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It’s 1994 and for a short kid with black horn-rimmed glasses, you’ve made quite a splash in the post-grunge MTV-friendly universe. This could not have been possible without a stellar self-titled debut record (which would later become knows as The Blue Album), three hit singles and two Spike Jonze-directed music videos that landed you several awards and a large cult following. So how do you spend your lucrative wealth and spare time?

Normally, this is the period when a rock star falls into the cliché trappings of the inevitable self-destructive lifestyle – but not Weezer front man Rivers Cuomo. Cuomo instead famously traded sex and drugs for the two next best things – an education and painkillers – and used his newfound earnings to both attend Harvard University and surgically correct the length of his right leg, which had been shorter than the other since birth.

Come 1996, and the world is hungry for the follow up to The Blue Album. Unbeknown to his fellow classmates, the barely recognisable Cuomo (who had grown a beard of Crusoe proportions and required a walking cane to manoeuvre about on campus post-surgery,) was already well underway with Weezer’s next outing.

Disillusioned with this anti-rock star lifestyle, Cuomo recoiled into a dark, lonely state of mind and the painfully confessional Pinkerton was the end result. Taking its name from the male lead of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly, Pinkerton was ten tracks of heartbreak, self-disgust, hopelessness and above all, an unrequited love/fetish for half-Japanese girls (“El Scorcho”). Gone was the squeaky-clean production of Blue and the pop-sensibilities of former hits like “Buddy Holly”, which had instead been traded for dark and distorted emotional tales chronicling Cuomo’s distaste for groupies (“Tired of Sex”) and the troubles of being an Ivy League loner (“The Good Life”). The rest of world was not interested.

Rolling Stone famously awarded Pinkerton the prestigious title of “second worst album of 1996”, and sales were less than impressive. Cuomo was embarrassed by Pinkerton’s flop, and would go on to describe the record as “hideous” and “a hugely painful mistake that happened in front of hundreds of thousands of people… It’s like getting really drunk at a party and spilling your guts in front of everyone and feeling incredibly great and cathartic about it, and then waking up the next morning and realizing what a complete fool you made of yourself.”

It’s 2000 and a little program called Napster is making the rounds and allowing folks with an Internet connection to become acquainted with bands they may not have heard before. In a twist of fate, Pinkerton gains a huge cult following from a new generation of fans and forces Cuomo and his band out of a five year retirement to strike back with their third record, symbolically titled Weezer (also known as The Green Album.) The band becomes a household name yet again. Thanks to the little album that couldn’t (finally certified gold in 2001), Weezer had returned from the brink of obscurity and continue to release music to this day. Looking back in 2008, even Cuomo kind of digs what he was doing with Pinkerton calling it “super-deep, brave, and authentic.”

(In a hilarious and somewhat shameful act, Rolling Stone would later ‘re-review’ Pinkerton in 2004, award it five stars and enter it in the “Rolling Stone Hall of Fame”.) 


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