Late Weezer bassist Mikey Welsh had tweeted death prediction

 

Mikey Welsh, the former bassist of Weezer who was found dead in a Chicago hotel room on Saturday, sent a number of odd Tweets in the weeks leading to his death. In fact, just two weeks ago on Twitter he predicted the exact location and time of his own death.

A post to his Twitter account on Sept. 26 stated: ‘dreamt I died in Chicago next weekend (heart attack in my sleep). Need to write my will today.’

He then added, "correction-the weekend after next."

This wasn’t the first time Welsh has expressed beforehand knowledge of his death. Aside from the Tweets, the New York musician-turned-artist had also mentioned it on his Facebook page underneath a showcase photo of one art piece. Welsh wrote that it was available for $250 with this caveat:

“if i am still alive at time of purchase, price to increase exponentially if I expire prematurely.’

No cause of death has been determined.

The news of Welsh’s death came from his family via Twitter and Facebook messages Sunday, which read: “We are deeply saddened to announce that Mikey Welsh passed away unexpectedly today. He will forever be remembered as an amazing father, artist and friend. May he rest in peace.’

Welsh joined Weezer in 1998 following the departure of original bassist Matt Sharp. His presence is primarily tied to the band’s 2001 album, known as the “Green Album” and played on such hits as “Island in the Sun” and “Hash Pipe.”

Weezer reacted to news of Welsh’s passing on the band’s official Twitter:

“We are shocked and deeply saddened to hear the awful news, our friend and fellow weez rocker @mikeywelsh71 has passed away. We love you Mikey.”

The year the "Green Album" was released, Welsh reportedly suffered a mental breakdown and later attempted suicide. He was also touring as a bassist for Juliana Hatfield at the time. During his music career, the list of bands Welsh played in included Verbena, Special Goodness and Homie, a short-lived side project of Weezer guitarist and singer Rivers Cuomo.

Welsh talked about the episode in a 2007 interview with website Rock Salt Plum:

“Basically, a lifetime of doing drugs and being undiagnosed as having bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and borderline personality disorder finally caught up with me when I was 30 years old,” Welsh said.

“At the beginning of a three month tour with Weezer, I started slowly falling apart.”

Following the breakdown, Welsh devoted himself to painting, and moved to Burlington, Vt., with his wife and two daughters. His style centered mostly on large-scale abstracts.

In July of this year, Welsh joined Weezer and the Flaming Lips on stage in New York, where he played guitar on “Undone.”

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--Nate Jackson

Photo: The rock band Weezer in Hollywood on April 6, 2001. From left are Pat Wilson, Brian Bell, Mikey Welsh, Rivers Cuomo.

 

Josh Freese celebrates 'My New Friends' with songs generated by zany marketing campaign


Josh Freese is back with a new record, but this time he’s not planning to let fans come rummage through his wardrobe to promote it.

The versatile musician, who is practically a one-man band on his new EP, “My New Friends,” became a virtual one-man, new-model army to combat the music business’s ills with a wildly inventive, and remarkably successful, self-generated marketing and promotion campaign for his 2009 album, “Since 1972.”

You may recall that one because the Long Beach drummer par excellence for Nine Inch Nails, Devo, Weezer, the Vandals and A Perfect Circle and the in-studio go-to guy for countless other bands and solo artists (has any other musician on the planet recorded with Trent Reznor, Mark Mothersbaugh and Michael Buble?) cooked up a wacky multitiered marketing scheme to sell his self-produced album.

The offers ran from the ordinary ($15 for a CD and a download) to the nutty ($2,500 for a drum lesson or a foot massage, a visit to the Wax Museum with a member of the Vandals or Devo and your choice of three clothing items from his closet) to the truly ridiculous (a $75,000 package for which Freese promised to write and record a five-song EP about the buyer, join the buyer’s band — if he or she had one — and tour with it, then take him or her to a flying trapeze lesson with his former NIN bandmate Robin Finck).

Live review: Weezer at Gibson Amphitheatre

Weezer’s 1996 album, “Pinkerton,” is the rare mainstream rock record about being a giant creep. Not in a lecherous Rolling Stones way, nor like Radiohead’s mopey early career. No, “Pinkerton” is the kind of record on which the band’s Rivers Cuomo seethes that a girl won’t reciprocate his love — for the totally unjustifiable reason that she’s a lesbian. It tapped a vein of Asian-female fetishizing among white male indie rockers — the thing is an emo album as an Orientalist fantasy featuring cellist girls who pen love letters on delicate stationery. Any woman who in real life encounters the flailing, vengeful passive-aggressive narrator behind songs such as “No Other One” should run screaming for the fire exits.

On the charts: Linkin Park continues to give Agoura Hills something to cheer about, and Weezer has a major indie debut

Linkin Park, the hard rock pride of Agoura Hills, ushers in the music industry's busy fall and winter release schedule, leading a charge of six new albums into the top 10 of the U.S. pop chart. The act's "Thousand Suns," which showcases a moodier, gentler and more contemplative Linkin Park, sold 241,000 copies in its debut week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. 

