No One Else

In October, 1996 LA four-piece Weezer visited Australian shores for the first time to widespread delight and acclaim. Their 1994 self-titled debut record (known to all and sundry ever since as The Blue Album due to its distinctive cover) had been out for a couple of years and gained massive traction with its distinctive geeky aesthetic and string of catchy radio singles – Undone - The Sweater Song and Buddy Holly in particular – while its follow-up, Pinkerton, was hot off the press, having been released globally just a couple of weeks earlier.

The tour seemed to go well – the shows were brilliant at any rate – yet in the intervening 16 years the band failed to return to our country at all. Their stocks as a band rose and fell many times in the intervening years: the intensely personal Pinkerton was uniformly lambasted by pundits on its release, and even though it has eventually become a cult classic (and revered in many circles as a proto-emo masterpiece), everything they've done since then seems on some level to be a reaction to that intense critical backlash. They took a few years off completely before re-emerging in 2001 with another self-titled effort (The Green Album) and have since released six more albums, but most followers consider those first two long-players to be the golden age of Weezer.

Even the band themselves seem to agree, having in the last few years embarked on a string of 'Memories Tours' whereby they play either The Blue Album or Pinkerton in its entirety, followed by a 'greatest hits' set covering the rest of their career. Fittingly, this is what's finally brought Weezer back to Australia, the two records that they already had to their name when they first graced our stages all those years ago.

“It's hard to say because there's so many different reasons,” offers frontman and chief songwriter Rivers Cuomo as to the lengthy gap between visits. “I kinda went into hiding for many years and wasn't doing shows anywhere, let alone Australia, and then we just got busy touring around the United States over and over and over again, and then I took a bunch more time off and before you know it sixteen years has gone by. We're very much looking forward to coming back though.”

Most Australian shows on this trip find Weezer playing The Blue Album from start to finish – is the band comfortable looking backwards and regularly playing their first album after so many years?

“Absolutely, that's one of my favourite albums of all time, and it really still represents so much of what I love about music – the soaring melodies and the crunchy guitars and the weird lyrics. I haven't really changed that much since we made that album.”

While he agrees that having such a revered debut album has been a burden at times (“I guess so, it's such a strong record and it's hard to do something as good again”) Cuomo still enjoys playing all of his earliest material onstage. “Yeah, I mean I wouldn't sit in my room by myself and sing those songs, but get me in front of a room full of fans who never got to see us live in the '90s, and they know all the words and they're singing along and I've got the band with me – it's just the greatest feeling in the world.”

There's a complete innocence and youthfulness to the lyrics throughout The Blue Album, partly due to the fact that Cuomo was at the time influenced heavily by The Beatles and The Beach Boys.

“Yeah, that's correct,” he smiles. “Actually in the early-'90s in LA when we were coming up there were a lot of bands that were trying to write lyrics that were extremely abstract and dark and poetic and weird, and at the same time I was listening to the early Beatles and Beach Boys records that had the most innocent lyrics of all time – just very direct and simple like I Want To Hold Your Hand or songs about surfing – and I just thought, 'That is so crazy! I've got to do that!'”

There's an interesting segue between the first two records: history tells us that many of the songs that eventually ended up on Pinkerton were originally envisaged by Cuomo as being for a rock opera he was writing called Songs From The Black Hole, which was originally intended to be the second Weezer release. The main character in the rock opera was a young man named Jonas – is this perchance the same character from The Blue Album's opening gambit My Name Is Jonas?

“My Name Is Jonas really is a standalone song, but for some reason the first line is 'My name is Jonas...'” Rivers reflects. “I didn't think through it, but it just felt kind of like this alter-ego for me, without really knowing what it meant. So when I was writing the script for Songs From The Black Hole and I needed a name for that character, I thought to use the name Jonas again.”

