The Endless Algorithm - "In the Garage" by Weezer
Welcome to The Endless Algorithm, a new essay series from Kool Kids Music Club. Each installment focuses on a single song, with the algorithm in my brain making some connection between each selection. Basically, I’m spelling out what’s happening in my mind when you give me the aux chord.
Hit the 🔙 button to read the previous post about Dikembe’s “Scottie Spliffen.”
Unlike Dikembe, Weezer are not emo. But they are a big influence on emo.
Throughout Weezer’s surprisingly long career, Rivers Cuomo and co. have proved particularly slippery when it comes to genre. First finding fame in Nirvana’s wake, they took a hard left turn into lo-fi self-flagellation on their second album, before settling into a steady stream of records that increasingly ping-ponged between trying to game the charts and fan service. I write that as someone who once called Weezer their favourite band, and who as recently as 2014 took the time and energy to write 5000-ish words about their career.
Unlike many of their 90s peers, Weezer didn’t arrive with deep indie cred or convictions. Raised in an ashram, Rivers Cuomo moved from Connecticut to Los Angeles with his metal band in 1989 with dreams of making it big. That dream quickly fizzled and Cuomo soon found himself working at Tower Records, where he was introduced to a whole new musical world — as well as his future bandmate, Patrick Wilson — by a fellow employee. The singer and guitarist shuffled through various line-ups and band names before He, Wilson on drums, Wilson’s pal Matt Sharp on bass, and Jason Cropper on guitar, formed Weezer in 1992. Their first gig was closing a night headlined by Keanu Reeves’ band Dogstar. By the following year, the group had signed to DGC and were in the studio with former Cars frontman Ric Ocasek. During the sessions that produced The Blue Album, Cropper was fired and replaced by Brian Bell, thereby cementing what most consider the classic Weezer lineup.
Pinkerton, that raw second album, was retroactively brought under the emo umbrella, though to the best of my knowledge they weren’t really in contact or dialogue with that nascent scene. In retrospect, there are moments on Pinkerton that scan as an incel version of Jessica Hopper’s “Where the girl’s aren’t” essay. I still think it has plenty of great moments — and proved to be a direct influence on fourth and fifth-wave emo bands like Dikembe (emo has a very complicated taxonomy, okay?).
Over the years, one of the biggest digs against Weezer has been singer-guitarists and main songwriter Rivers Cuomo’s increasingly impersonal approach to songwriting. I think the attachment a lot of Weezer fans have to the group’s first two albums is Cuomo’s humanity, something that, in my opinion is sorely lacking in the band’s post-millennial output. Pinkerton digs deeper, but The Blue Album is the platonic ideal balance of personal insecurity and rock star dreaming.
To my mind, the Weezer song that captures that spirit, and the one that continues to resonate with me today is “In the Garage.” Nestled near the end The Blue Album, its defining features are that it comes directly after all-time great karaoke belter “Say it Ain’t So,” features a harmonica, and is full of 70s pop-culture references.
The first thing you hear is that harmonica blowing the song’s central melody over top of an acoustic guitar. In that brief moment, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a cheap Bob Dylan rip-off. But then the electric guitars kick in; multiple, distorted guitars stacked on top of one another, creating a big, thick grungy take on power pop that would come to define “the Weezer sound.” The song’s first two verses are basically Cuomo listing off various pieces of 70s nerd ephemera — a Dungeon Masters guide, 12-sided dice, comic books, posters of Kiss, etc. Honestly, the whole thing’s a bit “I love lamp.”
As the song progresses though, it becomes clear that these objects are symbols of the protagonist’s feelings of alienation. While not particularly poetic, the chorus lays out the scenario: “In the garage, I feel safe, no one cares about my ways.” The garage, with all its objects of comfort, is where the song’s main character feels safe enough to indulge in their dreams.
