‘Blue’ over the inevitable Weezer letdown: 20 years of waiting for another ‘Buddy Holly'

Has there ever been a more disappointing band in this whole wide world than Weezer?

The post-grunge popsters seemed destined to save the world with three-minute blasts of perfection that helped ease morose, brooding teenage Gen-Xers hooked on the depressed dirges of the flannel-clad Northwest into a more sunny brand of angst.

Twenty years ago, Weezer’s self-titled “Blue Album” was the antidote for what ailed the gloomy teen-turned-twenty-something who just seemed a little tired of the gravity of Nirvana and the fun-free Seattle copycats who took slow, bellowed and bleak to its inevitable end.

The depression wasn’t gone, mind you. Those typical teenage feelings of isolation and longing were still there. Chicks were still giving the meatheads all the play and banning the arty introspective freaks into the friend zone. But this time around, the outcasts were no longer cutting in a dark bedroom with Nine Inch Nails. Instead, they holed up “In the Garage” in all-night D&D sessions, laughing it up on a Dr. Pepper sugar high with the rest of the misanthropic misfits.

The “Blue Album” really nailed a new way to celebrate outcast culture for a whole variety of nerds and iconoclasts with the most infectious, sweet melodies that made the maudlin fun again and allowed some sonic sunshine to muscle its way through Weezer’s overcast subject matter.

Weezer was unique in how the band captured a hardcore fan base from the get-go, dragging it kicking and screaming into their 30s and 40s with promises of one more “Blue Album” moment, and failing time and again to deliver. Yet, many of us — ahem, them — deluded ourselves into seeing glimmers of “blue,” through half-realized excursions into “green” and “red.” There were two additional self-titled Weezer releases where the hype gave us hope — 2001’s “Green Album” with the classic “Hash Pipe” and 2008’s disappointing “Red Album.”

An added wrinkle to this recipe is “Pinkerton,” Weezer’s second album released in 1994. It failed miserably on its initial release, flying far afield from the tightly constructed pop of the “Blue Album” into what seemed to be a wildly different direction. It might as well have been a solo album for Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo, who really shelved the group dynamic for a diary of depression that seemed to be rediscovered a few years later by a younger generation of pre-emo kids.

It’s funny-strange that Rivers Cuomo and all of the true-life stories on “Pinkerton” will now be the basis for a television pilot called “DeTour.”

Variety was reporting this week that Fox has been given the green light to produce the story of a “30-something rock star who, similar to Cuomo’s sabbatical at Harvard eight years ago, walks away from the spotlight at the height of his fame in an effort to capture the normal life he passed over to become a music success story. The series would embellish Cuomo’s journey with a fictional character,” according to the entertainment industry trade magazine.

Two decades later we’re all grown up, some of us in our 40s (“Blue”) and some of us in our 30s (“Pinkerton”) traveling the road of battered hopes, waiting for one last go-round, one more “Sweater Song,” one more “Buddy Holly,” one more “El Scorcho,” one more “Pink Triangle.”

On record (a truly ’90s term), Weezer is poised to let us down again with “Everything Will Be Alright in the End” in early October.

Are we destined for the same disappointment on TV? Will this fictionalized Rivers Cuomo of “DeTour” address the possibly unrealistic expectations of his fans? Who knows.

If the TV pilot is anything like the band itself, the first episode will be awesome, and each one thereafter will leave us wanting more, mad because we don’t get it, and still hanging on for “the next one.”

This column originally appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, Aug. 29, 2014