Rivers Cuomo Tried to Start Metal Band Before Weezer

There are turning points sometimes on the road to success, and for Weezer‘s Rivers Cuomo that meant moving on from his metal dreams, though not without trying to fulfill them first.

Speaking with Kerrang, the Weezer vocalist was asked about his pre-Weezer band Sixty Wrong Sausages. As Weezer lore goes, the band would play a number of rehearsals and jam sessions, then hit the stage for one performance at the Phoenix in Petaluma, Calif in late November 1991. But one show was it for the group, which also featured future Weezer drummer Pat Wilson, Jason Cropper and Pat Finn, and Weezer would form not long after. Footage of the group playing a song called “The Answer Man” can be seen below.

Reflecting on that group, Cuomo revealed that 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. 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.”

The singer recalls, “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. 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.”

According to Cuomo, he was influenced by Faith No More and the growing alternative ideas for metal, but he was met with some resistance.

“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.”