My Chemical Romance, From The Beggining!
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(Proximamente les daremos la entrevista traducida)
OCTOBER 2001, Ewing, New Jersey. Gerard Way and his kid brother Mikey are sitting in a beaten up van outside the town’s VFW Hall. They’re paralysed with fear. On one side of them is their good friend Frank Iero, whose band Pencey Prep are headlining the show tonight. On the other is another friend, John ‘Hambone’ McGuire – Pencey Prep’s bassist. Meanwhile the Ways’ guitarist Ray Toro and drummer Matt Pelissier wait nervously for them.
Each time the Way brothers think about what they’re going to do tonight, another wave of fear passes over them. They reach for their beers, chugging them down like water, hardly noticing the taste, relying on the effects to get them through. Hambone, hands pressed on Mikey’s shoulders, is giving the bassist a pep talk – “nothing short of a general ordering his troops into battle,” he recalls. Mikey reaches for another beer, this will be his tenth. His brother gives him a look then joins him. Inside the hall, in a little room that is, ironically, more usually used for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, there are 30 or 40 kids. They’re tightly pressed in, looking at a tiny stage with no monitors, a ramshackle vocal PA and a drum kit. They’re about to watch My Chemical Romance’s first ever performance – just as soon as the Ways can overcome their nerves outside.
The band pull themselves together, the beer giving them enough courage to move towards the stage. They plug their guitars in, Gerard grabs the mic, and they exchange one last look. “Let’s go,” says the singer. Within seconds of their first song – the only recently written ‘Skylines And Turnstiles’ – the hall is a seething mass of bodies.
“The room just blew up,” remembers Gerard now. “It was the best first gig I think we could possibly have had. We played the rest of the set on this wave; we felt totally on fire. We ploughed through the songs and each one got that same response. It was a fucking big deal for us.”
“Something about the music took over everybody in the band,” remembers Ray Toro. “It took over everybody watching – it was just something to see. I had never moved around onstage when I had played in bands before, I had always just stood there. This time though, the music made me move, headbang and thrash around. I was wild onstage and I had never experienced that before. From that very first show, we knew there was something special about the band.”
They staggered outside afterwards, full of fire and energy. “We were like a gang, we felt unbeatable,” says Gerard.
They grinned wildly at each other as more and more people came up to compliment them, slapping them on the backs. Then they shared another look. Mikey still remembers it to this day. “It felt so good. It felt like we were part of something. I was thinking, ‘Something’s going to happen here, I can feel it’. It felt like a spark on a pile of woodchips.”
GERARD ARTHUR Way was born in Belleville, New Jersey on April 9, 1977. He grew up, as he puts it, in an area, “full of Italian-American mafia kind of people”.
“My dad shaped my morally,” he says. “I have such a respect for women and I got that from my dad. He really drummed that into me. My dad’s a real man – a working class guy who worked hard for every single penny. He instilled so much respect for women in me.”
It was that respect for women that meant Gerard always had the utmost admiration for both his mother Donna and, more importantly, his grandmother Elena Lee Rush.
“She was so instrumental in my life, I don’t think I’d be doing any of this if it wasn’t for her,” he says. “She was just this little Italian lady but she was so inspirational – she’ the reason I found music.”
And everywhere he went as a child, like a shadow, was his younger brother Mikey – born three years after him. Theirs was a close relationship, so much so that Mikey says, “We never fought. We were inseparable. We hung out with each other constantly and we still do. Every day, me and him stick together all day long.”
“My dad shaped my morally,” he says. “I have such a respect for women and I got that from my dad. He really drummed that into me. My dad’s a real man – a working class guy who worked hard for every single penny. He instilled so much respect for women in me.”
It was that respect for women that meant Gerard always had the utmost admiration for both his mother Donna and, more importantly, his grandmother Elena Lee Rush.
“She was so instrumental in my life, I don’t think I’d be doing any of this if it wasn’t for her,” he says. “She was just this little Italian lady but she was so inspirational – she’ the reason I found music.”
And everywhere he went as a child, like a shadow, was his younger brother Mikey – born three years after him. Theirs was a close relationship, so much so that Mikey says, “We never fought. We were inseparable. We hung out with each other constantly and we still do. Every day, me and him stick together all day long.”
