Everyone knows that all real musicians hit the ashram at some point in their existence. They also hit rehab, but that’s totally unrelated to the following passage from Rolling Stone’s cover story about Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo:

Radical extremes are what Cuomo has made his life from, and in the context of his history, the Either Way I’m Fine era isn’t all that outrageous. It even makes some sense given his childhood, which was spent on ashrams — first at the Zen Center in upstate New York and, after his father left the family when he was five (he eventually settled in Germany for a while as a suffragan bishop in a Pentecostal church), at “Woodstock guru” Swami Satchidananda’s Yogaville commune in Connecticut. Everyone was a vegetarian, and no one raised his voice or cursed. Cuomo didn’t like it much. He declared himself a metalhead at eleven and started playing Kiss covers with the neighborhood kids. “I was only interested in Slayer and Metallica then,” says Cuomo. “I still love that music, but now I have so much appreciation for what my parents’ generation did for opening up our country to Eastern philosophy and raising me like that. I feel so lucky.” [Rolling Stone]

Rolling Stone: Weezer’s weird world