The Strange Birth And Near Death Of Weezer

25 years after the Blue Album, Weezer’s past and present members look back at their origin story

- Brian Hiatt

In the spring of 1990, Rivers Cuomo was 19 years old, and all of his plans were coming undone. The year before, he and his high school metal band, Avant Garde, moved from suburban Connecticut to L.A., all five members crammed into the same filthy studio apartment, sleeping on the floor. Cuomo was the lead guitarist, with an arsenal of squeal-y virtuoso licks and hair so long and majestically poufed-up that it essentially served as the band’s sixth member. Flamboyance aside, Cuomo left frontman duties to an operatically inclined friend. “I could have seen myself in the NBA as easily as being a lead singer in a metal band,” Cuomo says now. “That’s just, like, unthinkable.”

Avant Garde gave themselves a slightly less embarrassing new name, Zoom, and streamlined their music, though they still sounded like a more proggy, less-fun Dokken. Cuomo tried easing up on the hair spray. None of it helped them find favor in a metal scene so overcrowded with dreamers that Sunset Strip sidewalks were lined with discarded band fliers at night. Even worse, it was all about to fade away, in tandem with the decade that spawned it.

Thirty years later, Cuomo sits in his Santa Monica home studio, which is filled with sunlight and plants, and overlooks a Zen garden outside. His wife and two kids are upstairs; his mom lives in a house he bought for her next door. He’s wearing a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, gray jeans, and no glasses, which makes him almost hard to recognize. We’re listening to his heavy chugging on Zoom’s “Street Life,” with piercing vocals from his school friend Kevin Ridel. Cuomo grins, picks up an acoustic guitar (a compact Ed Sheeran signature model, for some reason), and riffs along, chuckling when the song shifts into an oddball funk feel in the verses.