Concert Review: Weezer

I’ve never been this close to a stage at a concert in my whole life, ever.  We had general admission tickets and, when the gates opened, just sort of sauntered up to the front row:

It was sweltering.

Though I have a few Weezer albums on my iPod, the Blue Album is the only one I’ve listened to substantially in the past decade and a half…I mean, it’s the one everyone has listened to substantially, right?

I don’t even think I officially owned the Blue Album—on cassette, no less—until college, now that I think about it.  The songs had been around long before that, though, and the lyrical self-loathing, the quirk, the rock, the all of it always resonated with me.  I don’t miss high school.  I do, though, miss being the exact age at the exact time songs like “Undone” were released that I could appreciate them the most.

And I wasn’t even one of the alterna-kids.  Yet, I’d made it through the 1990s and my life without seeing them in concert.

This show?  Took me back there.  Way back, to the school bus, to my car, to my dorm room, to friends I’ve not talked to in over a decade.  A concert really has never done that to this degree for me before.

Thus, by the time Rivers Cuomo ran out on stage wailing “Hash Pipe,” I was in full-on teenage-Holly mode—complete with the hair-slinging I used to do in my car on the way to school—thanks to my rapidly-growing-longer-but-probably-never-that-long-again hair.

And look at how close we were to the band!

And Rivers ran by and gave me five, and then later!  He splashed water on me!  I mean, he splashed water on all the people up front because he had several bottles of water up there he was slinging around.  But, at one point, he came around to our side of the stage and individually pelted the two cute girls to my right because, well, they were cute and obviously hot and sticky like the rest of us.  I looked up hopefully and he took pity on not-quite-as-cute-but-at-least-wearing-cute-glasses me, and that’s when an alternative legend looked into my eyes and threw water on me.

That’s also when I remembered that I had, indeed, once had a pretty good crush on Rivers Cuomo years ago, and also when I decided that I still did.  I mean…he’s manic and adorable:

I can’t give you a very good music-critic analysis of Weezer’s music through the years.  I just know they’ve been a steady backdrop for a long time, and Friday night brought it all together for me.  They did several songs from the Blue Album, a song or two from Maladroit andPinkerton and the Green Album, and some of their more recent hits, such as “Pork and Beans” and “I Want You To,” which featured some guy from Louisville who’d won a radio contest and got to sing (really well, I must say) onstage with the band.  They also did a Lady Gaga/MGMT cover mashup.

Energy out the wazoo, stellar musicianship, and years of memories.  One of the best and most fun shows I’ve seen in a long time, possibly ever.

HW