When Eric Weisbard '88 arrived at Princeton in 1983, he was interested in Russian and perceived himself to be a Wilson School major.
That all changed when, a couple of weeks into school, his friend handed him a tape with "The Velvet Underground" on one side and Lou Reed on the other.
"It was the idea that there was music this good," Weisbard recal-led about the epiphany that changed the direction of his life.
As a freshman, he lived in Holder Hall just above the basement studios of WPRB, Princeton's radio station. "I started to both deejay and take advantage of records I didn't know anything about," Weisbard remembered. In the fall of 1983, he was spinning Hsker D, the Replacements and the Meat Puppets on the air.
"It was romantic in a way" for Weisbard in those olden days — before MP3s and Napster — because he was able to experience and hear all of these records for free. He said, "I was not embarrassed if ordinary students didn't listen." His loyalties were to the PRB staff and not to the "bland mass of the average student body."
He eventually became the music director of the radio station, continued to deejay and focused his studies on American history. Throughout his Princeton career, Weisbard felt as if he were "reconciling his academic side and his changing as a person musically."
As a senior, he combined "an analysis of the origins of rock and roll with a study of the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies" into his thesis entitled "Pop Go the Masses."
"He always tried to stretch the usual intellectual boundaries, trying to find ways to study popular culture, to be iconoclastic, but at the same time to respect the highest of intellectual standards," Weisbard's thesis advisor and history professor Sean Wilentz remembered.
Aside from working for the radio station, Weisbard wrote about music and new bands for the Nassau Weekly. After graduation, he moved to the San Francisco Bay area and began writing music articles for the San Francisco Weekly and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He developed a relationship with his editor Ann Powers at the San Francisco Weekly and the two are now married.
The passion for music, however, began to outweigh the academic side of Weisbard. He dropped out of Berkeley's Ph.D. program in history and moved to Brooklyn to pursue a career as a writer and editor in the music world full time.
Weisbard has written articles for a variety of publications including Spin, The Village Voice, The New York Times and GQ and held editorships at Spin and The Voice during his professional career. "The excitement is writing to widely different audiences and see how they respond to it," he commented on the range of artists he has interviewed from Garth Brooks to DMX.
Now, the music critic is leaving New York to become the senior program manager of the Experience Music Project. EMP is a museum featuring music memorabilia and interactive exhibits in Seattle, Wash.
"I will be the main liaison with academics, journalists and other writers in the education department," he said.
"The Exper-ience Music Pro-ject has only been open for a short time . . . but in 1995, I first became involved with the planning," Weisbard explained. As he makes his return to academia with a musical edge, he is now busy coordinating the annual Popular Studies Conference set to take place in April 2002. He is very enthusiastic because "there are places to study popular music now. EMP is making it possible."
"Eric didn't have it in him to live the hard life of a graduate student and junior scholar. He did have it in him to follow the hard life of a rock music critic," Wilentz said in an e-mail. "It takes different temperaments. But now, with his new job in Seattle, I expect he'll be bridging the gap between university life and the world of music criticism, something that needs doing."
Ready to embark on the next phase of his life, Weisbard returned to his alma mater on Oct. 24 to give an address enigmatically entitled "Kurt Cobain Died for Somebody's Sins . . . But Not Mine." The speech commemorated the 10th anniversary of the seminal Nirvana album "Nevermind" — an anniversary "really bittersweet, more tragic than celebratory," Weisbard noted.
Ever the historian as well as music journalist, Weisbard decided to address the issue of rock icons and the cult of personality that seems to underlie the American music scene today.
"Why do we have this need for a transcendent rock star, for a figurehead at the front of a musical movement?" he posed to the large group who attended his lecture. "I want to argue that . . . there are spaces between 'underground' and 'so big you burst.'"
"When I look at what's happened in the 10 years since 'Nevermind,' I see a greatly under-appreciated historical development, the emergence for the first time of multiple semi-public spheres sharing dominance in pop music," Weisbard continued.
"In calling this talk 'Kurt Cobain Died' I wanted to do a couple things: First, be a crotchety, old indie rocker and say I just can't believe how few people understood where Nirvana was coming from," Weisbard stated. "But, a little more importantly, I wanted to try to stick some pins in the idea . . . that we needed these figures to be our sacrificial lambs especially when that archetype becomes the only way to sort of fix your star permanently in the firmament of celebrity culture. I am hoping that there are saner alternatives." He went on to make some comparisons between Cobain and a typical troubled pop star of today, Mariah Carey.
During the lecture, Weisbard varied not only the types of songs he described, from Big Black's "Kerosene" — a song he played constantly during his PRB days — to Carey's "Hero," but also the way he presented the material to the audience.
He would introduce a song, play it and then follow with discussion. "I think to actually hear the texture of the song says a lot more than just describing it," he explained as he wove the musical textures into his argument.
He contrasted indie music's "battle to be a part of public memory" with Carey's millions of fans. "If 'Nevermind' has been proclaimed the great album that no one can ever say a bad thing about, I don't think that there is anyone who can say a good thing about Mariah Carey."
This comment drew laughter from the audience, which had no sympathies for the beleaguered diva. To Weisbard, her "blockbuster capitalism" is the "antithesis of indie rock."
"There is the notion that Kurt Cobain died because [it] was impossible to make music on the scale of Mariah Carey with the values that resembled Steve Albini's," he commented. "These two worlds — one corrupt and one pure — couldn't coincide."
Ironically, although the tragic Cobain could not reconcile this dichotomy, "Everything in the Nirvana catalog suggests that it was perfectly possible to combine bigness and indieness," Weisbard noted.
His speech made clear that Cobain did not die because of the overwhelming trials of stardom, but because of his drug problem.
"Cobain's death in many ways led to the lingering death of alternative rock," the indie-rock lover sadly conceded, leaving the audience to mourn the great rock star and ponder his legacy.
Weisbard, however, is optimistic about bands like the Strokes and the White Stripes, who are starting to come out of the woodwork.
He stressed the need to let go of the notion that Cobain was a "frustrated rock-n-roll savior." He said he feels that there are "multiple and deeply contrasting ways that popular music is capable of functioning from underground ideology to pop universality to combative artistry that teases out somewhere in between."
"I think that it's time for us to think about popular music in all those ways and let Kurt Cobain down off his cross," Weisbard concluded.
Weisbard's abiding love of all music was very evident in the lecture and in an interview with the 'Prince.'
"I want to understand [music] from as many sides as possible," he said. "There is no one set of musical stars that speaks to one group . . . no dominant paradigm."
"There are things happening on so many different levels. Six or eight things are next," Weisbard said. Perhaps with his impending move to the home of Jimi Hendrix, Cobain and Eddie Vedder, a resurgence of diehard indie music will ensue.
Meanwhile, Weisbard was back on campus on Election Day for his annual radio show to play some records with old friends. This is a tradition that he hopes will continue into the future, as he sees Princeton as the birthplace of his life's work.
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