Chapter 1: What dark events shaped Weezer's history?
This is exactly right.
I'm Michelle McPhee, and I've been unraveling the strangest criminal alliance I've ever reported on. A Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman.
Multi-million dollar house, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, a billion dollar fraud. But how long can this alliance last? Tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me?
Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You know the famous author Roald Dahl. He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG. But did you know he was a spy? Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl. All episodes are out now. Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. What? Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you, the guy was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime.
The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until a confession changed everything. I was a monster.
Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode contains content that may be disturbing to some listeners. Please check the show notes for more information. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis.
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Chapter 2: How did Rivers Cuomo's obsession with Kurt Cobain influence Weezer?
Kirk cut his long hair short, and he shaved his face until it was smooth as the bare bottom of that baby that was on the cover of Nevermind, and as smooth as the voice he was now using to sing. It was a different voice. Gone was his trademark punk rock howl, and its place was a clearer, purer voice.
It was the voice behind his next hit song, a catchy tune inspired by that olive drab cardigan he'd famously worn during Nirvana's appearance on MTV Unplugged. And the song was called Undone, the Sweater Song. And it was the lead single off the debut album by Kurt's new band. A band that, like Nirvana, had a one-word name. That's right. Kurt Cobain did not die in 1994.
Kurt Cobain secretly became Rivers Cuomo of the band Weezer. As music conspiracy theories go, I gotta say, this one is both pretty ridiculous and pretty hysterical. Rivers Cuomo himself thought that it was funny enough to actually entertain the concept a few years back on Rick Rubin's podcast, even playing along as if it were true and as if he were Kurt Cobain for real.
But still, though it's good for a laugh and all, imagine that you're Kurt Cobain, a bona fide rock star, badass to your core. And then further imagine that you are beset on all sides by rubberneckers who want everything from you. Your blood, your sweat, your tears. Would it not be in line with your badass rockstar character?
Would it not be the ultimate fuck you to all of these culture vultures if you were to fake your own death and then live in secrecy as a nerd? Now, imagine the reverse. Imagine the tame nerd becoming the feral rock star. Imagine Rivers Cuomo becoming Kurt Cobain. That seems like a more unbelievable proposition, but that's exactly what Rivers Cuomo wanted to do.
Rivers Cuomo wanted it so badly to become Kurt Cobain that he kept a three-ring binder full of mathematical deconstructions of every Nirvana song. He studied them. He needed to understand how they were made. And by doing so, he could then write his own songs that would be just as impactful and beloved. But Rivers Cuomo wanted much more than to simply crack Kurt Cobain's code.
"'I seriously thought we were the next Nirvana,' Rivers told Rolling Stone in 2019 on the 25th anniversary of Weezer's debut. "'And I thought the world was going to perceive us that way, like a super important, super powerful, heartbreaking heavy rock band and as serious artists.'"
In May of 1994, one month after Kurt Cobain's death, when Weezer released their self-titled debut album, or The Blue Album as it's now known, the quartet of Rivers Cuomo on guitar and vocals and Matt Sharp on bass, Brian Bell on guitar, and Patrick Wilson on drums were not seen as a super important, super powerful, heartbreaking, heavy rock band. Nor were they seen as serious artists.
Instead, they were seen as four lovable dorks with a couple catchy songs. Not that there's anything wrong with that. And this isn't to say that they weren't commercially successful either, because they absolutely were.
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Chapter 3: What led to the drastic change in Rivers Cuomo's musical style?
The deviants. The savages. There was no place for the meek and mild, when Rivers Cuomo's high school band was quickly chewed up and spit out. Still, Rivers remained determined.
He would follow the path of the true artists, the path forged by the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, who Rivers learned about while working at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard, the same path later trampled by Kurt Cobain, whose songs Rivers Cuomo studied like they were fourth-period algebra. With Weezer, Rivers played a ton of shows. He gigged hard.
