Trivia / Weezer

• Artist Disillusionment: Rivers Cuomo has shown it in several interviews, and it's essentially the theme behind "Across the Sea" on Pinkerton (in the guise of a reply to a fan letter from an eighteen-year-old Japanese girl). When applying to a course in Harvard he wrote this about his experiences on tour:
  Fans ask me all the time what it is like to be a rock star. I can tell that they are dreaming, as I dreamed, when I was a kid, of someday ruling the world with a rock band. I tell them the same thing I would tell any young rock-star-to-be [...] you will get lonely. You will meet two-hundred people every night, but each conversation will generally last approximately thirty seconds, and consist of you trying to convince that no, you do not want their underwear. Then you will be alone again, in your motel room. Or you will be on your bus, in your little space, trying to kill the nine hours it takes to get to the next city, whichever city it is. This is the life of a rock star.
• Ascended Fanon:
  • The lyrics (specifically the "moaning" part) of "Perfect Situation" were changed after the band noticed that fans enjoyed singing the third moan in a more upbeat fashion.
  • The cover of Hurley is a close up of actor Jorge Garcia because Rivers said he just felt happy when he looked at it.
• Black Sheep Hit: The biggest hits from The Green Album, "Hash Pipe" & "Island In The Sun", can be considered this: "Hash Pipe" is much heavier and hard-hitting than the straight-forward power pop featured on the record, while "Island In The Sun" is much Lighter and Softer in comparison to the rest of it as well (it's also the only song from Green to utilize acoustic guitars).
  • In an unusual example, the band's B-side and Songs from the Black Hole outtake "I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams" gained a massive surge in popularity after going viral on TikTok, eventually becoming one of their most streamed songs on Spotify and reappearing in setlists for the first time in eight years. This was in spite of the song not only never appearing on an album but also being one of the rare tracks without Rivers on lead vocals, instead having guest vocalist Rachel Haden on lead and Rivers providing backing vocals near the song's end.
• Colbert Bump: Part of the reason for the band’s initial popularity was the “Buddy Holly” music video being included by default on Windows 95. The band were irritated by the deal initially, due to it being done behind their backs, and as none of them owned computers at the time, were initially unaware of how big of a deal it was.
  Pat Wilson: I was furious because at the time I was like, ‘How are they allowed to do this without our permission?’ Turns out it was one of the greatest things that could have happened to us. Can you imagine that happening today? It’s like, there’s one video on YouTube, and it’s your video.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: The iTunes Store’s description for The Teal Album states that the band covered The Monkees’ “I’m a Believer” for Shrek. Of course, this is Smash Mouth, not Weezer. It's not too out-there a mistake to make: Smash Mouth's cover is more heavily associated with Shrek as a franchise, but Weezer also covered the song for Shrek Forever After. It's even possible that they were using "Shrek" to refer to the franchise as a whole, except the same sentence also mentions Cars 2 instead of just Cars, so if so, they weren't being very consistent.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Due to the initial poor reception, the band all but threw Pinkerton into Canon Discontinuity for years, until it seemed that Rivers Cuomo was the only person left who disliked the album. He would later mellow out about it later and change his mind, even playing Pinkerton in its entirety and admitting he felt validated and happy at seeing how the album has become so beloved.
  • Toto keyboardist Steve Porcaro reported that Rivers winced at the news that their "Africa" cover became so big, as well as guitarist Steve Lukather reporting that Rivers refused to discuss the song with him, indicating that he wasn't happy about how big their little joke cover became.
  • If "Back to the Shack" is anything to go by, the band regards Raditude poorly. In addition, they don't play any songs off of the album live anymore other than "I Want You To".
  • The band wasn't happy with how the music video for "El Scorcho" came out; Rivers and director Mark Romanek argued constantly over the final cut, with the two of them editing their own versions, which lead to a combined version that aired that neither were happy with. Patrick Wilson overall called the video idea "lame" and the only version that's been officially reuploaded by Weezer since is the Romanek cut; The Rivers and televised cuts have only since been reuploaded by fan channels.
• Cut Song: "Cardigan Disaster", a song Rivers played at some solo acoustic shows, was at one point slated to appear on The Black Album - they recorded a full band version during the sessions but left it off the album. Rumor has it this was related to the unexpected chart success of their Cover Version of "Africa" - they wanted to release "Cardigan Disaster" as a single and remake the clip for "Undone" as its music video, which they ultimately did with "Africa" instead.
  • Even after the Songs From The Black Hole concept album was abandoned, "Longtime Sunshine", one of the songs intended for that album, was still in consideration for the last song on Pinkerton - Rivers wrote "Butterfly" later in the sessions and that became the closing track instead.
