To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Alternative Press, we’re diving into our archive and unearthing past cover stories that represent milestone moments across the brand’s history. To kick things off, we’re revisiting our Black Parade-era interview with My Chemical Romance ahead of their huge summer tour. Featured in the December 2006 issue (#221), all five members explored the making of their ambitious third album — a concept disc that embraced classic-rock tradition as much as meticulously detailed storytelling. Prior to its release in October 2006, the band were interviewed by Jason Pettigrew and photographed by Dave Hill.
As anybody who has ever seen their videos, witnessed their gigs or read their interviews will tell you, post-emo wunderkinds My Chemical Romance are all about making grand gestures. In mid-August, My Chemical Romance arrived at a soundstage in Downey, California, to begin work on two epic videos with director Samuel Bayer (Green Day, blink-182). At the end of the shoot, Bayer had the stage set on fire with the intention of filming the band amid the flames. Drummer Bob Bryar didn’t leave the stage fast enough, and the pants of his Black Parade uniform melted into the back of his leg. Within a few days, said leg, in his words, “looked like guacamole,” but he continued to travel across three continents to play gigs in England, Japan and New York City in abject misery while the infection circulated through his bloodstream. After the spectacle of playing atop the GE Building for MTV’s Video Music Awards, as well as a secret show at the Knitting Factory post-VMAs, he went to a hospital emergency room, thinking he would be there for an hour while getting his burns redressed. The doctors saw him, and 14 hours later, Bryar was rescued from a near-fatal infection that was traveling toward his brain.
Read more: Read AltPress’ first interview with Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance
During the second video shoot (for which song both band and label are keeping under wraps), guitarist Frank Iero—the energetic punk foil to MCR’s classic-rock-weaned shred-master Ray Toro—was caught up in the excitement of the huge blaze and tackled frontman and chief conceptualist Gerard Way. As Way was going down, he heard a snap; it was the sound of all the ligaments in his right foot tearing. (In true My Chem style, Iero’s tackle didn’t make the video’s final cut). Way, whose previous dalliances with drugs and alcohol have been well publicized, chose not to take any painkillers, despite his doctor’s overwhelming advice to the contrary.
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“I take that stuff as a really good omen,” enthuses Way. “Right before our success, we fired Otter [original drummer Matt Pelissier]; I had a nervous breakdown; and I had to get clean or kill myself. The other day, Brian [Schechter, MCR’s manager] told me, ‘Damn, the hits keep coming.’ I told him that’s the way it is when you’ve emotionally charged your life so much.”
New York City during Olympus Fashion Week brings people together—like a death camp. The Fashion District, the city’s high-ticket shopping area, is the epicenter of uptown fashionista/anorexic panic, where deals will be made and the season’s looks will be decided over “lunch” (read: glass of water, two leaves of watercress). The area is teeming with executives, fashion mavens, frumpy tourists, working stiffs and cubicle-dwellers on their way to fulfilling their weekly 40-hour depression quota. Thanks to the snarled traffic, a $4 cab ride is costing three times as much.
Iero is waiting in the restaurant of the Royalton Hotel, sporting a black ensemble (shirt, pants, tie, blazer and, um, tennis shoes) worthy of Fashion Week chic—or maybe an early Joe Pesci movie. It’s not long before Toro and Bryar overcome the traffic to join us. (The Ways are conducting business at their record label’s uptown office.) While Toro’s black button-down shirt and pants and Bryar’s dark charcoal-colored outfit aren’t as immediately eye-catching as Iero, they’re still nicer than the closets of every band who played the Kevin Says stage at this year’s Warped Tour. Bryar looks tired, but only because of his regimen of antibiotics. He’s not hungry at all, but he can’t take his meds on an empty stomach. However, he perks up when discussion turns away from his health and toward the creation of the band’s new music.
“I think we were just pretty crazy with ideas,” says Bryar, pushing away his lunch plate. “That’s what made the record so exciting. When you do it from the heart, you can do no wrong. Being in a band is about supporting ideas—you always have each other’s back.”