GERARD SAYS his schooldays were, “pretty solitary. I didn’t have too many friends. I was really isolated and found solace at the comic book store. One of my first days in High School I sat all alone at lunch time. It was the classic story – the weird kid in an army jacket, a horror movie t-shirt, long black hair. People were never really mean to me though, they mostly just left me alone. I think I wanted to be alone too.”
He played guitar – badly – teaching himself from a cheap acoustic he and his brother had at home. Eventually, at 15, he joined his first band. “It was a shitty prog rock band,” he says. “They kicked me out because I couldn’t play ‘Sweet Home Alabama’. I played rhythm guitar and I really sucked.”
He turned to art and comic books, eventually enrolling in New York’s School Of Visual Arts, and would occasionally go out to see shows – English bands, in the main, like Pulp or Morrissey. It was in 1997 though that he and his brother Mikey would see a gig that changed their lives. “I took him to see the Smashing Pumpkins at Madison Square Gardens,” remembers the bassist. “It was the most inspirational thing I’ve ever seen. As we were sat there, Gerard turned to me and said, ‘This is what we’ve got to do’. I said, ‘I know, dude. This is exactly what we’ve got to do’.”
They started to play in a band called Ray Gun Jones – “the Smashing Pumpkins meets Weezer,” according to Mikey – but it didn’t last long, the band falling apart as Gerard became more and more withdrawn, locking himself away in his parent’s basement, drawing comics and rarely coming up for air.
“I spent a lot of time holed up in that basement depressed. I found it hard to leave the house at times,” Gerard says. “I’d been to art school, got out and realised there were no jobs for me. I went through a lot of negative stuff then. I’d sit there beating myself up about not accomplishing anything. I’d worry, think too much and get myself depressed.
“The positive side was that I ended up with notebooks and notebooks full of ideas. I even wrote a short story called ‘I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love’. It was about gangland murders in Chicago. But, the point was, I had all these ideas and it meant that I was already shaping an aesthetic for this band – I just didn’t have a band yet.”
MEANWHILE, THE two guitarists who would bring his aesthetic to life were growing up nearby. Raymond Toro Ortiz was born on July 15, 1977 in Newark, New Jersey. He grew up in a small Puerto Rican household in a bad neighbourhood, sharing a bedroom with his two brothers, watching junkies overdose on the streets outside.
He says he was, “one of the invisible masses,” in High School – neither excelling nor failing at anything. As a 13 year old he’d sit up until two in the morning in his shared bedroom watching his brother play guitar along to Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Metallica records, dreaming of being able to do the same. “I got really obsessed with the guitar. I didn’t have much of a social life. I had friends but we wouldn’t hang out after shool. The only thing that was always there for me was the guitar.”
Though he played in bands – once, briefly, with Gerard Way in a “nothing special” pop-punk outfit called Nancy Drew after he left High School – film was Ray’s first love. “I wanted to be an editor – that was my focus. The whole time I was in college learning that, I almost stopped playing in bands. I played drums in a band called Dead Go West for about a year, that was it.”
FRANK IERO wasn’t the healthiest of kids. Born into a lower-middle-class family in Belleville, New Jersey, Frank’s parents separated when he was young. “We weren’t the richest of families,” he says. “But my mom tried really hard to make sure I had everything I needed, while my dad worked three jobs to support us.”
He suffered constant bouts of bronchitis and ear infections before developing a stomach illness and the [glandular fever-like] Epstein Barr Virus, both of which he still suffers from today.
He suffered constant bouts of bronchitis and ear infections before developing a stomach illness and the [glandular fever-like] Epstein Barr Virus, both of which he still suffers from today.
His dad, a musician, encouraged Frank to pick up an instrument. First, like his father and grandfather, he played the drums before picking up the guitar. “I’d go see my Dad in bars when I was seven-years-old and they’d have to hide me because I wasn’t allowed to be in clubs at that age,” he says.
It was in High School that Frank discovered punk, after hearing Nirvana for the first time. But his school days weren’t always easy. “I had about three friends,” he says. “I didn’t do much, I’d get really high and that was about it. I didn’t really want to be in school. I wanted to play music but I was always told that wouldn’t work. I got picked on and bullied a lot too. There was a lot of that.”
