: “Teacher says I gotta learn some facts / So I can make it in the Widener Stacks”

Jake Zavracky (member of Boy Wonder, Quick Fix, & Cyanide Valentine): “Well I only played one show with him. It was him and me and Pat Wilson (the drummer from Weezer) and Joe Klompus (who was in the band Jack Drag at the time). He had been playing this sort of rootsy music in a solo band around town, but that’s not what I was in. We just did a bunch of Weezer songs, at TT’s. I think it was just a one off. He said he really liked singing with me but I don’t think he liked my guitar playing very much.



I remember asking him what he was listening to when he was writing ‘The Blue Album,’ expecting to hear a bunch of contemporary bands like Pavement or something, but he said the Beatles and the Beach Boys, which makes perfect sense now, but I was surprised by that then.”

Rivers Cuomo (from his recent WTF podcast interview with Marc Maron): “I started out as a music major and then switched to English literature. To this day, my favorite is Shakespeare.”

Kevin Stevenson (The Shods, lead guitarist/vocalist/songwriter): “Yeah, we played a few– one at the Paradise. We were booked as Homie, I guess that was the name of the band— the only people who didn’t know that were the band! We switched out band members after a month or two. We started off with Mikey Welch on bass and Zephan Courtney on drums. It wasn’t working out, so they were replaced by the drummer of the Gigilo Aunts, and the bass player from Juliana Hatfield’s band, and it was a great fit.”

Julie Kramer: “He would always come to BBQ’s, but he didn’t eat meat. So he’d eat tomatoes.”

Drew O’Doherty: “I continued occasionally seeing him around at other shows throughout the year. One night, after a benefit show at The Middle East, some friends and I took a bunch of baked goods that had been left behind at the club and set out to give them to various homeless folks in the neighborhood. On our way, we bumped into Rivers. We explained what we were up to, and he said ‘Oh my God, I’m so hungry!’ and he scarfed down a bunch of muffins and donuts before walking away. It was kind of hilarious to see this skinny dude go to town like that. Fortunately, he left us enough food that our plan to deliver baked goods to non-rock star/millionaires wasn’t completely derailed.”



Rivers Cuomo, Harvard Crimson interview, 2006: “Yeah, I had a very close relationship with my Expos teacher, Naomi Stephen. At that time, I was working on the ‘Pinkerton’ songs a lot, so I feel like she was, in a way, a collaborator and an influence. But one example is, in ‘Pinkerton,’ in ‘El Scorcho,’ two lines in the song are actually taken from someone else’s essay in my Expos class.”



Jake Zavracky: “This was also well before ‘Pinkerton’ was widely considered an indie rock masterpiece as it seems to be now, and I got the sense that he was kind of stung by the slow sales and all that. He’s more of a populist than one would probably think. We’d be at a party at someone’s apartment and he definitely just blended in, it wasn’t like there was a lot of commotion around him or anything. He was a really sweet guy, I assume he still is but I haven’t talked to him since then really.



He just struck me as shy and inward, very thoughtful and maybe sort of ADD-ish like he couldn’t concentrate on anything because he had a millions thoughts going off all the time. It’s not that he’s a weird person necessarily, I guess he just wasn’t what I would have expected from a rock star (which is definitely a compliment coming from me, anyway). He was also extremely particular about the music, which I don’t think would come as much of a surprise to most people. He had a definite vision. He liked to keep things very angular, nothing bluesy in the guitar playing or singing, no glissing up to notes or bending strings too much. I also was definitely struck by how extremely simple the songs were and how easy they are to play on the guitar, but yet there was nothing generic about them, they sounded very fresh and inventive. To me that’s his genius.”



Rivers Cuomo, from the “Alone” album liner notes: “When one of my classmates, Lucia Brawley, left a message for me on my home answering machine relaying an assignment I had missed, I couldn’t believe how obtuse the language of my world had become. I snapped mentally and made a sound collage of Lucia’s message, calling it ‘Harvard Blues.'”



Julie Kramer: “The bass player of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion was a huge Weezer fan, which is so odd because their music is so different. I called Rivers and said, ‘this bass player is really into you. Will you come out tonight? He’d like to meet you.’ Rivers said OK. We go out to the show and the bass player was just gushing over him. Everyone’s a music fan. Whether you’re in a band or not in a band. I think Rivers was shy about it. But he was totally cool, like, “Oh thanks!” ‘Cause, you know, what do you say? He had a lot of humility and honor.”



Drew O’Doherty: “He was very jealous of my Stryper ‘777: To Hell With The Devil’ thrift store shirt.”