A lot of people love, beyond reason or logic, Weezer’s Blue Album. I am numbered among these people.

Nostalgia for Weezer’s self-titled debut record (known as, but not officially titled, the Blue Album) began basically upon its release. In my mind the record itself is nostalgia incarnate, and that it has become one of the most beloved records of the 1990s is both appropriate-it’s that good-but also inevitable. I am a sentimental person, and I love sentimental things. For such a person as me, the Blue Album came at the precise moment in time to forever hold my imagination and love.

As such, capturing the critical legacy or social value of an album as beloved as the Blue Album is impossible. Others are going about the task nonetheless, and we’ll leave the endeavor to them. Today is the 20th anniversary of the release of Weezer’s Blue Album. To celebrate, The Stake sent out a few requests to Weezer fans to share a small window into what they love about the Blue Album, twenty years later.

I also stopped by my local record store and spoke with a few of the men and women browsing the vinyls to ask what they think about when they think about Weezer’s Blue Album.

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I was into heavier stuff when it came out, but I remember distinctly all through high school someone had the Blue Album on. Windows down in the car, cruisin’, playing Weezer. It was always playing on the radio or in the tape player in the car. Even though it wasn’t my thing, I loved it. It was always playing somewhere.

Matt, St. Paul.

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When I was 10 or 11 I decided to learn how to play the guitar. My parents bought me a cheap, shining black electric guitar, and lessons from a local jazz guitarist. I failed and gave it up quickly; discipline was not among my pre-adolescent strengths. I packed up that axe and tucked it away, in a corner of the basement under the stairs, where it hid until 1994. In 1994 I dug it out, put the guitar in my lap, and didn’t leave my room until I could slowly, unconvincingly pluck out sounds that, if you listened closely, sounded something like “My Name is Jonas.” It took the better part of a weekend because I didn’t know how to play.

Twenty years later I still don’t know how to play. But I can pluck out the opening number from the most defining album of my childhood, Weezer’s the Blue Album.

Chris, St. Paul

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I was a little young when it cam out so I didn’t hear it right away. But I heard it at 16. I felt isolated then and there was a real innocence in the record that I felt strongly. I don’t even know if it’s an innocent record, or a dark record or what. It didn’t matter. I really felt that record in that time of isolation.

Matthew, Minneapolis

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It’s blistering hot out, the sun is beating down causing the world to quench in thirst, the pool in my back yard is begging for attention. If I want to swim, to cool down and get a moments relief, the pool my best-and only- option. We can’t afford air conditioning. I arrange the stereo in my bedroom to face out the widow, I lay the eye-popping blue cd in the top of the player, hit play and head out to the garage to collect the pool skimmer and vacuum.

By the time ‘My Name Is Jonas’ is coming to an end, the sweat is already pouring down my back. I set to work, skimming the bugs off the top of the pool and letting the vacuum roam aimlessly four feet below the waters surface. I imagine being the girl whose laughter wins over the heart of Rivers Cuomo. By the time time ‘Holiday’ comes on I can’t bear to be in the heat anymore and jump into the water, splashing and creating waves in the cool water with my relief. I swim and float and swim and float listening the to album on repeat, imagining high school, only a year away, as some strange and distant land.

Amber, St. Paul

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The Blue Album established Weezer’s status as nerd rock; it says something about my own status in junior high that my allegiance to the record made me feel cool. But I actually did seize on it as a form of social currency. I co-opted the album’s essence, wearing the “Rock Music” t-shirt to school once a week as self-expression. I scribbled =w= on my folders for all the girls to see. The music helped bind up my best friend group. It was also something you had in common with similar people your age, everywhere. Not necessarily the popular kids, but at least the cool ones. It was the album almost everybody of suburban experience loved for arriving at the right time in our lives.

The Blue Album was released during the internet’s nascence, before electronic music sharing put indie, old school country, hip hop, and fusions of all types into our playlists, and before we were exposed to the tools to appreciate each. At the time, most of us swore fidelity to one particular style of popular music, and adopted the culture that came with it out of social necessity. The Blue Album’s cover, with its plain portrait of the band cut off at the shins against the eponymous background, was one of my chosen culture’s icons. In fact, I once had a quasi-nightmare that Rivers Cuomo and Matt Sharp wore Nikes (urban!) instead of the black leather shoes I thought befit the alternative rock lifestyle, and wore myself. (The Blue Album’s cover left Rivers’ footwear a tasteful mystery, and for good reason.) My relationship to the album was so elaborate that my worldview would have warped to find out that the band didn’t conform to every element of the very culture I thought Weezer defined.

The music itself opened up possibilities when I was beginning to assert my social identity—something that rocked, but also with harmonic nuance. It was clean cut, but buzzed. It triumphantly harnessed with the right measure of electric feedback. At the same time, it felt platonic, as if something that had always existed in perfect ten-track form. And man, those guitars… In sum, it tapped into the novelty of being young and alive. Still does. Likely related, it might be the greatest sing-a-long album of our generation; once, riding back for a church retreat in Wisconsin in a 15-passenger van, my entire youth group belted out every lyric of the album, sequentially, without accompaniment. Say it ain’t soo-ooh-oo-ooh-whoa!! I don’t recall any other music from this period that could inspire a similar social achievement.

Every time I spin the Blue Album and Pinkerton, I try to listen freshly for new insights and criticisms—and to recapture the old romance. With Pinkerton, that is easy to do, because that record still startles when considered in the context of what preceded it: the vital, sunny Californian, effortless persona that the Blue Album created of Weezer. Ironically, it is the perennial surprise of Pinkerton, a different work completely, that continues to affirm the Blue Album as the most substantial music experience of my life. I wish I could really explain what this album means to me.

Brandon, Detroit

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Christopher Orfanos, my best friend at the time, a stranger to me now, invited me over his house down the block. It was the Fall or the Winter of 1994, or the Spring of ’95. Don’t make me nail the date down, man! We descended into his dark basement, with wood panelling on the walls, cheap carpeting on the floor, and neighborhood kids and mildew crammed into the air in between.

We played Battletoads. Battletoads. One level of Battletoads. the level of Battletoads that never ends. We didn’t know what music was really. We didn’t know what girls were either. We were kids. Don’t hate us for it.

Goddammit, we couldn’t beat that level. At least not that day. So we left his dark, dank basement. Us kids. We went into his living room with shag carpet from the 70s and sunlight streaming in from the numerous windows. The TV was already on. I recognized the Happy Days setting. I understood the Zelig-like tech of inserting some modern band into older footage. I didn’t understand that this music video, Buddy Holly, and this band, Weezer, was speaking the adult that I would be a year later.

My Dad was driving me and my brother through the twilight Autumn landscape of upstate New York. Leaves were falling. I had fallen for a girl. She had broken my heart into a thousand pieces. The sky was blue. I was. Blue. And I was listening to the Blue Album nonstop. I was no longer a kid. I was undone, and this album remade me.

Nick, New York City

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