Here it is, for those of you—well, for the five of us—left cold by Brendan Canty’s technically accomplished but tiresomely fawning Ashes Of American Flags. Not Alone is a DVD record of Rivers Cuomo’s by-invitation jam session at Long Beach’s Fingerprints music store last November, with an unrehearsed group of 36 backup musicians, on the release date of Alone II. Pre-ordering the disc got you inside, whereupon Cuomo, clad in engineer togs, invited crowd members onstage to help him select and perform the 12-song set. (Yes, some douchebag yells “Freebird,” as a douchebag invariably will.) Though the first songs are understandably tentative and threaten to completely fall apart once or twice, the musicians, Cuomo included, gradually get their legs beneath them, breaking out into huge smiles and adapting their interpretations to the limits of the form; check their hoot-along singing of the guitar break on “Buddy Holly,” for example. If you can get into the pickup-game spirit, the overriding charm of the DVD is its collaborative energy, and Not Alone is as unpretentious a document of a contemporary performer’s art as we’ve seen in a while. Maybe it’s that the diminutive Cuomo looks all but swaddled in his railroad clothes, or maybe it’s that he’s so outnumbered by the “friends” who showed up to play, but there’s absolutely zero space between the star and the crowd, which is rare even for an in-store appearance. And you can read it in the faces of the Weezer buffs who showed—they’re stone fans, yeah, but they’re serious about this, and they want to do right by the guy’s music. When the death of both the music industry and the indie record store is wailed on all sides, it’s refreshing to be shown a reminder of how music, good music, begins: in a single room where people have gathered to make a beautiful noise.
—Eric Waggoner
