Given my predilection in this blog to discuss classic rock acts from the sixties, it would be reasonable to assume I grew up during that time frame and am just nostalgic for the music that was popular in my youth. Actually I wasn’t even born until the mid-seventies – so I thought I would try my hand at crafting some hour-long intros to a band that first became popular during my teenage years: Weezer. Granted I didn’t really get into them until I was older and their heyday had passed, but I still thought it would be a worthwhile endeavor.

Much like the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society or the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Weezer has one record that towers above the rest in terms of its significance and artistry. Unlike those other bands, Weezer’s masterpiece was only their second album. There is a reason why there are so many different podcasts devoted exclusively to Weezer. Few artists have both the highs and the lows that this act does. It provides plenty to talk about.

For the first installment of this blog series I decided to stick exclusively to those first two Weezer albums, as they both establish the band and provide the monolith under which the entire rest of their catalog has either aspired to duplicate or escape the the shadow.

Now there are those who would rank the band’s debut, the blue Weezer album, as being as good if not better than Pinkerton. And while it is pretty good — especially compared to a lot of the albums they put out after it — their debut is not nearly as deep or as passionate. Much like the early Beach Boys, there’s some novelty factor here, alongside some supremely well-constructed, upbeat, catchy pop tunes that reveal more depth than one would expect at first glance when you really dig into them.

Thanks to some gimmicky video directed by Spike Jonze, this album was huge. Not only was songwriting good, but the production by the Cars’ Ric Ocasek was smooth and polished. Also, by this point people may have been burned out by the dour realism of grunge and were looking for a version of it that was a little more fun with a sense of humor about itself. If the Seattle grunge scene was the latest incarnation of Punk, then Weezer were the inevitable, more palatable follow-up, New Wave

This may also be why when the self-produced second album came out, with its embarrassingly personal and intimate lyrics it was such a huge flop. The videos were darker and not as fun. Especially from frontman and songwriter River Cuomo. If you watch the videos from this time, you can see the rest of the band jumping around and trying to be as wacky as possible to add some levity to Rivers’s glowering. It’s like they went directly from Fun, Fun, Fun to Brian Wilson’s unable to get to be out of his bedroom period. He even managed his own version of the aborted Smile album with an half-finished rock opera called Songs From The Black Hole that was worked on intermittently between the blue Weezer album and Pinkerton.

It didn’t even feel like the band was trying to copy the Nirvana aesthetic. They were just being… weird. The title is some sort of allusion to the opera Madame Butterfly. Rivers had grown a beard, gone to Harvard, and got surgery to extend one of his legs. There were songs about being attracted to lesbians and teenage Japanese fangirls. Writing about how they were tired of sex and even about how they weren’t any fun any more. It is a dark, disturbing record. It pretty much killed their career dead. The critics hated it. No one bought it. The presidents of their fan club died in an auto wreck on the way to a gig. The bassist quit the band, and managed to have a hit Friends of P with his new group, The Rentals. Pretty much everything was over for Weezer.

Except…

People slowly started coming around on Pinkerton. It was nakedly and unashamedly honest. Almost brutal. It wasn’t the happy, fun Weezer people were used to, but it wasn’t the angry, angsty sound of grunge either. It was something altogether new. Something that would later become labelled as Emo. There was an underground cult starting to grow around this record, and while Weezer had been on hiatus pretty much since that record flopped so spectacularly, their fanbase was beginning to re-build.

The only problem is that, while everyone else was slowly warming up to Pinkerton, Rivers was becoming more and more disgusted, disdainful, and downright embarrassed of the album that would eventually bring them to their comeback in the following century. But that is a story for the next week’s installment.

To listen to us discuss Pinkerton in all its messed-up glory on the podcast, click HERE