Our new feature on the birth of Weezer and the making of the Blue Album is just the beginning of our celebration of that albums 25th anniversary there will be much more to come from the interviews. In the meantime, here are some highlights from the feature; read it in full here.
Rivers Cuomo was such a metalhead that he hated alt-rock when he first heard it.
Cuomo knew metal, and had a quiet soft spot for pop, such as Madonna and Tiffany. Practically everything else was alien to him. At first I just could not get into it at all, he says. It sounded like garbage to me. Velvet Underground; Pet Sounds was reissued around that time. 13th Floor Elevators, Pixies, Sonic Youth, it all sounded like noise. I thought, None of this is catchy. But I came to love it all. Now I dont understand how I missed it.
While Cuomo was formulating Weezers sound, he apparently also dabbled in another genre.
Original guitarist Jason Cropper says that Cuomo made an entire, never-released rap album under the name Vegeterrorists songs about his lifelong vegetarianism in styles akin to Public Enemy and Run-DMC. Rivers can drop mad beats and spit mad rhymes with the best, says Cropper. And if I stayed in the band, we wouldve done records like that years ago. (The only released evidence of this period is a striking demo of Cuomo covering Ice Cubes The Bomb like a one-man Rage Against the Machine.)
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The band name Weezer, from a childhood nickname, has deep emotional resonance for Cuomo.
His dad wasnt in his life much after his parents divorce, when he was four years old or so, and he had strong, unresolved feelings about it all. He had already used the name Weezer as a label from one of his cassettes of new songs. I remember getting letters from my dad and it would always be, To Weezer. He didnt use an h, says Cuomo, who contrary to Internet conventional wisdom, never had asthma. It was definitely a very emotional name for me and I dont think for anyone else. For the other guys in the band, its just a weird word. I guess it even ties back to what I was saying about Sliver. Just this feeling of being this helpless little kid thats abandoned, or neglected. It was definitely the right name.
Drummer Pat Wilson is proud of the sacrifice he made in the early days of the band, living in a garage without plumbing.
I shit in a bag, he reveals, with a hint of pride. Because I had to go! And there was nowhere to go. And Im convinced the gods of rock said, That kids a true believer. Weve got to put the thumb on the scale for the old Weeze.
The band had strong ideas about the sound of their debut.
There was one overriding concept, says the albums engineer, Chris Shaw. The idea that the guitars and the bass were one huge 10-string instrument. Theres very few songs on the record to actually have a bass line that drifts away from what the guitar is doing. When they mixed the album, they insisted that all of the guitars be as loud as or louder than the ones on Radioheads Creep, which is why some of the vocals are almost buried.
Cuomo was hurt that people found some of the Blue Album funny.
I seriously thought we were the next Nirvana, Cuomo admits. And I thought the world was going to perceive us that way, like a super-important, super-powerful, heartbreaking heavy rock band, and as serious artists. Thats how I saw us.
Cuomo and original bassist Matt Sharp were reluctant to include Buddy Holly on the album.
In Cuomos mind, it was intended for the bands second album, which would be more keyboard-oriented and New Wave-influenced. (Weezer, of course, never made such an album; Sharp, destined to part ways with the group circa 1997, did instead, with his band the Rentals.) Sharp and Cuomo were also concerned that Buddy Holly could become the kind of Nineties hit that could kill a band. There was a worry that it could become the Detachable Penis of this album, says Sharp. We had the sense that it could be taken as a novelty song, and people arent going to take the album seriously.