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BEFORE YOU PROCEED: Have you read/listened to Part One? Find it here.
I Was a Teenage Weezer Fan, Part Two
May 11, 1995 Dear Journal, I cut French class so I wouldn’t have to see Mr. S.’s wretched face. And my Weezer fanclub stuff arrived today!
It likely wasn’t entirely true that I was the only person at my school who liked Weezer. One of my best friends enjoyed their music, and I can name two others who were casual fans. There were maybe more, but no one else was shouting it like I was from the low-slung, sixties-era A.C. Flora High School rooftops. I needed a family of real fans, hardcore fans, like me.
Enter: The Weezer Fan Club.
The origin story of the fan club is pretty fascinating, and I’ll provide some guidance at the end if you want to learn more, but here’s how it fell together for me…
Like any good music fan in the nineties, when I bought The Blue Album I read the fine print inside. Other than a black-and-white picture of what seemed to be a shoddy-looking rehearsal space, the album liner notes were pretty sparse. For the lyrics, you had to send a SASE to a listed address.
A few weeks later, the lyrics came in the mail, photocopied pages in Rivers’ handwriting, words scratched out, changed, and changed again. I wore those pages out poring over them, some I didn’t fully understand at the time but would later on. There was one song I had never heard of, called “Jamie”, where he’d written “Kurt Cobain”, crossed it out, and changed it to “Izzy, Slash.”
Rivers’ handwriting is etched in my memory—to this day, when I listen to some of the songs, I see the words in my head. Most important of all, I could belt them out with confidence (that is, as long as no one was around), knowing that the line was not, as I had thought, “I don’t dress like Buddy Holly.”
Along with the lyrics was a postcard asking if I wanted to join the official Weezer Fan Club. You didn’t have to ask me twice! I mailed off a 1x1 photo of myself and a check from my parents for $10 and waited patiently.
And on that day in May when I skipped class so I wouldn’t have to interact with a teacher who disliked me even more than I detested him, I was rewarded for my subversion with a bulky envelope, return address Portland, waiting there for me when I got home.
Inside was a blue Weezer sticker, a signed photo of the band, the addresses of all the current fanclub members across the country and a few internationally (there were only five of us in South Carolina), my very own fanclub card with my little picture and a fanclub number (I was =w= #0629; more on that later), and a little booklet called the Weezine.
I’d never seen a ‘zine before, and this little black-and-white magazine was a revelation. Inside the twelve or so photocopied pages were interviews with the band, pictures of shows, fan art, the band’s birthdays (Rivers, the youngest, was only nine years older—I could handle that!), and much more. I read that first one cover to cover, soaking in all that pined-for knowledge, my head and heart singing with happiness.
The Weezine and the fan club was run by two sisters in Portland, Oregon named Mykel and Carli Allan, fanclub members #0001 and #0002. They knew the band from very early on in Los Angeles, going to show after show even when Weezer was completely unknown, and considered themselves the band’s biggest fans. When Weezer started blowing up, they offered to manage a fan club, and the rest is history.
At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate the hard work that must have gone into supporting the club, which, at its peak in mid-1997, was nearly 4,000 members strong. They ran it like professionals, and even though they were hardly compensated, it was clear that they sincerely loved it, and that love shone through in their dedication to us fans.
Another central figure in the early fan club days was Karl Koch. Karl has been “Weezer’s fifth member” since the earliest lineup of Cuomo/Wilson/Sharp/Cropper, serving as roadie, videographer, webmaster, historian, manager, and just about everything else behind the scenes with a professional rock band. His ability to find the time to manage everything seems almost otherworldly; he’s always been there in the background, picking up whatever is needed, connecting the fans, all in a humble, “I’m-just-here-for-my-friends” kind of way. A friendly spectre, only less translucent.