But because the band constantly think of their next grand gesture, might they run the risk of overthinking things? At this point, it seems impossible for MCR to do something as immediate as recording a six-song EP of punk covers in three days.
“If we were to do that,” Bryar surmises, “it would turn into something else. ‘Oh, hey, we need another week…’”
The next thing you know, the band would be telling their label the project is now slated to open on Broadway in 2008, while asking for a loan to put it on.
“There’s always that fear,” says Toro, while Iero tries to find some vegetarian fare on the menu. “You can get caught in recording and mixing and start thinking, ‘We gotta scrap it and start again.’ There are bands out there that are still trying to make their first record. But you know when it feels right. Who knows, maybe next time, we’ll go into a studio for a week and peace out.”
While reinvention was one of the primary motivations behind the recording of The Black Parade, the disc’s 14 tracks are informed by the halcyon days of rock-music history. When presented with a list of songs from the record that guesses at their corresponding classic-rock antecedents, Toro seems impressed. He acknowledges the large-looming homages to Queen (“Welcome To The Black Parade”), Journey (“Famous Last Words”), Pink Floyd (“The End.”), even Creedence Clearwater Revival (“I Don’t Love You”), but also adds ’70s musicals (Annie, Cabaret, All That Jazz), as well as Phantom of the Paradise, obscure songwriter Paul Williams’ 1974 rocking rewrite of Phantom of the Opera. Ten out of 10 punk rockers will agree that any Misfits seven-inch is far cooler than anything currently rocking MCR’s sonic grocery list.
“The intention was to make something that was classic, something timeless,” says Toro. “Something that, 20 or 30 years from now, parents could play for their kids and say, ‘This is what I was listening to when I was your age. Check it out—it’s still fucking cool.’ We wanted to make a record you could pass down. There’s a lot of music out now that doesn’t feel like that.”
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It also doesn’t feel like something coming out of a bunch of Jersey dudes (OK, Bryar’s from Chicago) who came up through Jersey’s grimy club circuit. Actually, that’s not entirely true: Parade-floats like “House of Wolves,” “The Sharpest Lives” and “Sleep” are moments of prime MCR, with Toro’s arena-rock sensibilities complemented by Iero’s punk-based, one-two-fuck-you exuberance. While their breakthrough disc, the platinum-selling Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, found them tempering the thrashing exercises found on their 2002 debut, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, now more than ever, MCR have completely outgrown—artistically and, in some cases, socially—the scene that spawned them.
“If you go into making a record with that fear of, ‘Oh, my God, what will the scene think?,’ all you are doing is holding yourself back,” says Taking Back Sunday frontman Adam Lazzara. The members of MCR and TBS have been tight friends since they first met four years ago (“real” is Gerard’s favorite word to describe TBS). “The question is: Should the scene dictate what bands are doing, or should bands be dictating what’s going on in the scene? Because right now, everything’s sounding the same. My Chem [made] their record totally disregarding that fear, and they will be one of the key bands to change things. They’re separating themselves from [the scene], sure, but they’re also breaking boundaries for people to draw inspiration from.”
“At not one second during the making of this record did we dedicate to wondering what ‘the scene’ would think,” Iero says calmly. “Because the people who go to sleep at night wondering if they did the best they could are us.
“Growing up, when we did the first album, no one really thought we were the ‘cool’ thing,” the guitarist continues. “We weren’t post-hardcore; we weren’t a straight-up crust-punk band. All of a sudden, New Jersey became a hotbed, and we started getting attention. That’s fine, but we never changed what we did. When we did Three Cheers, we didn’t fit in. There was a little less screaming and a little more melody, but it was still us. Never was it a case of, ‘Don’t put that melody there because Hardcore Chuck, who took me to my first show at Fairfield American Legion Hall, is really going to be bummed at me.’ I don’t give a shit. If I had to work at McDonald’s for the rest of my life to play shows and ride in a shitty van on tour? I’ve done it. I’ll do it again.”
“The only pressure that we have ever put on ourselves for this whole process was to write the best record we could,” says Toro. “People will have their own opinions and expectations, but you can’t feel that. The furthest thing from our minds is how the record does [sales-wise].”
