A history of my discovery – back in the day of 30 second .wav file samplers, I played the one for “Buddy Holly” on loop. I loved the song. I wanted to own it. But, concerned that it would be the typical nugget-of-gold-on-a-mound-of-trash so typical of so many full albums (I’m looking at you, Better Than Ezra) that flooded music stores in the wake of the Nirvana explosion, I actually bought the single, not the album.
This led to a couple of discoveries – 1) I had made a mistake. I loved the crappily recorded live versions of “Surf Wax America” and “My Name Is Jonas” just as much as I loved the main event, and now I knew I had to own the album. 2) I experienced that perverse pleasure of music loving, the discovery of the obscure b-side, for the first time. “Jamie”, the b-side for that single, remains to this day my favorite Weezer song. It’s basically what I imagined the Jesus & Mary Chain sounded like from reading the reviews of Psychocandy – a pretty ‘50s singalong melody about a girl that sounds like it’s being played inside a tornado. I learned later that the song was recorded as part of someone’s graduate school project in sound engineering (details fuzzy), and it sounds like it. The guitars sound like a thousand amplified basses, all being played through a fuzz pedal. It’s glorious, and remains so.
I snapped up the S/T album and devoured it. Obviously, it’s great. It was then, and it remains so. The chief accomplishments of the album are sonic and lyric: sonically, it balances perfectly on the delicate fulcrum between sugar-sweet pop melodies (and delivery – Rivers Cuomo is a talented singer, a crucial component of the band’s appeal), and sledgehammer guitar fury – both the roaring 4/4 drive of the twin-guitar rhythm section and the Winger-meets-the-Pixies guitar solos. Lyrically, Rivers works a masterful variation on one of the definitive rock variations – the scorned geek. Backing those gorgeous melodies and venomous crunch is a boy/man that’s been rejected by the ladies, one that looks like Buddy Holly, one that plays a mean game of D&D, one that is holed up his garage trying to put a band together so he can tell the world just how thoroughly it’s done him wrong.
And, then, the horror. The third album. Lyrics, once sharp, insightful, personal; now dull, generic, unmemorable. The sound – no guitar solos. No longer tuned down half-a-step for that gravel crunch. The songs, that most crucial of components, the songs were just terrible. Actual bad songs. Trash. Songs I would never in a million years want to hear more than once. One line, just to pluck from many: “Open your heart and let the good stuff out”. What? What the hell? Who was this Stepford Wives version of my favorite band? I had no idea that Matt Sharp was so important to the quality of Weezer’s songs, but maybe I should have been after hearing the highs of some of his Rentals material. I felt genuinely betrayed. A band that I had wanted to return I now wished had gone on permanent hiatus.
It makes me appreciate all those diehard Rolling Stones fans, the ones who must have realized at some point in the ‘80s that their heroes had peaked.a while ago, and that while Exile In Main Street will endure, the current iteration of the band is mostly going to crank out forgettable crap. The titans of the ‘60s and ‘70s already had their peaks and declines frozen into a coherent discography/narrative – Weezer was the first band in which I experienced that rollercoaster personally, viscerally, for myself. Having read about the Replacements sad decline, and the Clash, and Zeppelin, and all the rest, here was the painful lived experience.
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