Weezer’s Big Makeover!

The blond girl with the broken leg is screaming from the balcony at Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo in that cheeks-in-hands, Ed Sullivan way few rock fans now dare. It’s a beautiful, even archetypal moment, but come on — Cuomo’s onstage stylings, such as they are, are not scream bait. He’s more Rushmore than Ricky Martin in his ski vest and black-framed glasses. Standing rigid, eyes downcast, he looks like he’s trying to tell us he accidentally ran over the dog.

Down on the packed floor of Detroit’s State Theatre, the audience vibe is sweatily devotional, typical for this instantly sold-out March tour sponsored by Yahoo. An expanse of 19-year-old plumpness sways like a wheat field in a windstorm, singing along with Cuomo word for word.

Suddenly, the entire floor raises a fist. Imitating Cuomo’s best Cobain yowl, 3,500 kids shout at the ceiling, punching the air:
Like father!/Stepfather!/The son is drowning in the flood!
Night after night, during the bridge of Weezer’s 1994 hit “Say It Ain’t So,” a torch song to boozer dads, the ritual is repeated. Holy beer nuts, you think, are there any kids out there who didn’t grow up with drunk fathers? And how did Cuomo, a shy lad prone to hermitry, turn a private, even claustrophobic song into an anthem — and a public catharsis?

Actually, let’s back it up for a sec. Not to be a jerk, but since when is Weezer such a big deal anyway?

No one knows, least of all Weezer.

In a nutshell: Weezer were one of a thousand indie bands drafted in the post-Nirvana offensive. Their Geffen A&R man, Todd Sullivan, told them they’d probably sell 15,000 records. Instead, 1994’s Weezer (a.k.a. the “Blue Album”) sold more than 2 million, with three hits: “Undone — The Sweater Song,” “Say It Ain’t So” and “Buddy Holly.” Produced by Ric Ocasek, the Blue Album remains one of those tight, perfect pop debuts, condensing its influences — grunge, metal, new wave, surf — into a supersaturated, radio-friendly take on indie rock that transcends its own Gen-X irony.

Even now, Cuomo, 30, marvels at the reaction to his songs. “I thought [they] were so intimate and specific to my life, no one would ever relate to them. It’s weird to see 5,000 people singing along to a song about a sweater.”

Unfortunately, Weezer’s excellent 1996 follow-up, Pinkerton, tanked. The band suffered a cluster of personal and professional tragedies and dropped off the radar in 1997.

But instead of appearing last year as beekeepers on an episode of Where Are They Now?, Weezer reemerged in 2000 as teen-cult heroes: Buoyed by successful live shows, Weezer recorded with Ocasek last fall, completed the Yahoo tour in March and this month are set to release their keenly anticipated third record, which they’re calling the “Green Album.”

No marketing monkeys, if they played golf for 100 years, could have planned all this. Weezer’s loopy lifeline largely reflects the internal cycles of Cuomo, whom associates describe as “inspiring,” “extremely guarded,” “incredibly bright” and “functionally nuts.”

Whatever the secret may be to Weezer’s professional voodoo, it’s a mystery even to Cuomo.

Backstage after the Detroit concert, Cuomo smiles sweetly, shrugs off a compliment about the show and glances at the floor.

Cuomo is shy, uncomfortable in groups — and lousy at masking it. (“It’s easy to be honest when you don’t say anything,” he quips.) He speaks with a croaky drawl, the faintest lisp, echoes of a stutter and, occasionally, a tiny squeak.

“Want to see what I do every night?” he asks conspiratorially, and we set off on a tour of the theater, beginning upstairs, outside a room of female teenage fans.

Cuomo stops just outside the open door. Then something strange happens. As a fan approaches him, Cuomo bows at the waist with a palm raised, as if overcome with stomach pains, and begins backing away, mumbling, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

And then we’re flying down the stairs. Manic laughter and running footfalls echo in the stairwell. Grimacing at himself, Cuomo yells over his shoulder, “How awkward was that?”

Awkward doesn’t cut it. It looked like an involuntary shutdown.

The tour continues onstage, where Cuomo checks in with the video operator, lighting director and merchandise vendor. They smile at him, and their shop talk has the easy cadence of an ongoing dialogue. (Cuomo rides mostly on the crew bus — he says he needs time to discuss the stage production.) “If you just get back on the bus and play video games, you feel like you’re wasting your life,” he says.

Does he enjoy seeing cities on tour?

“I just go from the bus to the venue and back to the bus,” he says plainly.

We hike up to the balcony to check out the view, chatting about his first band, Fury, formed at age 13 with best friend Justin Fisher in Storrs, Connecticut. “I thought if we only did Kiss songs we would be huge,” he says, a little proudly.

From the balcony, the stage looks a mile away. Taking it in, Cuomo sighs. “I wish I could see us play. But I never will.” He adds lightly, “And when I turn to look at myself in the video screens, I just see the back of my head.”

Cuomo was, in many ways, the quintessential child of the ’70s: In early grade school, his hippie parents (who named his brother Leaves) split up. Around that time, Cuomo also had the epiphany that “directed the course of my life”: A little girl played him his first Kiss record. Cuomo spent most of grade school in a Buddhist ashram in the woods of Connecticut with his family (now including a stepfather). At age 12 he moved yet again, to Storrs, where his folks founded a yoga-and-massage school. (This marriage ended several years later.) “Moving was a big shock for Rivers,” says Fisher. “An ashram can be a really supportive environment. Then suddenly you’re thrown into school with grades and kids swearing at you,” he says. “Not that I think he’s figured out how to deal on a social level even now.”

