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Page 1
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Rivers' (lack of a) sex life is splashed across newsstands and magazine racks everywhere ...
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Page 2
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The Weezer frontman also gives up sleeping on a bed, eating after noon and speaking ...
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Page 3
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Rick Rubin comes and goes, Rivers returns to Harvard and everyone questions the future ...
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— by James Montgomery
DULUTH, Georgia — This interview was supposed to happen four months ago.
Through various forms of finagling, wrangling, ducking and dodging, Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo managed to avoid MTV News' requests for an interview back in May, when the band's fifth album, Make Believe, was released. Behind the scenes, reps for the band's label, Geffen Records, shook their heads in disbelief. After all, Make Believe was Weezer's first album in three years — their first since 2002's Maladroit, which was panned by both fans and critics alike — and to say there was a lot riding on its success would be an understatement. If ever there were a band that needed the exposure, needed publicity, needed to sit beneath the hot studio lights and answer stupid questions, it was Weezer.
Still, no interview happened.
But suddenly, strangely, everything changed. In early September, the Cuomo camp blinked, and the word was out that finally Weezer were ready to talk. Geffen publicists spoke of a new, improved Rivers Cuomo; a happier, friendlier gentleman who would absolutely love to sit beneath hot studio lights and who would be delighted to answer a boatload of stupid questions. They cited his much-publicized obsession with Vipassana meditation — a strict mix of physical purification and mental observation — as the reason for this change, and they said everything people had read or heard about Cuomo in the past was wrong.
"Whatever you need," they promised, "he'll do it."
"Just name a time and a place," they said, "and he'll be there."
Which is how we get to right now, to a luxury suite deep inside the well-tiled bowels of the Arena at Gwinnett Center, just off the Sugarloaf Parkway in suburban Duluth, Georgia. It's the eve of Weezer's much-hyped co-headlining tour with fellow alt-rock survivors the Foo Fighters, probably the band's biggest string of shows in almost five years, and soundchecks are running a bit late. And as such, our interview with Cuomo keeps getting pushed back, so much so that when he finally ambles into the suite — shoulders hunched, hair wild, wearing a sport coat and wool pants despite the scorching Georgia heat — everyone is a bit nervous and a bit rushed. Except for Cuomo, who straightens his shoulders, studies his digital watch and glances around the room.
"OK," he says, staring ahead blankly. "We've got 13 minutes, let's go."
And he's not kidding. What originally was supposed to be a 45-minute, in-depth interview has suddenly been chopped down to a brief, 13-minute chat. Weezer's tour manager laughs nervously, and Cuomo's personal assistant shuffles her feet, but nothing changes. We have exactly 780 seconds to speak with Cuomo, because at precisely 6 p.m. he must meditate for exactly one hour, in solitude, before he can sing a note of music. And after his hour of meditation, the other four members of Weezer — guitarist Brian Bell, bassist Scott Shriner and drummer Pat Wilson — will join Cuomo for even more meditation, a rock and roll band holding hands and chanting to achieve mental clarity, standing backstage in a modified hockey arena in suburban Georgia.
But when you consider the entire 13-year history of this band, a roller-coaster ride filled with breakups and meltdowns and triumphs and failures (and the odd semester at Harvard), a little meditation doesn't seem that strange at all.
"It's funny, I was just talking to the president of our record company, and he was concerned that our younger fans were going to be freaked out because I was meditating or whatever," he laughs. "Like, they might think I'm some kind of hippie or something. But honestly, it's all perfectly normal. People think I'm a freak or something, but I'm actually a really normal guy."
Of course, "normal" is a fairly relative term for a guy like Cuomo, who's sold more than 6 million albums and has a personal collection of somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 soul-crushing songs of self-doubt, though he's never included more than 13 of them on any Weezer album. He's the shrugging leader of a fiercely loyal army of fans, though he rarely, if ever, talks to them. He's a fret-shredding rock and roll star who once isolated himself for an entire year in an apartment in Culver City, California, with just his pet gecko to keep him company. And in the interest of staying true to the tenents of Vipassana, he has abstained from sex for more than two years — a fact trumpeted on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in its May 5 issue.
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Photo Credit: Geffen
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