A weezer song at JJ's

Reflections on Playing a Weezer Song at JJs in 2020

By Chase Waller

I was sitting alone at the bar at JJs in March of 2020. I had played at JJs enough to know that getting there “on time” for load in meant that I would be about seven hours early. I was early enough that I sat in a completely empty bar, checked my watch out of habit, and kept checking my phone to see if any of the other bands were on their way.

In the early days of my performances as El Rocko, I pretty much only played at JJs and The Spot. Both venues had shows virtually every night, and at that point, I just wanted to play as much as possible.

I did play one other show at The Office, for those of you who remember that shitty little oasis of cheap drinks and cigarette vending machines (I’ll always miss dropping seven dollars worth of quarters into that clunk of metal and pulling the rusty lever on the Marlboro reds).

Anyway, there I was at the bar at JJs, drinking a PBR and chatting with the bartender, who had a confused look on her face. Fair enough. I think I even beat her there.

I didn’t know at that point that this show was going to be my last for a while– or anyone’s last, for that matter.

I didn’t use any guitar pedals back then. I used one guitar tone: the drive switch on my Fender DeVille. I still use that amp, and to be fair, the amp’s tone sounds fantastic. Gear talk used to confuse me. I perused Reverb.com, and read “Top 10 Beginner Guitar Pedal” articles, and peaked at other guitarists’ boards at other shows, like you’re supposed to do if you want to prove that you also play guitar. A lot of petals looked and sounded cool. But the sheer amount of knobs and colors dizzied me. So I stuck to my one crunchy, beefy tone. This made my load-in easy– one guitar, one amp. Besides me, there was only a bassist and a drummer. We played a short set. Everything simple.

For years after COVID, I felt a bit embarrassed about these early shows. I shifted in the post-COVID years to two guitars, a small slew of pedals, even fancy-schmancy vocal effects. I played less shows, I practiced more, I honed in my songwriting, I paid closer attention to the mix, etc. In other words, I’ve grown as a musician (much thanks to my bandmates). But my growth in some ways came with some cynicism.

It’s hard for me to look at young songwriters and performers and not see my young self, which is usually not a good thing. I go back every once in a while to read old lyrics or listen to old demos. I feel very critical of those things, of lyrics that betrayed a less mature, less experienced person scribing emotions and experiences out of my reach. I think about the constant attempts to be someone that I wasn’t, attempts to sound like musicians that I wasn’t. It all feels a bit naive and self-important looking back. Which is, of course, not at all to say that I have arrived now. Not at all. But these self-criticisms aren’t all that fair.

It’s a cynical way to look at myself, even though what I was doing back then was pretty damn sincere. That self-critical cycle translates to a pretty cynical way to look at others, too. I don’t want to view live music that way.

Recently, I played a small festival in South Carolina. A young lady, probably as old as I was in those early JJs shows, performed the first set. She got up there in her ankle length skirt with her Luna guitar. I’m embarrassed to say that I rolled my eyes when she opened with some covers, including “Landslide” and “Don’t Stop Believin”. But she caught me off guard when, after the covers, she nervously quivered into the mic: “Okay, I’m going to play some songs I wrote now. I’m super excited because I’ve never done this before.”

That is awesome. If you’ve ever seen the old animated Boris Karloff Grinch, you’ll know the scene where the Grinch’s heart grows three sizes. That’s what happened to Grinch Chase sitting there listening to her. To play your own music for the first time in front of strangers is a brave thing. To continue doing it, despite making mistakes or not being great at it, is even braver.

Part of the magic of JJs is that I have seen some of my favorite bands there, and I have seen high schoolers test driving their first live songs there. The same can be said for many other venues in the Chattanooga scene. It’s part of what makes the city special.

In the time since that festival, I’ve felt an increasing appreciation for the version of me that played show, after show, after show. None of them were very good. But none of my growth as a musician would have happened without them. Something very obvious, but very hard to remember.

Venues like this remind me that live music is one of the deepest and oldest human traditions. It’s a profound thing to participate in that tradition, whether you’re on the stage or in the audience. JJs offered me a special dignity in letting me play my set there so often. They required nothing of me and nothing of the audience besides a very small cover charge. That lack of requirement results in a deep freedom in the experience of music, which is why I always enjoyed those shows, and rarely felt self-conscious about it then. I think my live music is much better now, and much more compelling. But I think the enjoyment I got out of performing then is much the same as it is now.

There’s not much about that particular night in March of 2020 that I remember very well, except for the very end. I wrapped up playing at about 2 in the morning. If you’re doing the math, that means I was at JJs for about eight hours straight. If you’re doing even more math, that means that between myself and everyone else who smoked in that bar during those eight hours, I had inhaled about seven thousand cigarettes. Needless to say, things were going about as well as they possibly could. I finished my last song. The twenty-something people in JJs cheered me on, which felt amazing. Then they started to chant, “Encore!” but I had played every song I had written at that point. So for a moment I thought about repeating a song I had already played. But then I had an even better idea.

I turned to my bassist and drummer and said, “Do you guys know how to play ‘The Sweater Song’ by Weezer?” They did. So, we started playing Weezer. And as soon as we hit the first chord of the riff, everyone knew what was happening. This small group of loyal listeners went nuts, and everyone screamed the song in its entirety.

And then, when I had finished the encore, the folks in the crowd started shouting, “Play it again!” So we did. We played Weezer’s “Sweater Song” twice for an encore. The second time was rowdier than the first. To this day, I think that was one of the most fun moments I ever had performing live.

Interestingly, according to Rivers Cuomo, “Undone” is the first song he ever wrote for Weezer, back in 1991. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he also said that he was trying to write a Velvet Underground song and ended up ripping off a riff from Metallica. What a great distillation of the early musician’s experience– the imposter syndrome. Oddly enough, the most sincere and authentic thing you can do as a young musician is try to copy other musicians you love. It’s been that way for hundreds, if not thousands of years. I didn’t think about it at the time, but I was doing the same thing on stage at JJs back then. I was copycatting, in the most sincere way possible. And so was that woman at the show in South Carolina.

All in all, I can’t think of anything better to do before a pandemic than play “Undone” twice in a row at 2:30 AM in JJs. Honestly, if the last thing I ever do as a musician is cover that song at JJs, it’ll be a big win. I’ll probably show up on-time, too. Looking back on it now, that show marks a pretty great chapter break for my story as a musician, and as a person. If you were at that show in March of 2020, singing Weezer back-to-back with me, thank you. It meant a lot that you cheered for me. Keep up the good work. I hope to do the same.

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