[Reclaimed Timbre – September 3^rd, 2000]

My Weezer ride from triumph to tragedy has consisted within the mean, median, and mode of any representative sample of past Weezer listeners. The standard deviation corrects for the weird outliers, and the results are a downward trajectory in my pop rock regression analysis.

Weezer has been both the shining pride and the problematic bane of 90s grunge and grunge-adjacent genres.

…

In the year of our lord 2000, my friends Aaron and Dave and I scored tickets to see Weezer at the Metro. Those guys both worked at Super Kmart, and they had a mystery co-worker, Dan Wren who was also attending. Dan Wren invited us to tag along with him on the train. He wasn’t like us. He was a cool dork guy with thick glasses who reminded me of Rivers Cuomo.

Up to that point I had never taken the train on my own to the city. Dan Wren knew the route with the confidence of a garage band veteran, and we placed our allegiance in him as our guru. Our journey leader.

Having a plethora of spare time yet a dearth of knowledge lends itself to high inefficiency. I was lucky to have a random Dan Wren as a shaman. It was a pivotal voyage in slow burn profundity, and we graciously handed him our naïve vulnerability – a tradeoff for the Glengarry leads.

We drove from Kankakee to the University Park Metra station. After folding up the dollar bill to manually insert into the parking thing, our energy buzzed through our preppy Doc Martin loafers as we descended the ramp to the train stop platform.

Cracking wise about kids who might potentially be wearing Weezer shirts to the Weezer show, we rode the train. Watching the tangerine streaked azure over the south suburbs, due North we coasted to what was then Randolph Street Station. Following Dan Wren like a pack of geek lemmings we hiked up the bowels of subterranean downtown, hit the sidewalk, and galloped west on Randolph toward the Red Line stop.

I had zero clue what the Red Line was and had never ridden the CTA before in my life, even with my parents. My only knowledge of its lore was from the film The Blues Brothers. At that point in the trek, I might as well have been on the N Train to Coney Island. I couldn’t have told you if Abe Lincoln was shot or hit with a pineapple, let alone which direction the Metro was. All hope was entrusted to Dan Wren.

The rickety Red Line limped up through the city as night fell, away from The Loop, curving over unrecognizable neighborhoods I would one day get to explore in great detail. The train screeched to a halt at the Wrigleyville stop at Addison. We got off and shadowed Dan Wren down the escalator and we walked past Wrigley Field.

I miss old Wrigleyville. That janky-ass McDonalds adjacent the grimy Taco Bell. That 7-11 on the corner where my friend Mark Mitchell once gifted a homeless guy an orange, only to have the guy fire it across the fucking parking lot in disdain. I would duck the citrus comet that easily matched the impressive speed of a Rick Sutcliff curve ball.

Beautification efforts wouldn’t come to Wrigleyville for another literal twenty years after a rich family would buy up multiple lots. In autumn of 2000, it still smelled like Old Style, pee, and Old Style-infused pee. Sporadic garbage billowing across the alleyways. Just the grit of the “L” over some dumpsters and rats scurrying through the sewer runoff. The rats are still there beneath Sheffield Ave.

We walked up Clark Street, eyes darting around in excitement. Peter Pan’s Star Catchers in Neverland, spying hobos and beat up cars. As the fabled Metro grew like as oasis on the horizon, Dan Wren took a quick detour off to the right and just like an experienced pro blurted out, “okay we need to first hit Wrigleyville Dogs”.

Wrigleyville Dogs?! What was this guy not aware of?!

This dude not only knew the passages through Pleasure Island, but he had already established an iconic Chicago hot dog stand across from the venue? As far as I knew he had been there one hundred times. A seasoned expert. It would forever be engrained as a staple for me, years before I would ever live around the neighborhood.

…

The opening band Dynamite Hack was in my mind, a novelty group. “Hack” being an appropriate label, they got their cheap fifteen minutes with an appropriated rock version of NWA’s “Boys N the Hood”.

After wading patiently in that muck of a bummer, we had to then wait another thirty minutes for our dream band to emerge. Through the pre-smoking ban, Marlboro smoke filled room we saw the silhouettes of Weezer enter the stage.

When the pink light blared through the cigarette haze, the initial song from that set was “My Name is Jonas”. The first riff hit as a loud wall of sound and the energy at the Metro was a profound concentration of exhilaration like nothing I have seen since. I remember the crowd going berserk, squeezing forward to a dense mash of limbs and sweaty emo band tee shirts. Every lyric being yelled back at the musicians in a vacuum tube of elation. Nobody there had seen them play in three years, if ever, and undoubtedly every person there was a rabid fan of the first two albums.

The legend and superstition of the cult of Weezer coincided with the reality of bearing witness to the sounds playing out in real time. A rush of delirium. It has to have been the only band I’ve seen at that place that I learned about from MTV. ⁽¹⁾

That initial song that sparked the set is what stays with me. Really, the only songs to exist were tracks from the first two records and all the beloved B-sides which they played three or four of. The entire set was pristine, and the liveliness and vitality never wavered. Melodicism in four-part harmony.

They played “Hash Pipe”, a song from the forthcoming Green Album that I had heard via FM radio. I understood “Hash Pipe” to be decent, but probably the least-good song on the new album since it was chosen as the radio hit.

That night in Chicago, Rivers Cuomo, a man who took the 1997 panned reviews of Pinkerton to heart and had become a recluse, was once again rock god. His fabled existence: depressed, living out of an old motel room after he painted the windows black, doing nothing but sitting in silence, bouncing a racket ball off the wall over and over for months.

