How Weezer Forecasted Stardom With Debut LP
Looking back on the genesis of a modern rock institution
Thirty years on, Weezer is an institution which can still play arenas behind output known for its prodigiousness, if not always its consistency.
It’s easy to forget that the band was once a rather unlikely Next Big Thing.
Their self-titled debut, better known as Blue, which felt like it came out of nowhere, had its origins like so many bands before.
It started with guys coming to L.A. from other places, with dreams of making music — Rivers Cuomo from Connecticut, Patrick Wilson from Buffalo, New York and bassist Matt Sharp from San Diego.
As such things go, it was a case of a guy knowing a guy who knew a guy. Patrick Finn, a bandmate and friend of Wilson’s from back home, worked at Tower Records where he crossed paths with another employee — Cuomo.
At that point, the future Weezer frontman had hoped to make it as a metal musician. If multiverses exist, there’s a timeline where he was in a hair band that got lost in the wake of the alternative explosion.
But in this timeline, Finn rebuffed Cuomo’s invitation to join his band, Zoom (previously called Avant Garde), calling their music “terrible.” He suggested that he start listening to the bands he and Wilson were into, the ones who’d be at the forefront of that alt-rock wave. His job at Tower further exposed him not just to up-and-coming acts, but expanded his education into greats from the preceding decades.
AUDIO: Avant Garde “Tongue of Fire”
This was also the point where Cuomo was neither singer nor songwriter in Avant Garde/Zoom, which had fallen apart. Finn, never a member of Weezer, still managed to play a part in it during a walk with him one day.
Cuomo told the L.A. Times that Finn said, “Go write your own songs and sing them yourself. I don’t care if you think you’re not a singer. That’s gonna be a much better version of what you can do.”
Cuomo and Wilson had formed some short-lived bands, with names perfectly fine (Fuzz) and too intentionally wacky (60 Wrong Sausages).
Paying more attention to details, Cuomo started to concentrate more on the work of writing songs, a mix of craft and embarrassment over his recent hair metal past. Part of his reinvention was assembling a vast reservoir of material. He didn’t want to do a full band rehearsal, let alone play a gig, until he and Wilson had come up with 50 songs.
The next guy knowing a guy was Wilson, who’d worked for a company that sold tanning products to salons with Matt Sharp. For a time, Cuomo had moved in with them before leaving for Santa Monica, where Wilson would come down to in order to finish the 50 songs. They got up to a little over 30 before they got antsy to play.
Sharp, meanwhile, had moved up to the Bay Area. As things happened, with the new material, Cuomo and Wilson weren’t looking to put it together as a guitar-drum duo. They needed a bass player.
Wilson brought Sharp a tape of some of what they put together, which included future Blue album songs “The World Has Turned And Left Me Here” and “Undone – The Sweater Song.”
VIDEO: Weezer “Undone – “The Sweater Song”
The bassist was instantly sold, telling the Times this year, “It was the first time someone I knew created something where I thought, my God — this is something I’d listen to even if I didn’t know them.”
With Jason Cropper, who’d played with Wilson and Cuomo before, on board as second guitarist, Weezer had a name (from the nickname Cuomo’s father had given him as a child) and a lineup.
Their first show was March, 1992 at Raji’s, a Hollywood club where Dogstar played right before them. Once that band had finished, the Keanu-hungry crowd thinned out, leaving a small handful to see Weezer’s debut.
The crowds remained small as the band played clubs throughout L.A., but the group was starting to hone its material.
“We cast aside some of the bluesy, grungier rock stuff, and focused more on major keys and beautiful chord progressions,” Cuomo told Magnet in 2014. “I started singing more like I did in choir growing up, rather than trying to be Kurt Cobain.”
The crowds started to pick up, but not by much. There were still frustrations as the group felt like it was spinning its wheels without a record deal. Cuomo was getting to the point where he was seriously considering giving up the band for college in the near future.
The key turned out to be a song Cuomo came up with after the initial batch. He reconfigured an old Avant Garde song he liked, “Renaissance,” into a new track with all new lyrics. The result was “Say It Ain’t So.”