“I definitely thought the Warner Brothers would be standing in the studio with us overseeing everything,” Iero wisecracks before playing his Get Out Of Scene Free card. “Looking back at Three Cheers, we weren’t supposed to sell that many records. We were expected to sell, what, 15,000? [The label] probably thought it worked the last time, there was no reason to have their hands in it. And we haven’t had anything like that.” He stops to sip some water. “I’ll let you know when it happens, though.”
While Bryar, Iero and Toro claim to be completely unaffected by the level of expectation, both financially (from their label, hell, the entire music industry) and socially (from every neo-punk band toiling in the underground, bitching about or living vicariously through MCR), they do take the time to ponder if the droves of fans wanting Three More Cheers will back off Black. And they do it with the same kind of over-the-top thinking that propelled their recording sessions.
“If that happened, we’d still tour,” Bryar says. “I’m kind of hoping we can play a 100-seater [club] sometime.”
Iero perks up with a devilish grin. “One hundred-seaters would be pretty rad. I can spit on everyone then!”
“Here’s an idea we’re already in agreement on,” Bryar begins. “You know how you roll up to an arena with full-on production? We’ll roll up to a 500-seater and do a week there—and our tour will last for six years.”
Toro laughs, moving his head between his bandmates like he’s watching a tennis game, as Iero volleys again. “Why don’t we just go to the homes of everyone who bought the record? Set up full stacks in the living rooms!”
Bryar smiles. “They can invite 30 friends.”
Kevin Estrada
It’s 8 p.m.; Gerard and Mikey Way show up half an hour late to Brasserie 8 1/2 after their manager realizes he dropped them off at the wrong restaurant. The brothers Way are back in black, with the platinum blonde Gerard wearing a T-shirt reading The Black Parade under a tight-fitting hoodie. But it’s Mikey—hair dyed black, sans eyeglasses—whose transformation is the most startling. As Gerard talks to the headwaiter downstairs, Mikey starts shooting the breeze, catching up on the New York experience thus far. As the duo come down the steps from the street-level entrance, past the bar where a gaggle of happy-hour denizens are finding solace in $5 draft beers and aging fashion mavens nurse flat-tasting $4 Diet Pepsis, nobody looks twice at them.
Settled into a corner booth, Gerard orders some soft drinks and two dozen clams for the table. Bubbling with enthusiasm, he seems genuinely anxious for the interview to start. Talk turns to the Hammersmith Odeon gig in London this past August. The show began with an announcement over the PA that My Chemical Romance would not be playing this evening, but some friends of theirs, the Black Parade (geddit?) were filling in.
“Everything in my life had led up to me standing behind that curtain,” Mikey says, smiling.
“We looked like the death-rock version of Sgt. Pepper,” enthuses Gerard. “I hadn’t been that scared since our first show.”
Gerard envisioned the Black Parade as both an alter ego and a proper body of work. The idea of the Parade as MCR incognito stemmed from the frustration the singer was feeling with the state of music in general. Weary of the stuff everybody was settling on—as well as the makeup-toting doppelgängers that sprang up in the wake of his band’s success—he sought out inspiration in ’70s classic rock and Broadway musicals, where grand spectacle was the order of the day. Gone are the red-and-black-attack ties and blazers. Hell hath no tailor working two-tone brocade coats, complemented by the singer’s platinum-dyed locks.
“I don’t know why people want to be small,” he says, regarding the critics and detractors in bands who demeaned him throughout the course of MCR. “I’d ask them, ‘What are you here for? Why do you want to be mild?’ [The bands I loved] never wanted to be average. Why should we contribute to the redundancy?
“There’s two kinds of people who get success,” Gerard continues. “There are the types who are like, “Fuck, yeah, I’ll keep writing the hits,’ and they’re the ones that fall flat on their face. The other kind,” he begins to smile, “is sitting in a control room tracking with Liza Minnelli, asking himself, ‘Do I know what I’m doing right now? Is this for real? Who gave us the keys to the car?’” (In one of the more bizarre cameos of recent music history, Minnelli, star of stage and screen, appears on MCR’s song “Mama.”)
