There, Koch took a second job as a clerk in the nearby Wherehouse music and video store, at the corner of Sunset Blvd and La Brea Avenue. This apartment was known as The Blue Diamond Terrace. In March 1992, while Rivers, Matt and Justin Fisher moved into 2226 Amherst Avenue (home of "The Garage" rehearsal space, The Kitchen Tapes demos, and the Say It Ain't So music video), Koch, Pat Finn and Takashi Hasegawa moved into The Fuller-Martel Plaza apartment complex on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, next door to the apartment that housed their friends in Wax (as well as future jackass members PJ Clapp (Johnny Knoxville), Handsome Jack, and Loomis). In addition, an annoying girl from Holland named Antionique was somehow allowed to stay there for several weeks in the summer of 1991, as well as a several month long stay by Jesse Humphreys, a Northern California guy who Pat Finn had met through Jason Cropper. With 7 people sharing the $800 rent, they each paid $120 for several squalor filled months. Meanwhile the Stoner Apartment took on more and more people, including Bob Hnilo, Von Lono, and Takashi Hasegawa, a great guy from Japan that Rivers and Pat Finn met via Kyokushin Karate lessons in Burbank, CA. Koch was very excited by the new early Weezer songs and stepped in ready to help and document the band as he had with the short lived Sausages. Over the winter of 1991-1992 the band that would become Weezer was born from demos and discussions of Wilson, Rivers and Cropper. Over the course of summer 1991, Koch witnessed the coalescing of Wilson, Finn, Jason Cropper, and Rivers into Sixty Wrong Sausages, who ended up having one show around Thanksgiving 1991 in Petaluma, CA, before breaking up. Koch lived with a growing cast of characters at 1711 Stoner Avenue, and worked a warehouse job at REI in Torrance, CA (he and Pat Finn both found jobs there, and commuted for their roughly 30 hour a week schedules). So sit on lawn furniture.and watch Woody Allen films." "It was a nice apartment, but they couldn't afford anything. Pat Wilson, and Matt lived there, Pat was staying there temporarily, and Rivers was about to move in. This was in January 1991, 6 months before he moved to L.A., during a winter break California vacation. Koch recalled an early memory of (former Weezer bassist) Matt Sharp as a sad guy wearing little round glasses, black turtlenecks, and new wave hair.
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said, 'You gotta come out here man! Whatever you want to do, this is the place to do it!' I was like, 'Alright.' So I kinda packed up, against my parents' wishes." Koch's initial ideas for what he would do in Los Angeles included continuing his fine arts education at Cal Arts Valencia (plan abandoned after a breif visit to the Cal Arts campus), publishing a comic book that Pat Finn would write and Koch would illustrate (unfinished), and becoming a professional fine arts painter by setting up a studio in his apartment (a few new paintings made, but plan put on hold due to later Weezer activity).Īt first, Koch didn't know anyone that would end up in Weezer, but eventually met the members through Pat Finn. We lived in a cheap rather unpleasant apartment located on the ground floor of 1711 Stoner Avenue in West Los Angeles. A year later, I followed them out there, and Pat introduced me to Matt, Rivers and Jason. "I was introduced to Pat Wilson in Buffalo by Pat Finn, shortly before they took off to LA in early spring 1990. His parents (specifically his father) were a bit skeptical about his decision to move to LA. Karl Koch graduated in the spring of 1991 from Maryland Institute, College Of Art in Baltimore MD and soon went out to LA in a 1988 Ford Bronco at the urging of his best friend Pat Finn.