‘Hello, Los Angeles County’: 5 thoughts on Weezer’s show at the Troubadour

Weezer has big summer plans.

Next month, the veteran Los Angeles guitar-pop band will play KROQ-FM’s annual all-star Weenie Roast concert. Then it’ll hit the road for a lengthy tour with Panic! at the Disco that’s scheduled to wrap up in August at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre.

But Weezer was thinking smaller Monday night when it played a cozy gig at the Troubadour in West Hollywood. Billed as a hometown celebration of the group’s strong new self-titled album, the concert put Weezer in front of approximately 500 hardcore fans, not one of whom balked when Rivers Cuomo announced that he and his mates were about to do a B-side.

Here are five thoughts on the show.

1. In a recent conversation, Cuomo admitted he can get bummed out by how little attention some people pay Weezer’s recent work (at least in comparison to the band’s hits from the mid-1990s). Here, though, lots of folks seemed to know every word to songs from the White Album, as the new record is known, including the deceptively dark “Thank God for Girls” and “Do You Wanna Get High?,” about crushing up some blues and listening to Burt Bacharach.

2. Did the warm reception loosen up Cuomo, maybe get him to crack a smile (or a beer)? Only someone who’s never seen Weezer would expect that. His button-down shirt tucked neatly into his pants, the frontman was his typically inscrutable self Monday as he sang words about extreme emotional turmoil with the blank expression of someone waiting in line at Ikea.

Of course, that cognitive dissonance is precisely what makes Weezer so fascinating, especially in contrast with the band’s fans, who sang along red-facedly to oldies such as “My Name Is Jonas” and “El Scorcho.” At the Troubadour, the latter — from Weezer’s 1996 misunderstood-dude masterpiece, “Pinkerton” — climaxed in a call-and-response bit that had Cuomo and the crowd telling each other, “I’m a lot like you.”

And the temptation is to think, yeah, Cuomo speaks for these bespectacled bros who don’t know what to do with their feelings. Except Cuomo is actually nothing like his audience; he knows exactly what to do with his feelings, even the creepy, uncomfortable ones (as found in the new album’s “L.A. Girlz”). For him, confusion is not a condition of chaos but a kind of Zen state.

3. I’ve probably seen 150 shows at the Troubadour. But not until Monday had I heard a performer refer to it onstage by the full name that adorns its marquee. “Thank you, Doug Weston’s Troubadour,” Cuomo said before finishing the show with “Buddy Holly.” Another example of his deadpan sense of humor came at the beginning of the night, when he greeted the crowd with “Hello, Los Angeles County.”

4. Beyond the new tunes and the old hits — “Beverly Hills,” “Pork and Beans,” “Hash Pipe” and so on — Weezer did three songs from 2014’s “Everything Will Be Alright in the End,” which came as a welcome surprise to me. In our chat, Cuomo had blamed himself in part for the minimization of late Weezer, saying he tends to move on quickly from a project if it fails to meet with instant success.

And that was more or less the case with “Everything Will Be Alright in the End”; it got great reviews but didn’t make much of a commercial dent. When I asked him which songs he figured he’d play from the album on tour this summer, he said probably just the lead single, “Back to the Shack.” But here they also did “The British Are Coming” and, of all things, the heavy-metal instrumental “The Waste Land.” Maybe the crowd’s enthusiasm was having an effect after all.

Rivers Cuomo recently told The Times that he can get bummed out by the lack of attention paid Weezer’s recent work.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

5. Oh, and that B-side? It was “You Gave Your Love to Me Softly,” which appeared on the weirdly solid soundtrack to the 1995 movie “Angus,” as well as on a single alongside “El Scorcho.” On Monday, guitarist Brian Bell sang the song, a zippy little rave-up, and received a big reaction, which led Cuomo to point out that his bandmate “got the most applause of the night.”

Was he jealous? Admiring? Only Cuomo knew.

Twitter: @mikaelwood

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