It wasn’t until he met John ‘Hambone’ McGuire that he began to feel more comfortable. Hambone, an obsessive record collector, would constantly make him tapes of more and more punk bands, feeding Frank’s growing habit. They would bunk off school and get their educations at punk rock shows. From there, it was only a short step to starting a band of their own – Pencey Prep.
Hambone, whose current band Fairmont are due to release their album ‘Wait & Hope’ in Spring this year, remembers Frank’s dedication to that band: “He gave it everything, he was a fantastic frontman. Our whole band was inseparable. We’d rehearse for nine hours a day, go to a show, then go back and rehearse some more.”
“We played basements, legion halls, anywhere. I even played outside a hotdog stand one day. We would play anywhere because it was all we had,” adds Frank.
BY SEPTEMBER 2001, you’d be forgiven for betting against My Chemical Romance ever forming. Ray Toro was finishing his film course, having given up all ideas of playing the guitar seriously. Frank Iero was playing in Pencey Prep, touring their album ‘Heartbreak In Stereo’, while the Ways looked a long way from ever starting a band. Thursday singer, Geoff Rickly, knew all of them at that time.
“Mikey was always the more sociable one who’d come out to the parties that we threw,” says Rickly. “He could be really crazy. He’d stay over at our house and we’d often have to ask him, ‘Who the hell was that girl with you last night?’ He’d say, ‘I’ve no idea’. He was a little out of control.
“Gerard would stay at home. I got the feeling that he was pretty severely depressed because he would never come out. When I finally met him, we formed a friendship right away. I really liked him a lot. He was a big fan of Thursday and so, in the early days, he did some Thursday t-shirts and things like that.”
But, on September 11, 2001, Gerard’s life changed forever. Until then he had been working as an intern at the Cartoon Network on a show called, ‘Sheep In The Big City’. While there, one of his ideas – a cartoon called ‘The Breakfast Monkey’ – was beginning to excite some of the network’s producers. Soon they were talking to Gerard about merchandise, stuffed toys and script meetings. “They were missing the point. That wasn’t why I got into it at all,” he remembers. “I discovered I was dealing with a committee about something that <> had created. So I was thinking, ‘Fuck this’.”
One day, disillusioned and heading to work, he gazed up at New York’s Twin Towers, and nothing was the same again.
“I was in Hoboken, which is right across the Hudson River,” he recalls. “There were 400 people and me. Right in front of us, those buildings went down. It was the biggest fucking neutron bomb of mental anguish you’ve ever felt. I knew I didn’t have anybody in that building but the people around me were all co-workers and they were just freaking the fuck out. Crying, screaming and cursing and yelling about the Devil.”
Suddenly Gerard realised that he was wasting his time with cartoons; he needed to go out there and really achieve something.
“From then on, I was in my parent’s basement with a very small practice amp and a very old Fender guitar. That’s when I wrote ‘Skylines and Turnstiles’ [as a reaction to what he saw on 9/11] and some of the earlier material. I wrote those songs sitting in my pyjamas with notebooks all around me. It was me going, ‘All this stuff has been inside me for years and I want to get it out’. I wasn’t depressed at that time exactly but I was certainly a hermit.”
MOMENTUM STARTED to pick up extremely quickly from there on. Gerard met up with a drummer he knew, Matt ‘Otter’ Pelissier, at a local club called The Loop Lounge. “He was working as a mechanic,” says Gerard. “I said, ‘Have a listen to this song and, if you want to play to it, then great’. I rented a room for an hour, I plugged in my Fender and played him the songs. It was just the two of us. It came out OK but I realised I couldn’t sing and play guitar at the same time, so the first person who came to mind was Ray. He was actually playing drums for a local band at the time. Ray’s that kind of guy – he was the best guitar player in Jersey, yet he was playing drums just because he wanted to be playing. He’s so talented. That really says a lot about him. He’s never been in it for the glory; he’s just in it for the joy.”
So the three of them climbed into Matt’s attic and Ray sat and watched as Gerard and Matt banged out ‘Skylines And Turnstiles’. “That was the only song they had,” says Ray. “I heard it once and worked out what they were doing and it kind of went from there. I remember Gerard talking about wanting to do it ‘for real’. There was a focus to him. He really wanted this to happen, he really wanted this to work. So we got Mikey and started practising. Frank was in Pencey Prep at the time and they were amazing to us, they let us rehearse in their practice studio and really helped us. Watching that band was great for us. They had a real work ethic – they practised every day for hours and hours. We learned how a real band operates from watching Pencey.”
