When is a Blue Album not a Blue Album?

Last night, I paid a lot of money to see Weezer in concert for…let's see…the fifth time in my life? The band's first major tour (opening for Live in Minneapolis—I really liked those guys till they went all Jesusy); then early in Pinkerton tour again in Mpls; then, the week I moved to NYC, the tail end of the Pinkerton tour at Roseland; nine long years ago at Jones Beach, before they started pumping out mediocre albums; and now last night, again at Roseland. Want to feel really, really old? Go see your favorite college-era band in the same venue you saw them 13 years earlier, then spend the whole next day lying on your couch with a headache blogging about it. Works every time.

This was Weezer's Memories tour (sponsored by State Farm, only slightly more rock & roll than when Sears sponsored a Phil Collins tour), and as per the modern fad, it involves the band playing its classic albums in their entirety. Last night is was the band's self-titled debut release from 1994 (a.k.a. the Blue Album), tonight it's its legendary and misunderstood follow-up, 1996's Pinkerton. Together, those albums formed the bulk of the modern contingent of my college years' soundtrack (most of what I listened to in those days was 15-year-old punk and new wave), so they're indelibly hard-wired into my psyche. I wasn't sure at first which of the two shows I preferred to see, finally opting for night one, since (a) Pinkerton is a little too depressing for me to handle this time of year, and (b) Blue is just a flat-out better record, perhaps the best of the '90s.

But a quick note about my particular Weezer connection: As you may or may not recall, Pinkerton bombed when it was released. Frontman Rivers Cuomo sort of freaked out and bagged on properly promoting it, and the album was just dark, flying in the face of the reputation the band formed among nonfans as a joke-rock band (hard to blame them if the only thing you know is the video for "Buddy Holly").

By the late '90s, the band was considered all but dead, yet another example of '90s alt-rock-boom roadkill. And in 1999, still a dreadfully young man, I'd inexplicably found myself the very junior man in the music department of Rolling Stone magazine, and I lobbied hard for the Blue Album to be included in the magazine's list of the top 200 (not even 100) albums of the '90s. My bosses literally laughed at me; half of them thought I was talking about Ween. The album didn't make the list, but Foxy Brown, the Spice Girls and Billy Joel's River of Dreams were in attendance. Five years later, the Blue Album anniversary release got five out of five stars from the magazine. I love to say I told you so.

I'm getting way off the point here, which is…what? Weezer thoughts in general? As I tweeted during the show (of course), "Seeing Weezer perform the Blue Album makes me realize that I became a quizmaster only because I knew I would never be Rivers Cuomo," and I think that's one faux-profound witticism that stands up to scrutiny the next day. I couldn't fulfill the near-universal dream to be a rock star, but I still wanted to be king of the nerds.

And this thought: "the Blue Album." Such is how everyone refers to that first Weezer album, the band included, in reference to the cover hue, to distinguish it from Weezer's 2001 self-titled album (known as the Green Album) and its 2008 self-titled release (the Red Album). It's a little weird to hear it universally referred to as "the Blue Album," since for seven years, at the height of its fame and emotional power, it didn't have this name at all. It was just Weezer, or "the first album," or "the self-titled one" or "the one everyone cared about."

Even weirder is when it's rendered as The Blue Album—the italics indicative of an official album title (e.g., Pinkerton). Wrong, screams the nit-picky copy editor in me: just the Blue Album. Same as the White Album (formally The Beatles) and Led Zeppelin IV (untitled, also called Zoso, Runes, a bunch of other stoner-derived monikers).

Just nicknames, people. The Blue Album is not The Blue Album. Excuse me while I edit the Wikipedia page.

Thoughts on Cheap Trick and Squeeze

A few thoughts about the Cheap Trick/Squeeze concert I went to Tuesday night at Radio City Music Hall ($50 ticket off Craigslist, went alone, treated myself for my birthday):

— Radio City Musical Hall is a sick venue. That place is just awe-inspiring, from every angle: The architecture, the decoration, the stage. For a time, I said that my ultimate goal in life was for the Big Quiz Thing to play Radio City, but then I realized it has fixed row seating. I'll have to settle for Carnegie Hall.


-- I'd seen Squeeze a couple times before, but never Cheap Trick, so I was more interested in the madmen from Freeport, IL, legendary for their live act. (How many bands can you name whose most beloved release was a live album?) I assumed—I don't know, maybe because New York magazine and a couple other places suggested it—that the Trick was headlining, so I arrived at 8:15 for an 8pm show, figuring at worst I'd miss a couple Squeeze tunes. Nope: Took my seat just as Robin Zander was finishing the a cappella climax to "I Want You to Want Me," my karaoke standby.

Anyway, they were fucking great. Cheap Trick is really a unique band: They struck this weird balance between half a dozen forces going on in rock in the late '70s/early '80s: glam rock, emerging metal-pop, new wave, arena rock. Right now I'm listening to the Cheap Trick channel on Pandora, and it's the best thing I've heard from this program; plug in most bands, and it gives you a pretty narrow range of sound-alike acts, but apparently Cheap Trick is at the sonic center of the classic-rock universe: I can do without Aerosmith, and it's a little too heavy on Queen, but otherwise there's the Beatles, Van Halen when they were good, the Who, the Cars, CCR, the Romantics, Tom Petty, Journey…hell, Tommy Tutone. It's like a really good classic-rock station, the kind that made me a rock fan to begin with.

More of my thoughts about the concert in this review; I didn't write any of the bits about Squeeze, I was just helping out a colleague who arrived seriously late.