“Yeah,” Mikey says, carving a steak. “It’s like putting a power drill in a cradle and letting a baby play with it.” He starts making buzzing noises as his older brother cracks up.
In an underground music scene where the pursuit of success is greeted with cries of “Sellout,” MCR have always had the drive and the vision to move to the next level. Forget about modesty: Three years ago, when the band made the announcement on their website that they were signing to a major label, they were known for little more than being friends of Thursday. It was like Joey The Bag-Boy from the grocery store down the street telling you he was going to be president one day: Put the eggs on top of the canned goods and shut the hell up.
“That was the perspective that everybody saw it as,” Gerard says. “We saw it more as a declaration than an explanation. There were reasons we did sign—it was always us against the world. Three Cheers was our response to that.
“I remember the first time I was onstage supporting whatever band in the middle of America, and hearing the first time somebody calling me ‘faggot,’” he continues. “I just sat there and said, ‘I don’t want to be part of this.’ And we’ve been resigning ourselves ever since. This record is like slamming your resignation on your boss’ desk.”
As a body of work, The Black Parade is a concept album about that great equalizer: Death. The story begins with the central character, the Patient, hooked up to life-support machinery. The overarching premise, according to Way, is that Death comes for you the way you want it to; in the Patient’s case, it’s a comforting childhood memory of a parade. The rest of the album explores death in many manifestations, from spent relationships to personal failures to lost opportunities, before finally reaching a sense of redemption. In MCR’s case, it also works as foreshadowing.
After spending the beginning of the year in New York writing songs and doing their own pre-production, the band traveled to California in February to hole up at the Paramour, a gated mansion in Silverlake used as both a studio and a rehearsal facility. (HIM, Gwen Stefani and Fiona Apple have recorded there.) The house is acoustically sound, its 30-foot ceilings giving musicians a great sense of how their work is progressing. On the downside, cell-phone reception is next to impossible, heating is scarce and none of the local eateries deliver food there—because many think the place is haunted. But instead of seeing the Paramour as a totem of some perceived “coolness factor” (Scooby-Doo 3 starring My Chemical Romance, anyone?), the experience almost cost MCR one of their own.
During the band’s last victory lap of America, Mikey started to become increasingly insular and withdrawn. The band member who was always lightening up a mood whenever things got hairy was in the throes of anxiety, which soon developed into full-blown depression. On the road, he purposely limited his universe to playing the shows and heading back to the privacy of his bunk on the band’s coach immediately afterward.
“Some of the best shows of our career just flew right by me,” Mikey admits. “Some of them I’d been waiting for all of my life. I had gotten everything I ever wanted, but there was a point where I was just… ‘What the fuck?’ For so long, I was so pissed off at myself—the littlest things would set me off. I’d keep my mouth shut and stand in the back. Some people would mistake [my behavior] for shyness or arrogance. It was just terrible anxiety.”
The moment the band arrived at the Paramour and dropped their luggage on the floor, Mikey was at an emotional low. His existing condition, coupled with the vibe of the mansion and the amount of pressure the band members were putting on each other to make MCR v.3.0 the best batch of songs yet, made the bassist think he had two options in life—to quit the band or, worse yet, to quit the human race.
“I remember sitting in the main room thinking, ‘I’m not going to make it through this,’” he says. “I was either offing myself or leaving the band—one or the other was going to happen.” After staying for one month and enduring a series of hyperventilating attacks and nervous breakdowns, Mikey left the Paramour to stay with the band’s attorney, Stacy Fass. When he wasn’t seeing specialists for his condition, he would come down and work on music, but never stay the night.
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With Mikey gone, the rest were creatively paralyzed. Gerard stopped showering and changing his clothes, choosing instead to pace the halls of the house. He was averaging less than three hours of sleep a night, and his dreams were full-on night terrors, filled with images of flames and things burning. He would describe these dreams into a portable recorder to try to gain some kind of insight. (These soundbites were later used on the song “Sleep.”) One of the notes he wrote in his troubled state was the line, “We are all just a black parade.” He thought about it and realized that the Black Parade were MCR. He shared his idea with the others, and the band began piecing together the story.