Together, Cuomo and Fisher forged a brave new teen identity: metal nerds. At 15, Fisher tried pot at a party. The next day, Cuomo and band sat Fisher down at the kitchen table. “It was like an inquest,” Fisher recalls. “They told me that if I wanted to go on with that kind of behavior I couldn’t stay with the group.”

Cuomo’s willful leadership over his band wouldn’t change much with Weezer. Drummer Pat Wilson compares Weezer’s intraband dynamics to those of the Pixies, whose leader, Frank Black, was emotionally distant and hated to share songwriting. “I just read an article about them,” Wilson says. “I was sad because I saw so many similarities.”

After the Blue Album (for which Wilson cowrote three songs), Cuomo told his bandmates, all songwriters, that he wouldn’t use their material. In response, they dived into side projects: Wilson in the Special Goodness; guitarist Brian Bell in the Space Twins; and former bassist Matt Sharp in the Rentals.

“Rivers wants to be a benevolent dictator,” says Wilson. So much for team spirit, huh? “We had a tenuous grasp on that concept, but [Weezer] became more the product of one man.

“We’re fortunate to be able to play [Cuomo’s music] and dig it,” Wilson admits. “But at the same time, I feel like if things had gone differently, we would be a much bigger band than we are.”

“All my life I had wanted to be a rock star,” Cuomo says quietly the day after the Detroit show. “I had worked very hard to become a rock star. And finally it had happened, and it wasn’t what I had dreamed. It wasn’t like being in Kiss.”

And he wasn’t Ace Frehley. At the peak of Weezer’s improbable success, Cuomo took a powder: retreating to Harvard University, he grew a beard and walked with a cane and a medieval-looking brace screwed into his femur (treatment for a short right leg). “I looked like a crippled, homeless rabbi,” he says, “and I wondered why no one talked to me.” But Cuomo was setting an elaborate trap for his muse: This miserable period birthed over half the songs on Pinkerton.

Thematically inspired by Madame Butterfly, Pinkerton was a major artistic step for Weezer, and Cuomo’s declaration of self, ricocheting between sexual swagger and heartsickness. When it flopped, Cuomo recalls, “it felt like a personal attack because it was such a personal record. I put it out and was basically saying, ‘OK, this is me; take it or leave it.’ And everybody left it.”

Pinkerton’s rejection made a depressing backdrop for more horrific losses. After a 1997 summer tour with No Doubt, “everything just fell apart,” Cuomo says. “We talked about trying to fight onward, but it just seemed like the gods were against us, and we’d better give up while we were still alive.”

On July 9, 1997, Weezer’s friends and fan-club founders, sisters Mykel and Carli Allan, were traveling between Weezer shows when they were killed in a car crash with their sibling, Trysta. As Weezer roadie and “fifth member” Karl Koch wrote in an open letter to fans: “It is beyond words, beyond reason, how…cruelly unfair it feels.”

The last show of the Pinkerton era was a benefit in Los Angeles for the girls’ family at which Cuomo sang an acoustic version of “Mykel and Carli,” a song he had written for them three years earlier.

“I had two best friends.…/Till the school bus came/And took my friends away.…/Now I’m left alone at home/To sit and think all day.”

Over the next year, Cuomo spent time in Boston and L.A., and bassist Sharp quit in February 1998, apparently tired of living by Cuomo’s clock. Weezer attempted recording, and Mikey Welsh replaced Sharp that April, but Cuomo was having trouble writing.

Finally, in 1999, Cuomo retreated once again. “He didn’t go outside and do stuff,” says friend Todd Sullivan. “He had been playing a lot of soccer — boom, he gave that up.” Hunkering in his bedroom with handwritten charts of Nirvana songs, Cuomo searched in vain for a formula to catalyze his writing.

Sadly, Cuomo didn’t realize Weezer’s expanding fan base was geeking out on the Web, sharing MP3 bootlegs and craving a comeback. “What did I know?” Cuomo asks. “I was sitting in my apartment all by myself with no computer, no telephone, no TV. I had no contact with the outside world. The only thing I knew was what was in my head.”

Last spring, a lucrative offer for some Japanese concerts helped pull Cuomo out of his funk. And Weezer discovered they’d become unwitting heroes of a burgeoning underground movement: emocore (emotional hardcore), an evolution of indie rock and straight-edged punk with roots in the Promise Ring and Fugazi. “I don’t really know what emo means,” says Cuomo. “But apparently I had something to do with it.”

By now, it’s no surprise that Cuomo’s still worried, fearing fans won’t accept the new album, which is more lyrically neutral than anything Weezer’s done. “People expect me to be extremely sensitive and emotional, insecure, conflicted — ”

But, well, isn’t he?

“No. I feel — well, whatever I feel, I don’t feel like showing it. I don’t want to wear my heart on my sleeve.”

No telling how long Cuomo’s “Mr. Anti-emo” phase will last — he still doesn’t seem entirely comfortable in public, but he doesn’t foresee another major retreat, either: “I don’t need to go back into hibernation mode. I’m not a kid anymore,” he says. “Now’s the time I should be kicking ass.”