  • Make Believe notably had several fully finished songs cut from the album that wound up being dubbed The Fallen Soldiers by fans, including an early version of the Raditude song Love is the Answer. All that was heard of them for years were several very low quality snippets played by webmaster Karl Koch on a stream, until finally the tracks were released in demo form on Alone IX
  • Everything Will Be Alright in the End had a good supply of cut songs showcased within Alone XI, though the most notable may be Rules of Life, which had undergone several incarnations of different lyrics played at both live shows before ultimately being cut.
• Executive Meddling: "Beverly Hills" started as a fairly straight and optimistic song about how the singer genuinely wishes he could join that society but got mutated into something much more bitter and sarcastic-sounding.
  • The band wanted to produce Blue themselves, but Geffen Records pushed them to get an outside producer, so they settled for Ric Ocasek. When Green came around the label also said no since their self-produced Pinkerton had tanked commercially and critically, so they once again brought in Ocasek.
  • The band initially wanted to use a collage of sampled dialogue for "Undone - The Sweater Song" playing on the theme of contrasting extremely optimistic and extremely depressed dialogue. Geffen nixed the idea at the last minute since they weren't eager to go through a long sample clearance process, and as a replacement Matt and the band's friends, Karl Koch and Mykel Allan recorded the now-famous spoken-word dialogue. Geffen's rejection came after the sessions for the album were finished, so the dialogue was recorded in Los Angeles and had to be flown to New York to be added in during mixing.
  • Make Believe was originally meant to be much darker & melancholic, with demos released by Rivers in the form of Alone IX backing this up, but when executives from Geffen heard these initial demos, they weren't happy with the album's direction and forced the band to scrap what they had and start over.
• Follow the Leader: A Running Gag in Rivers Cuomo's Twitter feed is his making comments implying that Weezer just constantly copies other bands (especially Nirvana).
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Unlike with The Blue Album or Pinkerton's b-sides which were made widely available on their deluxe editions, The Green Album-era b-sides have not been re-released outside their initial runs, not even digitally ^note "Island In The Sun" B-Side "Oh Lisa" is the only exception, as it's available digitally as part of a 2002 WWE tie-in compilation album. Good luck finding a copy of the Japanese version and second edition of the UK version of "Island in the Sun" if you want everything from the era. Rumor has it that no Green Album Deluxe was ever released despite the album's commercial success because the masters were destroyed in the 2008 Universal Studios fire.
  • If you want to hear the Angus version of "You Gave Your Love To Me Softly", you'll have to go out and buy the film soundtrack, as it was mysteriously taken off of streaming services, and other releases of the song use the Pinkerton-era version instead. While the soundtrack album is out of print, it's relatively easy to find on eBay.
  • The Maladroit outtake "Living Without You" is only available on the international versions of the album as a bonus track, and has not seen release anywhere else.
  • The Christmas CD was only sent out to fanclub members in 2000, and the publicly released version, Weezer Winterland, was taken off of iTunes in 2008.
  • Good luck finding a copy of The Pinkerton Diaries. Only 3,000 copies were ever produced, and was never re-released, not even in eBook format. For the longest time, it was the only way to obtain a copy of Alone III, but thankfully Rivers made the demos from this CD more widely available for purchase on his website through other Alone demo compilations.
• Meme Acknowledgement: In late 2017, a 15-year-old fan started the Twitter account @weezerafrica and launched a tongue-in-cheek campaign to get the band to cover "Africa" by Toto, persistently responding to tweets from band members with requests to do the song. A positive response to one of her entreaties by Pat Wilson marked the first acknowledgment of it by the band. After a few months, they made an unannounced drop of a cover of a Toto hit, but picked "Rosanna" instead. A couple of weeks later, they did in fact release a cover of "Africa". The cover art included one of her tweets to Rivers telling him "it's about time you bless the rains down in Africa." Their version proceeded to become a huge radio hit. Then Toto responded by releasing a cover of "Hash Pipe". And then came The Teal Album.
• The Pete Best:
  • Original rhythm guitarist Jason Cropper, who was asked to leave the band during the Blue Album sessions. Accounts differ as to why. Cropper suspects some Yoko Oh No issues, since his girlfriend had become pregnant and he was giving more attention to his relationship. Matt Sharp says it was because Cropper had committed a bunch of "tiny infractions" that were negatively affecting band unity. Cropper, as the token punk guy in a band of self-professed nerds, was always an uncomfortable fit. Rivers re-recorded his guitar parts. He only earned one writing credit, for creating the acoustic intro of "My Name Is Jonas".
  • Weezer evolved out of two very short-lived earlier bands. First was Fuzz, with Cuomo, Wilson and bassist Scottie Chapman (a woman). Then Cuomo and Wilson formed Sixty Wrong Sausages, with Cropper on guitar and Pat Finn on bass.
• Reclusive Artist: Rivers himself became one during the hiatus between Pinkerton and The Green Album. As he explained in an essay he wrote for Harvard University:
  Rivers: I became more and more isolated. I unplugged my phone. I painted the walls and ceiling of my bedroom black and covered the windows with fiberglass insulation.