He worked harder than most to plant his own mild-mannered flag in a scene full of unruly animals. Now, finally, it looked as though success had come, but it was success on someone else's terms. Spring, 1995. Rivers Cuomo reclined in his seat as Weezer's tour bus rumbled down the highway. A mischievous grin crept across his face as he thought about the previous night.
Not about the show itself, but the afterparty. His hotel room. Ten, maybe fifteen women. Attractive, excitable. All of them there not so much because he was Rivers Cuomo, but just because he was a rock star. For months, Rivers hadn't been able to work up the courage to do what he thought a true rock star would do, to engage in some wild and debauched orgy.
Hammer the gods type stuff, which left these female fans milling around, raiding the minibar and talking about how much they loved Green Day or whatever, because, you know, normally Rivers wasn't all about that. But last night was different. Last night, Rivers even surprised himself when he boldly made the announcement. Any woman who wanted to stay had to get naked. And the room cleared out.
Almost. Four women stayed behind. Four women who proceeded to remove every article of their clothing, just as Rivers had instructed them. But anything goes, encounters with fans of the opposite sex wasn't enough to keep Rivers Cuomo on the hamster wheel. He'd been out on the road with Weezer for a year straight, and already the monotony was crushing his soul.
Playing the same ten songs from your one record every single night, giving the same dumb responses to a different dumb journalist every single day. And he wondered if Kurt Cobain had felt this way, like he was slowly watching his own life waste away. Actually, he didn't have to wonder because he knew the answer. So, like Kurt, Rivers decided to do something about it.
But unlike Kurt, Rivers didn't turn a shotgun on himself and pull the trigger. Because Rivers Cuomo was a different type of rock star. He was the opposite of Kurt Cobain. So, Rivers Cuomo quit his own band and went to college. Jacob Kingston grew up in an isolated polygamous sect. We were God's chosen kingdom on earth. He felt destined for greatness.
So when a swaggering Armenian businessman catapults Jacob into an extraordinary world, he doesn't look back.
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Chapter 4: How did the release of Pinkerton impact Weezer's reputation?
Listen to The Psychology of Your 20s on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests, like Emilia Clarke. When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever, my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in.
Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up, and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bottle. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance, like he's about to attack me, like...
making karate noises. And here's the entire, the Kardashian family over there. Everybody's going, and the air marsh is trying to grab my arms and screaming. I immediately know that I've been sleepwalking.
David Oyelowo.
I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts.
Guy Branum. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Urban.
Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting.
I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things, Tana Mongeau, Camilla Marone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Alizarov technique, developed in the 1950s by a professor in the former Soviet Union, is a surgical procedure that uses an external device to help reconstruct, reshape, or lengthen bones, usually in the limbs. Following surgery, the alizarov apparatus, or fixator as it's also known, is attached to the exterior of the body with a series of rings, rods, adjustable nuts, and wires.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Mikey Welsh face during his time with Weezer?
Weezer's sophomore studio album, Pinkerton, was released in September of 1996. Musically and lyrically, the record came as a shock. The Blue Album's sonic template was in part defined by their producer, Ric Ocasek of The Cars, who turned the gain on their amplifiers all the way up but turned the volume all the way down, thus capturing a crunchy guitar sound that wasn't noisy and didn't feed back.
But on the self-produced Pinkerton, the guitars routinely squelched out of control. The bass and the drums were pushed into the red. Rivers, still in his Elisarov apparatus, still in physical and emotional pain, delivered raw physical and emotional vocal performances of lyrics that were extremely personal and nakedly documented his current state of alienation.
It was an abrasive about-face for Weezer. And honestly, Pinkerton is fucking awesome. This record is great. It's so much better than the so-called Blue Album. I don't care what anybody says. However, the intention for Rivers was to prove Weezer's biggest critics wrong. But the critics hated Pinkerton. So did many of the fans.
It was voted the third-worst album of 1996 in a Rolling Stone readers' poll, right behind Bush's Razorblade Suitcase and DJ Spooky's Songs of a Dead Dreamer. And while Pinkerton did have his cohort of diehard fans, Rivers started to believe what the detractors were saying about Pinkerton.
