Rivers Cuomo recalls the time he tried to start a metal band before forming Weezer

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Rivers Cuomo has recalled the time he tried to start a metal band before finding fame with Weezer.

• Read more: Weezer’s 10 best songs

Speaking in a recent interview, the frontman revisited his pre-Weezer band Sixty Wrong Sausages and how his initial vision was to form a metal band.

“I was always in bands growing up, when I was in school and when I first moved to LA,” he told Kerrang. “In those days I was almost anti-punk: I did not like punk music, or the whole punk aesthetic. My attitude was pretty much exclusively metal: practice your scales, your arpeggios, use a metronome and don’t play sloppy. I was anti-nihilist, really.

“Then I got a job at Tower Records where I met this guy named Pat Finn who was 100 percent punk. He had a shaved head, he’d try to grab your testicles, he’d try to get the boss to hit him and he’d listen to punk bands like Black Flag, that I didn’t know anything about.”

He continued: “When I worked there, I was exposed to all these different kinds of music – not by choice, but because all the different employees played it – so I gradually got interested in branching out from heavy music. At first I thought I would take Pat Finn and have him be in my metal band. I told him I thought he would be, like, the DJ who would scratch over my metal songs.”

Cuomo went on to reveal that he was influenced by Faith No More and the growing alternative ideas for metal, but he was met with some resistance from Finn.

“Unfortunately my idea for Pat being my metal DJ didn’t pan out. He said, ‘I don’t want to be in your band, but why don’t we start a new band?’ I went for it, Pat Wilson was on drums and original Weezer guitar player Jason Cropper was in the band, too. It was basically Weezer, but instead of Matt Sharp it was Pat Finn on bass.

“We all wrote songs, I completely stylistically jumped ship and tried to do the opposite of everything I had ever done before. It was this accommodation of funk and punk with completely gibberish lyrics. It was very wacky and musically progressive, with odd meter and time changes and all that,” said Cuomo. “We played one show, and then we broke up. Classic story.”

Last month, Weezer performed a stripped-back version of their recent single ‘Hero’ on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. 

The remotely recorded performance was set in frontman Rivers Cuomo‘s living room where he played piano, while the rest of the band’s parts were superimposed onto a television in the corner.

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