— The crowd was very working-class; lots of rough-looking old rock & roll fans wearing Mets caps and holding plastic cups of beer. I say this with no intended condescension. But it was a little surprising, and heartening. Squeeze is an unabashedly London working-class band (think "Up the Junction"), so it's nice to see the sentiment communicated across the Atlantic.


-- Speaking of which, while Cheap Trick T-shirts were not in short supply, this crowd was definitely there for the headliners, which surprised me but shouldn't have. Squeeze was (is) an excellent band—Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford were the new-wave Lennon and McCartney—and while they never met tremendous mainstream success in the U.S., they for some reason have maintained a huge amount of goodwill in the NYC area. Growing up in New Jersey, under the aegis of New York rock radio, I was under the impression that Squeeze was one of the biggest bands in the world; they were in heavy rotation on WNEW, and it seemed like owning a copy of Singles 45's and Under was a prerequisite for getting a driver's license. In 1989, I saw them play a packed Madison Square Garden.

The next year, I moved to Canada, and was surprised to discover that Squeeze did not stride the earth like a colossus; most of my classmates didn't know the band, they were a cult act at best. Same thing when I got to college in the Midwest; sure, everyone knew "Tempted" (the Reality Bites soundtrack had reached campus saturation levels), but otherwise the band was one many in the sub–Elvis Costello hipster-'80s-rock loam.

But last Tuesday's show proved that New York hasn't forgotten. It was fun to watch the crowds varying reactions—hanging on every word when Difford, Tilbrook and their current crop of hired hands (including an irritatingly jumpy keyboard player) played a song from the Singles collection (even if there's no way most of those people knew what Difford is talking about in the über-British "Cool for Cats"), and subdued when the band indulged in an excellent obscurity like "It's So Dirty" or a latter-day single like "Loving You Tonight."

—By the way, shame on them—they played every song from Singles 45's and Under, with the exception of their absolute best song, "Another Nail for My Heart." Instead, watch it here:

This oversight renewed a promise I made to myself once upon a time: If I ever become filthy rich, I will pay to coax all my favorite bands to perform just for me, with a set list of my choosing. I just hope my favorite bands are still alive by then.

Concert recap: The Futureheads

Heads-up: I wrote another concert review for Time Out New York, this one dashed off very quickly (busy week, just needed to justify the free ticket). The Futureheads, currently my favorite, not-past-their prime punk-pop band, sort of an amalgamation of Devo, the Undertones and XTC. (I know, the best thing ever, right?)

While we're at it, here's the video for their new single, "Heartbeat Song," which has convincingly staked a claim on my cerebral matter these past weeks. The game-show theme helps.

NT's greatest hits, No. 10 (of 34)

So this time, I'm dropping the idea of picking these songs from my list of all-time favorites at random. Rules are made to be broken, bitch! Here we go…

"Don't Let's Start" by They Might Be Giants
Yesterday, I was among the entertainment at a bachelor party; an hour of custom quiz as part of a day of festivities. The evening's climactic event was an outing to (Le)Poisson Rouge in the Village to see They Might Be Giants in concert, and my payment was an extra ticket to the show*. Good deal. This was not the first time I saw TMBG live—No. 7, by my rough estimate—but it was the first in probably ten years. I'm not all that into them now, but I loved the two Johns in high school and college, which is extremely unsurprising. This is a band that by all rights, has no business still having a career 25 years after they formed. Lucky for them, geeks like me have conquered the world.

My favorite They Might Be Giants song—sadly omitted from last night's playlist (and no, Katie, they didn't do "Minimum Wage" either)—is "Don't Let Start," one of their first singles. I will not write another word (except these) before showing you the outstanding video:

This is another one of those videos that is perfectly attuned to its song—the rollicking interplay of guitar and keyboard, the jerky stop-start rhythm, the ridiculous randomness. I've written before about how I tend to be drawn to rock & roll with just the slightest avant-garde bent, and I think They Might Be Giants is the apotheosis of that idea: They were your typical NYC music nerds who synthesized whacked-out art music into hooky pop songs, Sonic Youth but catchier and a lot less intimidating. It's no wonder they now make their bread and butter as kid-rockers, considering that most current children's entertainment is predicated on the concept of weird for weirdness' sake.

"Don't Let's Start" was a tremendously influential song in my rock & roll development, like so many other tunes on this list. I first saw this video—first heard of the band—in January 1988, when I saw it as part of a Dr. Demento–hosted MTV countdown of "The Most Demented Videos of All Time." (No. 1 was this, which seems about right.) This was one of the initial things that clued me in to the existence of pop music out of the mainstream, a richer, more intriguing, and just plain smarter world of rock & roll beyond the pabulum pumped out by bar mitzvah DJs. Eight months later I discovered classic rock and developed a rock snob disdain for nearly anything made after 1979, but I always kept a place in my heart—for much of high school, the most honored place—for They Might Be Giants, who always seemed to have something fascinating and fun to offer.

Who's doing that now? Fascinating, okay—lots of rock bands now are continually trying new things. But very few are remotely as fun as TMBG was in its heyday.

*This is what we in the trivia business refer to as a lie, or at least a grossly misleading statement. I was indeed paid money for the trivia event; the concert was an excellent bonus. Moreover, the party had an in with the venue, so it didn't cost them anything to add my name to the list. But it sounds more interesting this way.

Earlier editions of NT's greatest hits:
"Suffragette City"
"See-Saw"
"My Name Is Jonas"
"Mr. Tambourine Man"
"Reelin' in the Years"
"Objects of My Affection" and "Crimson and Clover"
"OK Apartment" and "Just What I Needed"