Rivers Cuomo: Weezer’s Invisible Man
Radical extremes are what Cuomo has made his life from, and in the context of his history, the Either Way I’m Fine era isn’t all that outrageous. It even makes some sense given his childhood, which was spent on ashrams – first at the Zen Center in upstate New York and, after his father left the family when he was five (he eventually settled in Germany for a while as a suffragan bishop in a Pentecostal church), at “Woodstock guru” Swami Satchidananda’s Yogaville commune in Connecticut. Everyone was a vegetarian, and no one raised his voice or cursed. Cuomo didn’t like it much. He declared himself a metalhead at eleven and started playing Kiss covers with the neighborhood kids. “I was only interested in Slayer and Metallica then,” says Cuomo. “I still love that music, but now I have so much appreciation for what my parents’ generation did for opening up our country to Eastern philosophy and raising me like that. I feel so lucky.”
Some of Cuomo’s phases make a little less sense, though. Like when he followed the blockbuster success of Weezer’s first album, Weezer, also known as the Blue Album, which went platinum in 1995, by getting his right leg broken: The leg was forty-four millimeters shorter than his left, and in order to make them equal, a metal cage was affixed to his right thigh; every day he’d tighten some screws on it to pull the leg a little longer. Or when, shortly thereafter, he shelved rock stardom to pursue an undergraduate degree at Harvard, studying there from 1995 to 1997, when Weezer’s second album, Pinkerton, was released (he resumed his studies last fall and now has one semester left). When that record proved less critically and commercially successful than the Blue Album, Cuomo went back into his shell. Living in a Culver City apartment building under a Los Angeles freeway, he put fiberglass insulation over the windows and hung black sheets over the insulation. Then he painted all the walls black, disconnected his phone and spent a lot of time with his pet gecko.
Punishing himself has always seemed like a good bet to Cuomo, and you only have to look at his perpetually hunched shoulders and balled-up palms to realize that the assignations he keeps with himself are brutal. He gets off on deprivation. Cuomo doesn’t own a car, even though he lives mostly in L.A. (“I don’t have a parking space,” he says, by way of explanation). He rarely listens to music. But one song he cued up recently was Kiss’ “Goin’ Blind”: “Little lady, can’t you see/You’re so young and so much different than I/I’m ninety-three, you’re sixteen/Can’t you see I’m goin’ blind?”
“I’m so moved by those lyrics,” says Cuomo. “I can’t believe they came up with that.”
As far as his lyrics are concerned, Cuomo has long protested that Weezer’s songs are not funny or ironic or anything other than a reflection of his own anguished state. Most of the songs on the current album are about things that happened to him. “Pardon Me” was written after he attended a meditation course in which the teacher told him to repeat over in his mind “I seek pardon from all those who have harmed me in action, speech or thought.” “Freak Me Out” is about a spider, says Bell. “Beverly Hills” is about, well, how Cuomo feels about Beverly Hills. “I could live in Beverly Hills, sure,” he says, meaning he could afford it easily. “But I couldn’t belong there.”
Cuomo doesn’t seem to belong anywhere, really. The only thing more uncomfortable than Cuomo alone is Cuomo around people, even his own band. Everyone walks on eggshells, and conversation takes on a stilted tone, like there’s a dignitary in the room. Some dialogue: “Whassup, Dude!” says Weezer’s bassist, Scott Shriner, 39. “Nice haircut!”
“I didn’t get a haircut,” says Cuomo.
“You didn’t, Dude?” says Shriner. “It’s looking good, Dude!”
Weezer were formed in L.A. in 1992; after Cuomo’s high school hair-metal band, Avant Garde, the one he moved West with, broke up. The original members (Shriner is the third bassist; the first sued the band for royalties, and the second ended up institutionalized before chucking music for art) were introduced by a co-worker of Cuomo’s at Tower Records on the Sunset Strip. No one had a car. For a while, they lived in a house in Hollywood together, with lawn furniture inside and no refrigerator. “Rivers’ look back then was ‘sporty metal guy,'” says Wilson. “He’d eat a piece of pizza and then stick the crust in his fanny pack. Every once in a while he’d pull it out, take a bite and put it back in.”