It was Mikey who came up with the band’s name. One day, while working in bookshop Barnes And Noble, he was flicking through a stack of Irvine Welsh books. The name ‘Ecstasy: Three Tales Of Chemical Romance’ jumped out at him and suddenly the band had an identity. Their excitement at what they were doing was, according to Geoff Rickly, almost overbearing: «Gerard came up to me at a party and said, ‘Me and my brother are going to start a band’. When your friend says that to you at a party, you think, ‘Okay, whatever’. He said, ‘No, I’m serious. We’re going to be called My Chemical Romance’. I laughed and just said, ‘Well, at least you’ve got a great name. I’m sure you’re gonna be huge…’»
They played wherever they could, including that first gig in Ewing’s VFW Hall, and recorded a demo in Matt’s attic which Ray would send out to anyone he could think of. Suddenly people on the local scene realised this was a band with potential.
“I was on tour with Thursday,” says Geoff Rickly. “I got a call from [Eyeball Records founder] Alex Saavedra. He said, ‘Dude, I’ve got to tell you about My Chemical Romance. They’ve got this one song that they’ve recorded and it’s <
THE BAND pestered Rickly constantly, determined that he should be the man to record their first album. This, remember, was a band who were only three months old at this point. “There was such an urgency to everything at that point,” says Gerard. “It felt really unique and, most importantly, it was all ours. It felt right immediately. There was a magic to it that felt so unusual.”
“As soon as I got home from touring, they asked me to produce their record,” says Rickly. “I said, ‘I’d love to but our touring schedule is so intense that I can’t fit it in’. They instantly replied, ‘That’s okay, we checked your schedule and you’re free this week’. I had a ten day break between two three-month-long tours and I had to go into the studio with My Chem for seven of them.”
In January 2002, the band and Rickly headed into Nada Studios, New Windsor, New York with producer Rickly, label boss Alex Saavedra, and engineer John Naclerio. The problem was My Chemical Romance weren’t the most accomplished musicians.
“Gerard had a billion great ideas and he was very excited about it all,” says Rickly. “Mikey had a great record collection but had no idea how to play bass. Ray was the sort of guy you’d find working in a guitar shop – one of those people who’d be a little hard to deal with because he’d be a much better player than anyone else. Otter [Pelissier] was messy though.
“The thing was though, they had <> ideas. Ray had tons of different guitar parts that he wanted to try. I asked, ‘How are you going to play those live?’ He just shrugged and went, ‘I’ll just choose between the important parts and the not so important parts’. I thought, if they’re that important then you need to get another guitar player to play them.”
Which is when Frank Iero stepped in. Pencey Prep had almost fallen apart and Frank had been playing with other local bands. My Chemical Romance, as well as being his close friends, were his favourite band. A week before MCR went into Nada Studios, he got a call asking him to join.
“It was fucking awesome. I felt like the kid in the crowd who had been pulled up to play a song. I just <
“I wished we had had more time,” says Ray. “Frank was taking demos of the songs into our van, where he’d write his part, then he’d run into the studio and record immediately. I had never played with another guitarist before and he brought a very different style and way of thinking to the band which was very cool. I saw the way he played and tried to incorporate that and I think he did the same with me.”
There were other difficulties too. As they went into the studio, Gerard contracted paralysing toothache, making him unable to sing. The pain was so bad that he had to go to an emergency dentist and have his wisdom teeth removed.
“When he came back to the studio, he was slurring so much because he had blood in his mouth,” says Rickly. “They had given him a load of painkillers, so he took them and they zapped the life out of him. There was no way he could sing on those painkillers, so we took his pills away. About six hours later he was in so much pain that he was pleading with us not to make him sing.”
Sick of Gerard complaining and realising that something had to be done in order to force the life back into him, Eyeball Records boss Alex Saavedra took matters into his own hands.
“I was about to sing ‘Vampires Will Never Hurt You’,” remembers Gerard. “There was a storm forming outside, my teeth were hurting and then Alex came up to me, gave me a hug, then punched me right in the mouth. I think he did the right thing, to tell you the truth. I was very jittery and real nervous. I think the punch was motivational. It was an act of love but I was fucking riled. I went up to the mic and nailed it first time. Then John, the engineer, goes, ‘Fuck, that was amazing…could you do it again, I was just setting the levels.’ Fortunately I did it again almost exactly the same. We listened to it in the van ride back. It was just the loudest, knarliest, darkest most melodic song I’d ever heard. It was fucking amazing.”
