Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo slides from his hotel bed and drops his trousers for the VOX photographer. But this is no saucy fashion shoot for the king of post-grunge nerdcore. Because, halfway down his right thigh, a lethal-looking metal cage has been bolted right through his leg. Ouch....
“I have to keep the cage on until the bone is completely solid, which probably won’t until the end of the year,” frowns Cuomo. This space-age contraption is actually part of a ground-breaking operation in which the leg is deliberately broken and gradually lengthened, forcing new bone to grow in the gap.
“See this scar?” he asks, indicating a dark, two-inch ridge just above his knee. “That’s where they went in and broke the bone in half. They took a hammer and chisel and cracked it all the way around. Now, this frame is bolted on to either side of that crack, so the bone can’t move either way or collapse. Each day, I have to turn each of these four cranks and extend the screws, separating the bone by a millimetre a day.”
This bizarre technique originated by mistake in Soviet Russia. A patient trying to compress his overlong leg with a similar device accidentally cranked it the wrong way; doctors were amazed when his bones began growing as a result.
“Yeah, it was an accident,” laughs Cuomo, “like every other great discovery. They used to just cut the bone and stick some other bone in there, from some farm animal or something. When I was around ten, that was they offered me. I said: ‘No thanks, I’ll wait until something better comes along...”
Born with a congenital condition which worsened as he grew older, Cuomo insists having one leg 44 millimetres longer than the other had a major affect on his direction in life.
“I had always been very athletic, pretty much all I did was play football and baseball-which may now seem hard to believe-but as I got taller the doctor told me I couldn’t run any more, because it would mess my back up. So I had to drop out of sports altogether, and that’s when I decided I wanted to be a rock star.”
In his notebook, Cuomo has drawn two graphs of his post-operative state under the headings ‘PAIN’ and ‘MISERY’. It’s black humour, but a long way from chirpy Happy Days videos and jokes about Buddy Holly Day 22 looks like a real bummer.
“I remember that day well,” he nods. “I was having a muscle spasm all day long. Without warning, it would seize up and I would just scream.”
At least the worst is now behind him. Despite being doped up on painkillers for the last three months, Cuomo now feels fit enough to play live, as last month’s mighty Glastonbury set proved. But even when laid up in bed just after surgery, he still kept busy. He wrote most of Weezer’s second album, a song for Tom Jones (“I don’t know when he’s going to use it, but supposedly he really likes it”) and several magazine articles. One of these was about Weezer’s garage band days, debunking any lingering myths about the glamour of rock’n’roll.
“Instead of cocaine, chicks and limousines, I showed what it was really like for us,” he laughs. “Now, of course, we have cocaine, chicks, and limos, so I’ll have to write another article.”
So do Weezer really get groupies? “We somehow seem to have avoided that whole groupie thing,” sighs Cuomo. “If I could see how I’m living now, when I was 15 and dreaming about being a rock star, I would be so disappointed because I thought the whole point of it was to get chicks. But now I’m in the position to live like that, it’s no longer appealing. If I could have had this when I was 15, that’s the time to do it. But now I’m 25, I’m an old fart and my values have completely changed. I feel like I’ve been robbed.”
Of course, Rivers can take some comfort in the phenomenal runaway success of Weezer, now approaching two million album sales world-wide. He claims this change of fortune has hardly affected him, but surely it must have a pleasant side?
“I couldn’t have had the operation before Weezer,” he admits. “I wouldn’t have been working, I wouldn’t have had time to recuperate, or the money to pay for it. It has cost probably around $50,000, and I don’t know if my medical insurance will cover it. Also, now I can go to whichever school I want, because I can afford it. I can study what I want without worrying about getting a job.”
With Weezer now established, Cuomo intends to make the band a part-time enterprise while he begins a music degree at a new college in the autumn. He won’t reveal which, except to say: “It’s one of the most expensive ones.” It seems a healthy dose of anonymity is just what the doctor ordered for the world’s most unlikely rock star.
“I really want to disappear, grow a beard, not talk to anyone, not make any friends,” he says wistfully. “I just want to disappear and study.”