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66 | Rolling Stone | September 2019
There was a worry
that ‘Buddy Holly’
would become the
‘Detachable Penis’
of the album,” says
former Weezer
bassist Matt Sharp.
“We sensed it could
be seen as a novelty
song, and people
wouldn’t take the
album seriously.”
Around the time Zoom began to fizzle out, Cuomo
got some bad news from the Guitar Institute of Tech-
nology, the trade school for shredders he was sup-
posed to be attending. Cuomo was educated in an
ashram before the culture shock of public school at
age 11, and had always been a gifted and disciplined
student. But he was overwhelmed by the excitement
of playing gigs and skateboarding around Hollywood,
which he saw as “the center of the universe.”
“I couldn’t bring myself to get into diligent-student
mode,” he says. When G.I.T. administrators told him
he was “basically expelled,” he was crushed, begging
them to take him back, mostly because he felt terri-
ble about wasting his parents’ money. He still seems
to regret it, though he’s amused at the notion that he
may well be the only person on Earth to flunk out of
the Guitar Institute of Technology and later gradu-
ate from Harvard.
Faced with all these failures, “my system of val-
ues was crumbling,” as he later wrote in a college ap-
plication. “I was thinking of myself as a lead guitar
player, thinking that faster harmonic minor scales
equals better,” he says. “Thinking that I could move
out to L.A. with Avant Garde and we were just going
to be huge rock stars. Then seeing one band mem-
ber after another leave, abandon me, and not being
able to hold it together or put it back together.” There
were nasty breakups, too, “heartbreak with two girl-
friends, back to back.”
When Weezer eventually emerged with a ma-
jor-label debut in 1994, a shorn and oft-bespecta-
cled Cuomo at their helm, it seemed like they had
emerged “out of nowhere,” as a then-suspicious Ste-
phen Malkmus of Pavement puts it; he recalls raising
his eyebrows at the “Pixies/Pavement-y sound” of a
band with zero indie releases to its name. (He says
he’s now a fan.) The guys from the Chicago alt-band
Urge Overkill wondered aloud to one band member,
in all seriousness, if Weezer’s record label put them
together, Monkees-style. Weezer’s young fans, un-
concerned with indie cred (or unaware it existed),
were entirely unbothered, but many critics shared
the skepticism, in an era when subtle distinctions be-
tween different brands of guitar rock seemed all-con-
suming and identity-defining.
“People see us now as this credible band, and they
assume we always were credible,” says Cuomo. “But,
man, we could not have been more hated on when
we came out.” He’s never forgotten a local newspa-
per referring to the band as “Stone Temple Pixies,”
the idea being “Stone Temple Pilots were a corporate
copy of all of the cool grunge bands, and we were a
corporate copy of the Pixies.”
In a way, Weezer did come out of nowhere. They
exist only because of the small miracle of Rivers Cuo-
mo’s impossibly fast reinvention, abetted by meet-
ing just the right collaborators at just the right time.
If Weezer’s detractors had seen a picture of Cuomo
circa 1989, they would have considered their worst
suspicions confirmed. Weezer would far outlast their
initial critics, surviving long enough to win a whole
new wave of them. They inspired countless emo
bands, made two classic albums in a row, and be-
came one of their era’s most indefatigable acts, tun-
neling through styles and decades with output of
varying quality in a manner more akin to the Isley
Brothers or Jefferson Airplane/Starship than any of
their own alt-peers. (Their lineup has been admira-
bly stable, too — current bassist Scott Shriner is still
the new guy after 18 years.)
Weezer’s self-titled debut, a.k.a. the Blue Album,
is one of the most enduring artifacts of the alt-rock
age, winning teenage hearts in generation after gen-
eration, not unlike Green Day’s Dookie, released a
few months earlier. It’s the geeky, equally angsty lit-
tle brother of Ten and Nevermind, somehow both
more sincere and more ironic than its predecessors,
and in some ways bolder in its disregard for the old
rules of rock; Kurt Cobain liked Marvel Comics too,
but he never sang about Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawl-
er, as Cuomo does in “In the Garage.”
By 1991, not much more than a year after Zoom’s
demise, Cuomo was writing what would become the
first Weezer songs; he still had his metal hair when
the band played its first shows. In the space of 16
months or so, Cuomo would utterly transform his
musical value system, learn to write hit songs, start
singing lead vocals, and find a whole new set of band-
mates. And by 1995, he would already be sick of it all.