Forcing himself into character is a trick Gerard has repeated ever since.
“It’s almost like method acting,” he says. “‘Vampires’ was definitely the first instance of that. Each song had to have a completely different approach and a lot of times that involved method acting.”
“There were times,” adds Rickly, “that Gerard completely ripped himself apart on that record. The second I started recording Gerard’s vocals I turned to his little brother and said, ‘If you stick with this, you’re going to be the biggest band in the world.’ I knew from Gerard that they were a band who would have an impact. There was a level of humanity in there that meant people would be able to relate to it so well. I was amazed by it because I’d never seen that in a person before.”
‘I BROUGHT You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love’ was released in July 2002. From the minute the band had left the studio until its release, they had toured almost solidly.
“We toured with a lot of bands,” says Frank. “The point was just to go out on the road as much as possible. We’d just be going round asking, ‘Do you have a show? Does anyone have a show? Put us on it, we’ll open for any-fucking-body, any-fucking-where. We don’t give a shit, just let us play.’ We would be playing on these bills where we completely didn’t fit in. It just snowballed from there. There would be kids there who didn’t fit in either and they latched onto us. They would tell their friends who didn’t fit in and it would build and build. Suddenly a whole bunch of kids who didn’t fit in would come to our show because they had found somewhere they could be themselves because we were just the same as them.”
Soon their reputation spread, earning them a tour with The Used. Here they met The Used’s tour manager Brian Schechter, who was so impressed by the band that he offered to manage them. They also met The Used’s soundman – an accomplished drummer called Bob Bryar who became firm friends with the band, something they’d remember down the line.
Tours of Europe followed – all five of the band cramped into a splitter van with their equipment, merch, a merch guy and a guitar tech. “I was really sick on that tour,” remembers Frank. “It was hell. Only two of us could drive a van with a stick-shift gear and the fucking steering wheel was on the other side of the van, so we didn’t know how to deal with that. We didn’t know our way around, we had no map. I remember the lowest point was in Spain somewhere. We were sick, in the middle of nowhere and we couldn’t read the signs because they were in Spanish. The only map we had was of the UK. On top of that we were in a British van in Europe so the steering wheel was on the wrong side. It was fucking terrible.”
But something special was happening – especially in Spain.
“Our last show was in Barcelona and there were kids there from Portugal with homemade My Chemical Romance t-shirts,” remembers Frank. “That was amazing. We felt like we were really doing something important and, from that point there was no turning back.”
BY NOVEMBER 2003 life was looking good. MCR had just signed a major label deal and were about to head into the studio to record their second album. Suddenly, tragically, Gerard and Mikey Way’s grandmother – the woman who had taught Gerard to sing, paint and play music – died. The pair were utterly crushed.
“I wasn’t with her when she died and it took me a while to get over that,” says Gerard. “I was very angry with myself. She was in hospital and I had just got home from tour. I went to bed, woke up the next day and she was dead. She died the night I got home. The emotions I went through at that moment and over the next six days completely fuelled ‘Revenge’. All the fucking anger, the spite, the beef with God, the angst, aggression and the fucking venom all came from those six days. Every single emotion you go through when you’re grieving is on Revenge. When I lost her, I thought I was screwed. I thought I was done. I felt like I had lost my mentor. That’s why I took it so hard”
He took out his frustrations by drinking heavily and popping Xanax, an anti-depressant pill. Meanwhile the pressure on his band to record an album worthy of their major label deal was tightening.
«It was a very fucking insane place to be at that moment», says Gerard, with considerable understatement.
A MONTH later, still grieving, Gerard, Mikey and My Chemical Romance flew to Los Angeles to begin sessions on ‘Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge’. They chose Howard Benson to produce, who’d previously worked with P.O.D., Sepultura and Motorhead among others.
“I had heard their demo and, honestly, it really wasn’t that impressive,” says Benson. “But it did have the one thing I always look for and that was intensity. It sounded fearless. They played some songs and they weren’t great. But I sat and talked to Gerard and he said he was willing to work. I always look for a star in a band and Gerard is certainly that.”