Future Weezer guitarist Brian Bell saw the band at Coconut Teaszer, a metal club, later telling Magnet, “I wasn’t super-impressed, but when they got to ‘Say It Ain’t So,’ I was like, this is a cover, right? There’s no way a local band could write a song this good.’
The group recorded a four-song demo that included “Undone” and “Say It Ain’t So” in November, 1992.
The latter was the song that drew the attention of an A&R man at DGC, Geffen’s subsidiary that had already released Nirvana and Sonic Youth and would eventually release Hole’s Live Through This weeks before Blue.
VIDEO: Weezer “Say It Ain’t So”
Smaller labels showed interest, but Weezer wanted more, eventually managing to get DGC to make an offer.
The group had some songs, but they needed a producer, as the label was not about to let them produce themselves, especially not recording the album in their garage rehearsal space.
Cuomo either hearing the Cars’ “Just What I Needed” in a grocery store or a newly-purchased copy of “The Cars Greatest Hits” (depending on the story) led him to suggest Ric Ocasek.
By that point, Ocasek had turned his time after the Cars’ breakup into a second career as a producer. Once he heard the demo, he was eager to take the job. In L.A. to produce Bad Brains, he stopped by to hear the band in the garage. Their performance, including a cover of “Just What I Needed” he deemed “charming,” cinched the deal.
The only condition was that he insisted on producing them in New York to be near his pregnant wife, Paulina Porizkova. That’s how Weezer found itself in Electric Lady studios, a place with a history that touched Cuomo’s particular rock geekdom.
“I was beside myself because I knew KISS had recorded there. I remember going to the bathroom for the first time thinking, ‘Ace Frehley sat on this toilet that I’m about to sit on,'” he told the L.A. Times.
Ocasek was more steady elder than drill instructor, guiding the band, getting them to tighten things up. Cuomo and Sharp had their own rules, like no reverb and no downstrokes on guitar.
Cuomo hadn’t stopped writing, either. “In The Garage” and “Buddy Holly” both arrived after the producer was on board. He’d be the one who made sure the latter was on Blue, rather than get held over for the second album. He made signs urging Cuomo to include it, a wise move with the early good omen of a studio receptionist being spotted humming the hook one day after hearing it.
VIDEO: Weezer “In The Garage (live)”
All in all, things were going mostly smoothly. The one issue was that things were growing tense with Cropper. The other three felt his focus wasn’t as fully on the band as they wanted. His then-girlfriend and future wife, Amy, was pregnant with their first child, with the reported last straw being when she showed up to one of the sessions.
Cuomo delivered the news that he was fired. Cropper later said that the frontman was kind and professional in the awkward situation, but Sharp said things he wouldn’t repeat. He’d later feel a mix of sadness and relief as the band took off, eventually reaching a state of acceptance.
“It’s weird to be this generation’s Syd Barrett or Pete Best. But it’s pretty cool too,” Cropper told Yahoo Music in 2019.
But in 1994, Weezer needed to adjust as the album was close to being ready for mixing. First, Cuomo replaced Cropper’s guitar parts, which he did in one day. Second, they needed to find a replacement.
They’d find him in a guy who’d been in the audience at the Coconut Teaszer. Bell, who’d come to L.A. from Knoxville, was in a band called Carnival Art as a bass player. Even though Weezer members hadn’t seen him play guitar, they felt he looked the part and could handle the instrument change. An audition tape of him playing with demos confirmed it.
The biopic moments followed. The label flew Bell to New York, sending a chauffeur to pick him up at the airport. He slept on the floor of a room at the Gramercy Hotel that first night, getting mooned by Wilson. He heard what the band came up with in the studio, telling them they were going to be “fucking huge.”
Bell’s only needed contribution at that point was backing vocals, as the album was mostly done. When they finished it, Weezer decamped back to L.A. to work on their next move.
They knew they needed to integrate Bell into the band, so that fall, they booked what they called The Self-Punishment Tour, basically playing a different club every night for two weeks.
Or, as Todd Sullivan, the A&R guy who’d signed them, put it in a Geffen memo: “Weezer Tours the Bowels of L.A.”
More shows followed. Band members kept working their day jobs. Cuomo started taking classes at a community college. The wait for Geffen to actually release the album felt interminable.
