Rivers Cuomo was born on June 13, 1970, in New York City. His father, Frank Cuomo, was a musician who played drums on the 1971 album Odyssey of Iska by jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter.
Rivers was raised in Rochester, New York, at the Rochester Zen Center, until his father left the family in 1975. His mother relocated the family to Yogaville, an ashram in Pomfret, Connecticut. Cuomo attended the Pomfret Community School, and his mother married Stephen Kitts.
In 1980, Yogaville relocated to Virginia. The Kitts family opted to stay in Connecticut and moved to the Storrs Mansfield area. During this time, Cuomo attended Mansfield Middle School and E.O. Smith High School. Rivers was a member of the high school choir and he performed in a school production of Grease as Johnny Casino.
One of Cuomo’s earliest music projects was the glam metal band Avant Garde. In 1989, after playing several shows in Connecticut, Avant Garde moved to Los Angeles and changed their name to Zoom, but broke up in 1990. In 1990 and 1991, while Cuomo was writing material for what became Weezer’s debut album, he was a roadie for the band King Size and worked at Tower Records, where he listened to “basically everything that was released at that time … I was exposed to a ton of music I otherwise never would have heard.”
Cuomo formed Weezer in 1992 with drummer Patrick Wilson, bassist Matt Sharp and guitarist Jason Cropper. “Weezer” was the nickname given to Cuomo by his father when he was a toddler. Weezer signed with DGC, a subsidiary of Geffen Records, on June 25, 1993, and released their self-titled debut album, also known as the Blue Album, in May 1994. Cropper left the band during the album recording and was replaced by Brian Bell. The album was certified platinum on January 1, 1995, with sales of over one million. Despite his success, Cuomo tired of the monotony and loneliness of touring and developed a “huge inferiority complex” about rock music, saying: “I thought my songs were really simplistic and silly, and I wanted to write complex, intense, beautiful music.”
In the fall of 1995, Cuomo enrolled in Harvard University to study classical composition. He told The New York Times: “The only time I could write songs was when my frozen dinner was in the microwave. The rest of the time I was doing homework.” He auditioned for the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum chorus but was not selected. He became introverted and grew a beard, and wrote in his diaries how students wearing Weezer T-shirts did not recognize him.
Cuomo had planned Weezer’s second album to be a rock opera, Songs from the Black Hole, but he abandoned the project as his songwriting became “darker, more visceral and exposed, less playful”. Realizing he did not enjoy contemporary classical music, and missing Weezer, Cuomo dropped out of Harvard two semesters before graduation. He expressed the isolation and sexual frustration he had felt at Harvard in Weezer’s second album, Pinkerton, released in September 1996. With a darker, more abrasive sound than Weezer’s debut, Pinkerton was a commercial and critical failure, but attained critical acclaim later.
Following Pinkerton, Weezer went on a three-year hiatus. Cuomo enrolled at Harvard twice more and completed semesters in 1997 and 2004. During the 1997 semester, he played with a new band, Homie, in Boston. In February 1998, Cuomo disbanded Homie and moved to Los Angeles to work on new Weezer demos with Bell and Wilson, but the sessions were unproductive. In 1998 and 1999, he lived in an apartment under a freeway in Culver City, California. In an essay for Harvard, he wrote: “I became more and more isolated. I unplugged my phone. I painted the walls and ceiling of my bedroom black and covered the windows with fiberglass insulation.”
Disappointed by Pinkerton’s reception, Cuomo intended to return to simpler songwriting with less personal lyrics. He stated that Weezer’s subsequent albums, the Green Album (2001) and Maladroit (2002), were “very intentionally not about me. Not about what was going on in my life, at least in a conscious way.” He also developed a greater appreciation for pop music, feeling that its multiple disciplines — including lyrics, improvisation, and image — produce a multifaceted art “that moves people and is important, and relevant to our culture in a way that serious classical music isn’t right now”. In June 2006, he graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in English from Harvard and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
On December 6, 2009, Cuomo was in his tour bus driving to Boston from Toronto with his family and assistant when the bus hit an icy road in Glen, New York and crashed. He suffered cracked ribs and internal bleeding. Weezer canceled the rest of the 2009 tour dates, planning to reschedule them the following year. They made their return to the stage on January 20, 2010, performing at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.
In December 2007, Cuomo released Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo, a compilation of his demos recorded from 1992 to 2007. It was followed by Alone II: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo in November 2008 and Alone III: The Pinkerton Years in November 2010; the latter album was sold exclusively with a book, The Pinkerton Diaries, which collects Cuomo’s writings from the preceding the release of Pinkerton.
Cuomo credited the Beach Boys as a major influence on his early songwriting. He told Upset:
I remember when I was 21 or 22, right when Weezer got together. I went to the local used record shop in Santa Monica with the intention of buying a classic album that was going to be a huge influence on me and my writing for Weezer. I flipped through all the records and I narrowed it down to two records. One of them was Led Zeppelin, the other was Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. It was almost a coin toss but I ended up going with Pet Sounds, and I really came to love the melodies and the chord progression and the emotion on that record. It has to be one of the biggest influences right when Weezer was starting out.
Cuomo’s other influences include the Beatles, Kiss, Nirvana, Giacomo Puccini, Green Day, Jane’s Addiction, Cat Stevens, Lou Barlow, the Who, Pixies, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Mike Smith and Sonic Youth. In the late 90s, Cuomo created an “Encyclopedia of Pop” for himself, a three-ring binder which examined pop and rock songs by artists including Nirvana, Green Day and Oasis. In 2008, he said his biggest recent inspiration was rapper Eminem, praising his “creativity, passion, inventiveness, and playfulness”.