Rivers Cuomo

**Association with Weezer** | Vocalist, Guitarist, Pianist

**Rivers Cuomo** (born June 13, 1970) is an American singer, songwriter, and musician. He is the lead vocalist, guitarist, pianist, and songwriter of the American rock band Weezer.

## Early Life

Rivers Cuomo was born on June 13, 1970, in New York City to a father of Italian descent and a mother of German-English descent. Accounts differ as to the origin of his name. According to one account, Cuomo's mother Beverly Shoenberger named him Rivers either because he was born between the East and Hudson rivers in Manhattan or because she could hear a river outside her hospital window. However, his father, Frank Cuomo, a musician who played drums on the 1971 album *Odyssey of Iska* by jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter, says Cuomo was named after three prominent soccer players: Rivellino, Luigi Riva, and Gianni Rivera, all of whom were playing in the 1970 World Cup.

Rivers was raised in Rochester, New York, at the Rochester Zen Center, until his father left the family in 1975. His mother relocated the family to Yogaville, an ashram in Pomfret, Connecticut. Cuomo attended the Pomfret Community School, and his mother married Stephen Kitts. In 1980, Yogaville relocated to Virginia. The Kitts family opted to stay in Connecticut and moved to the Storrs/Mansfield area. During this time, Cuomo attended Mansfield Middle School and E.O. Smith High School. Rivers was a member of the high school choir and he performed in a school production of *Grease* as Johnny Casino. He also changed his name to Peter Kitts; after graduating, Cuomo reverted to his original name.

One of Cuomo's earliest music projects was the glam metal band Avant Garde. In 1989, after playing several shows in Connecticut, Avant Garde moved to Los Angeles and changed their name to Zoom, but broke up in 1990. During this time, Cuomo attended Santa Monica College. In 1990 and 1991, while Cuomo was writing material for what became Weezer's debut album, he was a roadie for the band King Size and worked at Tower Records, where he listened to "basically everything that was released at that time ... I was exposed to a ton of music I otherwise never would have heard.", Rivers quoted.

## Weezer

Cuomo formed Weezer in 1992 with drummer Patrick Wilson, bassist Matt Sharp and guitarist Jason Cropper. "Weezer" was the nickname given to Cuomo by his father when he was a toddler. Weezer signed with DGC, a subsidiary of Geffen Records, on June 25, 1993, and released their self-titled debut album, commonly known as the Blue Album, in May 1994. Cropper was asked to leave the band by Cuomo during the album's recording, and was replaced by Brian Bell. The album was certified platinum on January 1, 1995, with sales of over one million. Despite his success, Cuomo tired of the monotony and loneliness of touring and developed a "huge inferiority complex" about rock music, saying: "I thought my songs were really simplistic and silly, and I wanted to write complex, intense, beautiful music."

Cuomo at Don Mueang International Airport in Bangkok in 1997
In March 1995, Cuomo had extensive surgery to extend his left leg, which was 44mm shorter than the right. This involved the surgical breaking of the leg bone, followed by months of wearing a steel brace and painful physiotherapy sessions. The procedure affected his songwriting, as he would spend long periods hospitalized under the influence of painkillers.
In the fall of 1995, Cuomo enrolled in Harvard University to study classical composition. He told The New York Times: "The only time I could write songs was when my frozen dinner was in the microwave. The rest of the time I was doing homework." He auditioned for the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum chorus, but was not selected. He became introverted and grew a beard, and wrote in his diaries how students wearing Weezer T-shirts did not recognize him.
Cuomo had planned Weezer's second album to be a rock opera, Songs from the Black Hole, but he abandoned the project as his songwriting became "darker, more visceral and exposed, less playful". Realizing he did not enjoy contemporary classical music, and missing Weezer, Cuomo dropped out of Harvard two semesters before graduation. He expressed the isolation and sexual frustration he had felt at Harvard in Weezer's second album, Pinkerton, released in September 1996. With a darker, more abrasive sound than Weezer's debut, Pinkerton was a commercial and critical failure, but attained critical acclaim later.
Following Pinkerton, Weezer went on a three-year hiatus. Cuomo enrolled at Harvard twice more and completed semesters in 1997 and 2004. During the 1997 semester, he played with a new band, Homie, in Boston. In February 1998, Cuomo disbanded Homie and moved to Los Angeles to work on new Weezer demos with Bell and Wilson, but the sessions were unproductive. In 1998 and 1999, he lived in an apartment under a freeway in Culver City, California. In an essay for Harvard, he wrote: "I became more and more isolated. I unplugged my phone. I painted the walls and ceiling of my bedroom black and covered the windows with fiberglass insulation."