When it came out, nothing happened at first. Sharp later recalled seeing all the promo copies in the used section of a record store.
Given the band’s under-the-radar incubation and its relatively short existence then, there were some who thought them industry plants. One critic derided them as “Stone Temple Pixies,” which rankles Cuomo to this day.
Weezer didn’t have much time to be anxious. 107.7 The End in Seattle started playing “Undone.” KROQ in L.A. came next. Stations across the country soon followed. Suddenly, any indifference the suits at Geffen had started to wane. They wanted a video.
Spike Jonze got the call to direct after a pitch that wasn’t a pitch at all (he’d told Sharp the video could be anything, including a performance clip with dogs running around).
The song used the time-tested move of marrying unhappy lyrics with a happy-sounding chorus. Party chatter is heard over instrumental sections. Verses are delivered off-kilter, as if Cuomo and Sharp had just discovered Pavement. Then comes the Big Rock chorus, belying the protagonist’s sad emotional state (“Watch me unravel/I’ll soon be naked”). It all explodes in some form of unresolved catharsis.
VIDEO: Weezer “Buddy Holly”
The second time around, Jonze had his actual pitch. For “Buddy Holly,” he wanted to have it look like the band performed on an episode of Happy Days. The band was in and with releases from the old sitcom’s actors in hand (Henry Winkler saying “yes” being the key), the shoot was a go,
Pre-CGI, Jonze relied on careful editing, well-chosen clips, some camera trickery and a guest appearance from the show’s Al Molinaro to create a pretty seamless video that, paired with the catchy-as-hell-song, became an even bigger hit.
Tired of insults at his on-again, off-again girlfriend at the time, he cranked out the song full of pop culture juxtaposition (opening lyrics “What’s with these homies dissin’ my girl/Why do they gotta front?” in a power pop verse) and cleverness (“Ooh-wee-ooh, I look just like Buddy Holly/Oh, oh, and you’re Mary Tyler Moore”).
It’s the little touches that push it farther — the handclaps, Sharp’s falsetto and the ridiculous rapid-fire bridge.
“Say It Ain’t So” became the third and final single, a song inspired by Cuomo being a child of divorce and informed by his childhood misreading of what caused it.
He and his brother had been under the mistaken impression that their father, who hadn’t been in his life much from the time he’d been four, had been an abusive alcoholic. Their mother later corrected that, pointing out he was neither. So while Cuomo felt good about the song’s emotional truth, he was embarrassed at the misunderstanding that inspired it.
The verses were comparatively quiet, but the hurt from feeling abandoned or having a parent whose addiction kept them paying more attention to the bottle than them came through in the roaring choruses. This one cut deep, with a killer bridge to boot.
“In the Garage” is Cuomo’s spiritual homage to the Beach Boys “In My Room,” with its particular pop culture references to tabletop gaming, X-Men and KISS. Its tuneful hard rock depicts a literal safe space where the nerdy kid can dream alone, feeling their power – the dorky wannabe rock god finding coolness in supposedly uncool pursuits.
The Brian Wilson connection is even clearer on “Holiday.” Not a Beach Boys soundalike, it places that desire for sun-and-fun escape into a bursting modern rock context, the undercurrent of sadness under the joy still intact.
The canny move was the break halfway through, where the words “We will write a postcard to our/Friends and family in free verse” are repeated quietly as a build-up before the band kicks back in as if it wants to blow your speakers out.
The now-shorn Cuomo may have cringed a bit at his not-so-distant metalhead past, but he wasn’t fully hiding or abandoning it. The photo from the garage in the album booklet clearly showed Judas Priest and Quiet Riot posters and the guitars weren’t exactly quiet.
“My Name Is Jonas” starts with a finger-picked lick (Cropper’s idea) before those hard rock guitars kick in, its head-swaying tempo played to arena volume.
The lyrics are a bit of a mishmash open to interpretation, but the band tears through it forcefully enough to make it an effective opening track and preview of what’s to come.
VIDEO: Weezer performs “My Name Is Jonas” with My Chemical Romance
Charging right out of the gate, “No One Else” might just be the most relentlessly catchy thing on Blue, albeit with lyrics equal parts “Under My Thumb” and future Andrew Tate fanboy. Less creepy than Pinkerton’s questionable moments, they veer into ridiculous territory, as in the character’s insistence that the woman not wear any makeup when not in his presence.