He bared it all, ripped his heart out, and put it on his sleeve, beating and bloody, and no one cared at all, it seemed. So Rivers Cuomo needed a distraction, something deeper than meditation. He needed to get back to the good life, the life of the road, shaking booty and making sweet love every night. You know how the song goes.
The life that once bored him to tears would now dull the heartache that he was feeling as he tried to escape that life. Make that make sense. The Pinkerton tour of 1996 and 1997 was happening just as the internet was evolving at move-fast-and-break-shit speed. Soon, word of the Weezer frontman's sexual conquest spread to a GeoCities website with the unfortunate title Rivers L. Pervo.
Now, on the website Rivers El Pervo, fans, or former fans, I don't know, they detailed both Rivers' alleged methods to select and lure women backstage like he was David Lee Roth or something, and also his, again, alleged interactions with girls who were barely of legal age. Rivers freaked out when he came face to face with Rivers El Pervo.
He no doubt immediately thought of the lyrics to the Pinkerton song Across the Sea. It's a song he wrote in response to an actual letter that he received from an 18-year-old female Japanese fan. The lyrics to the song lay out his moral quandary in how or if he should respond to this barely legal fan. And he even wondered aloud in the song, quote, I wonder how you touch yourself, unquote.
Not that he'd done anything wrong, not legally anyways. Certainly every word out of his mouth now with this Rivers L. Pervo website was going to be scrutinized and worse, documented online. So, Rivers Cuomo stopped with the naked hotel room shenanigans. He stopped having assistants scour the audience for women who were, you know, looking like they wanted to hang out with a rock star.
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Chapter 6: How did the LAPD incident involving Jillian Schreiner affect Weezer?
Mikey didn't know it at the time. Many didn't, but by the end of the Pinkerton tour, Matt Sharp, Weezer's bass player, would be out of the band. It wasn't the first time that Weezer had experienced turnover. During the making of the Blue album, founding guitarist Jason Cropper was fired and replaced with Brian Bell.
Matt Sharp later revealed that he was also fired, like Jason, before him, although Rivers says that the real reason Matt left was to focus on his other band, the so-called Friends of P, The Rentals. Whatever the case, by 1998, Matt Sharp was out and Mikey Welsh was in. Mikey left Boston for LA, moving into an apartment with Rivers on Sepulveda Boulevard in Culver City.
In doing so, Rivers got a front row seat to a true rock and roll animal. Because Mikey Welsh was the one. Mikey was the one mixing Klonopin Speed and Red Wine. Mikey was the one dropping LSD right before Weezer's first secret show, playing Nirvana covers under the name Goat Punishment.
Mikey was the one tripping his balls off on NoFX's tour bus, eating mushrooms while watching a porno with Fat Mike and the gang on a large screen TV. Mikey was the one hanging around the kinds of people your mother warned you about. Fuck, Mikey was the type of person that your mother warned you about. But Mikey hung around with them because these were the types of people who had drugs.
And for a guy like Mikey Welsh, not only did you play rock and roll, you got high. And yeah, it was dark. But to a guy like Mikey Welsh, that's what rock and roll was. And Mikey brought that darkness and the danger that went along with it to Weezer in a way that Rivers Cuomo never could.
And pretty soon all that darkness and danger became too much even for a rock and roll animal like Mikey Welsh to handle. Because in just a few years time, as Weezer hit the biggest peak of their career to date, Mikey Welsh would go missing. We'll be right back after this word, word, word. Jacob Kingston grew up in an isolated polygamous sect. We were God's chosen kingdom on earth.
He felt destined for greatness. So when a swaggering Armenian businessman catapults Jacob into an extraordinary world, he doesn't look back. Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets. Meeting the president of Turkey. I'm Michelle McPhee, and this is one of the most shocking criminal conspiracies I've ever come across.
