What a year it has been for My Chemical Romance. Only just forming this year and now they are on the verge on releasing their debut album later this month. It seems nothing can go wrong for these guys at the minute so I though I would be apart of the good fortune and ask Gerard a couple of questions and what the key too their success was, this is what he had to say.
Anemic: Hey Gerard, thanks for taking you time to do this interview?
Gerard: You’re welcome. Thank you for giving us one. Sorry it took a bit to respond.
Anemic: No problem at all mate, so how are you doing today?
Gerard: We’re doing very well thank you. Mostly healthy and almost all of our teeth!
Anemic: Well I must say it’s been a rapid rise for you guys to say the least, you only formed at the start of the year and now you have an album coming out next month on Eyeball Records, how are you taking in all in?
Gerard: It’s been more than would could have imagined when we started the band. From our first show we’ve been getting such a nice positive response. Getting signed by Eyeball Records really clinched it and since then we’ve been on a roll. We’re all smiles.
Anemic: So how has it been getting your material out their, I mean you guys must be doing a great live show for people to stand up and take notice of how well you guys are really doing?
Gerard: After recording we were a little rusty as far as performing the material live but after the last weekend of shows we’re back to 100%. We try to put on the most honest, energetic, and intense show we possibly can and it has paid off for us so far. It’s really like therapy for us to be up there, we would do the same show for 5 or 500 people, the same energy would be there. Getting radio play and having a pressence on the web has helped get the material out there but our biggest push has been word of mouth.
Anemic: With live shows there must be a lot of fans, how would describe you fans?
Gerard: Well it depends. Alot of people that come out to see us have just heard about us so they don’t know what to expect. Generally after we start playing alot of people just take a step back, this just happened in Deleware last weekend. I think they may think we’re going to hit them but I always try and promise them we won’t, we would never do that. We just go crazy up there. The fans that know us are all great, they are always friendly and our first biggest fan, Carlos, is the head of our street team now. The best way to describe our fans would be “diverse”. We get all kinds.
Anemic: Who has been the best band you have played along side so far?
Gerard: Pencey Prep, without a doubt.
Anemic: How was it recording the new album, was their a good vibe in the studio were you could go about things the way you wanted them too without having any hassles in the process?
Gerard: The vibe in the studio was excellent. Very positive all the way through. Geoff, Alex, and John were great to work with and brought alot to the table creatively. It was hard to finish because there was a situation where Gerard ended up in the emergency room 5 times and it slowed down recording but we were still able to come under the deadline and make exactly the album we wanted.
Anemic: What should we expect from the new album?
Gerard: Well it’s our first album so I would expect to see a band that evolves from the first songs that were written to the last. Expect a very different sound from what is out there right now. Very honest, sincere, aggresive. We make music that we would want to hear and thats why we play it so hard.
Anemic: Once the new record is out and selling to you guys plan to seel it on a global scale i.e maybe in Australia?
Gerard: Eyeball Records just got hooked up with worldwide distrobution, so the album will be available in Australia upon release I believe. We’re very excited about that!
Anemic: Who are your musical influences, I guess you would have heaps and heaps but who are the ones that stand out the most for you?
Gerard: Classical guitarists, The Smiths, The Misfits, Queen, At The Gates, Iron Maiden.
Anemic: Before starting the band what did you guys do to occupy you time?
Gerard: Ray is a film maker. Matt is a mechanic. Mikey was in college. Frank was in college as well. Gerard is an artist. Other than that we used to play video games, watch zombie movies, drink beer, hang out, stuff like that.
Anemic: Some rumours I have heard is that you guys like Bats, what’s the fascination with them, is it the Will Haven song BATS, or you just like the species?
Gerard: Haha…the whole bat thing came about at an early practice when Mikey joined and we finally gelled. Our energy just came together and a giant heavy metal vortex opened up and out flew a swarm of bats. We all saw it. It was like an awakening. After that we accepted bats into our lives. It was also while we were playing “Vampires Will Never Hurt You” so it probably had alot to do with that.
Some of you, who have seen my twitter about wanting a 1979 Pontiac Trans Am, may be asking yourselves, “Is this for real?”
And my answer to you is one-hundred percent MFR (“Mad Fucking Real” for short).