But the real breaking point came one night while walking the halls, when he heard Toro in the library, playing songs from Ozzy Osbourne’s Bark At The Moon album on his guitar. The band traveled cross-country to refine their songs, but ended up being spent before they started.
“It upset the shit out of me,” Gerard remembers. “He wants to play our songs, but he’s playing Ozzy. He was playing the songs a lot faster. They sounded angrier and I knew it was coming solely out of frustration. I went down and had a talk with him. I picked up a guitar and started strumming it. I began to play something heavy, and asked Ray to play it while I sang some words.” The track became “Famous Last Words,” the album’s sonic beacon of optimism.
The next day when Mikey came to practice, the rest of the band played the song for him. Although he wasn’t out of the woods, the experience rejuvenated everyone’s spirits significantly. Realizing what needed to be done, the band left the Paramour several weeks earlier than planned, to move into the Oakwood apartment complex near the studio. By the time the band completed recording, Mikey had snapped back into his old self. After everything he has been through, he couldn’t care less about how the record does in the marketplace.
“What happened to me was art imitating life,” he says with the most conviction he has spoken with all evening. “Seriously, if it wasn’t for the band, I would not be here talking. You can’t fake what I went through. Forget about the record, the touring history or SoundScan numbers. The real success for me was being able to get through.”
In an effort to further distance himself from his past, Mikey dyed his hair and got Lasik surgery. Of course, he found out that some fans believe misery loves company. “I don’t have eyeglasses anymore, which some people took really hard,” he says, nodding his head in disbelief. “Fans got bummed! Our publicist was getting emails from kids that were disappointed. It’s like Batman losing his cape!”
It was a little more than two years ago that Mikey’s brother had his bout with depression, along with an inevitable drug and alcohol problem. Today, Gerard has been clean for two years, thanks to a counselor named Bruce, whom the singer describes as “totally cool, and a big fan of Paul Simon.” Gerard went to some AA meetings but didn’t go into rehab proper or do the 12 steps. What he did do was re-evaluate everything—and everyone—in his life and made the necessary changes.
“Digging through the black shit, what you’re looking at is all of your imperfections, your flaws, your mistakes,” Gerard says, reaching for the breadbasket. “I’m a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. I’ve made a lot of mistakes and did a lot of fucked-up things. That’s especially ironic when you’re in teen mags with stupid [headlines] like ‘Hot Boy Alert.’”
Right now, it seems that Gerard is adding another item to the list. He’s spent the last five years of life creating a persona that’s one-part Superman, one-part self-help guru Tony Robbins and the rest pro-wrestling good-guy. In an era where there are far more hip-hop stars than rock stars and digital downloading is rife, Way was able to achieve the notoriety he’s always wanted by selling a million records and getting both fans and haters to look in his band’s direction. He wants a normal life of anonymity and the ability to choose his audience? He knew full well the job was dangerous when he took it.
“I was feeling a lot of that in California,” he says in earnest. “But a lot of things have changed. A lot of [my life now] is about coming to grips. Now, I’m not being pissed at being in teen magazines, or not being able to get a cup of coffee anonymously. I wasn’t really pissed off, but [just] seeing that stuff at a dark time. But you are right: Everybody in the band wants to be a hero.
“I had a conversation with [Green Day’s] Billie Joe Armstrong about backlash,” he says, passing a serving plate of creamed spinach. “I felt like I would disappoint people because I didn’t want to be a rock star. He told me, ‘You give them something to look up to. That’s what being a rock star is, and there’s nothing wrong with it. You give kids something to believe in and that gives them hope. You need to embrace that.’ You can’t play both sides of the fence—I get that now.”
