Guitar World interview with Rivers Cuomo - March 1997

==Gallery==
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==Transcription==
Schoolhouse Rock
By Tom Beaujour
After Weezer went multi-Platinum, guitarist Rivers Cuomo took a year off, grew a beard and went to college. Now he gives a lesson on the making of Pinkerton, the band's raunchy sophomore outing.
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"If we all stay cool and follow the rules, we'll have a great time!"
It's lunch period at Shore Crest High School in Seattle, Washington, and Weezer are about to play an "unplugged" set to a cafeteria full of giddy students. Despite the dismally un-rock-and-roll introduction they have just received from young Lad Martin, a Shore Crest freshman who won a "Have Weezer Play at Your School" contest sponsored by a local radio station, the band is in good-enough spirits. As they work their way through the all-acoustic gig, the audience—except for a few burly jocks in the corner whose disdain for Weezer's ultra-clever power pop is as large as their oversized Rage Against the Machine T-shirts—screams and howls its approval and support of frontman Rivers Cuomo and his bandmates, guitarist Brian Bell, bassist Matt Sharp and drummer Pat Wilson.
At times, the students' enthusiasm takes on a downright eerie quality. During the bittersweet "Pink Triangle," in which Cuomo laments the fact that the girl he has a crush on turns out to be a lesbian, the students of Shore Crest seem completely oblivious to the song's narrative, but whoop and holler wildly each time the naughty "L" word is pronounced in the
chorus. It's a reaction that could be expected from such a young audience; unlike so many grunge poets who tap into teen angst for their subject matter, Cuomo's lyrics are essentially autobiographical and as such very much geared toward the 20-somethings of this world.
"Right after the show, a girl came up to me with a little tape recorder and asked me, 'Why do you think high school students relate to your music?' And I was completely stumped. I didn't say anything," Cuomo recounts later, nestled in the comfort of the Weezer tour bus. "I think they probably just relate to it on a more pre-verbal level."
Cuomo, however, is one of the most verbal rock musicians in current circulation, an avowed bookworm who took a year off after he finished touring behind Weezer's double-Platinum 1994 debut to enroll at one of the nation's most prestigious Ivy-League schools (the identity of which he insists on keeping a secret). If going back to school at the peak of one's career seems like pure insanity, Cuomo explains that for him, there was no possible alternative. 
"I knew it was what I had to do, creatively," he says. "I had to take time off and do nothing except be by myself and think and read and write songs. And I can't do any of that when I'm on the road because I'm having fun—there's nothing to write songs about. But as soon as I get off the road and I'm in school, I'm lonely and miserable. Then I start writing."
The songs Cuomo penned during his recent college stint are textbook Weezer: classic power-pop riffs, ferociously catchy hooks and anthemic choruses, all topped with habitually blunt lyrics that bubble with wit. The new album, cryptically entitled Pinkerton (a reference to the morally bankrupt Captain Pinkerton, a character from the Giacomo Puccini opera Madame Butterfly), is a loose, raunchy production, a far cry from the radio-friendly slickness that producer Ric Ocasek imparted to the band's debut. 
"I like the way that both albums sound," says Cuomo, "But I think that Pinkerton is a lot truer to our vision of what a Weezer record should be, which is one of the reasons why we produced it ourselves. I love pop music and I feel that if I have any talent, it's in pop music, so those are the songs I write. But then when it comes time to record them or play them,
if they're done too slickly, it just sounds terrible to me. You've got to fuck with it a bit."
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