Some of you may be asking, “Why?” , so I provided this photograph to answer your questions, and if you need further persuasion-
Quite simply, I need the vehicle for “research and exploration”. I will be researching the high-voltage hydra known as the 9th dimension , I will be exploring the barriers of speed and time, the history of heavy-metal haircuts, and the 24-Hr rest-stop cappuccino.
I will be chasing the “electric-manticore”, and unlocking the riddle of “Muscle Mystery” in this muscle-machine, and it will most likely occur in the desert.
Now that I’ve assuaged your curiosity, here’s what I’m looking for, more or less, and some might think I’m picky, but I think you should be picky when looking for such an important piece of scientific equipment.
***What I want***
First and foremost, I want a good car. It doesn’t have to be great, it doesn’t need to have been kept in an airtight garage for 30 years, but I would prefer something that’s not a piece of shit. I would like it to be in California, close to or within the greater Los Angeles area. I would also like “the fast engine” to show you how much I know about cars, though I have friends with vast automotive knowledge, and my father was a mechanic when I was a child. I want it to run, run well, and have no rust. Oh and it needs to be an automatic, as I can’t drive stick (suprise!).
***Colors and specifics***
Exteriors (in order of awesome):
Silver, the color of steel, and the eye of the falcon.
Faded, slightly shitty, or semi-bombed out looking Nocturne Blue. This color looks great with some age.
Mad-Max Black.
Shitty bombed-out Red/Orange
Obviously I am looking for something with a bit of character but I will settle for better shape for a better car.
I am open to other things but I absolutely do not want Gold, Brown, or that frigging Smokey and The Bandit car- that shit is whack.
Interiors (again in “awesome order”)
Red leather (combined with a silver exterior is an ideal car for me- like a fucking Mach-5 red-velvet cupcake with Terminator 2 frosting)
Black leather (of course)
Blue (cuz it’s cool, but this limits what I can paint the exterior if I choose to do so)
Interior material is not as much a deal breaker as a bad color.
I’ve seen the “Anniversary Edition” ‘79 Trans and I like it but something about the silver leather interior rubs me weird. Looks like pudding, and a light color will only stain when I shit my pants as I tear-ass through scorched earth.
T-Tops a BIG plus.
All of this stuff I am semi-flexible on, as I just want a great car, but I think I will know the right one when I see it.
***Important***
No scams or hustles. I won’t have cash on me, and I’m not important enough to kidnap, but if you’ve got the right car and the right “vibe” I can find us someone important enough to kidnap together- IN-THE-CAR-YOU-JUST-SOLD-ME. Like, for example, the Jonas Brothers. I have been on T.V. and I have access.
You bring the ‘bird- I’m bringing “British Steel” by Judas Priest.
xo
g
PS- Thanks for everyone’s help thus far- you guys are great. I will be looking in the twitter replies for leads.
***Update***
I have noticed that some people are wondering if I am having a mid-life crisis or asking why I am not buying a station wagon or something for a baby. Answers!
Firstly, I am only 31, so I have a bit of time before that whole “crisis” thing, and secondly- I’ve run the numbers on car safety and have come to the conclusion that this IS the car for the baby. This thing is a tank. Usually, when people get into accidents while driving a Trans Am they usually ask “How is the other guy?”.
Trust me. I got this.“
‘THE BLACK PARADE, THE TRIUMPHANT NEW ALBUM BY MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE MAY HAVE A TRAGIC STORYLINE, BUT IT’S NOTHING COMPARED WITH WHAT THE BANDMATES ENDURED TO BRING THE DISC TO LIGHT
PHOTOS BY JON WIEDERHORN PHOTOS BY JUSTIN BORUCKI
STANDING ON A BALCONY nine floors above the teeming streets of New York, Gerard Way overlooks the city in which My Chemical Romance began assembling their ambitious new album, The Black Parade. The newly peroxide- blond frontman takes a deep drag from a cigarette and exhales with a sigh. He knows he shouldn’t smoke, but it’s his only remaining vice.
“If I hadn’t been sober, I think The Black Parade surely would have killed me,” says Gerard, who climbed on the wagon in 2004. “We were going insane the whole time, and I had to cling to my sobriety to stay even a little lucid. The album became like this beast that was consuming us.”