Benson sat down with the band and ripped apart almost everything they had written, honing their songs. He repeatedly reinforced his production mantra: songs must have strong choruses. Only then would he allow them to start recording in LA’s Bay 7 Studios, where he pushed Gerard as far as he would go.
There, Gerard was kept just out of his comfort zone and made to sing harmony parts he wasn’t used to. He accessed every locked up emotion, taking on different roles in his lyrics, playing with the comic book personalities he had in his head and turning himself into those characters on the record.
“It meant re-inventing the wheel each time,” says Gerard. “A lot of times that involved method acting. During ‘You Know What They Do To Guys Like Us In Prison’, I wasn’t wearing very many clothes, for example. I was in an attic that nobody was allowed into and running pornography on the TV at the same time. I do remember Howard encouraging me to get pretty weird in there.”
“Gerard is one of those people who can translate the emotions of those around him very well,” says Benson. “When he gets in front of the mic, he can find those emotions through characters in his head. He jumps into his brain and, when he’s done, he can jump out again.”
The turning point in the sessions was when Gerard sang ‘I’m Not Okay (I Promise)’. It was a song that had been kicking around for a while but hadn’t yet been developed by the band. “It was beautiful,” says Frank, “but it was only Gerard singing, ‘I’m not okay’. Then Ray put a few chords under it and it was the most beautiful song we’d ever heard. We went, ‘Why the fuck haven’t we put this on the album?’”
From there on, the recording went like a dream, the song giving focus to their ideas.
“Still, there were times we were worried that we might be the only people in the world who liked it,” says Frank. “We were thinking, ‘Is this good?’ I thought it was awesome but I was so attached to it that I didn’t know if I could make an honest decision about it. We lived and breathed that record. There were times we got so attached to it that we wanted to redo the whole thing because we wanted it to be <> good. It was real intense.”
WITHIN DAYS of finishing the record, they were on tour again, arriving in England in January 2004. It was their first headline tour of Europe but, what should have been a triumph was fast becoming a disaster as the atmosphere within the band slowly fell apart. It was something Bob Bryar, then working as MCR’s soundman, saw firsthand.
“I noticed that things weren’t right between them all. The mood around them was ruining them and I think it came from the old drummer. They were definitely going to break up at that point. They just weren’t getting along. They wouldn’t even look at each other when they played. They’d get in the van, put their headphones on so they couldn’t hear each other and couldn’t talk to each other. It was just miserable.”
Still, it wasn’t affecting their performances. The band’s first UK press officer, Susie Ember, remembers when they headlined The Barfly in London.
“I had spent all day with them doing interviews and I was struck by how articulate and confident they were,” she says. “When they went onstage, they morphed into a completely different entity. The band blew us all away. Everyone’s mouths were gaping open. It felt like the beginning of something explosive.”
The problem was, behind the scenes, one member of the band was falling apart.
“ALCOHOLISM RUNS in my family,” says Gerard Way. “They say it’s something that’s in your DNA, like cancer. I started drinking four or five beers before we played to deal with the stage-fright. Then we started touring. Most of the time, it’s easier to get beer than water on tour. It was a boredom killer and that’s where things started getting serious.”
It was a problem spinning out of control but one the whole band had, on some level, been party to.
“When we were recorded ‘Three Cheers’, we were all partying a little,” says Frank. “We’d get home from the studio, have a few beers and then maybe take a few pills. Let me put it this way, there are some weekends that I don’t really remember – I took a bunch of pills and woke up on Monday.
“What sent Gerard over the edge was after we finished recording. He had recorded certain songs as though he was playing a character. In order to play those characters, he had to get fucked up, which meant that, live, he felt he needed to be in the same headspace. That led to him drinking a lot.”
He also had a willing partner in crime. His brother Mikey was perfectly happy to be Gerard’s drinking buddy.
“We were pretty wild,” says Mikey. “People were giving us nicknames – they called us ‘The Chemical Brothers’. I’d roll into places and people would always ask me if I had any drugs, because that’s what they were used to. Me and him got a reputation for it, we had this aura of trouble around us, people thought we were dangerous.”
“I was such an alcoholic,” says Gerard. “While we were touring with Funeral For A Friend, I remember going into their dressing room and asking to drink some of their vodka. The next thing you know I’d almost finished it. I had to apologise for that sort of thing a lot. Our manager started removing vodka from our rider to keep it from me. I got extremely frustrated about that.”