It's fascinating to think that Pinkerton songs like No Other One, Getchoo, Why Bother and Tired Of Sex perhaps aren't meant to be taken as literal, when they've always been assumed to be autobiographical. “Honestly, those songs that you just mentioned started out as autobiographical and standalone songs, and then later when I started working on Songs From The Black Hole I kinda took those songs and stuck them in the musical and changed a few words here and there, but to be honest they really didn't belong there. So actually most of the time I'm just writing in the moment, like whatever's happened or is happening to me on that day I just write about off the top of my head. It's much more rare that I try to fart out this large-scale, arch-form dramatic piece and write from more of a fictional point of view.”

The songs that eventually comprised Pinkerton are some of the most open and emotionally vulnerable tracks ever put to tape – listening to it feels akin to reading someone's personal diary – did Cuomo find it difficult baring his soul to the public in such a manner? “Well I think my plan was that I was going to put Pinkerton out and everyone was going to love it and they were going to relate to it and identify with me and really appreciate everything that I was sharing, and therefore it wouldn't be hard at all – it would be easy. But that's not what happened,” he laughs. “It was a big commercial failure and people were offended or just thought it was worthless, so yeah, it was very hard and it was very painful.”

Given that he was so obviously scarred by Pinkerton's initial mass rejection, does he feel vindicated now that it has become such a cherished body of work to so many people? “Yes, I feel massive vindication. Never more so than on the first Pinkerton Memories night – I think it was here in LA – and there were six-thousand people singing every word to the album, and it was absolutely the best feeling that an artist can have.”

Though Weezer have spent the last few years looking over their shoulders and revisiting the past, it seems that there are still no plans for new music in the immediate future – even now Cuomo still doesn't seem that assured of his amazing band's ongoing validity. “No, we don't have plans to record anything soon. Of course I'm always writing, but we don't have a plan to go into the studio. There's a lot of questions just in general, like, 'Do people even want albums anymore?' or, 'Does Weezer's audience want a new Weezer album?' We're not really sure; we put out so much music in 2008 through 2011, it feels like maybe people need a break from us for a little while. But of course we'll still keep going out and playing shows, as long as our audience wants us to."

THE OTHER WAY

You may notice at the impending Memories shows that Patrick Wilson drums for the entirety of The Blue Album and/or Pinkerton – as he did back in the day – but then takes up guitar for the remainder of the set. He talks to Steve Bell about tradition and change.

For the last few years Pat Wilson has found himself up front of Weezer playing guitar a lot of the time instead of behind the kit, and he explains that this is largely due to the particular wants and needs of his bandmate Rivers Cuomo rather than a personal preference. “You know, I think I still prefer playing drums just because I can sort of shape the feel of the band a little bit. I feel like I can really push the music, compared to when I'm on the guitar, and it's a really different approach to how you work with the music. Plus I think it's just classic – I should be playing drums in Weezer and Rivers should be playing guitar.” What prompted the change? “I think Rivers just wanted to run out into the crowd with his wireless microphone and be that kind of guy, and I was worried because I love the way he plays guitar. So I said, 'Well, I'm not going to let just any joker come in here, so I'll just do it myself.' Plus we already had a history with [touring drummer] Josh Freese – he's a great guy and I love him – so it was easier for him to just step in behind the kit. But I like the four-piece Weezer style; I think that's the classic style.”

Luckily the affable multi-tasker has no problem revisiting early Weezer. “It doesn't seems strange to me, I just sort of look at it like if I was going to see one of my favourite bands then I'd want to see all kinds of music from them, but I would definitely want them to keep playing the songs that I love by them. I remember REM once went through a period where they said that they weren't going to play anything earlier than their album Green or something like that, and I thought that was the dumbest thing to do.”

Weezer will be playing the following dates:

Sunday 13 January - Entertainment Centre, Brisbane QLD
Wednesday 16 January - Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 19 January - Entertainment Centre, Sydney NSW
Wednesday 23 January - Perth Arena, Perth WA