SEATTLE — 1994 was a pivotal year for music. Losing Kurt Cobain, a leading voice in the alternative revolution, that spring left a cultural chasm and sense of “Where do we go from here?” as the sun seemed to set on the grunge era.
A month after the Nirvana frontman’s death, Weezer — one of the next big bands to hit the post-grunge landscape — released its self-titled debut, better known as the Blue Album. The endearingly geeky Los Angeles rockers paired walloping, metal-informed riffs with infectious Beach Boys-gone-grunge melodies, creating a far sunnier sound that was fresh yet familiar.
In some respects, Weezer was a departure from the Seattle gloom, without the long hair and flannel. But the Emerald City, the alt-rock epicenter of the time, helped fan the band’s early flame as they were just starting to heat up.
Marco Collins still remembers the first time he heard Weezer, currently on its Voyage to the Blue Planet Tour as part of the Blue Album’s 30th anniversary celebration. The late Susie Tennant, Geffen Records’ Seattle music insider (or was it Seattle’s major-label insider?), passed the radio vet an early copy of Weezer’s first single “Undone — The Sweater Song.” He was hooked.
“I loved the sort of heavy-soft dynamic of the song,” said Collins, then a disc jockey and music director at 107.7 The End during the ‘90s. “Obviously a lot of bands had made that happen prior to Weezer, like Nirvana and the Pixies, and even Nine Inch Nails early on. But I felt like Weezer did it in a way that hearkened back to the Ramones a little bit more, in that it was super in-your-face and then they’d back it off. I just thought the song was gonna sound [expletive] great on the radio.”
He was right.
Collins started spinning the quirky, fuzz-punched riff monster on his night show, which attracted a younger audience and became sort of a testing ground for breaking new music at The End. The Seattle alt-rock radio bastion became the first commercial radio station to play the single, he said.
“I could really feel what might be a hit and what might not be a hit almost instantly by the way that set of listeners responded,” said Collins, who most recently anchored the afternoon show for the short-lived 98.9 KPNW. “It very quickly became one of the most requested songs on the station.”
Around that time, The End had some radio-world cachet in Seattle and beyond as the cutting-edge alternative station at grunge’s ground zero. Collins, who’s consistently championed up-and-coming artists throughout his career, has been credited with helping break other bands of the day like Beck and Garbage.
At least to some degree, Seattle — or more specifically, Weezer’s label mates Nirvana — was on the band’s mind when the Blue Album was released in May 1994. “We all wondered whether Kurt would’ve liked Weezer,” guitarist Brian Bell told the Los Angeles Times earlier this year. “That seemed important.”
No doubt a larger factor in the distortion-heavy power-pop band’s ascent was when MTV started pumping its striking Spike Jonze-directed videos for “Undone — The Sweater Song” and “Buddy Holly.” For the “Buddy Holly” video, which portrayed the band performing in Arnold’s Drive-In from the 1950s-set sitcom “Happy Days,” Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo ditched the thick-rimmed glasses that had already become his signature look, fearing he’d too closely resemble Cobain in Nirvana’s “In Bloom” video.
“He looked like Elvis Costello or Buddy Holly when he came out,” Collins said of Cuomo. “That was not the ideal style at that time, so it stood out and it was badass because there was a lot of contradictions going on in Weezer. And I think that works for them, too. You have this band that’s got pop songs from hell with these massive metal hooks, and then [they’re] the sweetest guys you could ever meet — clean-cut, guys you wanna bring home to mom.”
To whatever extent The End’s early-adopter support helped generate momentum for the quirky California band that didn’t take itself too seriously, Weezer maintained a cozy relationship with Collins and the Seattle station. As the band was winding down the album cycle around the Blue Album and prepping to release its sophomore record, “Pinkerton,” Weezer and The End held a contest asking local high school students to write letters or send videos “to plead their case about why they wanted Weezer to come play at their high school,” Collins said.
Shorecrest High School student Ladd Martin apparently made the most convincing case and the ultra-buzzy rockers showed up at the Shoreline school to play a free 25-minute acoustic set in the gymnasium.
“That’s when I realized that The End was making a huge difference, when kids are screaming like these are the friggin’ Beatles,” Collins said. “It was really cool.”
Collins and Cuomo reconnected again a few years later as Weezer emerged from a brief hiatus following the self-produced “Pinkerton” — a darker cult classic that wasn’t an immediate hit with critics, but has since been properly reevaluated. The two crossed paths at an L.A. party and Cuomo invited Collins to the studio where they were working on another self-titled album (aka the Green Album) with Ric Ocasek of the Cars, who also produced their debut.
Cuomo played some early mixes of 2001’s return-to-form Green Album, which dialed up the radio-friendly punch with guitar-blasting “Hash Pipe” and the breezy “Island in the Sun.”
“We pulled into the parking lot, there’s Ric Ocasek, one of my childhood heroes, smoking a cigarette out back, leaning against the wall and I was, like, ‘This is the wildest thing in the world,’” an awe-struck Collins recalled.
One of Weezer’s strengths that’s made the band so endearing and enduring for the past 30 years is their ability to make serious music without taking themselves too seriously, starting with that allusion to the “Buddy Holly”-like appearance back in the day. More recently, there was that unlikely 2018 hit with a cover of Toto’s “Africa” at the behest of a teenage Twitter user and embracing ‘70s/‘80s hard rock on 2021’s “Van Weezer,” with Cuomo going full “Heavy Metal Parking Lot,” rocking a mullet and Flying V guitar on the subsequent tour.
“They’re doing that stuff tongue in cheek, but in reality, they [expletive] love metal, especially the cheesy [stuff],” Collins said. “They have no problem embracing their cheesy sides, they’re really good at that. They’re extremely self-deprecating guys and I think that keeps them in check also. They’ve never become so full of themselves — you won’t see Weezer on TMZ, you know what I mean, because they’re living regular lives, they’re doing their thing.”
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