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.” 