Trivia / Weezer (The Blue Album)

• Black Sheep Hit: "Buddy Holly" is notably the album's lightest song both lyrically and musically. Cuomo didn't even want to record the song at first, until Ric Ocasek talked him into it. Then they worried that people would perceive them as a novelty act based on it (like what happened to King Missile after "Detachable Penis"). But it's now considered a Signature Song by both the fans and the band.
• Meaningful Release Date: "Buddy Holly" was released as a single on September 7, 1994, which would have been Buddy Holly's 58th birthday.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: "My Name Is Jonas" is mostly about Cuomo's brother, Leaves, who faced heavy insurance fines after a car accident.
• Sleeper Hit: The band and the album seemingly came out of nowhere in 1994. Weezer had no indie releases to their credit, and had almost no following on the L.A. music scene (they typically played to audiences of around 10 people at club shows, and most of them were friends).^note In one of their earliest shows they played after Dogstar, the vehicle for Keanu Reeves and his short-lived bid for rock stardom. The club was packed for Dogstar, then only five people stuck around for Weezer There was even speculation that DGC Records had put them together as sort of a manufactured Grunge version of The Monkees to fill the void after Kurt Cobain's death (DGC A&R rep Todd Sullivan had actually signed them after hearing a demo). The album slowly picked up sales: in its first week it sold just 90 copies nationwide. The breakout of "Undone" on MTV a few months later finally launched them into stardom.
• Technology Marches On: Rivers revealed years after the album's release that Matt Sharp had had his face photoshopped on the cover, and replaced with a photo from a previous session, since he didn't like the way it looked.
• Throw It In!: In the "Buddy Holly" video, "Kenosha, Wisconsin's own Weezer!" was an ad-lib by Al Molinaro, giving a Shout-Out to his hometown (and Kenosha being down the road from Milwaukee dovetailed nicely with the whole Happy Days theme). But it didn't stop some Common Knowledge issues from developing, with people wrongly believing that Weezer really was from Kenosha.
• Write Who You Know: Rivers Cuomo mentions actual relatives in "My Name is Jonas" (as mentioned above) and "Say it Ain't So" (Jimmy is the alternate name of Leaves, Stephen is their stepfather and the "Dear Daddy" verse is aimed at their birth father, who became a Pentecostal Christian minister later in life).

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