Though Linkin Park has no doubt successfully shifted out of the rap/rock-metal scene of the mid- to late '90s, becoming one of the few hybrid acts from the era to demonstrate some career longevity, it isn't immune to the general industry downturn facing the music biz. The band's 2007 effort, "Minutes to Midnight," bowed with a much-mightier 623,000 copies, according to the Billboard archives. This could be a transitionary moment for the band, as initial fan reaction to the less hard-hitting sound appears to be mixed. 

Nevertheless, Linkin Park still outsold the latest from R&B artist Trey Songz, icon Robert Plant, still-rising country star Jamey Johnson and Weezer, who jumped from the Universal Music Group empire to locals Epitaph Records. The fourth effort from Trey Songz, "Passion, Pain & Pleasure," narrowly missed the top spot, selling 240,000 copies in its first week. That's actually a career-best for Trey Songz, who Billboard notes has never sold more than 131,000 albums in a single week. 

Further down, mainstream country's rougher-and-tougher Johnson entered at No. 4 with "The Guitar Song," an album that sold 63,000 copies, while Plant's "Band of Joy," which continues his atmospheric explorations into the American songbook, bowed at No. 5 with with 49,000 copies.

Weezer's "Hurley" didn't arrive with quite the same fanfare as last year's "Raditude," which saw the band selling Snuggies and collaborating with Lil Wayne, yet it did see the act taking greater ownership of its career. For the album, Weezer started its own W Records and licensed the effort to Silver Lake's Epitaph. The independent move still gives the band a top 10 album, as "Hurley" opened with 45,000 copies sold. That is, however, a little less than "Raditude's" debut, as that effort bowed with 66,000 copies sold.

Other notes from this week's chart:

Weezer washes up for deodorant-sponsored secret show at the Dunes Inn Hotel in Hollywood

The veteran alt-rockers get back to their roots with the help of body spray, My Chemical Romance and that dude from "Lost."

 

Miracles, as the Insane Clown Posse might helpfully point out, are all around us. Just look at Weezer. Fourteen years ago, they were a band at rock bottom: "Pinkerton," the group's painfully vulnerable follow-up to its multi-platinum self-titled debut (better known as "The Blue Album"), was savaged by critics and spurned by fans with a harshness that dwarfed frontman Rivers Cuomo's most embarrassing narratives of romantic failure. All these years later, a generation of teenage fans knows all the words to "The Sweater Song" and have probably never read Spin magazine. Water into wine? Close enough.

Things could certainly be worse for the alt-rock lifers, who played a secret show on Tuesday night at the Dunes Inn Hotel in Hollywood as part of Axe's One Night Only music series. (Rapper T.I. played the first installment last month in New York City.) Cuomo earned his paycheck, name-dropping the body-spray brand at least three times during the band's one-hour show.

L.A.'s Anti- has won the respect of Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, whose band just happens to be a free agent

Like asking Yankees chief Joe Girardi if he would be willing to leave New York to manage the Chicago Cubs, peppering a famous musician with inquiries as to where his band may or may not sign is a line of interrogation that's sure to be met with vagaries (warning: this post has them). Yet Wilco's Jeff Tweedy knows the questions will come his way, and understands that speculation could point the daring Chicago pop band to a certain L.A. indie.

On Tuesday, Epitaph's multi-genre imprint Anti- Records will release "You Are Not Alone" from Chicago soul luminary Mavis Staples, a refined collection of gospel-tinged folk and blues that was produced by Tweedy in Wilco's Windy City studio. As detailed in Sunday's Calendar story, Staples is experiencing a late-career rejuvenation. The 71-year-old and 60-year-recording vet is now on her third album from Anti-, and the artist said she's noticed a boost in attention since linking with the respected label, where legends (Roky Erickson) stand alongside the elegant (Neko Case) and the out-and-out weird (Man Man). 

The label's multi-genre approach is not too different from that of Warner Music Group imprint Nonesuch Records, where Wilco has just completed its recording contract. With Tweedy recently telling Billboard that it "seems unlikely that we will be under the umbrella of a major label" for future albums, has his experience working with Anti- on the Staples album put the Silver Lake-based label in the running as a future Wilco home?

Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo on signing to Epitaph, getting wild onstage

 
Any live music maven in the second decade of the 21st century knows that a plain old rock band has a little problem. Shows have become so elaborate, overstimulating fans with lights shows, props, dancers and other distractions, that three or four people banging away on standard instruments can seem awfully dull.

Weezer leader Rivers Cuomo has overcome this disadvantage by diving deep into the rock and roll frontman's smelly trick bag and refreshing its contents with the kind of energy you'd expect from a young brat, not a 40-year-old dad with 15 years of stardom under his corduroy-hoisting belt.