But rather devolve a la Tate into opining about how enjoying food is “embarrassing” and how, and this is an actual quote, “Any man who has sex with women because it ‘feels good’ is gay,” Cuomo immediately gives the manchild his comeuppance in the heartbreak of “The World Has Turned And Left Me Here.”
Instead of issuing Girlfriend Rules, he’s reduced to masturbation, deluding himself that she told him he was the best she ever had, before facing the cold reality that he’s alone in the void. Along with “Say It Ain’t So,” it’s one of the few moments on Blue without an optimistic to one.
“Surf Wax America” comes in putting the foot on the gas, a relentlessly sunny punk fantasia (Cuomo was about as much of a surfer as Brian Wilson). But then, as a prime example of the canny songcraft on Blue, the instruments all but die out for a hushed bridge halfway through that’s a lead-in for the guitars to kick back in, Cuomo to scream “Let’s go!” and the whole thing to ride out in metallic glory.
“Only In Dreams” stands as an outlier in the band’s history. Later, Cuomo would sometimes take the “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus” philosophy to lengths that would squeeze life out of songs or, as in a period over a decade ago, lead one to believe that he wished he was a Swedish pop songwriter-for-hire instead of Ace Frehley.
Ending the album, “Only In Dreams” is something much of Weezer’s discography is not — patient. It ebbs and flows along Sharp’s most noticeable bassline, finding a sort of comfort in futility in that teenage angst of not getting the partner you want (or perhaps anything else). It’s well over five minutes into the eight-minute song that we get steady build into musical catharsis before fading back into nothing but that bass.
The album was a guitar triumph with infectious riffs and well-chosen solos, as well as feedback and squall at calibrated moments, all with a tone that just worked.
Ocasek stayed true to his goal of bringing the Weezer he heard in that guesthouse garage on Amherst Avenue to the audience’s ears. His shepherding gave the album precision without sacrificing punch or polishing away Cuomo’s melancholia and neuroses. For all its familiar elements, it was a work that could only have come from this band.
For all of Blue’s influence (clearly a lot of future emo and pop punk band members had copies), the unique combination of Weezer’s idiosyncrasies and Cuomo’s knack for creating earworms was difficult for subsequent bands to nail. Even Weezer itself wouldn’t always get that balance right.
The packaging was Cuomo’s idea, inspired by the cover of a Beach Boys compilation, the kind of cheap-sounding comp you’d only see on cassette in places like truck stops or the discount sections of places like Walmart. The imagery of the band standing plainly in front of a single-color background was the template they’d return to again. They now have six self-titled albums, each known by the color.
Once the positive audience response kicked in, it snowballed. Blue was certified as gold after seven months, platinum after eight and double-platinum after 15.
Weezer relentlessly toured, mixing in some B-sides and the DGC compilation song “Jamie” along with early versions of future Pinkerton songs like “Getchoo” and “Tired of Sex” in over 210 shows before wrapping things up in August 1995. By that point, they were burned out.
Cuomo initially planned a rock opera, Songs From the Black Hole, as a follow-up, but his interest in the idea faded in the face of fatigue and a general recoil at the band’s explosive success. He took time off instead.
His right leg had been two inches shorter than his left since he was a kid, Cuomo decided to get corrective surgery. Two painful procedures and recovery followed. He also enrolled at Harvard, although he wasn’t at Cambridge long before he knew he wanted to bring Weezer back.
The other three stayed active with side projects. Sharp’s The Rentals had an alt-rock hit of their own with 1995’s “Friends of P.” It would eventually become his main band after he and Weezer parted ways after the Pinkerton tour.
The story of that album, a fan favorite that later underwent a positive critical re-evaluation, is a story for another day.
Blue, meanwhile, remains one of Weezer’s towering achievements – a place where the loud crunch of hard rock met the crafty hooks of power pop, wrapped up in Gen X emotions in one arena-ready package.
The geeks may not have inherited the earth. But three decades in, they’ve managed to put together a pretty good career that Blue made possible.
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