• Record Producer: The Cars' Ric Ocasek served as the band's producer for The Blue Album, The Green Album & Everything Will Be Alright in the End. According to Rivers, working with Ric got the best performance out of the respective band members.
• Role Reprise: Kristen Bell as Anna in the “Lost in the Woods” video for Frozen II.
• Series Hiatus: The nearly five-year gap between Pinkerton and the Green Album didn't really happen by design, but was due to several issues. The Creator Breakdown of Rivers Cuomo that famously made Pinkerton a Darker and Edgier album stayed in effect for a while, and the album's lukewarm reception sapped some of their enthusiasm. There was some internal hostility in the band, though media reports around the time tended to exaggerate it. Then toward the end of the Pinkerton tour, the Allan sisters, Mykel and Carli, who'd been longtime close friends of the band (and started the Weezer fan club) died in a car rollover traveling between Weezer shows in Denver and Salt Lake City, which severely affected the band (they cancelled one show so they could attend the funeral, where they were pallbearers). Add to all that Matt Sharp leaving, which necessitated finding another bassist, and it simply took a while before they were all ready to start recording and touring again.
• Schedule Slip: Van Weezer was originally planned to be released in May 2020, but was delayed a whole year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
• Throw It In!: The brief bit of Spoken Word in Music at the very beginning of "Falling for You" - an amplifier had started picking up interference from a radio station while recording, so the song ended up including the voice of a woman asking "Which company makes this product?" in Korean.
  • In "Mexican Fender", Pat is heard saying, "That's Truetone!" after the first lyric^note "Met her at a guitar shop on Santa Monica & 7th Street". Turns out, when he heard the song for the first time, he immediately knew which guitar shop Rivers was referring to and pointed it out before recording his drum part. A mic in the room picked this up, but the producer (Butch Walker) decided to keep it in because he found it funny.
• Trolling Creator:
  • After fans wanted them to cover "Africa" by Toto, they complied by releasing a version of Toto's..."Rosanna" but they covered "Africa" not long afterward.
  • Cuomo's very dry sense of humor and Cloudcuckoolander tendencies have led to debate over how much of his online interaction with fans is an example of this. The infamous Rivers Correspondence Board thread where Rivers (aka "ace") dismissed "Only in Dreams" as "GAY!GAY!GAY! DISNEYGAY!" was ostensibly an attempt to defend his newer material after a fan suggested it was inferior to "Only in Dreams", but he quickly resorts to Kayfabe-style over-the-topness. He claims that his brother threatened to disown him after hearing "Only in Dreams" for the first time, and proposes dropping all Blue Album songs from their concert setlist (despite his screen name being a nod to the Ace Frehley Shout-Out in "In the Garage"). A few years later, when a Harvard student reporter mentioned the incident in an interview, Rivers seemed amused by it.
    • Rivers' social media accounts tend towards playful trolling - his Twitter account frequently copy-pastes unattributed, out-of-context messages his fans sent to him rather than it being him speaking for himself. Leading to things like him tweeting ecstatically about a Saturday Night Live skit about the band soon after it aired, then claiming in a later interview he didn't see the episode in question, or seeming to tease an album's release date when he was instead quoting a fan who was asking about the release date.
• What Could Have Been: Most well-known among fans is Songs from the Black Hole, their abandoned Rock Opera. Rivers Cuomo went as far as recording a home demo version of the whole album, but it was scrapped in favor of what would become Pinkerton. Rivers claims the idea was abandoned due to a combination of his increasing doubts about the concept as well as Matt Sharp putting out The Return of the Rentals (an album heavily indebted to the Black Hole demos), which made him anxious to not be perceived as "stealing" from his bandmate. Most of the songs were either slightly adapted for Pinkerton, made B-sides or released in the Alone demo compilations.
  • Rivers had also planned to have the character Maria be voiced by Joan Wasser of The Dambuilders, but he neglected to ever mention this to Wasser.
  • Rivers had prepared an entire new batch of demos for the follow-up to Maladroit before abandoning them entirely. An essay he wrote later admitted that he was undergoing another Creator Breakdown over the fan backlash towards Green and Maladroit and his own behaviour towards them, and credited Rick Rubin with helping him by introducing him to meditation.
    • One potentially interesting demo from that period was "Mo' Beats", a Rap Rock-esque song that at one point was going to have a guest appearance from Axl Rose. Like many other songs written between Maladroit and Make Believe, the band put up a demo as a free download on the official site, so an Axl-free version is still circulating online.
  • The band almost made Hurley another Self-Titled Album, but gave up on the plan when they realised fans would just call it "the Hurley album" anyway.
