was wrong.

Speaker 2 (57:16):
But yeah, Rivers became a web and wrote weird stuff
about women on Pinkerton and somehow was disappointed that that
was not a hit. Later on, he talks about his
bitter disappointment in not being like his fixation on Kirk Cobaina.
Nirvana is really fascinating because he's like, truly he seemed
truly baffled when they came out and people were like wow,

(57:37):
nerd rock, Like he thought that they were writing like
that they were going to be received as the next Nirvana.
It's like, yeah, dude, with the cassio keyboard song Dame
Dropping Buddy Holly, It's like, that's what you thought was
gonna go. So there's like a there's a disconnect somewhere
between what he's putting out and what he thinks it is.
That is endlessly fascinating to me.

Speaker 1 (57:59):
I mean, the grace of God go all of us.

Speaker 2 (58:02):
Yeah, exactly right, Like it's it is funny because like
so much of their stuff that's dated is just like, yeah,
that could have been any weird guy's trajectory in the nineties,
and is a lot of weird Guy's trajectory in the
two thousands. It's just one of them. One weird guy
who had all of these hang ups happened to become
one of the last rock stars on the planet. Like,

(58:24):
oh well, it's just funny to me that we spend
all this time pouring over this and like, you know,
soft canceling him or whatever, and like Anthony Keatis is
still just running around out there, uninhibited, like the ultimate
offensive male idiot of nineties rock, just having a blast.

Speaker 1 (58:45):
I bet that guy, I know you do, Bud, I'm sorry,
I know where were we next up? We've got The
World has Turned and Left Me here? Tell us about that.

Speaker 2 (59:01):
As another song that, like my Name is Jonas, contains
some deft fingerpicking courtesy of Jason Cropper. Cromo told the
La Times, I still sweat if I have to play
those songs at an acoustic show, and then he gave
a deeply weird quote about this song, specifically to Chart
magazine in December of nineteen ninety four, aggregated on weezer Pedia.

(59:21):
I'm tempted to think that our song the World Has
Turned and Left Me here is about the day my
girlfriend left me. I remember that sad day I picked
up my guitar and spilled tears of grief over those
four sad chords. But if I think very carefully, I
also remember that a week later I met this new
girl named Sonia who speaks Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, and
forgot all about the first girl. But still, to this

(59:42):
day that song makes me sad and it still rings true.
So maybe it wasn't about what's her name after all?
Maybe it's the sublimated tale of how my mom refused
to suckle me one night in my infancy. Who am
I to say anyway? Fifth Weezer Carl Cock has a
funny story about Rivers recording the guitar solo to the song,
which he wrote in a set of liner notes to
a reissue four Blue album. Six hours into trying to

(01:00:05):
Nail The World Has Turned Solo, Rivers was laying on
his back in the tiny twelve inch space between the
two soundproof doors between the live room and the control room,
with his guitar perched up on his chest, his legs
squished up the walls. About one hundred tries into it,
he'd given up when Rick Okasick hummed a little melody
over the talkback mic. How about something like da da

(01:00:26):
da D D D, And in five minutes the guitars
were finished Buddy Holly, moving on to Buddy the Greatest
Songs the nineties. The lyrics to Buddy Holly were taken
from a real life incident that occurred when some of Rivers,
Buds and Weezer were mocking his friend Young He, a
classmate at Santa Monica Community College, for her haircut. They

(01:00:47):
were the homies disin my girl. He wrote in a
set of liner notes. I rarely wrote lyrics about the
tension between me and the guys and the band because
I thought it would be awkward for all of us
to perform those songs together. In this case, though it
didn't seem like a big deal. Cuomo was simultaneously messing
around on a friend's new coord keyboard and attempted to
write a quote neo new wave song inspired by some

(01:01:07):
of the presets on there. I love how it has
the it's got the like Ennio morri County good Man,
and the ugly interval in there.

Speaker 1 (01:01:15):
Oh yes that's fine, which is very carzy too.

Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
I feel like, oh yeah, yeah, since a super super
carzy uh the chorus melody, he said, the chorus melody
I came up with as I was walking through the
lawns of a campus. The melody was in time to
my steps. The lyrics I struggled with trying to find
the right reference point. An early version read ooh, Wi
you you look just like Ginger Rogers. Oh oh, I

(01:01:42):
moved just like Fred Astaire. Again, this is a guy
who thought he was about to become the new Kirk Cobain.
Just so bizarre.

Speaker 3 (01:01:53):
Producer Ric Okasik was the one who went to bat
hardest for Buddy Holly. He would tell Clomo's biographer, I
remember at one point he was hesitant to do Buddy Holly,
and I was like, Rivers, we can talk about it,
do it anyway, and if you don't like it when
it's done, we won't use it. But I think you
should try it. He did write it, and it's a
great song. He didn't leave it at that though, where

(01:02:14):
he's to remember. Matt Sharp recalled on a two thousand
and eight interview with Blender, We'd come into the studio
in the morning and find these little pieces of paper
with doodles on them. We want Buddy Holly, presumably left
by Rick okasik.

Speaker 1 (01:02:26):
I love that. What a nerd. That's cude, sweet nerd.
I enjoy that a lot. Yeah, don' worry talking about this.

Speaker 3 (01:02:32):
It was the Billy Joel episode about how he wanted
to leave I mean that's holistic, all right. There of
artists who wanted to leave their big song off of
the album. I wanted to believe just the way you
are off of the Stranger because he thought it sounded
like bad cruise ship rock, which I mean, yeah, he's
not wrong. And then when the Ronstadt stopped by the
studio and was like, no, you should you should do.

Speaker 2 (01:02:54):
That another way, in which she is like the Forest
Gump of twentieth century American music. Yep, I forget what
episode was it the Eagles when we ran down how
she's been like a collaborator of virtually every developed nation
and some undeveloped ones.

Speaker 3 (01:03:08):
That nich was it was I Will Always Love You,
because it was her version of I Will Always Love
You and not Delly Partons that got the attention of
Kevin Costner, who gave it to Whitney Houston. And then
you went off on this incredible tangent about exactly what
you just said. She's the lynchpin of twentieth century music.

Speaker 2 (01:03:26):
Yeah, at least since the seventies. I mean just all
of her stuff in the Laurel Canyon and the Nextees too.
Mike Nesmith, Oh, that's true, so sixties and seventies. But
then like you go through your discography and it's like
she's done an album in like every genre of quote
unquote world music and blessed her and Sullivan bless her
like with those actual musicians.

