In the previous entry, I looked back on Nevermind and it's influence on me in the earliest stages of my adolescence on the 20th anniversary of its release. Though it won't get nearly as much attention, just as seminal and important of a record was released 5 years later, Weezer's Pinkerton.
Like Nirvana and Nevermind, Pinkerton was Weezer's second album, though their stories could not be more disparate. Nevermind was a polished, relatively expensive production of a record, coming after their famously cheap ($600!) first album, Bleach. Weezer's first album, the note-perfect self-titled "blue" album, was slick, produced by a famous musician in the same studio that Jimi Hendrix recorded in, but Pinkerton was dissonant, cranky and self-produced. And despite this seeming reversal of fortune, these two bands are inextricably tied in my life and in history.
For all intents and purposes, Weezer and Nirvana never existed at the same time. Kurt Cobain took his life on April 5, 1994 and Weezer's debut album wasn't released until a month later. Kurt's death had what was probably the strongest affect any single event had on my life at that point. I was nearly 15 and Nirvana was the first "thing" to which I had belonged that I cared about. Like many people, I was a member of the church of Nirvana and when its messiah decided that he no longer wanted to be a part of this world, it left me with the first real feeling of loss I had experienced. So it was in this post-Kurt time that, in a desperate search for the remainder of Nirvana's music, that I first discovered Weezer on the DGC Rarities compilation record.
And what better music to fill that void? Incorporating all of the loud/quiet/loud dynamics with easier-to-decipher lyrics and even stronger pop melodies, Weezer was a band that seemed custom made for the next stage of my adolescence. For where Nirvana had succeeded in making me feel cool, Weezer had made it okay that I really wasn't. Here was a band singing about nerdy things like X-Men and Dungeons & Dragons and looking like a long-dead singer from the 1950's.
By the time Pinkerton was released, I was 17 and had made the full conversion from Nirvana to Weezer, hunting down every single and interview I could find, even purchasing the Angus soundtrack just to be able to listen to the two-minute long b-side, "You Gave Your Love To Me Softly." Unlike Nevermind, which crept up on me over a 6-month period, I was completely ready for Pinkerton and made the half-hour trek to buy it on the day it came out, the first time I had ever made such an effort to get new music that immediately. Yet as ready as I was to own Pinkerton, I was not at all ready to consume it.
Like I said, this was a cranky, dissonant album. From the feedback and noise that opens the record, it was easy to see that this was not the slick, highly-produced music that I had grown to love. In all actuality, this was more Nirvana's In Utero than Nevermind and I disliked it so much instantaneously that I nearly gave up on the band, like millions of others did. It was perhaps out of sheer stubbornness that I continued to listen to the album, determined to prove to myself that Weezer was my new favorite band and that I may even like them more than I ever did Nirvana. And it took until December of that year that I finally realized that I actually did. For if Nevermind was the soundtrack of how I wanted to feel, Pinkerton sounded like how I actually felt.
Famously recorded after Rivers spent a year at Harvard during 1995 and 1996, much of Pinkerton was derived from an abandoned project originally planned for Weezer's 2nd album, a rock opera called Songs From the Black Hole, a subject that deserves its own blog entry. Though not the rock opera that was envisioned, Pinkerton is still very much a concept album, uniting varied themes about love, lost love, unrequited love, sex without love and depression over lack of love. And for someone experiencing their first real heartbreak, at an age when every bit of heartache and pain is the certain to be the worst you would ever feel in your life, here was a record that understood every bit of pain you felt and then some. This was an emotional album, and the songs were just as intense as the emotions I was feeling.
But what really made - and continues to make - Pinkerton special was its musical complexity. These were only at their most basic traditional alternative rock songs; with more atonal vocal harmonies and guitar lines that would often work as counter-melodies to each other while drifting far, far away from the main vocal melody, especially in later-written songs like "Pink Triangle" and "Falling For You". Though this comes across as spontaneous and off-the-cuff, this was a planned complexity, carefully orchestrated by Cuomo via the influence of Puccini's opera Madam Butterfly, which inspired the record musically, lyrically and gave the album its name. Part of that is owed to the production, as the band purposefully did not hire a producer in order to stay truer to their live sound.
Unfortunately, departing from the sound that had made them a platinum-selling act caused a huge backlash, and Pinkerton was labeled as a commercial and critical failure. Rolling Stone famously named it as one of the worst albums of 1996 (a labeling they would recant, giving the record a five-star review years later). Most fans of the band's hugely successful singles "Buddy Holly" and "Say It Ain't So" would migrate elsewhere, finding the more mainstream rock sound they had enjoyed in Everclear, Third Eye Blind and Semisonic. This perceived failure sent Rivers into a fit of depression and rejection of his own work and a near three-year hiatus after the tragic death of Weezer's oldest fans.
Once Weezer reformed and released new material, it never managed to capture the same intensity or naked, confessional honesty that espoused Pinkerton. Their second self-titled album in particular, commonly referred to as the "green album" overcompensates in trying to erase the entire Pinkerton era. The songs on that record are so middle-of-the-road, with such broad appeal, that every guitar solo on the album exactly mimics the main melody so as to keep the song as simple as possible and not alienate the listener. As a result, the entire record comes across as completely reactionary; as if Rivers was so dejected by the relative failure of Pinkerton's risky departure, he became obsessive with proving that he can write a simple pop song with the best of them. Once that album was successful it only fueled his fire and the trend continued, even on the band's most challenging post-Pinkerton album, their next record, Maladroit.
Because of this dedication to a more standard, over-produced pop sound, many of Weezer's core fans, even the most fervent who have stuck with them through thick and thin, have given up on the band. Yes, we were thrown a bone with the band's "Memories" tour, during which the band would play the "blue album" and Pinkerton in their entirety, but it has ended up being a formal commitment to that being "old Weezer" and the new, listener-friendly incarnation is here to stay. And who, outside of these fans, could blame them? All musicians want to make a living playing music, and if writing broad pop songs pays the bills and ensures their families will be taken care of, isn't that a more noble choice than satisfying a small, yet intense portion of your fan base? Fans may want the emotive, uncomfortable and daring Weezer back, but in doing so they're still asking a man to explore the darkest parts of his psyche when it's obvious that is the last thing he wants to do.
Whatever the present and future hold in store for the band, it's still a testament to the greatness of Pinkerton that fans want to hear more. While that will probably never come, there is still that perfect set of 10 songs to remind us of how desperate and sad we can be; an album that, even after 15 years, is still full of surprises upon every listen. And if you don't like the shitty music Weezer has been putting out since 2001, you'll always have Pinkerton.
Whatever.
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