The most awkward interview you will ever see with Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo
Weezer’s music has always explored the nature of being a shy, awkward outsider. With the character of their music in mind, it’s all the more baffling that an Australian interview on the 1990s Recovery programme would not help Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo out by making him feel comfortable.
The interview begins terribly from the off when the host says, “I’d like you to make very welcome a very special guest who has stopped over on the way; please welcome River”. So straight away, he’s already got Rivers’ name wrong.
To add insult to injury, he then strangely calls him “River Weezer”. To state that Cuomo looks mortified would be something of an understatement, to say the least. The frontman just looks directly at the floor while the interviewer tries to ramp up the energy and fails miserably. “You’re waiting for a plane as we speak,” he says, to which Rivers merely replies, “Yes.” “Sorry about that,” the interviewer comments. Evidently, Cuomo does not want to be in the studio in the slightest, let alone give an interview to someone who can’t even get his name right.
“All the way from Los Angeles. LA. How are the gigs there?” is the first half-arsed attempt at a significant question. Cuomo misunderstands the question and explains that the gigs in Australia have been good, even if the band are “a little sleepy from jetlag”. So not the way you want to overcome the time difference, then. “You can’t tell,” the interview quips, oblivious to the fact that Cuomo is pissed off rather than just tired.
But perhaps the oddest question of all is, “So did you move to LA to become rockstars?” This bloke supposedly has a career interviewing famous bands, so why on earth would he ask a question as lame as this? Cuomo plays along in some fashion. He says: “Straight after college, I moved across the country to LA to, uh, yeah, become a rockstar…”
Not taking the hint, the idiotic interviewer asks, “So it was specifically to become a rockstar?” Still, Cuomo doesn’t give up, whilst the manner of his response should begin to give the interviewer a hint. “Yeah…” he says. The follow-up questions are similar. “Is it easy being a rockstar?” and “Yeah” is the answer. “Is it rewarding being a rockstar?” he asks before the Weezer man replies: “Yeah, it’s rewarding.” Painful.
The interviewer then asks about the touring schedule that Weezer were on, asking if they are touring “the world”. Cuomo responds, “Not the world, the United States, Europe.” To which the interviewer gets a bit rude, “Europe is the world.”
It’s a painful watch indeed, and you can check it out below.
