You mentioned your leg,
I wanna bring this up quickly,
because I actually know someone
who went through the same procedure.
Oh.
You were born one leg shorter than the other,
is that right?
Yeah, when I was born, they were even,
but as I got taller,
my right leg just couldn't keep up for some reason.
And yeah, by the time I was full grown,
it was almost two inches shorter than the left leg.
Wow, wow.
So yeah, there's a procedure,
I think they still do it, called the Ilizarov procedure.
They still do it,
and I know good friends of ours,
their child went through it.
And it's, when you hear about it, it almost sounds medieval.
Yeah.
This procedure, but it works.
Yeah.
You wanna describe it?
It's pretty basic.
They, well, in my case it was my femur,
so they cut your femur in half,
and then they screw this cage around your leg
Mhmm.
and into your bone.
And then every day you turn four screws on this cage
and it kind of separates either end of it a millimeter.
So over the course of a couple months,
it's separated two inches.
And the bone grows.
As it's doing that,
the bones kind of growing in the middle.
Oh my God.
Wow.
But it must be, I mean,
is that incredibly painful to turn those screws?
Yeah, it was pretty painful.
(Sona laughs)
Yeah, I mean,
I know I asked a really stupid question.
(all laughing)
And I'll own that, but,
and I'll admit that I knew the answer, but
I wanted you,
(Sona continues laughing)
I just, I cannot believe,
and as I said, I know someone who went through this
and it was very successful,
but I really felt for this young woman,
and I felt for the the parents.
'Cause I just thought,
I can't imagine turning those screws every day.
Yeah, I feel sad when I think about it,
a little kid doing it.
And I saw kids at the hospital
doing it same time as me,
and yeah, you feel bad for 'em.
'Cause they didn't, you know,
I signed up for it, I wanted to do it,
I was excited.
But it worked?
It was successful?
Well, it didn't work, but that's the thing,
is it works a lot better for kids.
Oh.
Their bones just grow.
And even for me, at 25 already,
the bone just wasn't filling in.
So I had to screw it back together again.
Oh, Jesus!
And then start over and start stretching it.
And it still didn't grow.
So they ended up, after a year of that,
they took some bone out of my hip,
ground it up and, stuck it into the space
between the two halves of my femur.
And then that finally took.
Oh my god.
(all but Conan laughing)
Sorry.
I'm sorry, that just took my breath away.
That is,
no, I mean, I'm sorry you went through that,
but my God, it just, you know.
Do you wanna ask him again if it was painful?
Well, okay.
(Sona laughing)
I actually do.
So you take a little aspirin?
Aleve?
What do you do?
No.
(all laughing)
I took a wonderful opiate called Demerol.
Oh.
I'd had no experience with those kind of pills
until that point Yeah.
and I really came to love it.
(Sona and Matt laughing)
I'm hoping you still don't love it.
I'm hoping that.
I try my best to avoid those kind of painkillers
if at all possible cuz they're so good.
I do have to say,
and I've been on record of saying this before,
the few times in my life
when I've required a professional level,
major league pain killer or opiate,
I've been the happiest I've ever been in my life.
And that's a terrible thing to, and no one should do them.
But I like, I understood, I understood.
Yeah.
Where Keith Richards and everyone was coming from,
but no terrible.
And the other silver lining is
the way it affected my voice.
So on our second record
I actually wanted to do the vocals
when I was in the middle of this procedure.
And man, just something in my voice,
just I can hear what I've gone through
and the physical suffering,
it comes out in in this very beautiful,
sad tone in my voice.
Mhmm.
And there's just,
I don't think there's any other way to get that.
You know, it's such a cliche, the hunger artist,
that great art has to come, you know, there has to be pain,
and everyone has their own version of that.
But, you know, and clearly I don't wish pain on anybody
but something does come from this, I would think.
Do you agree with that?
That you get something, I mean, other
than just a longer leg you,
that this is somehow influential
in your creative process or no?
It depends on how you feel about that album.
Cuz it, I mean it was a big flop when it came out.
Still, a lot of people don't like it,
you don't hear it on the radio.
But for other people it's their favorite Weezer album.
And there's, there's something really special on it.
There's, I love it.
And there's, I know at the time it was not considered
it was not a commercial success and critics didn't like it.
I think it's been reevaluated since then.
Yeah.
I'm a little skeptical,
because I feel like the only people who bothered to go back
and reevaluate an album from 1996
are the people who kind of already love it.
Mhmm.
I'd like to ask the people who gave it such bad reviews
when it originally came out,
hey, what do you think of it now?
Yeah, it's hard to, I mean,
who knows what they're doing now?
Like.
(all laugh)
Yeah.
Well that's, they may not still be reviewing music.
Yeah.
I mean that's the other thing I learned early on is
with criticism is try not to hold grudges.
Try not to, it just felt so destructive to me.
And I don't wanna have a dialogue with people who, whatever.
They didn't like what I was doing in 93 and 94
and there were a lot of people who didn't.
And I understand where they were coming from.
I just decided to keep going.
And if I ran into them today, I would like to think
I'd have a pleasant conversation with them.
You know, and because I don't want to have that,
hey man, why didn't you like me exactly?
Are you thinking of someone specific?
(all laughing)
There's too many actually.
Okay.
There's too many people.
That's weird cuz,
as somebody who's just watching your show back then
it would never have occurred to me
there's people that don't like you.
Well that's sweet.
Well, it was generational.
You mean the older people?
Yeah, there was, you know,
and I understood where it was coming from
because I really came outta nowhere
and I was very unpolished.
And I can see it,
I can see why people would.
What I loved, which really meant a lot to me,
is very young people were completely,
they were not judgemental at all.
They just saw the weird stuff we were doing and thought,
Oh, this is for us, I like this.
But it was very discordant, I think, to a whole generation
Oh.
and it really upset people.
And at the time I hated going through it.
But now it's part of the story and made my peace with that.
And so, but I know what that's,
I know that situation or that feeling of
you put something out there
and you know, you drop that penny down the well
and there's, you know, you don't hear the splash,
you don't get the response you wanted.
And so, and I think it would be,
It's so funny because I just think of
throwing it back to you, Weezer,
you guys have endured for so long,
and done such good work,
and there's so much great stuff there
that you have a conversation with anybody.
I don't see, you know, nobody knows
or really cares how your second album was received.
Mhmm.
Do you know what I mean?
Which is the way, which is really nice.
Yeah.
They're looking at the whole,
they're looking at the body of work.