If you know your mid-to-late '90s rock music, then you know the story. Following the stellar success of debut album Weezer (also known as The Blue Album) and its singles "Undone : The Sweater Song", "Say It Ain't So" and - especially - "Buddy Holly", Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo went a little bit odd and reclusive, and decided to write - and self-produce - a deeply personal, extremely raw album called Pinkerton. It was a complete flop both commercially and critically, but in the latter handful of years of the decade suddenly got jumped upon and held up as a genre-defining masterpiece, being saddled at the same time with the accusation of having kickstarted all that "emo" rubbish. In those few years, Weezer had all but disintegrated, but returned triumphantly in 2001 with a poppier sound, a new bass player and a new smash hit album. Since then, they've ploughed on producing progressively less interesting music, and now occupy the unfortunate position of being one of "those" bands that everyone's heard of but are never really described as geniuses save by those who remember their first two albums.

But it all could have been different. So very different. If Cuomo had had the conviction to follow through with an idea he had in late 1994/early 1995, Weezer's second album could have been even more of a masterpiece than Pinkerton is generally held to be. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the story of the 1990s' version of the legendary SMiLE. Welcome to Songs From The Black Hole.

Cuomo had been writing and demoing some of the songs that would go on to become integral parts of SFTBH and Pinkerton even before the release of The Blue Album. It was after the debut album's release, however, that he really began to turn ideas over in his head. After a busy summer and autumn touring and promoting the record, the band took a well-earned break over Christmas 1994. The band's official website's "recording history" takes up the story :

Over Christmas break, Rivers worked feverishly on writing, and recording 8-track demos at home in Connecticut, and emerged with a ‘mock-up’ demo of what he was starting to envision as weezer’s next album. Influenced by musicals, operas, and ‘rock-operas’, Songs From The Black Hole was an ambitious concept album idea.

Weezer performing "Getchoo" at Glastonbury 1995. At this stage, the song would still have been being considered for Songs From The Black Hole.

Throughout the first half of 1995, Rivers continued to write songs, developing the concept, and at various stages began recording demos. On some occasions, this was simply him on his own with a guitar; at other times, he worked with Weezer's drummer Pat, playing all the instruments but the drums and singing the various vocal parts that would go into the songs. By the middle of the year, he had a rough tracklist of around 16 songs in mind (although the finished album would undoubtedly have contained more songs than this, and some of the songs would have been no longer than a minute or so), and was developing the album's story. In the autumn of that year, he continued to tinker with the album after enrolling at Harvard, and came up with a second, altered tracklist which included some new songs and dropped others. But his focus on the project, and on his songwriting, was already beginning to change. Throughout 1995, discussions with the band had seen them wondering if the project could actually be pulled off. By the end of the year, Rivers had pretty much lost faith in the idea (nobody really knows why, although an increasing lack of confidence would surely have been a factor, and he has since claimed that the concept was ditched because of bassist Matt Sharp's side project The Return Of The Rentals), and furthermore his songwriting had taken on a new direction. He brought a new crop of songs to the band in early '96, and these songs - along with a selection of SFTBH tracks that had already been recorded (independently of one-another and without any of the coherency and theatrics that SFTBH had intended) in '95 - would ultimately make up Pinkerton.

It's here that the Songs From The Black Hole story takes a lengthy break; and indeed might have died altogether were it not for that eternal factor of fan curiosity. Many Weezer fans weren't even aware of SFTBH's existence, apart from whispered rumours, until a number of old Weezer demos were made available on the band's official website in 2002. Among these were a handful of the demos that Rivers had recorded for SFTBH. These tracks caused a massive stir among the older fans who, around this time, were beginning to despair that the Weezer who had recorded the bland, lacklustre Maladroit might ever recapture their world-beating form. Of particular note was "Blast Off!", which was immediately held up as an example of the classic, edgy pop songwriting that Rivers was capable of back then. Of course, everyone clamoured for more info. Weezer's longtime confidante, roadie, photographer and webmaster Karl Koch was extremely helpful in filling in the story, providing fans with a guide to the two tracklistings that Rivers had come up with. However, the flow of actual material had dried up - the exceptions being a frustratingly incomplete segment of the song "Superfriend" (recorded on video camera in the studio) on 2004's Video Capture Device DVD, and the release of the magnificent "You Won't Get With Me Tonight" on a compilation album in October 2003.

Indeed, it was the sleeve notes on YWGWMT's compilation release - written by Koch - that really began to get fans talking about the story behind the album, because apart from vague mentions of being a "rock opera", and speculation based on the often inaudible lyrics on the demos, no-one really knew much about the album's intended concept. Koch's explanation, though, opened the floodgates a little :

This track was written and recorded by Rivers as a home demo in early 1995, and was intended for the second weezer album. At the time, the second album was to be called Songs From The Black Hole and was intended to be a ‘space opera,’ along the lines of Tommy or Jesus Christ Superstar. The song lyrics may seem confusing, but what must be understood is that there are 2 different characters here, one male and one female, and that on this demo, Rivers is singing both parts. The song is really a conversation between two characters.

This CD-R of SFTBH belongs to Karl Koch. And he won't put it on the net. THE BASTARD. But isn't it good to know it exists?