Speaker 1 (01:03:45):
Yeah, yeah, you know, yeah, of course.

Speaker 3 (01:03:48):
Buddy Holly is followed up by perhaps Wheezer's defining statement
undone parentheses.

Speaker 1 (01:03:54):
The Sweater song.

Speaker 3 (01:03:56):
As mentioned earlier, it was Cuemo's attempt at writing a
velvet onunderground type song, only to be steamrolled by his
innate love of Metallica.

Speaker 1 (01:04:06):
For a feature on the ten.

Speaker 3 (01:04:07):
Best Weezer Songs in Rolling Stone, Rivers explained it this way.
I took typing psych one on one and English one
on one that semester. It was in my English class
that I heard the analogy of the unraveling sweater. Doctor
Eisenstein used the image to demonstrate the effectiveness of a
focused thesis statement in an essay, All I have to
do is hold a single thread in your sweater and

(01:04:29):
it will unravel as you walk away.

Speaker 1 (01:04:32):
See other guy royalties or something. Hey, I guess. For
the album's press kit, Rivers was more subtle.

Speaker 3 (01:04:40):
Undone is the feeling you get when the train stops
and the little guy comes knocking on your door. It
was supposed to be a sad song, but everyone thinks
it's hilarious. I don't get that analogy at all.

Speaker 1 (01:04:52):
He's a weird guy. Okay man, Yeah, okay man.

Speaker 3 (01:04:55):
The original version of Undone, though, threatened to tank the
entire record. This is because Rivers had envisioned the song
having a stereopanned conversation between two people run throughout the
entire song, with one side representing the positive and the
other side representing the negative, so one coming out of
one side of the speaker channel, the other coming out

(01:05:17):
of the other side.

Speaker 1 (01:05:19):
As Karl Koch.

Speaker 3 (01:05:20):
Explained in the liner notes of the Blue album reissue,
this idea had been sort of lost when the band
recorded their demos back in nineteen ninety two, and I'd
been asked to come up with an audio collage of
samples for the first two verses instead. It turned out
pretty silly, but for the album, Rivers wanted to try
and merge the two ideas a collage of samples that

(01:05:40):
collectively had that positive.

Speaker 1 (01:05:42):
Negative argument going on.

Speaker 3 (01:05:44):
I obliged, gathering two hundred potential samples of everything from
Humphrey Bogart to Christian radio dramas, the Peanuts Gang and
story dialogue from the Black Hole, pairing it down to
two fifteen sample sequences that I played out on a
mini keyboard, creating the stereo conversation. In the end, it

(01:06:05):
was this conversation that Geffen didn't want to deal with
over fifteen different sample clearances for a debut rock album.

Speaker 1 (01:06:11):
Not gonna happen. What a terrible idea, deeply awful.

Speaker 2 (01:06:18):
What did happen, though, was the now famous conversation between
two very different personality types at a simulated party. This
being the early nineties, it was a pain in the ass.
As fifth Wheez Carl Kotch explained. This was done on
Rivers eight track back in the Garage on Amherstave in
LA with Michael Allen, band supporter, bassist Matt Sharp, myself, Carl,

(01:06:42):
and a crowd noise sound effect CD A mix of
undone with the samples removed was made to a DAT
digital audio tape at Electric Lady, which was then sent
to LA where Rivers copied it onto two stereotracs of
his eight track cassette recorder. Onto the un U tracks
of the cassette recorder went the party noise from the

(01:07:02):
CD and the conversation, and then that was mixed down
to another DAT tape, which was then sent back to
New York. The finished party dialogue scenes were then flown
into the final mix just in time to get mastered. Insane.

Speaker 1 (01:07:17):
A lot of work for a not that great idea.

Speaker 2 (01:07:21):
I mean, it's just so funny that it's like the
workflow to just get the sound of people like acting
like nineties stoner cliches at a party. You know, surely
that could have been accomplished at Electric Lady Studios.

Speaker 1 (01:07:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:07:38):
One of the voices you hear on that song, the
aforementioned Michael Allen was one half of the Weezer super
Friends and Fan Club co founders. Her sister Carle was
the other, and the two were fans of the band
since their first days as a group. They'd seen the
band at Club Dump, which was later transformed into the
infamous Viper Room in Los Angeles in July nineteen ninety two,

(01:08:01):
and they were some of the biggest boosters of Weezer.
As fan club founders, they spent hours organizing mailing lists
and stuffing envelopes with their own membership cards.

Speaker 1 (01:08:10):
Reading zero zero zero one and zero zero.

Speaker 3 (01:08:14):
Zero two, forever earning them. The title was Weezer's Top Fans. Sadly,
as Koch recalled the Magnet magazine, the last show of
the Pinkaton tour, the last show before going dark for
three years, was a memorial concert for Michael and Carly,
the two sisters that ran our fan club, who were
killed in a car accident. They were traveling with us

(01:08:35):
organizing fan club meetups at shows, driving from Denver to
Salt Lake. Whoever was driving fell asleep. We decided to
schedule a memorial show at the end of the tour
in Los Angeles to help the family out. Three of
their daughters passed away, Michael, Carly, and the sister who
was in the vehicle at the time.

Speaker 1 (01:08:53):
It was brutal. The next Weezer album, released in two
thousand and one, would be dedicated to them. The album
I didn't realize that that's awful.

Speaker 2 (01:09:03):
Yeah, really really sad because I think they Weezer didn't
write this song as a tribute after they died. They
wrote it like in their early days. And one of
them in an interview had talked about like Rivers like
calling them up and being like because they were just butts,
they were just friends of the band, and so Rivers
would call them up and be like, Yo, what street
did you grow up on? Like what was your childhood like?

(01:09:25):
And all that went into this this song. And then
the first time they played it for them, they like
wept openly in the crowd. May all bands have at
least one fan like that, you are ours? You were ours?

Speaker 3 (01:09:41):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (01:09:41):
Surfwaxs America great song, another one with an intro riff
that Cuomo has acknowledged came from Jason Cropper, although he
did not get a compositional credit on it, and did
an interview with bill Board in twenty nineteen. Pat Wilson,
the drummer for Weezer founding member, not the actor, called
he called surf Wags America another desk needed up tempo number.

