Weezer at the Vera Project Weezer's hootenanny at the Vera Project on Saturday was their fourth on a short West Coast tour, following Phoenix, Portland, and San Francisco. In each city, Weezer's Rivers Cuomo, Brian Bell, and Scott Shriner were joined by fans (wrangled via radio contests) who would bring their own instruments to their city's designated venue to play and record half a dozen songs with the band.
At 6:00 p.m., eager fans are gathered outside Vera, sorted into groups based on instrument—guitars, percussion, strings, wind—and waiting to be seated and given their scores and instructions. An hour later, the show room of Vera is laid out like an orchestra, with Cuomo—wearing a Weezer shirt, a Weezer jacket, and a Weezer cap pulled down low over his face (not to mention shorts and kneesocks)—as conductor, surrounded by a half circle of seated acoustic-guitar players; Bell is surrounded by strings, Shriner by brass. Various other instruments—oboe, bassoon, accordion, gong, stand-up bass, melodica, didgeridoo, congas, xylophone—are scattered throughout the space. The crowd is a pretty diverse mix, from gawky teenage violin prodigies to old Folklife drum jammers. Several members of local power-pop bands are on hand, including players from the Lashes, Schoolyard Heroes, Speaker Speaker, and Natalie Portman's Shaved Head. Everyone looks pretty thrilled.
The session is being recorded for airing on The End, and before the campfire jam can begin, some arrangements have to be sorted out. What instrument will make the "chicken noise" on "Pork & Beans"? "Is that an oboe or a bassoon?" asks Cuomo. The recording engineer in charge tells everyone to get "real quiet, this is a proper recording session," and then the assembled band begins to play. A kid near me on the balcony shouts a "Hey" out of time and shrinks, face flashing red in embarrassment. Cuomo leaves the guitar work to the band, holding a mic in one hand and leaning into his vocals. "Pork & Beans" is a pretty weak Weezer song—although it's not bad if you can just ignore the abysmal lyrics—but even it sounds genuinely great given this big-band treatment. The engineer needs another take, faster this time, with more vocals on the chorus and less cowbell (no Christopher Walken, this guy).
It goes on this way, with Cuomo and Shriner working out arrangements of each song on the fly ("What's a neat way to start?" "Can we get some good shaker players by that mic?"), the rest of the songs mostly requiring only one take each. Cuomo is generous with praise: "Someone in the horn section was doing some sweet harmonies." "That accordion sounds epic." (That would be Jacob Hoffman on French horn and Nate Mooder on accordion, of course.) After a run-through of Radiohead's "Creep," Shriner instructs the band to play the "PG version" ("you're so very special"), asking, "Do you wanna be on the radio or not?" The band loses the groove after the first chorus and tries it again (if you've ever watched a Seattle crowd try to keep time clapping along at a show, you know our city has a bit of a rhythm problem). For "Beverly Hills," Shriner instructs the girls on back-up vocals to sing "real sexy on the 'gimmie gimmies,' like you're using your female powers to get something." He's a perfect dirtbag foil to Cuomo's carefully cultivated nerd.
It's a slow process working all the arrangements out, and the six songs end up taking maybe an hour and a half. The tightly packed show room becomes stifling hot about halfway through. The thrill of playing with Weezer comes up against the tedium of the recording process. Not surprisingly, the hootenanny set includes some well-loved older material such as "Say It Ain't So," "Island in the Sun," and "El Scorcho."
There are basically two takes on What the Hell Happened to Weezer. One is that nothing happened to Weezer; you just got old. This rebuke holds that were you an impressionable 15 years old now, like you were back when you first heard the Blue Album, then you would have loved Maladroit or Make Believe or the new return to monochromania, the Red Album. This argument, of course, is bullshit.
The other is that Weezer fell off—and hard—after Pinkerton. The initially cold critical reception of that album's intimate confessions, this theory goes, taught frontman Cuomo entirely the wrong lessons, primarily that it's better to be popular than good, better to be a pop star than an artist. Hence the Green Album's gentle sunshine-brightened Blue Album rehash and the diminishing returns since. Hence the band mistaking YouTube hits for acclaim, as painfully illustrated by the 15-seconds-of-internet-fame-mining video for the apathetic pop-chart complaint of "Pork & Beans." (Indeed, the Red Album's lyrical "boo-yahs" suggest that Cuomo might be confusing the site's semiliterate comments-thread chatter with actual writing.)
Still, even with the heat, the tedium, and the terrible new album, the hootenanny was a rare treat, possibly the coolest event The End has ever put on, and everyone there was smiles and cheers the whole time, right up to the final "It's a wrap." 