Even with this information, it wasn't until an online Q&A session with Karl Koch in July 2005 that more information about the project's story began to come out - and this information served only to increase fans' frustration about how brilliant the album might have been. It seems that the story would have followed at least five characters (we hear three of them in "Blast Off!", and two of them in "You Won't Get With Me Tonight"), all youngish space cadets on a mission to some planet far away. As well as documenting their mission itself, the album was to have focused on the relationships between the characters - indeed, most of what Rivers had written was on this side of the story, with little of the actual mission story developed by the time the project was scrapped. The five characters were to have been Jonas (the "lead" character, played by Rivers, and the main vocal on most of the songs), Maria (Joan Wasser), Lisa (that dog.'s Rachel Haden), and two more characters to have been played by Brian Bell and Matt Sharp, whose names remained a mystery for some time but have now been deduced/remembered to have been "Wuan" (pronounced like Juan) and "Dono" or "Donno" (as in the lines "Oh, Wuan and Dono" in "Blast Off!" and "Especially that Dono" in YWGWMT). There is also a robot called M1 in "Blast Off!" (sung through a vocoder by Rivers on the demo) who would have been played by Koch.

So what would the album have been like? With the amount of legend and speculation that surrounds it, it's perhaps easy to lapse into hyperbole. But if you consider the prospect of a band who were as at the top of their form as Weezer were in the mid-90s (The Blue Album stands up as one of the finest rock records of the past couple of decades, and even with all the problems that surrounded its inception Pinkerton is still something of a masterpiece), crafting an ambitious, epic, story-driven rock opera album... it's hard not to be excited. The whole thing might well have been overblown, tacky and bloated - but it might also have been absolutely magnificent. The idea that five different singers (only Rivers was ever a "main" singer for Weezer) might have played different parts is mouthwatering, and while the "love story" side of the plot is perhaps cliched, there's something extremely charming about the futuristic-yet-retro feel of the setting - it comes across as a 1950s interpretation of the future rather than a 1990s one. Furthermore, while it may seem strange to think of a "conventional" rock band doing a story-led concept album (I mean, isn't it just so '60s?), the concept certainly didn't harm Green Day, who took on a similar approach nearly ten years later, and in the process turned in one of the best albums of 2004 in American Idiot.

Musically, meanwhile, there's no doubt that SFTBH could have been something special. Nearly all of the demos that we've been lucky enough to hear are top-notch songs, particularly YWGWMT and "Longtime Sunshine", and that impression is only enhanced by looking at the eventually-recorded songs that would have been a part of it, such as "Tired Of Sex", "Why Bother?", "No Other One" and "Devotion". But it's actually the b-side "I Just Threw Out The Love Of My Dreams" that offers the best impression of what a completed SFTBH might have sounded like, as it features Rachel Haden singing lead vocals and is drenched in the keyboards and production that would surely have been a feature of the album. And for many years it's been held by fans as one of the best Weezer songs in existence.

Weezer live in 1996. By this point, with Pinkerton in the can, SFTBH was already becoming a distant memory, although a number of its songs survived..

Aside from merely ruminating on what a great album it may or may not have been, there's a further consequence of the revelations about SFTBH. Among the songs that were intended to be on the album were four that ended up on Pinkerton - "Tired Of Sex", "Getchoo", "No Other One" and "Why Bother?". It's worth noting that they ended up on the album as the first four tracks - the six that follow were all songs that Rivers had written after scrapping the project - or, at least, while he was on the process of abandoning it. Pinkerton is an extremely overanalysed album, due to the highly personal nature of most of its lyrics and its position as a forefather of modern "emo" music. All of a sudden, though, learning that those songs were intended to be part of a narrative, and therefore are written by Rivers in the third person rather than being about himself, adds a whole new complexion to them. This is particularly notable in the case of "Tired Of Sex". As the opening track on Pinkerton, it's a raw and harsh abandonment of the poppy sound of The Blue Album, and furthermore its lyrics seem to detail Rivers' dissatisfaction with the rockstar lifestyle; how he's fed up of sleeping with groupies every night and yearns for something more meaningful ("Monday night I'm makin' Jen / Tuesday night I'm makin' Gwen / Wednesday night I'm makin' Catherine / Oh why can't I be making love come true?"). Learning, then, that it is in fact supposed to detail the dissatisfaction of a fictional character (probably Jonas, although possibly "Donno") - and furthermore that it wasn't originally intended as an opening track, seems to tear away a lot of preconceived wisdom about the song. Of course, it could still remain the case that Rivers was drawing from his own experiences and placing them onto his fictional creation, but still. The long-held perception that Pinkerton was a cathartic, in-one-go explosion of Rivers' feelings in the post-Blue Album years suddenly has a significant rethink demanded of it. Instead, it seems like "Across The Sea" onwards represents the "true" Pinkerton, and the opening four tracks are merely the legacy of the album it could - and perhaps should - have been.

It's unlikely that the band would ever go back to those songs, write some more, and record the whole thing properly - not least because so many of the songs did get a proper release in some form or another (in addition to the four Pinkerton tracks, we had IJTOTLOMD and "Devotion" as full-on, studio-recorded B-sides to the singles "El Scorcho" and "The Good Life"). But could we ever see either of the demo tapes released, online or otherwise? Weezer fans can but hope, as SFTBH harks back to an era when Rivers and Weezer were creatively at the top of their game. Even in demo form, it would certainly piss over anything they've done in the past five years. Which, on reflection, is probably the main thing that would stop them from doing it...

What we're left with, then, is a handful of great (although raw and choppy) songs, and a tantalising glimpse of what might have been. Every Weezer fan who knows the SFTBH has their own version of the album, because you can work from different tracklistings and you can use different versions to fill in the gaps (some people prefer to use Pinkerton versions of the songs that were properly recorded - others prefer to use earlier demos in order to retain a more consistent, unpolished feel to the record). In this sense, Songs From The Black Hole really is a SMiLE for the 21st Century. And hey, it only took thirty-odd years to get that released. It's now been ten years since the SFTBH sessions - should we pencil in a release for 2025...?

Much of the information in this article comes from the extremely helpful sftbh.com (where you can also download the raw versions of the tracks that were originally released via weezer.com), and from the fantastic article here, which also contains the full Q&A session with Karl Koch in which he explains a good deal of previously unknown information about the album's story.