(01:10:02):
Rivers especially really loved the Beach Boys, and I think
he tapped into that vibe a little, but in a
more punk rock way. I don't believe any of us
had ever surfed. At that point, we were painfully lacking
in self awareness. Ah, the Weezer mission statement, it's a
young person's take on the world saying this is all
bull I'm just gonna do whatever I want to do.
I think it's a rejection of paths chosen for you.

(01:10:25):
Other fun facts about the song from Weezer Pedia. The
song's first verse contains a reference to the song Round
and Round by American Hair Metal also RAN's rat with
two te's, and it's become a niche fan ritual to
yell smoke dope at live performances of the song when
it goes into the breakdown section in the middle, solely

(01:10:46):
because there is an oft circulated live recording of Surf
Wax America in which a guy in the crowd yells
smoke dope. So that is a lesson in the intensity
of Weezer fandom. They have started recreating at shows currently
happening live bits from what were initially like bootleg only

(01:11:08):
live recordings.

Speaker 1 (01:11:10):
I appreciate that. I applaud that.

Speaker 2 (01:11:13):
Yeah, I bet you too, he said rudely. Up next,
we have again another defining statement say it Ain't So.
I found it really interesting going back and listening to
some of the demos of this song, where you can
absolutely hear Rivers Cuomo doing John Frisciani and like all

(01:11:33):
the stuff that John Frusciani lifted from Hendrix to do
in the red on chili peppers, and then they paired
it all down for the recording, which is good choice.
This song's imagery comes from his teen years when he
saw a beer in the family refrigerator, which prompted him
to panic that his stepfather was planning to leave the family.
Also because Rivers had mistakenly connected his birth father's abandonment

(01:11:58):
of the family with alcohol. Jordan, please delve into this
fascinating dynamic that spawned a hit song.

Speaker 3 (01:12:05):
Yes, Rivers explained to the La Times, my birth father
only had a fax machine at the time, and out
of the blue, I got this fax from him, Weezer,
give me a call.

Speaker 1 (01:12:15):
We need to talk. So I got in touch and
explained where I was coming from in the song.

Speaker 3 (01:12:20):
But I'm kind of morrified that a lot of say
it ain't So, as powerful as it is and as
true as it is, is based on a misunderstanding the
root of it is this photograph I have of my
dad and my mom where he's wearing a sleeveless undershirt
and smoking a cigar and holding a Heineken.

Speaker 1 (01:12:37):
He looks so intimidating.

Speaker 3 (01:12:39):
Years later, I was talking to my mom about it,
and she said he wasn't an alcoholic.

Speaker 1 (01:12:44):
He didn't even drink or smoke. He was like a
zen Buddhist guy. We were just goofing around in that picture.
Those were just props.

Speaker 2 (01:12:52):
Wow, Yeah, just like misinterpreting your entire familiar dynamic for
decades based on a snapshot, yeah, and then making a
hit song out of it and having your dad like,
get back in touch with you because yeah, yeah, one
of the three times you spoke with him were like
four times you'd ever spoken with him, to be like,

(01:13:15):
thank you for doing that. It was incorrect.

Speaker 3 (01:13:20):
The line you cleaned up found Jesus, though he is
addressed to his birth father, who, as you mentioned earlier,
became a pentecostal preacher. In a twenty fourteen Rolling Stone interview,
Rivers talks about watching his father preach sermons and how
it made him feel better about being an introvert fronting
a rock band, seeing himself in his dad's movement and speech,

(01:13:40):
which is sweet in its own way.

Speaker 1 (01:13:42):
Did they ever yeah, like reconcile in any meaningful way?
He said that he's yeah, he yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:13:47):
I think his quote in like twenty fourteen was like,
now that I'm a father, I've forgiven my dad, which
story of everybody's like again again, just such a fascinating
guy man, Like you know, he's talked so much about
how like like he metates every day, which is not
a weird thing, a lot of people do that, but
just this whole he's described a lot of his like

(01:14:08):
way of being as like being steeped in these Eastern
philosophies growing up like meditation and zen thinking and everything,
and also being very much like a product of like
straight man rock, like growing up in the seventies and eighties.
And this detail, well, the Jimmy in the song is
also his brother Leaves by the way, And here is
my the most crushing detail about say it ain't so

(01:14:30):
that you will never ever be able to forget unless
you are already a Weezer fan and have internalized it.
The single, back when they were CD singles for this
song was released with artwork that was a childhood drawing
Rivers made of he and his birth father playing soccer.
You may remember that his dad supposedly named him after

(01:14:51):
a bunch of World Cup soccer players, and the art
focuses on a young Rivers scoring a goal, which is
given the childlike phonetic spelling of g olll and his
father cheering him on with lines like yay, my son, Wow,
cat's in the cradle slowly faded.

Speaker 1 (01:15:07):
Oh my yes, yes, yes, yes, I know.

Speaker 2 (01:15:11):
So speaking of that single release, the version of Sad
and So that went out on the on the original
version of Blue album didn't have that awesome feedback that
comes in right before the right before the chorus kicks it.
I'm getting goosebumps talking about it's such an awesome part
of that song. And then when man heard it with
the feedback in, they were like, no, that should have
been there all along. And so that's the new master

(01:15:33):
in the video for the song, it was the third
one that they'd done for the record, the one that
they didn't do with Spike Jones. They did it with
Sofie Sophie Mueller, and it's in there old It's a
glimpse that you can see of their their place in
l A H. And there are indeed heavy metal posters.
On the background. You can see King Diamond, who is

(01:15:53):
the vocal the first the lead singer of Mercall Fate
and then his own band. So that's fun in the garage,
moving on to in the garage and other. I god,
this song is so pure to me. Yeah, it's like
toy story or something. Man, it is such a like cute,
like whimsical song about like the pains of growing up

(01:16:17):
I feel, And it's just you know, it is yeah,
like looking back on like the childhood passions that you
had when you were like safe and secure before society
started telling you you were weird for them. But again,
like also in nineteen ninety five, coming out of grunge
and like Lane Stalely bellowing about burnt corpses and rooster

(01:16:38):
and you know Eddie Vedder singing about Jeremy. You have
little real little rivers coming on and singing about X Men, comics,
dungeons and dragons and kiss. I didn't know this until
reading about this, but their dedication to dungeons and Dragons
is impressive. They had a tour where their setlist was
determined by rolling a twenty sided die, and as with

(01:16:59):
everything we it masks the deep well of sadness that
hides behind Crooma's sort of impassivity. This is in his
bio sheet for the record label that came out with
for the like the record label biosheet that came out
with Blue album.