About the fan club, Karl said: “For the hundreds and then thousands of kids that wanted the club, these are the most motivated, most interested and most likely to spread the word themselves, ‘cause they were so into it, you know, they wanted everything…we knew that these kids were the ones that cared the most, it just made the most sense to treat them the best, because…if they like you and they’re supporting you, then they’re ones you want to hold on to.” (From 'The story of Mykel and Carli, Weezer's most legendary fans' — Derrick Clements)
And they did treat us the best! Mykel and Carli gave us the framework to keep us connected and added fun little touches along the way, like annual “secret surprises” (more on those later, too). And Karl wrote “Karl’s Corner,” a surprisingly thorough dive into not only the band’s entire discography, merch history, gear setup, and backstory in general, but the technical aspects of musicianship and what it was like to get signed to a label and work in the modern recording industry. Fans wrote in with a lot of questions; some questions were quite intelligent and some were rather insipid, but Karl didn’t discriminate or make any of us feel bad for our lack of knowledge about music.
There would come a time, sooner than anyone preferred or expected, when Karl’s wisdom, expertise, and generosity would be the only glue holding the fan club together. I don’t think he would ever admit that, since it did take a huge team of volunteers during a time of crisis, but if it hadn’t been for him, the fan club would have quickly and completely disintegrated.
It’s kind of weird to think of him as a role model and mentor to thousands of teenagers he never met, but he’s just that: Karl has always had Weezer’s back and stuck up for the fans. A real gift.
Without a world wide web, the fan club and the Weezine were my lifeline to all things Weezer. Four times a year for the next few years, I’d get a new issue in the mail and lots of new tidbits about the band. It was how I learned about their interests, tour dates (it seemed like they were never coming to my neck of the woods!), even who was who in the band (most of us didn’t know whose names went to whose faces) and that coveted treasure: more music.
In July 1995, Mykel and Carli found out about the “Say It Ain’t So” video premiere with only a few days' notice, not enough time to notify all the fanclubbers by mail. So, along with their roommate, Tiffany, and armed with their dad’s phone card, they started making calls to all the current fan club members.
At the time, that meant seven hundred phone calls.
Our conversation went something like this:
MY MOM: [downstairs] Ashleigh! Telephone!
ME: [upstairs, yelling down] Okay! [walks over to the phone in my parents’ room, picks it up] Hello?
CARLI: Hi Ashleigh, this is Carli, from the Weezer Fan Club!
ME: [jaw drops the floor, silence. Then, awkwardly] Oh, hello!
CARLI: [very friendly] We’re calling all the fans to let you know that the “Say It Ain’t So” video will premiere on MTV in three days, so check it out!
ME: [still picking my jaw up off the floor] Okay, thank you.
CARLI: [brightly] Well, I hope you have a nice day!
ME: [a million questions swimming around in my head, none of which surface quickly enough] Thank you. You too!
CARLI: [hangs up. Six hundred and ninety-nine more calls to make].
The funny thing is, I don’t recall whether I was able to watch the video or not; like I said, we didn’t have cable. But I’ll never forget how speechless I was to get a phone call that day from the legendary Carli! (She’s famous herself! And she knows the band!!!)
During the two years between Blue and Pink, the fanclub carried us through the Weezer music desert. At the time, there were only ten songs out in the world; there was no back catalog to speak of then, at least none that the band would release to the world. We were operating under scarcity. I clung fast to The Blue Album, listening intently, over and over, learning to recognize every drumbeat, every vocal, every chord. It was all the Weezer I had.
But the fan club directed us to little breadcrumbs that I would have never known about otherwise. Weezer’s first B-side, “Jamie” was on the DGC Rarities album, and thanks to my brother’s subscription to Columbia House, it was a big day when I discovered that it was already in my house!! I learned about Matt’s other band, The Rentals, and bought their record, too. I found out about other B-sides appearing on movie soundtracks (“Susanne” on Mallrats, “You Gave Your Love To Me Softly” on Angus), and snapped those up as soon as I could. The songs were amazing, and those comps helped me discover other like-minded bands, like Ash, Belly, and Archers of Loaf, to start.
And on April 2, 1996 (remember that date for later!), I was in Bath, England, and bought a cute mini skirt the same color as The Blue Album, and in a small record shop found a used copy of the UK “Say It Ain’t So” single. Finding that pearl in an oyster was definitely a highlight of the trip, right up there with Buckingham Palace and one of the best desserts I’ve ever had.
