'The Geeks Shall Inherit The Earth' (Part 4)
Jon Pikus Talks About Recording Weezer's Third Demo
Cassette demos ruled the Hollywood music scene in the early ‘90s—the analog equivalent of a private Soundcloud link these days.
Compact discs already dominated mainstream music distribution by 1992, but most local bands looking to book a show or get signed still distributed their music on the trusty plastic cartridges that fit neatly into the pocket of short-sleeved, collared thrift store shirts. And many cars and tour vans still had cassette players.
For fans, those cassette demos were an underground currency that carried a certain cachet. The best of them were endlessly dubbed on the dual cassette decks we all had back then, select songs by unsigned bands even turning up on highly-curated and coveted mixed tapes freely traded by tastemakers.
Like all analog media, cassette tapes and their diehard users mostly went underground in the new Millennium—although, like vinyl, they have experienced a resurgence among audiophiles and lovers of physical media in recent years.
“(Cassettes) are for individual use and collective exchange. They have built communities, connected like-minded people over long distances, and passed along local and regional styles and innovations when no other means or medium would or could. They are do-it-yourself and do-it-ourselves,” Marc Masters writes in the introduction to his book High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape.
Like many of their unsigned peers, Weezer recorded a series of demos—but it was their third demo (aka “The Real Demo”) that helped them land a contract with DGC in 1993.
“The songs on that demo hit me immediately. And you know, I just got goosebumps because the songs were great,” former Geffen A&R rep Todd Sullivan told me in an interview for Generation Blue: An Oral History of the Hollywood Geek Rock Scene in the 1990s & 2000s.
That demo was recorded by Jon Pikus in the makeshift studio at Transcendental Hayride’s mid-Wilshire band house where he lived. Pikus was already making a name for himself as an engineer/producer and indie label proprietor prior to working with Weezer, recording LA bands like Wax, Daisy Chamber and Lovedolls.
“Dano (from Trascendental Hayride) appointed me de facto manager of his garage recording studio, which had a Fostex 16-track analog tape machine and a Soundcraft mixing console, a step up from my trusty Tascam 388. It was there I recorded Transcendental Hayride, Black Market Flowers, and in November '92, Weezer's 'third demo,’” Pikus said.
Pikus was well-connected on the local music scene as the drummer for The Promise and El Magnifico (and later Campfire Girls—see playlist below). While flyering outside English Acid in 1992, he met Black Market Flowers bassist Bryan Ray and the two started booking shows together with bands like Wax and Weezer.
“Weezer had a strong fan reaction at their high energy live shows; even if just playing for like 50 people they were always entertaining, with a sort of nerdy look. I remember seeing and sharing bills with them at Club Lingerie, Club Dump and The Gaslight,” Pikus said.
“Rivers still had very long hair, which he kept up in a bun concealed in a trucker cap. Always on ‘Undone (The Sweater Song),’ usually the last song of their set, as the song crescendoed into its guitar solo and outro, Rivers would shake his head, the hat would fall off and his long hair would emerge to cheers from the crowd, a moment of pure nerd rock elation. I wanted to capture that feeling on tape!”
The Real Demo recording/mixing session took place over two days, with mastering by Alan Yoshida at A&M Records.
The five songs recorded were: “No One Else,” “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here,” “Say It Ain’t So, “Undone—The Sweater Song” and “Surf Wax America.” Most versions of the demo omitted “Surf Wax America,” which was a newer song.
“Equipment included several Shure SM57 mics, 2 dbx compressors, an Alesis Midiverb, and a CAD condenser mic used on vocals. Mixing went late into the second night, with only Matt Sharp staying until the very end,” Pikus said.
The bill for the session came to $200, but like most struggling musicians the members of Weezer had no money to spare. So, they compensated Pikus with a pair of stereo speakers that one of the band members bought from some guy in a van. The speakers promptly blew up during Pikus’ next session a week later.
(Geeky Side Note: This was also the session where Weezer’s flying =W= was first designed by drummer Patrick Wilson when he and Karl Koch, who is often referred to as “the fifth member of Weezer,” were playing with Pikus’ labeling tape. According to Weezerpedia, the logo was “a simultaneous homage and spoof of Van Halen's classic logo, which featured 'wings' protruding from the band's initials ‘VH.’”)
“Although I only received an engineer credit on the printed cassette stick-on decal (misspelled “Jon Pickus” on one version), I felt like I engineered and produced that 5-song Weezer demo. I put session standout ‘Say It Ain’t So’ on my production reel that I handed out to label A&R folks I met with, and other bands I wanted to work with in an effort to rustle up more engineering and production work,” Pikus said.
Weezer’s Pikus-produced third demo eventually ended up in the hands of Sullivan at Geffen Records who later signed the band. That led to recording the Blue Album with The Cars’ Ric Ocasek at Electric Ladyland in New York.
“Other than the much-improved snare sound, I felt the Blue Album recordings sounded pretty similar to our demos. I was happy that they had kept some of those ideas and built upon them to create a full-fledged signature sound,” Pikus told me for Generation Blue.
The Blue Album was released in May 1994 and the rest is Geek Rock history.
English Acid. The reason I had to get a crappy fake ID.