Speaker 1 (01:17:13):
He wrote this.

Speaker 2 (01:17:13):
Himself because I'm so terrible at expressing my feelings directly,
and because no one really cares, and because anything real
is almost impossible to talk about. I've come to rely
on music more and more to express myself. And then
you pair that with a quote from this twenty fourteen
Rolling Stone profile where he says, I'm often troubled by
a very strong instinct to share everything that's going on

(01:17:34):
with me. I want to feel that connection, even with
people I don't know. Then there's this other voice that
says that's not prudent. People will use what you've said
to hurt you. Again, I do not want to live
in that guy's head. Holiday another great song. Just some
more great songs, interesting lyrical concepts under the hood. In
a fan interview in two thousand and six, Quoma said

(01:17:56):
that he had a big Jack Caroac phase, which I again,
there's like lyrics on this album that I'd never really
parsed until I was researching this. He does, in fact
say on the road with Krawak in the breakdown to
the middle of that song, and you'll love this. The
opening line Let's go away for a while is a
direct title of a Beach Boys track on pet Sounds.

(01:18:19):
And you are holding a copy of pet Sounds up
to me. Do you just have one of those with
you every time you record?

Speaker 3 (01:18:24):
It's like liness with his blanket. Yeah, it's like I'm
recording now, Brian recorded this.

Speaker 1 (01:18:31):
I can do just as good.

Speaker 2 (01:18:34):
Well, here's another tremendously depressing quote from Rivers from nineteen
ninety seven letter that he wrote the road of the
song is any form of escapism, be it beautiful melodies, drinking, drugs,
love art, whatever. However, it is important to note that
even in the song holiday escape is short lived. Right
after the line on this road will never die come

(01:18:55):
the ominous crashing chords of fate.

Speaker 1 (01:18:58):
Okay, cool man, this brings us to only in dreams.

Speaker 3 (01:19:06):
Funnily enough, well, it's easier to assume that the song's
lyrics are a straightforward relationship. Cuomo told Rolling Stone in
twenty ten that the song is really about his artistic process,
by which you think he means that attempting to get
a song to live up to the expectations you hear
or have in your head is a lot like building
up a romantic partner to an unachievable ideal.

Speaker 2 (01:19:28):
Yeah, And I mean I think that makes sense he
you know, as any kind of creative person, right, Like,
you start with this idea in your head and you're like, oh.

Speaker 1 (01:19:37):
It's got to be this amazing dag and I'm gonna problem.

Speaker 2 (01:19:39):
And that the more you work with it, yeah, and
live with it, like, the more you start to realize
this will never sound, read look like the thing that
I have in my head. And I think that is
a very similar situation that a lot of mostly single
young men find themselves in with women from a Fall.

(01:20:02):
But there's another even more horrible influence lurking Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:20:07):
In the afore mentioned podcast Shred with Shifty Rivers said
the long instrumental portion of the song was inspired by
jam Icon's Fish and their guitarist Trey Anastasia, saying, I
went to Fish shows and had the tapes and it
was like, man.

Speaker 1 (01:20:25):
This is just so transcendent. The way Trey plays, and
that's kind of what I wanted to do.

Speaker 3 (01:20:32):
The solo in the song has repeatedly come up as
one of his favorites, though Weezerpedia has hopefully noted that
in two thousand and two, Quomo's quote infamously derided only
in Dreams on the Rivers Correspondence Board as quote, pardon
me gay gay gay, Disney gay all one word, and

(01:20:52):
claimed it made his brother leaves Aca a Jimmy embarrassed.

Speaker 1 (01:20:57):
Make of that and the offensive language.

Speaker 2 (01:21:00):
What you will I find Disney gay on a continuity
with the brick and morty guy justin Royland. In some
of his canceled he was canceled for being like a drunk,
useless idiot and also like a sex pest, and in
one of his grooming dms to Like a Young Woman,
he described himself as Atlanta drunk, which I truly think

(01:21:23):
needs to go into the lexicon. Like more so, we
have to find the opposites of the level of.

Speaker 1 (01:21:31):
Drunk you get in Atlanta what I've ever been?

Speaker 2 (01:21:39):
Oh yeah, I mean yeah, the city run by Coca
Cola and strip clubs like.

Speaker 1 (01:21:47):
You get up there.

Speaker 2 (01:21:50):
Some of there's a continuity of Disney gay and Atlanta
drunk in the thoughts of canceled white men.

Speaker 1 (01:21:58):
How do you feel about try Anastasia.

Speaker 2 (01:22:00):
I hate Fish. I understand it, and I will say
this for their fans, they are fing tenacious. I have
never had a subset of music fans try to bully
me into liking their music that they like, except for
reggae fans. If you tell me, oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:22:19):
Dude, you've never gotten that.

Speaker 2 (01:22:21):
Like if you tell people like, yeah, I like, I
don't really like reggae, like sort of the I mean,
I guess I've gotten into dub, but like a lot
of reggae, I find that like upstroke thing really kind
of like oppressive and if it's not done by like
the Masters, to be really grating and sort of it
sounds like poka if you do it poorly. But yeah, man,

(01:22:43):
whenever I tell people I don't really listen to reggae,
they'd be like, oh, you just haven't heard Augustus Pablo
meets the Uptown Rockers. You know, it's King Tubby. It
sounds like it was recorded in like a deep mind shaft,
and it's every song is twenty minutes long. And Fish
fans are like that you know, Oh you haven't heard
this like idiotic song about like some idiot cartoon protagonist.

(01:23:08):
And then the version that they did on like March
nineteen ninety two is thirty minutes long and has like
seventeen covers welded into it, and just like everybody gets
a great solo, but that's not as good as the
one from like and they like they're like Grateful Dead
fans in that way, like, yeah, I don't really like that.
Oh have you heard this soundboard recording from March third,
nineteen sixty nine, like it'll really change your life? But

(01:23:30):
not the one from March second, you know, nineteen eighty one,
completely different band. Donna Godshaw's in there, not really the best.
It's not really fan of Donna, but you know, once
you get into the Bruce Hornsby era of Live Dead,
they really come into their own with a new professional
sheen coming out of the keyboard corner.