My modest Weezer collection includes, among many other things: about ten t-shirts, the first four albums on vinyl, paper copies of every interview or blurb about Weezer (up until there were too many to gather), four fanclub ID cards, and plenty of other singles and 7” still wrapped in plastic. I felt like a real collector.
The fanclub was not just for Weezer info; it was also a community. I started writing to people in the address book and they wrote me back (and sometimes the other way around). I taped copies of the rarer B-sides I owned for other fan club members (“Jamie” live acoustic, “No One Else” live acoustic), who would send me stuff: recordings of Rivers’ solo shows, his side band with Matt, Homie, and grainy-sounding live Weezer shows at small clubs. Some of those I received were terrible quality, but others stood the test of time (and dubbing) and I heard them again on the Bonus Disc for The Blue Album Deluxe Edition. And I’m still partial to the bootleg version of Homie’s “American Girls” over the one that ended up, crisp and clean, on the Meet the Deedles soundtrack.
Before internet chat rooms and MySpace and social media, I could connect with my fan club friends who had the same passion I did: an undying love for and belief in the supreme dominance and rocking quirky loudness of a young, new alternative rock band named Weezer.
After buying [the album], for the next six months I found myself with Weezer stuck in my head, like I knew Rivers, almost. The songs had such a warm [quality] to them. They were in my head every moment and I would listen to them from the moment I got home from school to the minute I left in the morning. –Peter #3941
Back in July at the PEZ Convention in Cleveland, I saw this guy with a Weezer shirt on and he [looked to be] about 45 years old! He didn’t have kids with him or anything, so I guess he was just a =w= fan. Pretty cool! –Andrea #0254
Just forget about all those people who don’t understand Weezer. It’s the kids like us that can truly understand. It’s more than just songs and words. It’s pure emotion, and feeling. I’m glad that only people like us get it, that’s one of the things that makes =w= so special. –Andrew #3440
I’ve finally met someone who digs Weezer as much as I do. –Donny #????
It seemed like most everyone in the club was pretty much my same age. Of course, it makes sense—when are you most likely to be a rabid fan of a band, having the time to focus so much energy on one big thing? So I felt like there was a real connection with these people, even though some of us lived states apart in places I’d never been to. All that mattered was our shared love for Weezer, and we immediately accepted one another, no questions asked.
The Weezer Fan Club was a way to be a part of something bigger. I was finally part of a group of people who understood this one very specific, very important part of my life, and it meant the world to me. It felt like home. It was home.
For years, I would tell anyone who asked (and many, many who did not ask) that I was the “Second Biggest Weezer Fan in the State of South Carolina.” How did I earn such a prestigious (and 100% true!) title?
I had a loyalty bordering on selfishness for the band that had changed my life, and, if I’m honest, I still feel the pangs of both of those. (How do I feel about the new fans, the ones who weren’t even born in 1994? I’ll get to that in Part 5). I had to be scrappy, being a Weezer fan from the smallest southern state, nowhere close to a cool city like New York or L.A. (Sorry, Charlotte and Atlanta, you weren’t cool enough yet)!
As I’ve already mentioned, my fan club number was #0629. That meant, theoretically, that I was the six hundredth and twenty-ninth person to join. It was not a low enough number for my liking—I started liking them months ago!—but all those kids in better states had beat me to it. Still, that zero in front would become a badge of honor for the next few years as the club ballooned, and to this day I’ve only ever met one person with a lower number than me.
That person was my pen pal Andrea, who lived in Greenville, and for reasons I’ll never know, managed to squeeze in at #0254. She was a few years older, already out of high school and working, so I gave her that. She and I were the only South Carolinians of the original five to continually renew our membership every year that the club was active.
I’m embarrassed to admit this, but comparing fanclub numbers is the closest I’ll ever come to knowing what it’s like for guys to compare penis size. Just about everyone I’ve talked to wishes their number was lower. I have a coveted zero in front of mine, but what about those with two zeros, or even three? (I’m not competitive about much, but when I am, it better be about something that is completely erroneous to 99.99% of the population)!
While my days of being the biggest Weezer fan in South Carolina are behind me, I will always take pride in being one of the very first.
