Mike Comite
speaker
32 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Mike Comite’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
There's this video. I've watched it more times than I'd like to admit in the last decade and a half. Kind of like a retired football player watching old game tapes from his glory days, who pauses and rewinds that one play where he tore his ACL over and over to see where his career went sideways. It happened at Bonnaroo, this music festival with some of the biggest acts in the world.
That year Dave Matthews' band and Jay-Z were playing. It was 2010. The band I was in was invited to play on one of the medium-sized stages, which is a huge deal for us. There'd be over 2,000 people watching. It'd be the biggest stage we'd ever played on. But then I saw that Weezer was also playing Bonnaroo. It felt like some kind of fated opportunity.
We were actually covering a Weezer song in our set. And so I had this big idea. Our front person, Julia, was a musician who had blown up on YouTube. She had thousands of followers on social media. What if we got them all to tweet at Weezer's lead singer, Rivers Cuomo, to see if he'd come sing with us? I asked Julia, and she was game for it.
And shockingly, it worked, better than we could have hoped. Rivers didn't come sing with us. Instead, he invited Julia to come play her ukulele and sing with Weezer during one of their songs on the main stage. Julia's visibility at Bonnaroo would be multiplied tenfold. If this went well, who knows where it could lead. Maybe Weezer would bring us on tour with them as their opener.
Our agent immediately submitted us to their team for some of their upcoming shows. Or maybe Rivers would write a song with Julia, play on our record, or she'd play on theirs. The possibilities kept me up at night. I was 22. I'd only been playing music professionally for a year at that point. But I was convinced this would be the moment that would transform our careers.
The day of the show, Julia split off from our group to rehearse with Weezer on their tour bus. I felt a little sting finding out I wasn't gonna meet them too. Weezer went on a little before sunset. Me and the rest of the band sat way back in the crowd on some bleachers while Julia was somewhere backstage. There had to be at least 20,000 people between us and Weezer.
I couldn't believe that a dumb idea I'd cooked up in rehearsal had led to this. The song Julia was going to play on was called Trippin' Down the Freeway. Weezer started it a few songs into their set. Julia's offstage for the first half of the song, but after the guitar solo, Rivers brings the band down to a vamp and has Julia come out, kind of dramatically.
Julia walks onstage strumming her uke, but something sounds off. They are not in the right tuning.
For a split second, I'm convinced I'm having a nightmare. I try telling myself to wake up. Nope. Weezer is still on stage, having a conversation mid-song about Julia's tuning through the PA system. Rivers pivots. He turns to the crowd and starts talking about how Julia had ended up on stage with them that day. About Twitter, about Julia's fans.
He's making fun of her? I start clenching my jaw from the stands.
I'm mortified. I can't believe how mean he's being to her. Just so passive-aggressive. At this point, our crew member who's been sitting next to me, excitedly filming Julia's big moment, quietly stops recording and puts down her camera. This isn't her video. Someone else posted this one to YouTube. I couldn't help thinking I'd been the one to suggest she do this in the first place. This was on me.
After an excruciating 62 seconds of improv, Rivers wanders across the stage to where Julia is trying to retune with another band member.
I'm just going to sing, she says.
Rivers counts off and starts singing, and Julia jumps in.
Julia looks so small from where we're sitting, but I can tell she's holding her ukulele by her side as she sings. They finish the song, Rivers thanks Julia, and she walks off the stage. I'm sitting in the bleachers, shocked by what just happened. Weezer keeps playing a bunch of my favorite songs, and I can't enjoy them.
The next day, Rivers tweeted at Julia and thanked her for playing despite the mishap. A few weeks later, Weezer's manager officially turned us down for the opening spot on tour. In the music business, you need some moment to pull you out of obscurity and propel you forward. And it felt like for us, Weezer had been it. Instead, we'd blown it. And that was the beginning of the end.
After Bonnaroo, Julia and I stayed busy touring, just the two of us for a while. But then things slowed down. Julia and her management were about to part ways. I started getting nervous about being able to support myself. So I tapped out of touring with Julia and got a full-time job where a lot of struggling musicians and actors end up. At the Apple Store.
And so this is when I started watching and re-watching that video, the Weezer performance. I've been doing that for the last 14 years. Each replay, I keep hoping that it won't be as bad as I remember. But it always is. I'm still stuck on, what the fuck happened? And in particular, was it our fault? On stage, Rivers had made it seem like it, but I've gone through the details again and again.
Julia had received tuning instructions from Weezer's road manager. Were those incorrect? Had Julia done the math wrong tuning her uke? Had I? I'd helped her with that. I found a video of Julia rehearsing with Weezer on their tour bus. She was in the wrong tuning there, too, but no one had noticed? Julia might know what went wrong, but I never really talked to her about that show.
Only once right after. It was uncomfortable. She was clearly upset, had been crying. She asked to let it go, so I did. But she must remember something from that day. So I called her. When is the last time you thought about the Weezer performance?
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