How KISS changed Rivers Cuomo’s life forever
A band like Weezer always reads like the least likely band to become rock stars. Despite having some of the catchiest songs of the mid-1990s, their dorky persona made them look like the direct inverse of what was expected out of a rock star, with Rivers Cuomo singing songs about his sweater coming undone. Although the band always embraced their nerdy look, Cuomo’s musical origins came from a different place.
Living in an ashram when he was in his youth, Cuomo was first exposed to bands his parents enjoyed, which gravitated towards the mellow sides of rock and roll, such as Cat Stevens and The Beatles. While Cuomo could appreciate the sounds of those acts, it wasn’t until a girl introduced him to KISS when he was seven that he started to feel moved by music in a different way.
As Cuomo recalls in This Little Light: “This little girl came through the ashram for a visit, and she brought a KISS record, Rock and Roll Over. She came over to our house, and while we played the KISS record, we recorded ourselves running around in circles as the tape played. It was like, ‘this kicks ass’”.
While Cuomo had talked about loving music in the past, the sound of Ace Frehley’s electric guitar really set his world on fire. From there, Cuomo had found his way of communicating with the world, eventually forming his own hair-metal bands in high school, trying to play as fast as he could.
Once Cuomo ventured to Los Angeles, his mind was blown again by hearing Nirvana for the first time, thinking that Kurt Cobain’s music was more in line with what he wanted to say. Embracing his reputation as a nerd when he was in high school, the first songs by Weezer were about coming to terms with the lovable dork inside himself, writing songs about being unlucky in love on ‘The World Has Turned and Left Me Here’ and ‘My Name is Jonas’.
Although this style didn’t necessarily align with the kind of music that Cuomo loved as a kid, he did sneak in a reference to his favourite band on the song, ‘In The Garage’. Being an ode to the days when the band would sweat it out in their rehearsal space, Cuomo namechecks both Frehley and Peter Criss in the lyrics, knowing that everything will be OK as long as he has his KISS records on when he gets home from a hard day at school.
For all of his love for his favourite band in the early days, Cuomo started to awkwardly resent the rock star ethos that KISS preached when he started becoming famous himself. Once Weezer’s blue self-titled album came out in 1994, their massive success clashed with Cuomo’s personality, leading him to go in the opposite direction for their next album, Pinkerton.
After being thrown into the pop music machine, Cuomo quietly retreated inside himself and made an album that was far more confessional than most anticipated, whose negative reception led to the band going on hiatus. While KISS may have been the archetype for what Cuomo wanted to be when he grew up, he didn’t want all of the baggage that came with it.