Speaker 1 (01:23:49):
Like that's all these people talk.

Speaker 2 (01:23:52):
And I like the Grateful Dead not fish though, what
was I talking about?

Speaker 1 (01:24:00):
You?

Speaker 2 (01:24:03):
You knew that I was going to do that. You
baited me into a fish ramp.

Speaker 1 (01:24:09):
Mons. We call this in TMI circles Gone Fishing.

Speaker 3 (01:24:17):
We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back with more too much information in just a moment.
Although mixing Weezer's Blue Album, which you'll recall us what
this episode is actually about, went over budget, the album

(01:24:41):
Weezer's Blue Album was done and in the can, and
the band returned to La to embark on an intensive
series of local shows intended to break in new guitarist
Brian bell Bill has an amazing recollection of his first
show at the band. He would say, my parents came.
It was a big moment. Afterwards, Rivers and I hugged
for the first and last time. It was the most

(01:25:03):
awkward thing in the world. I think I told them,
don't worry, that'll never happen again.

Speaker 1 (01:25:08):
Ah.

Speaker 3 (01:25:11):
Meanwhile, Geffen Records kept pushing the album's release date back,
but they did at least pony up the cash for
esteemed pit up photographer Peter Gowland to shoot the now
iconic cover image of the album. Cuomo told the La
Times the night before I went to some random salon
and said, give me a haircut, and that's what they
gave me. It totally sucks, but now that's me for eternity.

Speaker 1 (01:25:34):
In every meme.

Speaker 3 (01:25:36):
The original conception for the cover was for the band
to be in matching striped shirts, like my beloved Beach Boys,
but they all ended up wearing basically their street clothes.

Speaker 1 (01:25:46):
What did you read about the specific Beach Boys cover
that it comes from.

Speaker 2 (01:25:50):
No, this is fascinating because I think you'll connect with
it on a granular level at some point. And they
have the actual picture of this greatest Hits collection Rivers
or I think it was Rivers. He found like a
cassette only greatest Hits collection that's just called like best
of the Beach Boys or something, and it was it
was never issued on like CD, it was like or vinyl.

(01:26:13):
It was one of those things that was like in
a gas station, bar Bin and he carried the CD around,
was like, this is what the album needs to be.
So they all got these matching striped shirts, much like
ones that I assume you own in multiples warm for
our bands, and they played, they played a whole show
in these shirts and like, but then when it came
time to shoot it, they abandoned the idea and just

(01:26:34):
wore their regular street clothes. It's also I think they
got for one point, it's also very similar to an
album by the Feelies, the band had not listen to
at this point, which I get like they that was
That's an obscure band kind of even now, much less
back in than pre internet days.

Speaker 3 (01:26:52):
But for the blue for the cover, it took them
two days to find the right shade, which, unsurprisingly, as
we've learned thus far in this episode, it's connected back
to Rivers childhood. He wrote on his website in twenty twenty.
My parents said I could paint my room any color
I wanted. I painted it my favorite color, a specific.

Speaker 1 (01:27:12):
Shade of blue.

Speaker 3 (01:27:14):
When I was thinking about a cover for the first
Weezer album, I wanted it to be that same shade
of blue. This mode of nostalgia for the lost innocence
of childhood was the same source of my look in
the blue album era, the glasses frames, bowl cut, Dicky's
blue T shirt, and windbreaker for my childhood photos.

Speaker 1 (01:27:33):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:27:34):
Man, the idea for this album cover did not thrill
the record label FNA and r Rep. Todd Sullivan recalled,
I remember that I had been shown the cover of
some Beach Boys album, and what caught my eye was
that they were all in striped shirts and a blue background.
It looked like some sixty sears family photo. It was
a shock, like, oh okay again all comes back to

(01:27:58):
his childhood.

Speaker 1 (01:27:58):
Man. Yeah, I've read that Matt Sharp didn't like I
was face looked.

Speaker 2 (01:28:03):
So either the photographer or something that Geffen like just
photo like flew in in an alternate with photoshop.

Speaker 1 (01:28:09):
But I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:28:11):
I didn't read that anywhere other than your article and Wikipedia,
So make of that what you will.

Speaker 1 (01:28:18):
Anyway.

Speaker 2 (01:28:19):
The Blue album finally dropped on May tenth, nineteen ninety four,
a month after Kirk Cobain's suicide and weeks after Live
Through This by Courtney Love's band Hole and Kirk Cobain's
Widow came out, an album that, if you believe certain
conspiracy theories, was either co written by or mostly written
by Kurt or Billy Corgan.

Speaker 1 (01:28:38):
Right, is that the that?

Speaker 2 (01:28:41):
Yeah? Anyway. H Wheezer's out of Nowhere major label deal
drew suspicious looks from the alt rock community, who accused
them of being an industry plant, given that they hadn't
followed the traditional route of heavy underground touring and the
series of independent releases before signing with Geffen. One review
that they all apparently remember called them Stone Temple pick
which is an extremely niche pun that I will now

(01:29:03):
explain to you. Stone Temple Pilots were seen as the
radio friendly, super slick Johnny come Lately to the grunge
trend because Scott Wiland used to sing in a chesty
baritone much like Eddie Vedder before they really revealed themselves
as weird seventies fixated like glam rockers on some of
the albums that nobody listens to. Stone Teple Pilots are

(01:29:25):
a great band, all of you. And it could also
possibly be a reference to Pixies signing with Elektra after
the Come On Pilgrim EP and the wild success of
Surfer Rosa, which was an independent I think it came.

Speaker 1 (01:29:39):
Out on four A D.

