Weezer's Blue album in ONE DAY

The art of the arrangement is being lost. In times gone by , musicians were considered skilled if they arranged, in interesting ways, other peoples music. Songwriting was a separate art altogether. No one would argue that Cole Porter was somehow a ''better'' musician than Ella Fitgerald, just because he wrote songs and she interpreted the songs of others.

Within the last fifty or so years, that seems to have changed. I'm not sure where are it started, although I have some ideas (Beatles, I'm looking in your directions), but nowadays you're only a good musician if you can write a good song, and arrangement and performance have been relagated to that sticky catchall term of ''cover''.

I do think it's no accident that musical copywright has intensified along with this trend. The record industry is only too happy to cordon-off more and more spheres in which to accumulate capital. It may be that people have been disenchanted with ''covering'' songs because of a sea change in popular music and the industry has gone along with that, or it could be that because of stricter copywrights, people are less capable of arranging songs legally. Either way, interpretation of great music has taken a nosedive.

I find this to be really sad, as I became a musician not because I had delusions of grandeur about my own talent and ability to be famous, but because I love music—I'm a fan before I'm anything else. Music is such an integral part of my life that I can imagine being a musician without it. Every time I play a D major chord on the guitar I think of ''Crazy little thing called love'' by Queen; C major reminds me of ''Patience'' by Guns'n'Roses; B minor starts ''Exit music for a film'' by Radiohead playing in my little inner radio. I'd like to think that I'm not the only picker who has that kind of musical memory. There have been so many great songs that have touched my life in some way, and playing them by myself, with friends, or on the stereo drives every feeling home to me.

My friend Juan and I were getting drunk one night while watching ''1 Million Years B.C.'' and talking about music. He's quite a good songwriter and musician himself, and while Rachel Welch's breasts made their way across the fictional prehistoric landscape of clay dinorsaurs, Juan and I tossed back and forth the idea of making an album in one day. We have enough equiptment between the two of us, but we thought to do it right, we'd need the songs already written. We would take an album that we both knew and loved, churn it around in our heads, and rerecord the whole thing. To figure out which one to do, we put a bunch of albums on pieces of paper, dropped them into his Detriot Tigers cap, and drew one out. We had a lot of ideas: ''The joshua Tree'', the first Violent Femmes record, ''Wish'' by the Cure, the third Velvet Underground record, and a bunch more. But when we open the piece of paper that we drew, it said ''The first Weezer record''.

I've been listening to that album since I was fifteen. A girl that I was in the process of breaking up with played it for me on one of our last car trips together. My friends and I would listen to it when we camped out back of Dan's house, shooting the shit, playing DnD, and enjoying our youth. It's an album I've got a lot of love for, and when I thought of the possibilities of rearranging it, I was really stoked.

Somewhere along the way, our friend Chris got involved, and two weeks ago, we ended up over at his house at ten in the morning, ready to rock it out.

And we did. Although it was slow going (the first two songs took us four hours), we finished at 11:30 at night, and I went home with my 8 track filled with bizarre covers of Weezer songs. I'd love to post them here and get everyone's opinion on the slash-job we did, but I imagine that the folks at DGC and whoever owns the song credits would be none too happy that I've so flagrantly violated their copywrights. Still, I thought I'd post brief descriptions of how we changed the songs and what other crazy crap we did.

MY NAME IS JONAS—I've always liked the ''workers are going home'' part of this song, so we started with that—just bass and vocals, with guitars building and building until we spill over at the verse. Chris programmed a beat on his drum machine that gives the song a bit of a tribal feel.

NO ONE ELSE—Chris sang this one, but he didn't know the words. I played his wurlitzer organ and sang a guide track. With the thumping beat, and Chris's off-kilter ethereal vocals, the song sounds like the grisly conclusion to a stalking.

THE WORLD HAS TURNED AND LEFT ME HERE—Juan sang this, and he loves Belle and Sebastien, so it kind of sounds like them. I played a little violion part underneath one acoustic guitar

BUDDY HOLLY—Chris later described this as sounding like ''sweaty robots having sex''. We slowed it way down, put some funky guitar and bass on it, and turned it into a distorted doo-wop number. During the “bang, bang, knock on the door” part, Chris read a poem in German called ''The panther'', then laughed manaically when he finished.

THE SWEATER SONG—Everybody knows this song. The acoustic guitar riff is instantly recognizable—almost to the point of being hideously annoying. We played it on three different instruments and just looped it for like five minutes. The sketch in the beginning has changed form a little, but still gets the same points across: lonliness, alienation, and the haughtiness that comes from being an outsider. We put in a strange inside joke as the "sketch section" involving Ron Perlman, the character actor.

SURF WAX AMERICA—A few years ago, I played in a Hawaiian band in Boston. Hawaii has a music scene that is absolutely huge, wonderful, and that no one on the continent ever hears. It's basically folk music with ukelele's. I didn't have a uke, so I just played acoustic guitar. Chris provided a little slack-key solo and Juan played a nice bouncing bass.

SAY IT AIN'T SO—This is probably my favorite Weezer song. For a band that thrives on power rock, this mournfull little ditty is like looking over a cliff at the waves of distorted guitar. We slowed it way down and played a really minimal guitar riff with lots of reverb, along with a bass and Chris's digitech effects pedal for some flava-country. Then at the ''Dear Daddy'' part, all hell breaks loose. This song turned out scarily good.

IN THE GARAGE—By this point in our recording, it was about 9 at night and we were getting tired. Chris put on a fast techno beat, I played a distorted part and just kind of shouted out the words. It made me think of my first recordings with a casio keyboard in my room when I was 14. I guess we kind of captured the spirit of the song, even if it's not terribly interesting.

HOLIDAY—We had literally no idea what to do with this song. None of us really liked it, and we all wanted to get to ''Only in dreams'' anyway. After just kind of farting around for a while, Chris found this shimmering guitar sound on his digitech and started playing two chords in the song while I was doing a vocal check with various lines. We looked at each other and realized that it would sound pretty good as a spacey, dream-like holiday, instead of the raging cruise-ship of a pop-song that is the original.

ONLY IN DREAMS—Each of us took turns singing verses. We moved the two choruses together, and sang one quiet, and then one with all the energy we had left in us. We didn't do the extended jam at the end, which I always thought was kind of pretentious anyway. We just left it with a strummed acoustic guitar and a fadeout. Not a bad way to end the thing, if you ask me.

Despite the hard work, we had a great old time. While I may not listen to the album very much after the initial excitement wears off, I'm gonna remember that day until I die. It proved to me that the joy of music isn't in writing some deep meaninful song, or even in playing something technically complicated. It come from moment and presence and feeling, like most joy in life. Play music, anyone's music for yourself, and revel in it's power to evoke the greatness of experience.