Following up a release as successful as 2004’s Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, which sold 1.4 million copies in the U.S. alone, is never an easy task. And the various scares the band experienced as they worked on the new record-drummer Bob Bryar had a near-fatal staph infection, Gerard seriously injured his foot, and some restless spirits at the studio where they recorded kept them all on edge-did not help matters. And neither
did MCR’s decision to make The Black Parade (Reprise) a concept disc. Together, Gerard and his bandmates – Bryar, guitarists Frank lero and Ray Toro, and bassist Mikey Way (Gerard’s younger brother)- decided to craft a record about a dying young man who is visited by a cast of strange characters that help him examine his short life.
But diving into the conceptual deep end proved well worth the hassle. The Black Parade is not only MCR’s most realized offering; it’s also one of the most eclectic, enjoyable rock records of the year. One listen to tracks
like “House of Wolves,” “The Sharpest Lives,” and “Dead!” makes it clear that My Chemical Romance can still rip a good metallic punk tune. But the bandmates are now equally influenced by epic albums like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, David Bowie’s The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, and Queen’s A Night at the Opera.
“A lot of bands from the scene we came from try to strip down their music to ‘keep it real,” Gerard notes. “But the real you is what you’ve always had inside you and what you strive to be. So when we started compiling the material we had written, we were like, You know what? This has to be a huge, theatrical record.”
MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE started working on ideas for The Black Parade in the back of the bus while on 2005’s Warped Tour, after which they flew to New York and rented a rehearsal space for two months. And that’s when things started to get weird.
“I was living in Queens, and I had to commute on the subway every day,” Gerard says. “I was suddenly very scared and paranoid. I felt more like an outsider than I ever had, and I had no confidence, which is bad when you’re trying to work on a record. And I had no anonymity because there were a lot of teenagers on the train.” In reaction to the young fans he encountered on the underground,
Gerard wrote “Teenagers,” a T. Rex-style romp with the chorus line, “Teenagers scare the living shit out of me.” “The song came directly from commuting when school let out and being so terrified of them,” the singer says. “I was like, Wait a minute. These are the same people that listen to our band. Why am I scared? And I realized it was because they’re scared, too. Teenagers are made to feel like they can only solve their problems withviolence. They lash out at each other in a really volatile way.” After several months experiencing the joys of mass transit, MCR had completed only a handful of songs and felt like a change of scenery (and climate) might do them some good. “I couldn’t keepworking in New York,” says Gerard. “We wanted isolation.”
id: Gerard leads the way to what will likely be the band’s second platinum record
So the group relocated to Paramour Mansion, outside of L.A. Nestled high in the hills, the deluxe estate overlooks the trendy Silver Lake area and boasts spacious rooms, a gorgeous pool, lush gardens, a state-of-the-art recording facility-and a few special guests.
“The place is definitely haunted,” Gerard says. “Doors would slam, and the faucets would turn on. You’d get a bath drawn for you of freezing-cold water in your room, and you wouldn’t know why.” As unnerving as its mischievous spirits could be, the Paramour was also inspiring, and contributed to the haunting vibe of songs like “The End” and “This Is How I Disappear.” More important, it led Gerard to come up with the bleak, surreal concept for the record. “I would have these night terrors, where it would feel like someone was choking me, and my heart would stop and I would stop breathing,” he says. “I would wake up in the middle of the night and write these notes to myself, and one of them read, ‘We are all just a black parade.’ So I started thinking about how this band is kind of a black parade, like a funeral-procession rock thing. And I used that idea to piece together this story about the idea that when you die, death comes for you however you want.” Gerard molded his concept into a narrative about a character he dubbed the Patient, whose strongest memory from childhood is of his father taking him to the city to see a parade. Two songs into the album, he dies, and the black parade comes for him.
“During the rest of the story, he meets this entity of death and all these characters, like Mama, who represents anyone who’s ever lost their son in a war,” Gerard explains. “It’s almost like these Canterbury Tales, where he goes along on this journey, and at the end he decides whether he wants to live or die.” With the concept in place, My Chem made the songs as sweeping and theatrical as Gerard’s lyrics. They accomplished this, in part, by combing through their own eclectic record collections and pulling choice elements that would set them even further apart from other melodic punk bands.