Speaker 2 (01:29:42):
So there's a couple of different things that you have
to go around in your head there. But then there's
the also interpretation that it could be calling Weezer the
Stone Temple Pilot's version of the Pixies, which is just
so bizarre to me, because how the do you listen
to blue album and think, yes, this it sounds like
Airsat's Pixies. Like what music critic was high enough on

(01:30:05):
their own supply to make that connection. Anyway, That's not
a job you can have anymore, so it doesn't matter
shout out to Conde Nast. Consequently, the record didn't really
pick up until The Sweater Song started to pick up
on college radio back when there was such a thing
and they were taste makers, and then hip modern rock
radio station like LA's K Rock and Seattle's The End

(01:30:29):
started picking it up as well, again a tract no
longer available to up and coming bands. There were no
videos when the album was released. There wasn't even a
single fifth wheez. Carl Koch told Magnet it was really
hard to get Geffen to spend a dollar without seeing
some potential. And the potential came when Undone started getting
played on the radio in Seattle, and then modern rock
stations all over started following suit, and Geffen was like, Okay,

(01:30:51):
we need to make a video. The band was initially
reticent to make one at all, but they wound up
in touch with Spike Jones, who they knew, I think
vaguely from like their circles. According to the La Times,
Spike Jones told the band, look, a music video can
be anything. It doesn't have to be what you think
it is. It could be as perfect and simple as
your album cover. Just you guys playing against a blue wall,

(01:31:12):
singing or half singing, or not singing at all. And
Jones's recollection of the phone conversations. Then the Rivers said,
but then what happens? And Jones says, I don't know.
A bunch of dogs run through at the end, and
he said, I wasn't pitching an idea so much as
I was just saying that you could make anything out
of a music video. But the rest of the pitches
that they'd gotten for music video directors were like apparently

(01:31:34):
just them being like, all right, we're gonna wrap you
up at a giant sweater and then it's gonna unravel
throughout the course of the song.

Speaker 1 (01:31:41):
You know, get it.

Speaker 2 (01:31:43):
Spike Jones were called the same day he had that meeting,
Matt Sharp called him again and was like, Rivers wants
you to do the video you pitched, and Spike joneses like,
what video? And Matt Sharper was like, you know with
the dogs running around, Oh, it's also funny to hilariously enough,
On the day of the video shoot, guitarist Brian Bell

(01:32:03):
still very much. The new guy in the band were
called to The La Times. I'm not sure if I
was told the dogs were going to come out. Carl
Kanch recalled, we couldn't get the dogs to do what
we wanted them to do. It was a big room
with loud music blaring, so it was hard to get
them to hit their marks, and you had like fifteen
different trainers trying to tell their dog which way to go.
At one point, one of the dogs came over and

(01:32:25):
crapped on Pat's drum pedal. At that point we realized
this was ridiculous and we should just let everyone do
whatever they wanted, dogs included, and it will be fun.

Speaker 3 (01:32:34):
The video hit MTV and earned their coveted buzz clip status,
which repelled them to a second video with Jones at
the Helm, which wound up being their iconic video for
Buddy Holly, which saw the band intercut into an episode
of My beloved Happy Days. Jones recalled as creative process
for coming up with a video concept to The La Times,

(01:32:55):
the way I come up with ideas for videos is
I listened to a song over and over again and
write every idea I have, bad, good, stupid, whatever with
buddy Holly, I just wrote down Happy Days.

Speaker 1 (01:33:07):
At some point, Fifth.

Speaker 3 (01:33:09):
Weezer Carl Koch said that Rivers wasn't convinced, but he
was hardly the heaviest lift for the video. That was
getting all the Happy Days people to sign off on it,
which wasn't easy. Sharp recalled and Blender Potsy didn't want
to have anything to do with it, and David Geffen
himself wrote Potsy actor Anson Williams a personal letter. But

(01:33:30):
the turning point came when Henry Ponzie Winkler signed off
on the idea and everyone fell in line.

Speaker 1 (01:33:37):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (01:33:38):
Sharp continued to Magnet Magazine. The cast apprehensive at first,
but when the fawn said I'm in, everyone else said
fawn says, It's cool. It's cool words to live by.
Following the two day shoot, Jones began splicing the new
footage he shot with vintage Happy Day scenes, mostly called
from episode.

Speaker 1 (01:33:57):
Number fifty three. They call it Potts Love.

Speaker 3 (01:34:01):
Shout out to my buddy Paul Anka and the Paul
Anka Our White podcast who wrote they call it Puppy Love.

Speaker 1 (01:34:08):
Yeah there, and I found it. Yeah there it is.
Henry Winkler aka Fawnsie later told Bunder. I was happy
to do it. The fawns would have had Weezer on vinyl.
I love how Henry Winkler, he is in no way
cool in real life, is like like a Shakespeare story
and actor or something.

Speaker 2 (01:34:26):
Tiny, tiny little man who's just got great comedic chops
and was somehow the coolest guy on television for a while.

Speaker 1 (01:34:35):
I feel like John Lennon crashed the happy Days set
in the seventies when he was living out in la
I think he brought his son Julian too.

Speaker 2 (01:34:42):
Like I gotta meet Pozzi, I got I gotta meet fawns,
Fawns and the Pozzi.

Speaker 1 (01:34:46):
Pots and Potzy Ralph Mouth. Why was he never the.

Speaker 2 (01:34:49):
Pozzi the Fawns. Yeah, because I already had the one
guy with a definite article.

Speaker 3 (01:34:55):
That's a good question, I guess you can. Really Yeah,
that's probably a big part of it. But Potts is
that was that his last name, Potsy Weber. It was
just his Nauren Potzy Weber. No, No, it was Potzy
was his nickname?

Speaker 2 (01:35:09):
Is?

Speaker 1 (01:35:10):
Say? Did you get that nickname? Think? Oh, here we go.

Speaker 3 (01:35:13):
In Deadly Dare's season one episode six, Potsy revealed how
he got his nickname he was asked, Potzy Webber, what
kind of name is this? He replied, They called me
Potzy because when I was a young boy, I used
to like to make things with clay, and one day
my mother called me Potzy.

Speaker 1 (01:35:29):
That was not where I thought that was going.

Speaker 3 (01:35:30):
I thought it was something evolving a toilet, how honestly,
how deeply uninteresting?

Speaker 1 (01:35:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:35:37):
Yeah, Back to Arthur Fonzarelli, or Henry Wrinkler as he's
known in Not Happy Day's Lore, he wasn't the only
seventies TV icon who appreciated the attention from the song.
Pat Sharp said that Mary Tyler sent us each framed
personalized autographed pictures.

Speaker 2 (01:35:55):
I love that. Yeah, that was cool, A big moment
for all of them.

Speaker 3 (01:36:01):
Spike Jones and his editor Eric Zumbrunnen reverse engineered the
process of sticking the band into Happy Days. They spent
hours compiling a skeleton of old Happy Day shots to
drop the band into, but in the end, there's actually
no CGI in this video, just a lot of clever
old school editing techniques. The only new footage from anyone

(01:36:22):
in the Happy Days crew is from Al Molnaro, who
plays the drive In's owner, also named Al Aldavecchio and
who introduces the group by saying Kenosha, Wisconsin's own Weezer.
The clip was one of the most popular of nineteen
ninety five, earning four MTV Video Music Awards and two
Billboard Music Video Awards.