Pinkerton was released at the beginning of my senior year: September 24, 1996. I had known for about a month that this exact day was coming; thanks to Rivers’ updates to the fan club, us clubbers had gotten to follow along with the writing and recording of it for the better part of the previous year.
It had been a difficult one for the band. Matt, Brian, and Pat were all doing their own things with each of their other bands, and everyone was spread out all over the country (or, in Matt’s case, across the Atlantic). The cohesiveness of the group was somewhat in question at this time.
Rivers had struggled most of all. Even though he’d anticipated it, the aftermath of his leg operation had been incredibly challenging. He’d never been able to comfortably participate in typical activities like running, walking barefoot, playing soccer—his right leg had always been shorter than the left, and between Blue and Pink he’d undergone a surgical procedure to lengthen the shorter one. His leg had to be broken, and then for the next 13 months he wore a contraption attached directly to bone, with pins that needed to be regularly twisted to stretch the bones and tendons. He was in almost constant pain, at least in the early months, and his isolation as an undergrad at Harvard was like a neverending winter he couldn’t crawl out of.
For the band and for Rivers especially, the release of Pinkerton marked the end of a very dark period in his life and the start of a newer, brighter one. So many stops and starts had finally, finally led to this one monumental day: MORE WEEZER MUSIC!!!
After school, I took my mom’s car to the record store, nonchalantly strolled over to the cassette section, and tried to look aloof as I scanned between “V” and “X”. I knew the name was going to be Pinkerton but I didn’t know what the cover looked like.
My eyes landed on a tape, brown with a darker brown, the image reminding me of Hokusai, and I saw that unmistakable font and my heart swelled with both relief and excitement. I paid cash and walked back outside in the September sun.
Back in the warm chamber of the car, I fumbled with the cassette wrapper (thank god for fingernails), and slid it into the car stereo.
And then, BOOM.
As I sat in the parking lot, “Tired of Sex,” squealed out, all drums and wishes and screams, and it rolled right into the screeching guitars on “Getchoo”, and a waltzy-but-still-fuzzy-guitar-y “No Other One”. “Why Bother’s” themes of longing and resignation, set to a jumping beat, doubled down on the energy and frustration that kicked off the whole thing.
The last song on Side A, “Across the Sea,” was a sparkling story of longing, with rollercoaster melodies and the exhilarating sensation that I had been to Japan and back in just under five minutes.
After that dreamy journey, I flipped the tape over. The first notes of “The Good Life” hopscotch out, winding us up with a frenzied guitar solo and slow build back to the chorus, then finally leading towards the breathless end.
Back to back, these two were highlights on the album and they instantly skyrocketed into some of my favorite Weezer songs ever.
I started the car. With the windows down I took a longer way home, through commercial areas and then neighborhoods. “El Scorcho'' popped in, with its quirky-as-all-get-out lyrics and frenetic tempo, fantastic bridge execution (they are great at bridges!), and—I can’t really explain this part but I’ll try—the notes go all whichway, like Medusa’s hair, or like I’m listening to a picture of a map of the DC Metro, and I want to squinch my eyes shut to fully feel it, but I can’t, because I’m driving.
Then the album slowed considerably, still packing a punch, though, with “Pink Triangle’s” kind-of-funny-but-without-irony love story and another gleefully torturous build back to the chorus. And then in the matching tempo of “Falling for You,” the energy of the loudest songs on the album and the heart of the quieter ones come together in even more grinding guitars and that sweetly nostalgic, warbly vocal tone that makes the meaning of the song even more urgent. The lyrics lay bare that universal emotion of liking someone more than you should, probably way more than they could ever like you, and how awful (and blindly optimistic) that can feel.
It all ends with Number Ten: “Butterfly,” a stripped down, wistful love song, tragic on multiple levels: the literal (from the perspective of a child) and the metaphorical (from the perspective of an adult). It was the perfect closer to this album, a foil to “Only in Dreams,” the perfect and perfectly loud Blue closer, and with it, told us that this collection of songs busts open a very different trove of emotion than the first one did.
