Musician played ‘Buddy Holly’ until Weezer agreed to a jam
It was an audition 990 days in the making. In June 2020, isolated in the early months of the pandemic, Evan Marsalli challenged himself on his then-new TikTok account. The drummer for Milwaukee garage-rock band Diet Lite played the signature guitar riff from Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” and vowed to do it every single day.
He would stop under one condition: if Weezer did a duet with him on the app. Last week, Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo did, 990 days after Marsalli’s first video. It was the ultimate reward for Marsalli’s multiyear commitment. But Cuomo issued Marsalli a challenge of his own on TikTok: “to come play this live on Weezer’s Indie Rock Roadtrip Tour this summer.”
Marsalli will get to do just that at the band’s Madison show June 14 at Breese Stevens Field. “It’s kind of unbelievable,” Marsalli told the Journal Sentinel. “You get to the point after 900 days or so of doing this where you’re like, ‘Is this going to happen? Is this still worth it?’ Obviously it was.”
Marsalli, 27, said he’s been a Weezer fan since he was a kid, before he started playing instruments himself — first, drums in fifth grade, then guitar in college. When the pandemic hit, Marsalli sought another creative outlet through TikTok, and determined he “needed some sort of consistent content people can rally behind.” But he didn’t know what he was going to do until he heard “Buddy Holly” on the car radio.
“My brother reached the dial and turned up the volume, and that made me realize this is something that resonates with a lot of people,” Marsalli said. “The song is iconic, the part is iconic. … It was just perfect.”
It didn’t take too long for Weezer’s camp to notice. In October 2000, the band’s social media team reached out to Marsalli about potentially setting something up with Cuomo. Literal years went by with no follow-up, but Marsalli continued playing the riff on TikTok every day.
“It did at some points feel like I was shouting into the void,” he said.
His duet dream was finally realized, with Marsalli finding out at work when people tagged him on Cuomo’s video response. That video has since been seen more than 1 million times, with Marsalli’s own TikTok following jumping from about 13,000 to more than 15,000 since the Feb. 27 post.
“I was dumfounded,” Marsalli said. “I did not expect this to happen on a random Monday morning.”
He suggested reality may not have set in yet, saying he feels no anxiety about playing with the band in Madison in June. He does have plenty of live-show experience, with a Diet Lite album release show booked April 15 for the Back Room at Colectivo Coffee.
And while his daily “Buddy Holly” TikTok posts have come to an end, Marsalli isn’t going to stop playing the riff. “I guess I’ve got to keep practicing this thing so I don’t mess it up in front of a few thousand people,” he said.