In 1996, Pinkerton had just been released and I was at the height of my infatuation with Weezer and so I dragged my best buddy Robert Nevin to the front row of Roseland to watch em play the album, when one of the most virulent mosh pits known to man erupted and we almost got killed.
I still don’t get it.
The emo rock album that invented emo, has moshing so vicious it puts Soundgarden to shame. Go figure, right?
On the deluxe version of Pinkerton released earlier this months, the live versions of the clutch of Pinkerton tracks that make up the album are hard candy: crunchy and sweet. But nothing you can much go berserk to.The berserkness is all in the lyric: these strange songs of self-destructive love and self loathing: falling in love with gay chicks, imagining your fans masturbating, self-disgust with yourself, rejection, rejection, rejection. That’s what Pinkerton is about. Or, if you prefer, it is a vision of the soul, the ineffable self-loathing of being.
If you love the album, and believe me, you love the album, you will thoroughly enjoy the acoustic live versions, the live in concert versions, the song noodles, all the ephemeral of this great album.
And if you love the album you will flip, I mean FLIP, for rarities “Tragic Girl”, “You Gave Your Love So Sweetly”, “I Just Threw Out The Love Of My Dreams” “Devotion” and especially “Long Time Searching”.
“Long Time Sunshine” is a superior version of “Don’t Bother”. Torn from his diary, the search is for love but it ends with the question “Why Bother” begins with during a terrific, terrific coda: A counterpoint melody with “Don’t bother going to hurt me” and “Long time sunshine” an internal argument of hope and the lack there of.
It shoulda been on the album.