The first two minutes of “Welcome to the Black Parade” stemmed from Gerard’s love for Broadway musicals, the horns in “Dead!” came from Mikey’s interest in Blur and Britpop, and the jaunty feel of “Mama” was informed by Tom Waits and Nick Cave. But the most poignant moment on the record, “Cancer,” was (unlike its morbid moniker) something of a pleasant surprise. “I was very upset about something in my personal life, and that’s when that song came out,” Gerard says. “It was really spontaneous, and it was recorded pretty much live with Rob [Cavallo, the record’s producer] on the piano and me in the vocal booth. Then we added layers of drums, which gave it a certain urgency. It’s the song I’m most proud of because it was the most pure emotion we’ve ever captured, and it gets such an immediate response. You can’t shake what the song is about.”
As the CD approached completion, some members of the band began to show signs of nervous exhaustion. The group was scheduled to fly to England to play the Reading Festival, and as the date grew near, Toro, who has a fear of flying, got noticeably agitated. Then, after the band tracked “Welcome to the Black Parade,” which was originally called “The Five of Us Are Dying,” the guitarist lost it.
“I thought I had this premonition,” Toro explains. “I was flipping through the TV channels, and on the news. there would be something about a plane crash, and every time I woke up in the morning, the clock would say 9:11. I was playing Tomb Raider the night before the flight, and on the level I ended up at, there was this whole flashback to a plane crash. So right before the flight I was like, ‘That’s it. I’m not flying.”
Despite his misgivings, Toro boarded the plane, and when My Chemical Romance returned to L.A. (all of them still very much alive, thank you very much), The Black Parade was completed without further incident. Listening back to the record, the band members were in awe of what they had achieved and eager to share it with their fans. “There was a real confidence that came to us,” Gerard explains. “Having survived it, we felt like we were changed forever. I feel different as a performer now, and I think we really finally discovered who we were as a band.” But just because MCR were done with the record didn’t mean that it was done with them. About a month later, the band was shooting a video for “Famous Last Words” with director Samuel Bayer (Garbage, Smashing Pumpkins) on a set featuring walls of flame, when-seized by the moment-lero grabbed Gerard’s throat from behind and wrestled him to the ground. The singer rolled one way; his foot went the other. “It bent completely backwards, and I heard a crack and felt this agonizing pain,” Gerard recalls. “I tore all the ligaments in my foot, but I got up and continued to perform.”“I didn’t know what I was doing,” says lero, shaking his head. “I wasn’t trying to hurt him. I felt awful. I still do.” Gerard’s injury was serious, and he still walks with a cane, but it paled in comparison to what happened to Bryar. At the end of the shoot, the pyro was so intense, the drummer could feel his leg burning, but he stuck it out for the rest of the song. By then, he had a nasty third-degree burn. And the misfortune didn’t stop there. Bryar didn’t take his antibiotics regularly, and he failed to keep the wound clean. By the time the band got back from a brief tour of Japan, the burn was severely infected. Then Bryar’s face swelled up and, after doing the MTV Video Music Awards preshow telecast and a special club show, stumbled into a hospital emergency room in intense pain. “I thought I’d be there for 10 minutes, but as soon as they saw me, they got all serious and gave me an IV and said they had to do a CAT scan,” recalls Bryar.“ They did all these blood tests and kept me there for 14 hours.” Doctors discovered that Bryar’s leg infection had spread to his blood and caused an abscess in his face that was creeping dangerously close to his brain. If it had been left untreated for another two days, he could have died. “The whole thing was such a nightmare,” Bryar says. “This doctor stuck my cheek with a needle about six inches long and the width of an IV tube. Then he went in and out of the inside of my mouth with the needle about 10 times. Fortunately, the treatment worked, and Bryar left the hospital three days later. With tragedy averted, My Chem are now focusing on touring for The Black Parade. They’ll be in Europe for most of November, and when they get back at the end of year, they’ll start rehearsing for a U.S. arena tour that starts in February. “We want to put on a full show with props and staging like The Wall,” Gerard says. And MCR plan to keep the Patient alive long after they’re done touring for the CD. “I would love to see the story turned into a play or a musical, and it could easily be a movie,” enthuses Gerard. “Making this record, we cut ourselves open every day, pulled out every organ, and lay them on a table so it would be something we’re completely happy with. We want The Black Parade to exist for a long time.” “The whole hole thing nightmare. This doctor stuck my cheek with a needle about six inches long and the width of an IV tube.” – BOB BRYAR
“I felt more like an outsider than I ever had, and I had no confidence, which is bad when you’re trying work on a record.”
