On Loving Weezer [2]
[cont.]
Pinkerton
1996, DGC Records, Prod: Weezer
Rivers Cuomo doesn’t want to be a rockstar.
Rivers Cuomo has only ever wanted to be a rockstar.
With the enormous success of The Blue Album, Weezer did as successful bands do and toured. Heavily. For a couple of years.
Rivers didn’t have fun. In fact, he kind of hated fame and fortune and the girls and playing shows every night and playing the same ten songs every night.
Depressed and wanting to get away from it all he sat down to write some new songs. He went to Harvard to study classical composition and decided that the next album was going to be a sci-fi rock opera called Songs from the Black Hole.
Which may not have been what you expected here.
Ultimately, recording the album was abandoned. Why? Well, the prevailing theory is that the sound and themes to the Rentals album Return of the Rentals released in 1995. Cause that was Matt Sharpe’s band.
Honestly, Songs from the Black Hole is one of those great what if moments in music. What if this was Weezer’s second album? Would it have been successful? If it was, would it have provided a different direction for Weezer? Would Matt Sharpe have stayed in the band? If Pinkerton doesn’t happen, then what does power pop sound like through the late 90s and early 00s?
It’s actually a bit of a banger of an album, all things told. Through the release of B-side and rarities albums by Geffen, a lot of Rivers’ demos for tracks over the years have made their way to the public (plus Weezer fans have always been very good at collecting multiple versions of demos since the 90s). Some of the tracks would be transposed into the Pinkerton sessions. Hence, the ability to recreate the album.
Look, even if you don’t think much of the album (and that means you are silly because ‘Long Tim Sunshine’, ‘Devotion’, ‘I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams’ are worth the price of entry alone) the opener ‘Blast Off!’ fucking slaps.
So, the album went unfinished and Rivers was at Harvard and feeling increasingly isolated.
One of the odd things that needs to be known is that Rivers was born with one leg shorter than the other. Being flush with cash and not needing to be on the road presently, he got leg extension surgery on the shorter leg (which is one of those surgical procedures that if you find out what is involved makes you want to vomit from sheer grizzliness).
Now hopped up on painkillers, not able to move, increasingly depressed, Rivers was listening to a lot of opera (cause, sure) and in particular Madama Butterfly (cause, sure).
All this mixed together to form a soup that would result in Rivers and Weezer writing just an aggressively unfriendly, tragically longing, almost hateful album.
This is just about the nicest song on the album.
If I said that The Blue Album was like fingerprints for me, Pinkerton is like drawing breath.
I know every inch of this album from start to finish. I know that at the start of ‘The Good Life’ Matt says “Yeah, check me” in a way that is almost sub audible, and even when the volume is down on the track I still hear it internally, even if I can’t actually hear it. The starts of songs are the ends the songs that came before them, to a point that I can’t put any song on this album on a playlist or mix tape because I can’t hear them in isolation. This is the album where learnt the purpose of an album versus a collection of songs.
So ingrained in my being is the totality of this album, my neural pathways shaped and hardened by the tracks, that when my kids challenged me to sing it all from start to finish a few weeks back (they’re going through a Weezer phase at the moment), I could do it easily. Despite not having properly listened to the album in some time. Though I will admit the opening track required some deft censorship on my part to make it kid friendly.
I remember a conversation with an older friend of mine about Flood by They Might Be Giants. His argument was that you can’t really be a fan of an album unless you were there, man. If I’m being generous, he was arguing that albums are artifacts of their time and so to really understand an album you needed to hear it in the context in which it was released.
Which is kind of moronic (“Hey kid? I hear you like The Beatles. Well fuck you, you weren’t born in the 60s.”) However, I do think there is something that our personal context of when we first encounter a work (whether album, film, book, whatever) is consequential of how we respond to it. Yes, we may not have insight into the social context that lead to its creation but we know our own context that we bring to the work.
And Pinkerton happened at pretty much the perfect time for me. After stumbling across “El Scorcho” in early 1997, I consumed the album in rapid order. I loved The Blue Album but this was something else.