When Jacob met Levant, this went to a billion dollar fraud.
But with two kings from entirely different worlds, just how long can their empire survive?
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Chapter 7: What role did algorithmic songwriting play in Rivers Cuomo's career?
I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts.
Guy Branum. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Urban.
Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead.
Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things, Tana Mongeau, Camilla Marone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more.
Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
New Year's Eve, 1998. Beck was talking, but Mikey Welsh could only make out every other word. Something about Tommy Lee of Motley Crue falling sideways into the bushes outside. Mikey just smiled and nodded. He was only half paying attention anyways. His mind was likely squarely fixated on the baggie of cocaine stuck inside of his pocket. The shit weighed a ton.
Standing next to him, having better luck in the conversation department, was Rivers Cuomo, who was chatting up their host, Gwen Stefani, who had invited the guys to her New Year's Eve party after Weezer opened a few dates for No Doubt. Rivers was obviously having a good time and Mikey loved to see it. Over the last few months, Rivers had become something of a recluse, depressed, not writing.
The muse had packed her things and flown the coop. Mikey couldn't help but wonder if that muse had been the guy he replaced, Matt Sharp. Anyway, Mikey had been spending lots of time with the 72-hour party people up in the Hollywood Hills. The benders were so insane that they bordered on lethal. It was a miracle that Mikey stumbled home alive every night.
One time, he found his way back to the apartment that he shared with Rivers, only to find that his roommate had painted the walls and the ceilings of his bedroom black. He'd also covered up his windows and disconnected the phone. It was just fucking weird and it worried Mikey. But tonight, New Year's Eve, he told himself that he wasn't going to worry about all that.
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Chapter 8: How has Weezer's image evolved over the years?
For Mikey Welsh, 2001 became a nightmare. The MTV Movie Awards were part of an insane stretch for Weezer. They toured the States, played Coachella, played Saturday Night Live, played Late Night with Conan O'Brien, toured Europe, taped Top of the Pops, and then returned back home to appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
As they stepped onto the NBC Studio stage in Burbank on July 27th, Mikey Welsh was hanging on by a single tattered thread. His drug use had spiraled out of control. He'd lost 70 pounds.
You wouldn't know that something was wrong if you watched the Leno clip now, as Mikey Welsh is super engaged, as always the most animated one in the group, repeatedly interacting with the crowd as the band performs the Green Album's second single, Island in the Sun. But by the time that performance aired on The Tonight Show later that evening, Mikey Welsh had disappeared.
It would be days before Rivers, Brian, and Pat even knew that anything was wrong. They found it strange when Mikey didn't show up to rehearsal. Stranger still, when no one in the band could reach him on the phone. It's unclear exactly how they found out, but before too long, word reached the Weezer camp that Mikey had suffered a mental breakdown shortly after taping on Jay Leno.
He had tried to commit suicide by overdosing. His heart nearly quit on him. He slipped into a coma, and when he regained consciousness, he discovered that he was locked up in a psychiatric hospital. Mikey Welsh suffered from bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and borderline personality disorder.
He'd gone undiagnosed his entire life and had been fueling the psychological fire with copious drug use. It was a near fatal combination, but by getting the help he needed, by leaving Weezer and the music industry, and by refocusing his creative life as a painter, Mikey Welsh was now safe, for a moment at least.
After he left Weezer, Rivers Cuomo had lost his rock star avatar, not to mention Weezer's rock star street cred. So Rivers immediately made a call to an L.A. music scout with a deep Rolodex of professional musicians. Rivers knew in no uncertain terms what he was looking for. Send me the baddest, meanest, most evil guy you got, he said. So in other words, the exact opposite of Rivers Cuomo.
And with that, Weezer got their new bass player and retained their rockstar street cred. But most surprising of all, they also, unknowingly, set in motion the most true-crimey chapter in their 30-plus year career. And when the smoke cleared, someone would be shot and wounded by the LAPD, and Weezer would never be looked at the same again.
Thank you.
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