Performing Saturday afternoon at the U.S. Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach, Cuomo spent more time in the audience than he did onstage. He climbed onto camera dollies, played catch with giant Nerf footballs and several beach balls, and consistently invaded the personal space of his screaming fans. The madman routine was sharp as an ice pick -- Cuomo nailed every vocal in Weezer's wordy hits, led the band and pulled out several large guitar solos to boot.

The undeniable fun of the Weezer show made clear that this alternative rock mainstay is still ready to take any comers. Freshly signed to the Los Angeles indie Epitaph Records after parting from its longtime label DGC/Geffen, Weezer is promising a return to the raw melodicism of its best-loved records. We'll be spending more time with Weezer in anticipation of that release, but for now, Cuomo clarified the band's arrangement with Epitaph and answered some other pressing questions about Weezer's current state -- and his killer live attitude -- via e-mail.

The big news is that Weezer will release a new album, "Hurley," on Epitaph Records on Sept. 14. This announcement ends the rampant speculation about how you would  release your next musical project. Why did you decide to go with Epitaph, rather than self-releasing via the Internet, or selling the music out of your garage, wrapped in a Wuggie?

Technically "Hurley" is released on our own record label, W Records, and it's just being licensed to Epitaph.  So far we've had a really good creative collaboration with Brett Gurewitz and the other people at the label, and I'm looking forward to collaboration with other like-minded alternative music fans at the label.

I've only heard one track from the album so far -- the super-punchy twist on nostalgia, "Memories" -- but that one indicates that this album will be pretty raw. This seems like a departure from the pop experimentation of your last album, "Raditude." Is it a deliberate about-face, or just another side of what you do so well?

We all felt that the really intense, raw emotional side of Weezer is what's going to make everyone the happiest at this moment.

Weezer goes indie, inks deal with Silver Lake's Epitaph Records

No press release, and no further comments from the Weezer or Epitaph camps, but the band has announced that it has signed with the local indie label. The punk-leaning, Silver Lake Lounge-adjacent Sunset Boulevard fortress that Bad Religion and Offspring built will release the band's new album, "Hurley," on Sept. 14, according to Weezer's Twitter page and official website.  

Weezer will join Social Distortion as veterans to recently join the Brett Gurewitz-run Epitaph fold. It appears that that the band will release its album under the Epitaph brand as opposed to the imprint's more eccentric Anti- label, which is home to Neko Case, Nick Cave's Grinderman and the wonderfully weird Tim Fite, but Weezer's relationship-focused pop gems have always had a shade of the Ramones and Buzzcocks, and the act recently toured with Blink-182. 

Weezer's contract with Geffen expired after the release of last year's "Raditude," bringing to end a 15-year relationship with the major label. Weezer used Rolling Stone to help unveil the news, and leader Rivers Cuomo had this to say in explaining the move to an indie: "At this moment in our career, it feels like we don't need a major label, and the major label culture isn't inline with our values," Cuomo said. "We like Brett Gurewitz, and it feels like a smaller and more appropriate operation for what we like doing at the moment."

-- Todd Martens 

Photo: Christine Cotter / Los Angeles Times

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Weezer cancels Irvine show

Rock band Weezer was able to avoid a significant tragedy after an early December tour bus crash, but the band has still had to bring a halt to its partying. Weezer announced today that it is canceling its Jan. 11 stop in Irvine at the UCI Bren Events Center. Previously, the band had only postponed its December tour dates.

As previously noted, leader Rivers Cuomo was said to have suffered three cracked ribs after a tour bus crash on Dec. 6. The accident occurred about 40 miles west of Albany, N.Y.,  on Interstate 90, according to the band. The bus was described as losing control after hitting a patch of black ice.

On its site today, the band wrote, "due to the recent bus crash involving Rivers Cuomo, as per doctors orders all previously scheduled December and upcoming January Weezer shows are cancelled. At present, neither the December shows nor the upcoming January shows are being rescheduled."

The band is touring in support of its recently released "Raditude." In six weeks on the chart, the album has sold 140,000 copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan.

-- Todd Martens

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Photo: Weezer's Rivers Cuomo. Credit: Christine Cotter / Los Angeles Times

Weezer cancels December dates after bus crash

Weezer has canceled its remaining December tour dates after a a tour bus crash early Sunday left lead singer Rivers Cuomo with three cracked ribs. The band's next stop in Southern California in support of its recent release, "Raditude," is currently scheduled for Jan. 11 in Irvine at the UCI Bren Events Center, followed by a Jan. 13 date in La Jolla. As of now, those dates are still on.

The accident occurred about 40 miles west of Albany on Interstate 90, according to the band. The bus was described as losing control after hitting a patch of black ice. "The driver employed every ounce of skill he had in fighting to keep the bus upright, as the vehicle violently fishtailed over the highway," according to a post on the Weezer website.

Cuomo's injuries are described as "mostly minor but very painful internal damage."  His assistant and nanny were also reportedly injured in the accident, but the rest of the band, as well as Curomo's wife and daughter, appear to have survived the crash without any major injuries.