  • Rapper Asher Roth wanted to sample "Say It Ain't So" for his hit song "I Love College," but couldn't secure the rights. Several remixes which combine the songs properly exist on YouTube.
  • Michel Gondry was asked to give a treatment for the "Dope Nose" video: His concept would have had the group playing their instruments and competing in a soccer match at the same time, possibly against a Mexican heavy metal band doing the same. Gondry's full treatment is in a booklet included with the DVD The Works Of Director Michel Gondry - in the treatment, he explains the inspiration was that he had been both a drummer and a soccer goalie and noticed certain similarities between the two roles (e.g. mostly being stationary and in the back while your teammates/band-mates are up front and more free to move around)
  • "My Best Friend" was at one point going to be included on the Shrek 2 soundtrack - despite it being a song they wrote before the Shrek producers had contacted them about giving a song to the film, they were asked to rewrite the lyrics to be "less Shrek-like". Ultimately, Counting Crows' "Accidentally in Love" was used in the sequence instead. In the long run, they said they were happy it didn't end up in the movie because they didn't feel the song was "finished" at the time.
  • The Green Album had a similar situation to Make Believe in that an album's worth of demos were recorded, then almost entirely scrapped: 14 of these songs appeared in set-lists for a tour during the summer of 2000 (hence receiving the fan nickname "summer songs 2000" or "ss2k"), but only one, "Hash Pipe", made the next album ^note B-Side "Brightening Day" was a demo from the same era, but was never played live. In response to fan demand, two more of the "SS2K" songs appeared on Maladroit ("Dope Nose", "Slob"), and Rivers Cuomo gave a fan-site an "official" Summer Songs 2000 digital release, consisting of ten studio demos and live soundboard recordings which were edited and re-structured to Rivers' liking.
  • Rivers Cuomo originally wanted to make both the musical style and lyrical content of "The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived" shift repeatedly, based on whatever genre/artist that section was meant to represent. For instance, the "rap" section was still going to have its boastful lyrics, but the "Slipknot" section would have had such lyrical themes as "victimization" and "physical destruction", while the lyrics to the "Nirvana" section would have been full of "sarcasm" and "indifference". He ultimately discarded this idea because it came off as too disjointed, and decided something about the song should stay consistent.
    • There was also supposed to be a video for the song, which would've reunited the band with Spike Jonze. Given the length and style shifts of the song, the possibilities for that video are very tantalizing. But Geffen decided the album had reached its sales peak and didn't really need any more promotion, so they said no.
  • Director Marcos Siega had long wanted to do a video where an artist performs on The Muppet Show, and had originally pitched the idea to Weezer for "Hash Pipe" before it finally got used for "Keep Fishin' ". Siega had also unsuccessfully pitched the concept to blink-182 and Ozzy Osbourne.
  • A group of fans missed their shot at briefly being promoted fanboys during the Green Album sessions; the band were adding overdubs to eventual B-Side "Teenage Victory Song" when Rivers decided that it needed some "gang backing vocals" - earlier in the day some fans had found the studio and gathered outside hoping to catch a glimpse of the band, so Rivers went to where they were last seen to recruit them as a choir; by this time they had apparently left.
  • According to Rivers, "Hash Pipe" could have gone to Ozzy Osbourne - in 2000, he was contacted about contributing material to a new Ozzy album; he submitted a demo version of the song, but it was ultimately passed over, so Weezer released it themselves.
  • Conversely, Rivers wrote and sang the hook to rapper B.o.B.'s hit "Magic", but he had originally conceived of it as a Weezer song before deciding to give it away. This may be why the hook to "Magic" ("I got the magic in me") is actually a recycled lyric from Weezer's "Angel And The One".
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: When the band's sophomore album Pinkerton was negatively received, they went in a Lighter and Softer direction for The Green Album, only for Pinkerton to develop a cult following. Despite this, the band refused to make a proper follow-up to Pinkerton and relegated the album to only a song or two during live shows for years due to Rivers being traumatized by the initial negative reception and poor sales of the album.
• Word of Saint Paul: Karl Koch is considered such an authority on Weezer (especially because he's known them for a year before they actually formed) that whenever Word of God is unavailable, fans usually ask him instead. This happens so often fans Punnily refer to the practice as Karlification.
• Working Title: Make Believe could have been called One Thousand Soviet Children Marching Towards the Sun (Patrick Wilson's suggestion), or Either Way I'm Fine (after a phrase that Rivers Cuomo would frequently use when asked for input about how to arrange/produce particular songs).
  • Rivers originally came up with Somebody's Daydream as a title for Pacific Daydream - Patrick suggested the latter.
• Writer Revolt: "Pork and Beans" is a Take That! against Geffen Records for trying to tell Rivers that he needs to sound more commercial.
  • It became funny in hindsight, however, since 1) Raditude happened a year later; and 2) Pacific Daydream and The Black Album would follow suit many years later.

---