Rivers Cuomo Was In A Metal Band Before Forming Weezer

Writing "Rivers Cuomo" and "metal band" in the same sentence doesn't quite feel right, but if the Weezer frontman had his way he'd have made it big with a different band: Sixty Wrong Sausages.

Before founding the band that would make him famous, a 20-something Cuomo started a metal band called Sixty Wrong Sausages with future Weezer drummer Pat Wilson, Jason Cropper and Pat Finn. The band only played one show, at The Phoenix in Petaluma, California in November 1991. Weezer would form the next year.

During a recent interview with Kerrang!, Cuomo detailed his metalhead days. "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," he explained. "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.”

His punk co-worker was uninterested in this suggestion. "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?’" Cuomo recalled. "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."

"We played one show, and then we broke up. Classic story,” he said.

Watch Sixty Wrong Sausages perform "The Answer Man" below.

Photo: Getty Images


Sponsored Content

Sponsored Content