In a move some rockers might describe as perverse, Gerard has been reveling in adversity. The night after the Hammersmith Palais gig, the band played after Slayer at the prestigious Reading Festival. The thrash-metal icons are known for having rabid fans with no patience for opening acts. In a simultaneously terrifying and hilarious turn of events, MCR expanded the hatred. When they walked on the Reading stage, it began to rain—mud, coins, urine-filled bottles, batteries, fruit (a rotten grapefruit landed on Iero’s pedal board) and bottle caps packed with dirt to aid in their aerodynamics. By the end of the set—in typical MCR style—the crowd were won over.
“It was really one of my favorite gigs,” Gerard says, as Mikey nods in agreement. “Apparently, you’re not supposed to [play after] Slayer, either. [Laughs.] It encapsulated everything in the band’s career. There’s nothing like taking a golf ball in the stomach to remind you of your mortality. Nothing like it in the world!”
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The next day, Gerard grabs lunch at Bluefin, the seafood specialty restaurant located in the swank W Hotel in Times Square. The Merrill Lynch brokerage house is hosting a private party upstairs, while assorted fashionistas, tourists and at least one benevolent boss buying lunch for his interns commingle downstairs. Way walks in (no prizes for guessing what color he’s wearing) unrecognized. Well, almost: A middle-aged man on his lunch break who identifies himself as a MTV line producer approaches the table to offer him some genuine respect for MCR’s stunning VMA performance. And unbeknownst to the singer, two 20-something girls—one Asian, the other Hispanic—gasp, point and ogle him quickly before suddenly running out the door. He orders a dozen cherrystone clams and some coffee.
“Are you going to write about my love for raw clams?” he asks facetiously.
Maybe. Way has risen above such forces as depression, addiction and ligament damage; let’s see him eat a tray of clams in a month without an “r” in its name. Of course, tempting fate by eating raw shellfish out of season hardly rates as a superpower. Mustering enough psychological fortitude to make another record with the emotional density of The Black Parade? Now that’s heroic. In yesterday’s interview, Iero, Toro and Bryar seemed ready to commence work on Album No. 4. But then again, compared to their fearless frontman, they had a relatively stable emotional plane to operate on during The Black Parade’s creation.
“I think [the power comes] when you hear the result,” he says. “At the end of the recording, I turned to Rob Cavallo [producer] and said, ‘I don’t know how we did it. I don’t know how we’re going to do it again. But we will try.’ You get addicted to the quest for greatness.”
Way’s trading a life of drugs and alcohol in favor of a life rich in raw emotion is admirable. But he runs the risk of burning out both himself and his bandmates. Or worse yet, becoming a caricature where everything has to have 10,000 watts of emotional conviction burning brightly at all times. When he drops such bon mots as “You must give blood” and “This band seeks victory” to describe his level of conviction, he comes off sounding like he’s laying the groundwork for a cult in his name. He promises MCR’s full-on headlining tour next year will become a spectacle so large, it will shadow the concert experiences of his fans’ parents. Despite all his great ambitions (including his foray into comic books), Way is well aware life is in the details.
“To be honest,” he begins, “after this touring cycle, which is going to go much longer than the last, that is when we are going to take our first true break. We’ll finally get houses; have kids, that kind of stuff. Just let life come out of you. Then we’ll meet up again, as old friends.” He smiles. “Crusaders.”
Crusaders. Underdogs. Brothers. Despite Gerard Way’s complex concepts and larger-than-life proclamations, he’ll testify on a stack of the sacred books of your choosing that none of this means anything without his bandmates. In comic-book terms, My Chemical Romance are the Just-Us League. They clearly have the passion to raise the creative bar high enough to disrupt a communications satellite.
“A Justice League Of Rock would be amazing,” he says. “Freddie Mercury would definitely be Superman.”
Maybe. But what’s your kryptonite?
“That’s a good question. The easy answer is alcohol. I feel that if I take one drink ever again, I will lose everything. But let me think.” He pauses and sips his coffee. “I’d say not being taken seriously.”
How about being ignored?
He thinks for a moment and smiles. “You’re right,” he says, in a tone that sounds more like a moment of clarity derived from lying on an analyst’s couch than a chat with an interviewer from a rock mag. “All I want is for us to give people an experience they’ve never been a part of. It’s about putting a big exclamation point at the end of your life.”