Funeral For A Friend drummer Ryan Richards remembers those sorts of incidents well: “He would start drinking well before going onstage. The more he drank, the more unhinged the show would be. Watching him was almost like watching a car crash. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. Everyone was talking about him, about the band with the crazy frontman. Ironically, now he’s given up the drink, he’s even more compelling. He’s something amazing now.”
“I was pretty reckless and unpredictable then,” says Gerard. “In retrospect there was a lot of hiding. I wanted to keep anyone from knowing about the real me. The problem was, the real me was slowly disappearing.”
IT CAME to a head in Kansas in July, 2004. Gerard went to a bar called The Hurricane to see a then unknown band called The Killers. At this time, he estimates he was drinking a bottle of vodka a day and taking $150 worth of illegal prescription pills a month. That night, he also managed to score an eight-ball of cocaine – a drug he used infrequently when drunk. “I had done so much coke that night that I was completely out of my mind, I was throwing up in the street and my head was going to explode. I laid in my bunk and couldn’t sleep. I’d never felt more suicidal in my life. I just felt so empty. I felt so much despair, more than I’d ever felt in my entire life. I felt completely desperate. I wanted everything to stop; I wanted it to all be over. I wanted to go home, I wanted to freak out and smash things, I wanted to hurt myself doing it. I wanted it all over, all of it… everything.”
He phoned the band’s manager who talked him down and offered to cancel the band’s planned festival shows in Japan. Gerard, however, refused. Days later, My Chemical Romance were on a plane to Tokyo to play the Summer Sonic Festival.
“I didn’t pack anything to go to Japan because I didn’t think I was coming back,” says Gerard. “I’ve always wondered whether I was flirting with the romanticism of suicide or whether I really wanted to do it. I’ve never truly been able to figure that out. Either way, it’s dangerous.”
While there, he binged on sake, getting himself so drunk that he could barely perform. When he came offstage, he threw up for ten minutes straight before collapsing in a puddle of his own vomit.
“Ray turned to our manager while I was vomiting and said, ‘You’ve got to get this dude some help. He’s sick, look at him’,” remembers Gerard. “By sick, he didn’t mean I was ill either. He meant sick like I wasn’t going to make it. He was right. I knew it had to stop.”
On the flight home Gerard started going through withdrawal symptoms, shaking and crying until he reached such an emotional pitch that, when they left the airport in New York, he hugged each of his bandmates, unsure whether he could get sober. Unsure whether he would ever see them again.
He went to a therapist who told him that his problem was that he couldn’t find the line between onstage and off, he couldn’t stop performing. “He said I was permanently in character but the character was going to kill me,” says Gerard. “I had to figure out how to do this without being that character the whole time.”
Such was the success of the band at this point – ‘Three Cheers’ sold in one week what ‘Bullets’ sold in two years – that demand for the band was insatiable. They had tours booked in solidly then a long stint on the Warped Tour – not the ideal place to get sober.
“That was one of the hardest things,” says Gerard. “The actual physical addiction was the first part – I went through the sweats, I was lying in the bottom of the van shaking. Then came the mental part. That first year was fucking hard. I’m sure I made a lot of enemies on Warped Tour because I couldn’t leave the bus. I’m sure everyone thought that I was being the rock star and thought I was too hot to leave the bus. But I knew that if one more person waved a bottle of alcohol in front of me I would have gone crazy.”
GERARD’S DRINKING wasn’t the only problem they had when they got back from Japan. With so much touring ahead of them, they needed to address a dilemma that had been nagging at them for a while.
“There was definitely inner-turmoil then. It was mostly between us and our old drummer,” says Frank. “As much as we wanted to make it work, you just can’t live with certain people.”
The band had been nervous that Matt was unreliable onstage for a while. Ray was determined that, live, he should play to a click track to keep him in time. Matt was equally certain that he wouldn’t. Loyalty had kept him in MCR until August 2004 but the relationship between the drummer and the band had fallen apart long before.
Angry at being sacked, Pelissier immediately vented his frustrations on the band’s message board, saying: “They told me I’m out of the band because, ‘they are uncomfortable with me on stage and they’re afraid I’ll mess up.’ I’ve had some whoppers on a few occasions – I’m human we all make mistakes. Do I think I’ve been shafted? Yeah. Someone please tell me what happened to my best friends. Because they are lost.”
