Music Blogs

This week marks the kickoff of Yahoo! Music's new live concert program, Guitar Hero 5 Fridays--featuring rifftastic bands whose classic songs have been included in the game--and there's perhaps no better band to launch it than GH faves Weezer, who more than 15 years into their career are at the top of their live game (no pun intended), rocking harder onstage than ever before.

Yes, the shift of original drummer Pat Wilson to rhythm guitar--and the subsequent addition to the lineup of drumming legend Josh Freese, who is a MACHINE--has turned Weezer into an unstoppable live force, with band leader Rivers Cuomo now free to stalk the stage like a true frontman.

This is evident in Weezer's Guitar Hero 5 Fridays footage--shot for a private, ardent, intimate audience of diehard fans at the Roxy on L.A.'s Sunset Strip--in which Rivers tosses around a football, leaps into the crowd, boldly orders concertgoers to dance, smashes a ukulele to smithereens, bounces aerodynamically on a mini-trampoline, and basically acts like a full-on rock star. He's not a "nerd-rocker" anymore, that's for sure.

The white spacesuits and inclusion of the Pinkerton rarity "Why Bother?" (which is on Guitar Hero 5) are nice touches, too:

And check out Weezer's insightful and exclusive interview taped upstairs at On The Rox, in which Rivers, Pat, and Josh discuss the band's new lease on life, lineup switches, awesomely and aptly titled new album Raditude, and how Guitar Hero has helped them continue to gain new fans SEVEN albums into their career:

Visit http://weezer.com/live to download official bootleg recordings from Weezer’s tour with Blink-182.

Watch Wolfmother's Guitar Hero 5 Fridays concert