WOODSHED / MASTHEAD

YOU PROBABLY WOULDN’T have guessed it (at least I hope not), but this month’s Rivers Cuomo cover shoot represents the first Guitar Worldassigned photo shoot since the May 2020 issue, when Kevin Scanlon photographed Ozzy Osbourne guitarist/producer Andrew Watt and his nifty stash of gear. What’s really cool (and totally random) is the fact that Scanlon also shot our brand-new Weezer pics, thus creating a poetic little bookend to the whole pandemic-inspired photoshoot-shutdown.

During the height of the lockdown, a bunch of artists turned to setting up their own photo shoots in their own super-controlled environments. A great example of this is our recent (Holiday 2020) Angus Young cover.

But back to Rivers: It’s funny that this new post-photo-shoot-shutdown world looks a lot like the old world. We’ve got Cuomo on the cover — discussing an Eighties-hair-metal-inspired album called Van Weezer. As it turns out, the last time Cuomo graced our cover (May 2002, left), he was holding a Kramer 5150, a la Eddie Van Halen, complete with a cigarette sticking out of the headstock (as seen in a classic mid-Eighties Kramer ad featuring Eddie). There’s even a tiny Eddie Van Halen just below the G in Guitar

World! Anyway, long story short, I’m pscyched to be assigning cover shoots again!