Milwaukee Musician Set to Join Weezer on Summer Tour Thanks to TikTok

After 990 days of playing the lick of Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” on TikTok, Milwaukee musician Evan Marsalli of garage-rock band Diet Lite caught the attention of Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo. 

Marsalli posted a video of him playing the iconic guitar riff every day for nearly three years. On Feb. 27, Cuomo duetted his near-1000th video, garnering over 1 million views and granting Marsalli an invitation to join Weezer on the Madison stop on its Indie Rock Roadtrip Tour.

“My people will reach out to your people,” wrote Cuomo on TikTok. 

@rivers_cuomo

#duet with @dietlite_evan My people will reach out to your people.

♬ original sound – Evan from diet lite

Cuomo’s response surpassed Marsalli’s expectations. While he initially was not certain if Cuomo was serious, he was floored by the TikTok duet and audience reaction. 

“It’s kind of unbelievable,” Marsalli said. “This band that I have been listening to since I was a kid asked me to come on stage with them.”

In the summer of 2020, Marsalli noticed that his musician peers and friends were downloading TikTok. He decided that it would be a great tool to build the platform for himself and his band, Diet Lite. 

“I was searching for something I could do on TikTok,” said Marsalli. “Something replicable, something I can do every day, something that people can get behind and rally behind.”

He was in the car with his brother listening to “Buddy Holly” and when the lick came on, he watched him reach to turn the radio up. At that moment, he realized how legendary the seconds-long bit is. Shortly thereafter, on June 11, 2020, he started the series and began to gain a following. 

“Weezer has this, for lack of a better term, meme culture around [it] already,” Marsalli said. “The song had that meme culture. I feel like I might have perpetuated it a little bit as well.”

Demonstrating their early knowledge of internet culture, the members of Weezer featured meme references Chocolate Rain, Chris Crocker and All Your Base Are Belong to Us in their 2008 video for “Pork and Beans.” They also referenced the viral Damn, Daniel in the music video for “California Kids” in 2016.

Marsalli has noticed that while Instagram is where Diet Lite connects with long-time fans, TikTok is where it has grown the most reach. According to UWM Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies Senior Lecturer Marc Tasman, TikTok has a clean, smooth interface that is designed for an easy-scrolling experience, which lends to audiences spending more time on the app. Music and sounds are the anchors for the posts. 

“If you’re a musician and you’re willing to put out clips of your music on TikTok, you have a willing network of people that are essentially making music videos for you,” said Tasman. “Instead of the old model: MTV, producing a video, making a short film… Here, it is totally crowdsourced.” 

According to Tasman, Marsalli’s story makes good of the promise of the democratized internet and the industry changes that have been made over the last 20 years. 

“The thing that is most impressive about these new media technologies is that it has reorganized the hierarchical structures,” said Tasman. “It is no longer experts, whether that’s music producers, whether it’s agents, whether it’s musicians themselves.” 

While the series was helpful in Diet Lite’s social networking, we should not expect any more similar video series from Marsalli. 

“I’ve already done that and it would be a shitty sequel,” Marsalli said with a laugh. “It’s already been a thing. It doesn’t need to be a thing again.”

Diet Lite is set to release its new album Into the Pudding on 414 Day, April 14. The album release show is the following night, April 15, at The Back Room @ Colectivo with special guests Social Cig and Kangaroo Court.