Disappointed by Pinkerton's reception, Cuomo intended to return to simpler songwriting with less personal lyrics. He stated that Weezer's subsequent albums, the Green Album (2001) and Maladroit (2002), were "very intentionally not about me. Not about what was going on in my life, at least in a conscious way." He also developed a greater appreciation for pop music, feeling that its multiple disciplines — including lyrics, improvisation, and image — produce a multifaceted art "that moves people and is important, and relevant to our culture in a way that serious classical music isn't right now". In June 2006, he graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in English from Harvard and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
On December 6, 2009, Cuomo was in his tour bus driving to Boston from Toronto with his family and assistant when the bus hit an icy road in Glen, New York and crashed. He suffered cracked ribs and internal bleeding. Weezer canceled the rest of the 2009 tour dates, planning to reschedule them the following year. They made their return to the stage on January 20, 2010, performing at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.

## Equipment

Cuomo recorded the Blue Album with a Gibson Les Paul Special and a Fender Jaguar borrowed from producer Ric Ocasek. His amp was a vintage Mesa Boogie Mark I. For touring, he initially used a sonic blue Warmoth Fender Stratocaster copy with Seymour Duncan and DiMarzio pickups alongside Marshall amps. However, the guitar was destroyed in late 1997. In recent years, he has used additional Warmoth Strat copies (in blue, seafoam green, black and blonde), as well as a Gibson SG painted in white with a Seymour Duncan bridge pickup. During the Hella Mega Tour in 2021, Cuomo has been seen playing a Jackson Rhoads, which seems a tip of the hat to Randy Rhoads, likely having a connection to the recent use of Rhoads' solo on "Crazy Train", and the guitars are normally plugged into a Kemper Profiler amp.

## Personal Life

Cuomo took a vow of sexual abstinence from 2004 until his marriage in 2006. On June 18, 2006, Cuomo married Kyoko Ito, whom he met in March 1997 at one of his solo concerts at the Middle East club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He proposed to her in Tokyo shortly before Christmas 2005. The wedding was held at a beach on Paradise Cove in Malibu and was attended by all past and present members of Weezer (except for Mikey Welsh), as well as Kevin Ridel and Rick Rubin. The couple have two children: daughter Mia, born in 2007, and son Leo, born in 2011.

Cuomo was born with equal length legs, but as he grew to his full height, his left leg grew nearly two inches shorter than his right. After the success of The Blue Album, Cuomo underwent the Ilizarov procedure to correct the condition. This involved the surgical breaking of the bone in his leg, followed by several months of wearing a steel brace that required self-administered "stretching" of the leg four times daily; Cuomo likened the ordeal to "crucifying [his] leg."
Cuomo has been vegetarian since childhood. However, in 2002, he told an interviewer that he might like to start eating meat regularly and stated he had done so in the past, eating "some kind of barbecued beef in Tokyo."

Cuomo practices Vipassanā meditation and was a student of S. N. Goenka. As of mid-2009, he also teaches children's meditation as taught by S. N. Goenka. Cuomo helped acquire music rights and provided financial support to a 2007 documentary titled The Dhamma Brothers about Vipassanā meditation being instituted in an Alabama state prison.

Cuomo was a fan of soccer at an early age. He wrote a song, "My Day Is Coming", in tribute to the U.S. men's soccer team in 2006, and in 2010, wrote "Represent", an "unofficial anthem" for the U.S. team, which was released as a Weezer single on June 11, the day before Team USA's World Cup opener against England. In early 2008, Cuomo played in the Mia and Nomar Celebrity Soccer Challenge and scored a goal in the game. The video for "Lover in the Snow", from the Alone album, deals with this game and his love of soccer growing up. In August 2009, Cuomo participated in the Athletes for Africa 5v5 Charity Soccer Tournament in Toronto, Canada alongside actor Michael Cera.

Cuomo performed at a campaign rally for Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang in Iowa on November 1, 2019, though Cuomo did not explicitly endorse Yang.