According to Weezerpedia, which is a thing that exists, Cuomo knocked out the track, along with “Holiday” and “Buddy Holly” during a quick writing spurt after Weezer signed with DGC. Apparently, the garage they’re referring to was the one at The Amherset House, where the band held many early rehearsals and recorded some early demos. The space was further mythologized in the Blue Album’s inner sleeve and later, in the video for “Say it Ain’t So,” which was shot in the space, though long after Cuomo and bass player Matt Sharp, who lived in the house for a period, had moved out.
Yet the song’s lyrics feel closer to adolescence than that origin story suggests. Today name-dropping people and pieces of pop-cultural detritus is as much a way to warm the hearts of listeners as it is savvy SEO. But in the mid-90s it was still an anomaly. Also, the things in Cuomo’s garage were not cool. By 1994, the Satanic panic had chipped away at D&D’s popularity and comic books were still a good decade away from being cool. Cuomo, born in 1970, even pointedly shouts out the two members of Kiss, then at their commercial nadir, who were fired from the group at the beginning of the 80s. The only reason to attach your name to any of these things is if you have some personal connection.
For what it’s worth, I did have a personal connection to them. I came to Weezer like most people did in 1994: through Spike Jonze’s eye-popping “Buddy Holly” clip, an homage to another piece of 70s pop culture, the sitcom Happy Days. Yet even at 14, I could tell that there was more than a quirky slice of power-pop at play, even if I didn’t have the words to describe it. Weezer still play “Buddy Holly” at almost every show — it’s their most-played song ever according to Setlist.fm. But many of The Blue Album’s deep cuts, including “In the Garage,” which was never a single, have proven to have a very extensive longtail.
You’d be hard-pressed to find any musician, especially guitarists, who haven’t sat in their garage, or rooml or basement, dreaming about playing in front of an audience of adoring fans. Hard rock bands like Kiss (and AC/DC, Guns n Roses, and Def Leppard) were my gateway into music. Before that, I was obsessed with comic books and while I’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons, the fantasy aesthetic and world-building has always appealed to me. To my ears, “In the Garage” sounds like Weezer peering into my superficial teenaged soul and writing a song about it.
In that sense, the song pulls off a neat trick of channeling the sadness of Beach Boys’ 1963 introvert anthem “In My Room” while simultaneously yearning for rock stardom à la another song from 1994, Oasis’s “Rock and Roll Star.” Mind you, Noel Gallagher had no qualms about the massive stardom he and his brother Liam would achieve; both Gallaghers still possess the unearned world-conquering swagger that made them media darlings in the UK.
Cuomo’s rock star dreams came true too; The Blue Album was a hit. It’s apparently sold more than three million copies in the US alone. Yet, unlike the Gallaghers, fame didn’t sit well with Cuomo. 1996’s Pinkerton was a hard turn inward, and its commercial failure relative to its predecessor saw the singer and guitarist reconfigure his approach over a three-year hiatus. When the band re-emerged in 2001, sans Matt Sharp, they were a different beast. They were a band, but Cuomo was now clearly the lone creative voice controlling their output. He swore off Pinkerton, both its content and its aesthetics, in favour of a more streamlined, impersonal approach.
Take 2005’s “Beverly Hills,” the band’s commercial peak and arguable creative nadir. Though not intended as such, it’s sort of a spiritual sequel to “In the Garage,” yearning for luxury from the position of the have-nots (or at least have-lesses). Where the protagonist in “In the Garage” is searching for emotional validation through art, the one in “Beverly Hills” strictly aspires to a consumer-driven lifestyle.
The music and melody are dumb catchy, but lyrically it has always felt hollow to me, coming from the lead singer of a successful rock band a decade into their career. Cuomo might not have a fancy car or gone to boarding school, but he was doing just fine.
Naturally, it was their first — and so far only — top 10 single.
Next up in the Endless Algorithm queue… “The Sound” by the 1975.
Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
Write to koolkidsmusicclub@gmail.com for questions, criticisms and submissions