Speaker 1 (01:36:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:36:42):
I remember in one of these interviews. I didn't put
it in, but they talked about how CNN or ABC
somebody ran a special on like CGI new trend overtaking Hollywood,
and they included the Buddy Holly video even though there's
no CGI in it. Like that was Jones' whole thing
was just using block and editing and like all the
old school techniques that you would have to get this

(01:37:04):
and cutting like to get this effect, and people thought
it was CGI.

Speaker 1 (01:37:08):
I would believe that, like it's exactly I yeah, that
is wild.

Speaker 3 (01:37:13):
The third and somewhat forgotten pillar of Geffen's promotional strategy
for Weezer was negotiating to have the Buddy Holly clip
included on the installation CD ROM for Windows ninety five,
a sort of proto U two force installing an album
on your phone.

Speaker 1 (01:37:29):
Move. But I don't remember this.

Speaker 2 (01:37:31):
I remember the arrival of Windows Me too. I've in
my household.

Speaker 1 (01:37:35):
That's so weird.

Speaker 3 (01:37:36):
I was just telling I think I was just telling
my brothers about this, Like I it was like the
way our parents talk about like getting their first TV
or something like.

Speaker 1 (01:37:44):
I remember bringing it home. I remember that that.

Speaker 3 (01:37:47):
I remember it was Friday night because in the other
room TGIF was playing like Family Matters or something.

Speaker 2 (01:37:52):
And I remember all that Ryan Eno designed sound c
welcoming you into the new century that you would then
yearn to hopefully one day escape, and turned back the
clock into a wonderful pre digital era when we weren't
all insane and stupid.

Speaker 1 (01:38:08):
Do you remember this? This may blow your attention span. No,
I don't.

Speaker 3 (01:38:15):
Do you remember the like startup disc they gave you
was hosted by Dennis Miller? Do you remember this that vaguely?

Speaker 2 (01:38:24):
Like a vaguely, but I don't think I ever watched it.

Speaker 1 (01:38:27):
Oh, I remember.

Speaker 3 (01:38:27):
We all say it was like the story of like
looking up the TV, put the disc in and let
it play.

Speaker 1 (01:38:32):
It was the weirdest we had an MS DOS computer.

Speaker 2 (01:38:35):
Dennis Miller's smarmy pinched voice tell yeah, yeah, No.

Speaker 3 (01:38:41):
The fact that there was like anything vaguely resembling a
video on a computer screen in nineteen ninety five or
six or whatever. It was sure to our minds because
before that we had an MS Doss computer, we had
a tiny tapper, and Frogger was like the highlight of
I don't even think we had like Doom or any
of the three D like first person things. That was incredible.

(01:39:03):
But yeah, I don't remember, don't remember the Buddy Holly clip.
I would have, and I would have very much remembered that. Yeah, exactly,
damn it, Phil, I know he listens to these, my dad.
I could have.

Speaker 2 (01:39:15):
I could have gotten in on the ground floor for Weezer.
Maybe he saved me though, because then I would have
become a Weezer guy.

Speaker 3 (01:39:21):
Oh hilariously, Nobe and Weezer had a computer at that time,
so they had no idea what a big deal this was,
which feels like a very Weezer story.

Speaker 2 (01:39:32):
Yeah, exactly right.

Speaker 3 (01:39:34):
So all three of these efforts, these music videos and
this Windows ninety five cameo combined, and Weezer went from
playing empty rooms to being a legitimate phenomenon, which obviously
was a trip for everyone involved, especially Rivers Cuomo, who
seemed to have been completely unaware.

Speaker 1 (01:39:52):
That Weezer would be perceived as a nerdy band. You
mentioned this earlier.

Speaker 3 (01:39:57):
I seriously thought that we were the next Nirvana, he
admitted the Rolling Stone, and I thought the world was
gonna perceive us that way, like a super important, super powerful,
heartbreaking heavy rock band and as such serious artists. That's
how I saw us. The realization that this wasn't the
case quote was just like a gut punch, and that's

(01:40:19):
when I started to realize the world wasn't gonna see
Wheezer like I did, and the world wasn't gonna see the.

Speaker 1 (01:40:25):
Blue Album like I did. It's so heartbreaking but so
hilarious to me.

Speaker 2 (01:40:32):
Again, this is not like a band that was like
Alice in Chains or like Screaming Trees or any of
these bands that came out of the grunge ara that
could have that were like sufficiently dark and like heavy
to reckon with the legacy of stuff like Bleach and
in Utero. And then Rivers is out here being like

(01:40:54):
earnestly making comparisons to Buddy Holly and having a Happy
Day's theme video, and he's like literally describes himself as
having the wind knocked out of him by realizing that
his band was not going to be the next Servan.
There's such a disconnect there. I love, I crave that
in my own life, being able to make art, like

(01:41:18):
not having any idea of how it would be received.

Speaker 1 (01:41:20):
Yeah, or at least so self beautiful.

Speaker 2 (01:41:24):
Yeah, it's it's yeah, in a way, we should all
be so self delusional when we're creating. Anyway, whatever the
perception was, the material effect was undeniable. The record was
certified gold and just under seven months after its release
on December one, nineteen ninety four, certified platinum. Just thirteen
months later, it's gone three times multiplatinum in the US,

(01:41:44):
which seems very low to me, honestly, but I guess yeah,
man boy, rock music really died a hard death, didn't it.
After four thirty years at the top, repeated out into
the nineties. When it's like this foundational epical album that
everyone loves, it is like sold three and a half

(01:42:04):
million copies.

Speaker 1 (01:42:05):
I was gonna say that almost sounds high to me.

Speaker 2 (01:42:07):
Really, Yeah, all right, let's do some you know, how
have you ever listened to this movie podcasts where people
do like obscenely niche like box office analyzing.

Speaker 1 (01:42:16):
No but a funny feeling you're about to tell me no.

Speaker 2 (01:42:19):
I just I'm gonna do what they do and like
look up, like you know what was big in nineteen
ninety five as far as oh albums, what do you Got.

Speaker 1 (01:42:33):
Ninety five?

