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Weezer’s "The Sweater Song” Turns 15

Posted On: Sun Jun 28, 09 9:07 AM

15 years ago Weezer released their supremely goofy debut single “Undone - The Sweater Song,” off their self-titled disc fans call the Blue Album.

Produced by Cars frontman Ric Ocasek, the tune got loads of MTV airplay with a bizarre Spike Jones-directed video featuring the band playing the song in slow motion while a pack of dogs run amok. Along with Green Day (whose major-label debut Dookie came out three months earlier), Weezer would become one of the biggest bands of 1994. Later in the year Rolling Stone caught up with the quartet for a piece in which Rivers Cuomo says, “I don’t think what I do is original at all.” The complete piece is after the jump.

“Everybody in this band is sick all the time,” says Weezer bassist Matt Sharp as he, drummer Pat Wilson and guitarist Brian Bell sit in a Hell’s Kitchen macrobiotic restaurant. It’s the day of their New York gig opening for Lush, and the band’s enfant terrible — singer/songwriter Rivers Cuomo — is nowhere to be found. According to their manager, he’s sick. “We’re going to rip Rivers in this interview,” Sharp says cheerfully, stabbing a vegetable bundle with a chopstick.

If Beck is the slacker-sound god of the moment, then Weezer are the genre refined. On their debut album (produced by Ric Ocasek) the band shouts and rumbles through songs like “Undone - The Sweater Song” and “Buddy Holly” with the irreverent energy of the Beach Boys on mescaline.

The son of massage therapists, the 23-year-old Cuomo left his native Connecticut in 1990 and went to Los Angeles to be a rock star. “I failed, totally,” he says. The subsequent success of Weezer seems lost on Cuomo. Looking five years down the line, he imagines grad school rather than alterna-rock sainthood. “I don’t think what I do is original at all,” Cuomo says wistfully. “It’s more out of faithfulness to my adolescent dreams that I’m still doing this.”

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Wheezer- "Undone" (The Sweater Song)
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