Weezer
My current band. And what my dad always called me. I think he was indeed thinking of the Little Rascals character. Cuz "he was the cool one".
Might be hard to see in retrospect, but Weezer did not come from the indie lineage.
What's the term from evolutionary biology? convergent evolution?
Convergent evolution is when different organisms independently evolve similar traits.... Biologists call this process when two organisms share characteristics that they didn't jointly inherit from a common ancestor - convergent evolution.
We ended up appearing similar to an indie band even though we came from commercial alternative.
Unlike many bands in LA at the time, we never did a 7" single, never courted indie labels (we shot for the majors from the start), never put band stickers in dressing rooms.
It was me and Matt [who decided to court major labels]. Super ambitious from the start. We called ourselves 'Paul and Gene'. If you know Kiss's bio, they were the two ambitious and practical guys that did what they had to do to get the band as big as it could be.
We didn't have a manager until after we made the Blue album.
The indie establishment of LA thought we were a joke. And that was the case through the first two album cycles. It wasn't until the 21st century that a general audience came to think of us as a big indie band.