The songs themselves were about the messiest of situations: unrequited love, forced solitude, physical and emotional pain, rock-bottom exhaustion. And yet, packed together, they created this tidy little bundle bursting with meaning and noise. Pinkerton’s kick drum-heavy backbone was loud: fully fleshed out with lots of doubling of the guitar and vocals, nuanced key changes, layered reverb, and their signature feedback. The frantic pacing of the ten songs, clocking in at just under thirty-five minutes, made for a wild ride, like surfing those waves in “Surf Wax” but during a midnight storm where you can’t see a thing through the rain and the crashing seawater, and the shark trying to tear you to pieces is actually the person you’re most in love with in the entire world. Wild.
And the words! I didn’t have the language yet to describe that what I was hearing and identifying with fell neatly into the “emo” category. The lyrics themselves were emo, dwelling on vulnerability, love, and loneliness. But it was also Rivers’ delivery of these lines, full of absolute heartsickness, originating from a place of lived experience and genuine feeling.
We knew all about his leg and his loneliness, his trials and travails at Harvard, his struggle with the weirdness of being famous as a concept but the reality of his reclusive day-to-day. A line in El Scorcho sums it up nicely: “How stupid is it? I can’t talk about it, I gotta sing about it, and make a record of my heart.”
It felt real and true, oh so true.
It was Rivers Cuomo’s show, for certain, but Pat, Matt, and Brian had essential roles to play as well. Brian’s backing vocals and Matt’s flourishes of falsetto goofiness were perfection. I didn’t have the ear at that point to pick apart any of the guitars, but that was okay. And Pat’s drums were a legend to behold—he held nothing back and Pinkerton just smashed because of it.
By the time I pulled back into the driveway, I was giddy. I’d been nervous that this album wouldn’t be as good as their first one; after all, my expectations were enormous. It sounded different for sure; whereas Blue’s power chords at least seemed to be pumped with sunshine and surfboards, this one was heavier, grittier, more brooding.
Pinkerton had an edge, but I was right there with them on that precipice. The Blue Album themes had resonated with me figuratively but not literally (I wasn’t into KISS, I didn’t play in a band, I’d never been surfing!), but Pinkerton spoke directly to what my heart was going through at that very moment in time.
You see, at age seventeen, I felt like a seasoned professional in unrequited love. My guy interests were varied: baseball players, Boy Scouts, class clowns, skaters. All were patiently pined for, lusted over, crushed on, stalked (in that innocent, teenage girl way, of course). Give me any guy with 90s-era punk sideburns and I’ll do a double take. My crippling paralysis to make anything happen with anyone, plus the misguided belief that I was somehow not cute enough (I wasn’t unattractive; I was just kind of…there), added to the fact that teenage boys are just goofy dummies, had left me all but empty-handed in the relationship department.
This year, though, there was a boy. My best friend. I thought I finally had a sure thing on the horizon. But I was dead wrong about that.
Now entering, out of left field: The World’s Most Tragic Love Triangle™! Starring sad girls, confused boys, and a heavy dose of obnoxious PDFA: Public Displays of Fake Affection!
There’s definitely a nineties prom movie lurking in all of this.
Okay, technically it was a pentangle, but out of all the players, I was the only one not getting kissed. Not only that, but I had to witness all those other kisses, hear all those other stories about what happened in secret at each others’ houses, all while being told how I was so lucky because I didn’t have a ball-and-chain boyfriend to deal with. Over the course of the year, I was hit with the profound realization that I would leave high school without ever having had a relationship; the possibility of any other prospects was stolen from me because I had fed all my emotional energy into what turned out to be a black hole. It was devastating.
The epitome of “bittersweet” is a teenage girl—me, obviously—being told by no less than four girlfriends of the boys she liked that she is “so pretty.” It was a consolation that somebody thought so, I guess, just not who I wanted. I appreciated their pity (Girl Power!) but also wanted to drive a stake into the candy-coated hearts of every single smug couple promenading down our school hallways. At least it seemed like my whole class felt sorry for me, for a few days, I guess, until something else occupied their attention.