Speaker 3 (01:42:34):
That's a tough jack a little pills ninety five, I
want to say.

Speaker 2 (01:42:38):
Well, the biggest, the biggest singles were Gangster's Paradise I.

Speaker 1 (01:42:43):
Was gonna say, I can see cooler.

Speaker 2 (01:42:45):
Oh yeah, Shaggy's Bombastic, which was like number one everywhere
except for the US.

Speaker 1 (01:42:52):
Me Against the World Tupac.

Speaker 2 (01:42:54):
Nope, Michael Jackson's You Are Not Alone Take that back
for good. You two hold me, kiss Me, thrill.

Speaker 3 (01:43:02):
Me, oh HOODI, the Bullfish Crack Review I was just
ninety four to ninety five.

Speaker 2 (01:43:06):
This is ninety five, but this is worldwide, so okay,
so let's do top us albums.

Speaker 1 (01:43:11):
Cracked Rearview is probably one of the biggest. That's not
the biggest of the year.

Speaker 2 (01:43:16):
Well, this is where you start to get into the
commercial divide because the biggest, like critical hits were like
The Bends by Radiohead, What's the Story, Morning Glory, Melancholy,
and The Infinite Sadness, a pulp record called Different Class,
which I Don't think is the one people remember now
You're right about Jagged Little Pill b York Post Liquid

(01:43:36):
Swords by Jizza Elliott Smith, self titled PJ. Harvey's To
Bring You My Love, which again is not It's a
great record, but I think more people talk about rid
of Meat at this point from that era, and Pavement's
Wowie Zowie interesting. So yeah not. Weezer didn't even scrape
those levels. Highest selling albums US nineteen ninety five Cracked

(01:44:01):
review by Hoodie Crazy Sexy Cool by TLC oh Yeah,
Mariah Carey, Garth Brooks his greatest hits voice too, men,
The Beatles Anthology Won Help Freeze is Over by the Eagles,
Shania Twain, Woman and Me. You would never guess the
last one, did you say, Mariah Carey? I did, Yeah,

(01:44:23):
Daydream I'll give you a hint. The band is from
Pennsylvania and these are opened for them on this same
album tour of this album.

Speaker 1 (01:44:36):
I'm talking about.

Speaker 2 (01:44:39):
I Don't Know Live What Throwing Throwing Copper that was
one of the best selling albums of nineteen ninety five.

Speaker 4 (01:44:47):
Oh My God, Knock and Feel It Come in Mac
Again by Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads Pride of Lancaster, PA.

Speaker 1 (01:44:58):
That I didn't know anyway.

Speaker 2 (01:45:02):
Cuomo was reacting to this fame in his own way.
By the end of the summer of nineteen ninety five,
after year and a half on the road, he'd become
burned out on music, period and decided to enroll at
Harvard well rock music, i should say, because he was
initially pursuing a classical music degree. He couldn't get into
Juilliard though, and decided Harvard was his safety. But yeah,

(01:45:27):
Brian Bell told Magnet, I remember the first time when
we were on that tour, one of the first times
we were on tour and we saw kids running towards us,
and we were like, holy shit, run and Rivers said
something like being famous sucks. He also underwent the complicated
and invasive medical procedure to lengthen his lifetime shorter leg,

(01:45:47):
which involved breaking his femur in half to extend it,
so he was like consigned to bed, a bunch of
horrifying physical therapy. He had to walk with a cane,
and he had all the anonymity he wished his freshman
year at Harvard, where he disappeared into classes and then
by his own admission. About two to three weeks into

(01:46:08):
his first semester, he thought, I kind of want to
go back to being in a band, and he did
eventually graduate from Harvard. Also, while on Torres, we mentioned earlier,
Croomo had become obsessed with musicals and planned for the
follow up to Blue album to become this rock opera,
but then pivoted all of that energy into Pinkerton. He
said in two thousand and seven, I think the whole
songs from the black Hole thing has gotten way out
of proportion in people's minds. It was just like a

(01:46:31):
third of an album that was sketched out, and most
of these songs on it weren't really written specifically for it.
They were written before I conceived of the concept, and
then I reshaped them a little bit for black Hole.
After I abandoned that idea, I unshaped them and put
them on Pinkerton. Pinkerton, of course, in Weezer and twenty
century music stuff period, is like one of the great
misunderstood sophomore records. They produced it themselves. It was really

(01:46:54):
raw and as we mentioned earlier, had a bunch of
weird stuff about sex on it, and it has become
did as this, like I don't know proto emo. It
gets really weird because then you have to think about
his emo going back to the Washington DC era kind
of discord days. But you also think about emo as
this thing that pop emo kind of reached critical mass

(01:47:16):
in like that late nineties and early two thousands. And
I bore myself when I start talking like this, so well, stop,
that's all a story for a different time. I found
a wonderful quote from Rivers to end this episode on,
and I will do that now. He actually has said
this to his own biographer about the Blue album. None
of these songs are perfect, but I think you can

(01:47:38):
hear that we're trying hard to be honest and real.
The record sounds kind of weird, but if you turn
it up extremely loud and lie down, it can be rewarding.
What a beautiful summation of everything. We've spent three hours
talking about two and a half hours. Two and a
half hours.

Speaker 1 (01:47:56):
That's why I hope people listen to our show.

Speaker 2 (01:47:59):
True, I don't know if you need to hear me
really loud. We're both already kind of loud, but definitely
lie down.

Speaker 3 (01:48:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:48:08):
Anyway, thank you for listening. Folks, this has been too
much information. We didn't do any impressions or bits on
this episode.

Speaker 1 (01:48:16):
Can you do rivers?

Speaker 3 (01:48:17):
No.

Speaker 2 (01:48:18):
The other funniest thing about when they were recording all
this stuff with him being like, oh, I don't have
to sing like a heavy metal guy, Like I could
just use my normal voice. Like I think he just
did not have the conception of being like a front
man where you could just have a normal voice. Yeah,
so funny. Thank you for listening. This has been too
much information. And I am Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (01:48:39):
And I'm Jordan run Tag. We'll catch you next time.
Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's
executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk.

Speaker 3 (01:48:53):
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

Speaker 1 (01:48:56):
The show was researched, written, and hosted.

Speaker 2 (01:48:58):
By Jordan run Talk and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (01:49:00):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review.

Speaker 3 (01:49:07):
For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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