N THE SPRING OF 1990, Rivers Cuomo was 19 years old,
and all of his plans were coming undone. The year be-
fore, he and his high school metal band, Avant Garde,
moved from suburban Connecticut to L.A., all five
members crammed into the same filthy studio apart-
ment, sleeping on the floor. Cuomo was the lead guitar-
ist, with an arsenal of squeal-y virtuoso licks and hair so
long and majestically poufed-up that it essentially served as the band’s sixth
member. Flamboyance aside, Cuomo left frontman duties to an operatically
inclined friend. “I could have seen myself in the NBA as easily as being a lead
singer in a metal band,” Cuomo says now. “That’s just, like, unthinkable.”
Avant Garde gave themselves a slightly less embarrassing new name,
Zoom, and streamlined their music, though they still sounded like a more
proggy, less-fun Dokken. Cuomo tried easing up on the hair spray. None of
it helped them find favor in a metal scene so overcrowded with dreamers
that Sunset Strip sidewalks were lined with discarded band fliers at night.
Even worse, it was all about to fade away, in tandem with the decade that
spawned it.
Thirty years later, Cuomo sits in his Santa Monica home studio, which is
filled with sunlight and plants, and overlooks a Zen garden outside. His wife
and two kids are upstairs; his mom lives in a house he bought for her next
door. He’s wearing a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, gray jeans, and
no glasses, which makes him almost hard to recognize. We’re listening to
his heavy chugging on Zoom’s “Street Life,” with piercing vocals from his
school friend Kevin Ridel. Cuomo grins, picks up an acous-
tic guitar (a compact Ed Sheeran signature model, for some
reason), and riffs along, chuckling when the song shifts into
an oddball funk feel in the verses.IN MY ROOM
Rivers Cuomo
(left) and Brian
Bell, L.A., 1994The
Strange
Birth
and Near
Death of
We e z e r
25 years after
the Blue Album,
Weezer’s past and
present members
look back at their
origin storyBY BRIAN HIATT
64 | Rolling Stone | September 2019
I