To be clear, I’m not in any way mad at the forty-something year-olds we all are now; not the boyfriends, not the girlfriends, not the bullies, not the friends who I had to distance myself from, none. Not even that French teacher! And I presume they’re not mad at me, either, if they remember any of it at all.
But I will probably always be a little bit mad at some of those seventeen year-olds, myself included. That level of public rejection is not easily forgotten.
For me, it would get a hell of a lot worse before it got better. This formative experience echoed in my body for years to follow, having shattered my fragile self-confidence and my ability to trust. But in that moment, Rivers singing about insecurity and being paralyzed from the fear of rejection helped me feel less alone. “Why Bother?”, in particular, guided me through these times, plastering a smile on my face even as rage-filled screams pulsated, silently, throughout my skull.
Later on, critics would credit Pinkerton for inspiring second-wave and third-wave emo bands of the late nineties and early- to mid-2000s, so it’s no wonder that with my tortured, nonexistent love life and this album in hand, I was destined to be emo, too. (The entirety of “Across the Sea” is about as emo as you can get, the loneliness forcing you to cling to whatever kind of attention is paid to you, no matter how far away or improbable it is. The song still gives me chills).
Armed with a new Weezer album to carry me through my senior year, nothing was going to stop me from being who I was destined to be. Even though I still had no one I could talk to (in person, at least) about the masterpiece that was Pinkerton, it lived inside me, giving me power. The bullying from before had died down, some of the little jerks had actually become my sort-of friends, and eventually it was accepted that Ashleigh liked Weezer and everybody better respect that. And they finally did.
And though my love life was basically compiled of the trash heap of my own shredded heart, it was Rivers (and Brian, and Matt, and Pat) who helped me stay strong when I felt all alone.
I loved the album then, recognizing its brilliance for what it was. And I still love it now. Pinkerton speaks of specific experiences and raises specific memories in me while also espousing universally relatable emotions. With its catchy hooks and deeply felt lyrics, it is another perfect set of ten songs, and my favorite album of all time.
Weezer’s post-Blue tour schedule was painfully out of reach for me. They’d play at a venue three hours away, on a weeknight, or I’d find out months after the fact that they had opened a show semi-nearby. Being just a teenager with no car meant that there was a lot I didn’t have access to.
There had been a radio contest at some point to win tickets to a show; you had to be the 4th caller after they played a clip of what was supposed to be Buddy Holly’s plane crashing (morbid much?). It could have been Raleigh or Atlanta in November 1994, or Atlanta again in April 1995—and I had called into the station over and over to try to get those tickets. In that moment, missing out on winning them felt sadder to me than what had happened to Buddy Holly. I just knew that the person who won them didn’t deserve them as much as I did.
So, a few months after Pinkerton was released, I learned from the fanclub that they were coming as close to me as they would ever possibly get: Charleston one night, and Charlotte the next.
I was determined to go to both shows. Thankfully, all too familiar with my love for this band, my parents said okay. But I still needed help getting there. Like I said, no car, and parents who were unwilling to let a 17-year-old go alone, or take the family ride out of town overnight.
For the Charleston show, I asked my only friend who liked Weezer to come with me, but her parents said no. So I asked someone else who I thought was easygoing enough and wouldn’t complain if I wanted to be right up front the entire time; I didn’t want anyone to hold me back. My mom would drive us down and we’d stay in a hotel that night and drive back up the next day.
And for the Charlotte show, there was only one person who would do: Leslie, a cool-as-hell camp friend and pen pal. Leslie lived in Charlotte and we’d met a couple summers ago and bonded over our taste in fashion, our appreciation of Weezer, and that the hottest guy at camp that week (fantastic sideburns) told us that we were both the coolest girls there. I’d run into her at a Dave Matthews show a few months before, and I knew that we’d have an awesome time together.
Everything was set. This was going to be great. But I had no idea precisely how mind-blowing it would all turn out to be.
Reflection Questions
Do you have a band or an artist that resonates with you this way? What makes them special to you?
Are you/were you once a big Weezer fan? Email me by July 31st and I’ll send you some questions. You may be featured in a later essay!
Check back here in mid-July for Part Three: Rock =W= Music! Subscribe now to get it in your inbox before it’s released to the public!