A resurrection was now, at the epicenter of nostalgic revival in a church service devoted to his ingenious craft. He held his goblet before the neon serpent. In a sonic reverb Garden of Eden, the songs were offered to the innocent. Sweetberry apple wine for the ones who had no foresight of the coming plunder. Delicious songs plucked from the Sacred Tree.

I had spent the entire year of 1999 re-exploring Pinkerton for what it was – a masterpiece of blended spirit and wit. Melody and guitar driven emotion exposing River’s oddball sense of humor and tangents of love. At age nineteen I had become obsessed.

I went on Napster to find all the aforementioned B-sides and one-off morsels of candy – sparkly lemon drops as good or even better than most of the songs on the actual albums. Gummy Bears stretching taffy over the rafters, between Weezer, That Dog, and The Rentals, and me, buying all of those albums. Obsessing over those confections. Creating full CD-r compilations of Pinkerton and Blue Album era rarity songs and acoustic versions along with full detailed, homemade cover art.

…

After the encore concluded we shuffled out of my new favorite venue. After looking around the record shop that used to be attached to the Metro, I bought a Coalesce CD and we lunked back out into Lakeview among the Northside bars under a sky that knows no stars. Aaron bought a bootleg Weezer tee shirt from a shady sidewalk vendor.

What we had just witnessed, unbeknownst to us, would not only be peak Weezer, but probably the smallest hall they would ever play again. Ignorant in our experience of a survey of the mountain top view we jangled on down the street in our ill-fitting, doughy whiteboy clothes, sweaters unraveling back down Clark Street.

Matt Sharp had left the band, and the future would hold a storied harshness. Discussing a fondness for the Ric Ocasek produced Blue Album and an agreed upon fixation with Pinkerton, talking Weezer pre-Maladroit was fun. Our conversations would predate the Four Step program for the Ex-Weezer Fan support group sessions; a tattered paper posted on every future wall near the bitter coffee and stale donuts.

First:

The Green Album would ultimately be maintained as the third best Weezer album, establishing hopes, regal but weary.

Then:

As a conglomerate, we would all have individual whiplash about how bad Maladroit was. For me, I would bring some girl to see Weezer at the World Music Theatre to perform with Dashboard Confessional and Jimmy Eat World in 2002. I would witness her dance to a song from Maladroit and I would unexpectedly feel very, very embarrassed. A jarring pivot in my once-romantic soul.

Followed up by:

Everybody ending up absolutely hating every last song on the next two or three Weezer albums and feeling backstabbed and largely downtrodden. An uprise in a spirit of unison. A formation of the next generation of disgruntled, semi-hostile record store employees.

Finally:

All of us as a collective band of crushed twenty-somethings into thirty-somethings would witness Weezer release album after album of bullshit contrived, thoughtless garbage schlock. Each of us pondering what in the actual fuck Twilight Zone episode we’ve stumbled in to. ⁽²⁾

…

After exiting the Red Line we had to kill an hour before the final Metra train would board at Randolph Station. Not understanding that we could have found something else to do in one of the biggest cities in the country, we walked a few blocks east and just sat on some steps near the Prudential Building. It seemed like Dan Wren had no other play. Perhaps we ultimately drained the sum of his city knowledge that night. He had zero El Scorchos left up his sleeve.

Dave picked up a fallen Chicago street sign. Green reflective metal, it read “N Beaubien Ct”.

“I don’t know, I found this street sign. Better just take it home with me. No other option.”

As we boarded the University Park bound train, we were followed in by a CPD officer. He asked Dave where he got the street sign. He told the officer he had gotten it from his dad. The cop informed us that we were in the midst of stealing City of Chicago property. Since it was Labor Day weekend and the holiday fell on a Monday, he assured us that if he were to arrest us, we’d be in jail until at least Tuesday.

At the time I was petrified, but looking back I suppose he was just annoyed and was attempting to put a scare in to some suburban kids. Which, he succeeded. He took the street sign and hobbled away.

Aaron’s bootleg tee shirt he purchased literally one hour beforehand spontaneously fell apart at the seems.

These final events capped a bummer on the Weezer show excursion. Not unlike the end of Weezer’s high art tenure itself I suppose.

Sort of a metrical composition of long-term foreshadowing now that I think about it. ⁽³⁾

The world has turned and left me here.

…

[A Music SubSeries: 006]

…

Photos by @angeladeane (Instagram) / angeladeanestudio.com

…

¹ Besides Zwan – in an indirect way. Also not including bands I discovered from MTV2. If anyone remembers MTV2.

² There are actually two songs that I absolutely love off the 2017 album Pacific Daydream: “QB Blitz” and “Sweet Mary”. A couple big sparks in an overall non-starter of a wet fire pit that I play on repeat when the mood strikes.

³ To top it off, I saw Dan Wren at a show a year later and he was a major dick to me. A former wizard of transit proficiency, once upheld but now unfortunately relegated to the rebate bin of my soul along with other disappointments like Maladroit and the covers album where every song sounds EXACTLY like the one they are covering.

Dave would attend one final Weezer show at the United Center which oddly had a nu metal band called Cold as the opening act. As the crowd booed the opener, Dave sent a half-filled plastic water bottle flying on to the stage, hitting the singer dead-on. With a whir and a *glunk* it was a pristine shot at an intended target.

The singer started yelling “fuck you!” at the crowd while he flipped everyone off. Cold, one day later would announce they were quitting the Weezer tour, citing the water bottle event as a prime reason. Dave inched his way even further up the charts on my list of heroes as I heard about the scenario unfolding. The only other person besides Dave, to this day, who would perform such magical acts at the United Center would in fact be Michael Air Jordan.

As the circle of life does dictate, Dave would end up in Los Angeles County, in a serious, long-term relationship with Rivers Cuomo’s ex-girlfriend.