“As I get older,” says drummer Pat Wilson, “every-
thing seems weirder, and more strange and unlikely.
And that’s kind of how I look at Weezer.”I
T ALL STARTED AT Tower Records,
where Cuomo got a job while taking
classes at Los Angeles City College.
At Tower, he met a punk-rock dude
named Pat Finn who would hook
him up with his future bandmates,
and introduce him to a new world of music. Cuomo
knew metal, and had a quiet soft spot for pop — Ma-
donna, 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 Under-
ground; Pet Sounds was reissued around that time.
13th Floor Elevators, Pixies, Sonic Youth, it all sound-
ed like noise. I thought, ‘None of this is catchy.’ But Icame to love it all. Now I don’t understand how I
missed it.”
He would become a serious Beatles and Beach
Boys fan; on his bookshelf is a copy of Brian Wilson’s
1991 autobiography overflowing with Cuomo’s nota-
tions. But a much newer band was his greatest influ-
ence. Nirvana’s Bleach, and the 1990 single “Sliver,”
with its sugary melody combined with uncharacteris-
tic-for-rock lyrics (“Grandma, take me home”), were
transformative.
Cuomo first heard “Sliver” at Tower, shelving
CDs as he took it in. “It’s like, ‘Oh, my God. This is
so beautiful to me. And I identify with it so much.’
Hearing him sing about Mom and Dad and Grand-
pa Joe, these personal family issues, in a really heart-
breaking kind of innocent, childlike way. Over these
straightforward chords in a major key. But then the
distortion kicks in, and he starts screaming. Shit!
That’s what I want to do.” Cuomo took continual in-
fluence from Nirvana; the “In Bloom” video, where
Kurt Cobain wears thick glasses, helped Cuomo feel
comfortable in his own, according to founding gui-
tarist Jason Cropper.
Pat Finn connected Cuomo with Pat Wilson, an
endearingly goofy, cherubic They Might Be Giants
and Van Halen fan with serious drum skills, albeit in
a stripped-down style that initially baffled Cuomo.
Their first jam session went nowhere. They took an-
other stab at it after Cuomo moved in with Wilson
and his friend Matt Sharp, an arty, brainy dude with
gothy, Anglophile tastes, and a weird dyed rat tail left
over from his own longhaired days. He had his own
musical projects, and was, at that point, just a room-
mate, with a remarkably lucrative day job telemarket-
ing upscale dog shampoo.
Cuomo and Wilson started a band called Fuzz, en-
listing a young woman named Scottie Chapman on
bass. Cuomo’s first songwriting efforts included “The
Answer Man,” which sounds like a grungier Jane’s Ad-
diction — Cuomo is obviously trying to sing like Perry
Farrell, pushing his range, adding some grit to his
voice, even cursing in the lyrics. It’s solid, though;
you could imagine this band getting signed. “It was
maybe eight months into the band that I started sing-
ing much more simply,” Cuomo says, “as I had sung
in choir in high school. It was the strangest thing. I
was like, ‘Wait, you can just sing, like, with your nor-
mal voice? Over a rock band, and it will work?’ ”
After one or two Fuzz shows, Chapman quit, ap-
parently going on to star on the show Mythbusters.
She now works as a dental hygienist. “She realized
we were idiots,” says Wilson, laughing. “Rivers and
I had a lot of facility on our instruments. She was
like, ‘These guys are nerds.’ We were totally nerds.
Rivers was smart enough to realize, ‘I need to not
look like a nerd.’ I never gave a shit. I just wanted
to play.”
Wilson was such a geek in his own right, or Cuo-
mo’s camouflage was so effective, that the drummer
initially mistook Cuomo for a “Valley metal jock, like
Dan Cortese on MTV’s Rock N’ Jock” — he loved play-
ing basketball and rode his bike everywhere. There’s
at least one picture of Cuomo wearing bicycle shorts
onstage looking quite Axl-ish. In truth, Cuomo was
much like he is now: blazingly intense but quiet and
internal, prone to unsettlingly long conversation-
al pauses; he conveys the impression that social in-
teraction is work for him, but also that he can enjoyWEEZER
Senior writer BRIAN HIATT wrote the “Game of
Thrones” cover story in April.