My Chemical Romance had a ready made replacement – their old soundman and friend Bob Bryar. Born in Chicago on December 31, 1979, Bob had played in school marching and jazz bands since grade school. After leaving school, he studied for a sound engineering degree in Florida before becoming the soundman at the House Of Blues in Chicago, from where he was picked up by touring bands like The Used to be their on the road sound man.
“The first time I saw My Chem play was in Irving Plaza in New York,” says Bob. “It was before ‘Three Cheers’ was out and no-one knew who they were. I thought, ‘If this band ever need a drummer, I’m there’. I was shell-shocked when they asked me to join – they hadn’t even heard me play drums at that point. It was the most risky thing they’ve ever done. They picked me up and we went to New Jersey on the day they were shooting the ‘I’m Not Okay’ video. The next week we were out on tour. If it hadn’t worked with me, it would have been a disaster – they would have ruined the video and had to cancel the tour.”
THE NEXT year and a half was a blur of touring. UK tours, European tours, American headlining tours, the Warped Tour then another European tour. The highlight was going out on the road with Green Day, a band My Chemical Romance had always admired. The respect went both ways too, Green Day singer Billie Joe Armstrong saying: “I think they’re a good band. They’re really great people as well, really nice. They work hard to be the best band they can be. They want to make their mark, which is always good to see. I like the fact that Gerard takes charge of the audience, that he communicates with them. I can also see how he’s not afraid to play around with stage personas and to invent characters. Not everyone can do that.”
It was a difficult period though as Gerard learned to deal with more and more people wanting his time and opinion. Suddenly he realised people were treating him like a rock star – not something he had come to terms with.
“When we were on tour with them, I had conversations with Gerard,” says Armstrong. “He was feeling a bit uncertain at the time and I just told him not to be afraid. I think he was shying away. He was at that point where a band reads too much of its own press, and they start to internalise everything. To the point where they become boring. So I told him that it’s okay to be a rock star. It’s okay to be that, because the world needs good rock stars. We’ve got enough boring people. And he took that to heart, I guess.”
IT HAD been a gruelling year – one that left the band exhausted. Frank says: “By November 2005 we felt done. I didn’t have time to regenerate, to sleep, rest and heal my body. I felt like I was cheating people, I felt like a jerk because I didn’t have 100 percent to give.” A break was essential before they started work on ‘The Black Parade’, but it was a break one member couldn’t handle.
“It was the first time the band had got the chance to be home and be normal human beings for a while,” says Mikey. “That was a hard hit to me. It felt weird. I just couldn’t get used to being home for two or three months. I just didn’t get it.”
He was still drinking heavily, on top of taking prescribed anti-depression drugs and beginning to worry about how the band could follow ‘Three Cheers’.
By the time they actually went into the studio, he was in trouble. Their choice of studio didn’t help much either – hidden away in the Hollywood Hills, the Paramour is almost entirely cut off from the rest of LA. Mikey felt trapped, imprisoned by his own band. A collapse was inevitable. He had to leave the studio, convinced that he would also be leaving the band, and stay with a friend – band lawyer Stacy Fass. She forced him to see therapists – at one point four different doctors a week – while he commuted back to the Paaramour to record ‘Black Parade’ with the rest of the band. His brother Gerard was also going through his own set of problems.
It was an album fraught with drama and tribulations yet, it was also the making of the band. Within a week of its release, ‘Black Parade’ sold 240, 000 copies in the US alone. In the last fortnight of 2006, it was still selling 156,000 copies a week. ‘Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge’ took nine months to go Gold, ‘Black Parade’ took only a week.
The band, meanwhile, are about to embark on their most ambitious tour yet – a world straddling, arena bothering jaunt that they’ve already promised will outstrip any previous tour. Ask the band whether they expected any of this and they’re humble. Ask Mikey Way if he could have predicted it and he says, “I still barely believe it”.
“Honestly, we’re just a punk band from Jersey,” says Frank. “If this all ends tomorrow, then we’ll still be a punk band from Jersey. If we end up back in basements playing ‘I’m Not Okay’ to 50 kids, then I’m still psyched. That’s all I ever really wanted anyway.”