1997 saw me as a 15 year old nerd. I didn’t have many friends. I liked comics when other kids were growing out them. I did well in school. I loved reading. I liked music but I didn’t like the music the cool kids liked. I was good at sports but not so good that it made up for being a massive nerd. I had crushes that went nowhere. My skin was terrible. I was weird looking with my big ears and nose and bad skin and skinniness (all things which, skinniness aside, I have generally grown into). At best I was invisible in high school, at worst I was a target.
So Pinkerton was like listening to someone narrating my life. Longing, rawness, emotion, guitar fuzz. It hit me in a way that music hadn’t hit me before. It was the high that I have forever been chasing since (nothing quite like the mania of a crazed music addict). There are times that I have felt that again, the way the crowd sings out “hello” on the Live on Two Legs version of ‘Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town”, the first time I really heard ‘The End’ on Abbey Road, there have definitely been moments but they have been rare compared to the experience of listening to Pinkerton.
To this day, ‘El Scorcho’ is my favourite song of all time, and I’m only partly joking when I say to people that I want it played at my funeral.
Which is all to say that it is difficult for me to be objective about this album.
In many ways, Pinkerton is the shadow of The Blue Album. Right from the first second, the polished production is just gone. Where The Blue Album hid it’s depths in a candy coating of gloss, Pinkerton comes roaring out of the gate with a howl, feedback and guitars so fuzzy that you almost wonder if you’ve put The Jesus and Mary Chain on by mistake.
That sound carries through out the album, only dropping away for the acoustic strumming of ‘Butterfly’ as the closer of the album. Even there, while ‘Only In Dreams’ was a soaring epic lone song, twinged with some hopelessness, ‘Butterfly’ is its opposite. The dreams are gone, instead the character is left to seek forgiveness of the reality of what they have carried out.
Guitars aside, the album is essentially a thematic concept album based on Madama Butterfly. That idea of a rock opera not really leaving Rivers at that point. Mixed with Rivers’ frustration with being a newly minted rockstar and his inability to find love, it all comes together incredibly well. Contrast that with WE by Arcade Fire (an album I enjoy but isn’t great) which is so much Win Butler going “check me name dropping an early 20th century Russian sci-fi classic… now watch me take nothing thematically from that work and just released an average Arcade Fire album.”
For many, the core of the album is ‘The Good Life’ and ‘El Scorcho’. Like The Blue Album, the band hides the singles in the middle of the record. But extending out from there demonstrates that core is the album cresting and then falling. Certainly not in quality but in theme. From start to finish, this is a love album, or maybe a wanting-to-be-in-love-but-failing album.
Intellectually, there are things in the album that I see as an older listener that my teenage self didn’t see. There is a misogyny to a lot of the lyrical content. There is some casual racism that feels pretty bad. But there is a tension where this is from the point of view of the main character of the album, who from the first moments is not a good guy, and certainly not one to be emulated. But knowing this is Rivers essentially bleeding on wax, one does wonder how much of this reflects him rather than playing a character (future records suggest it is somewhere in between).
I find myself forgiving these elements of Pinkerton as much as I recognise them. I know part of that is what this album means to me (I sometimes wonder if this album saved my life) but part of me knows that stuff is kind of the point of the album. It’s supposed to be an ugly record. That is a feature, not a bug.
People fucking hated Pinkerton.
Sure, they may have enjoyed ’El Scorcho’ but that was about it. A song about falling for a lesbian? A song about meaningless sex? People didn’t want that.
Contemporary reviews were terrible. The album sold like shit.
The band did their best to promote it and tour it but no one really wanted it.
The strange thing is that over time, people came around to the album. While contemporary reviews may have been bad, later reviews were glowing. To the point where it is now considered one of the best albums of the 90s.
People love this album now. Future bands would point to it as a formative record for them. Critics would look back and realise they were totally wrong. To many, it is the knockout punch of the The Blue Album-Pinkerton one-two combo.
If there is an issue with that legacy, its that it happened too late.
Which isn’t to say that all those years ago I knew what I was talking about when it came to this album. But I’m not not saying that.
Then, Matt Sharpe left the band.
[cont.]