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 Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2007 3:35 am
Ok, I worked hard in typing this out for you all. I hope this clears things up.
‘The Black Parade’ wasn’t just one of the biggest, most ambitious albums of 2006. It also transformed My Chemical Romance into international superstars. But is their success a poison chalice? Alexander Milas took a swig.
There’s little point belabouring what’s now undeniable truth: My Chemical Romance, erstwhile New Jersey nobodies with a dream, are ********. Huge. But if you think their follow-up to the 2004’s already rapturously-received ‘Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge’ is merely a commercially-minded crash-grab then think again. It’s a big, ******** concept album that more happily sits near a peer group born in the 70’s. But even as they acknowledge, the making of ‘The Black Parade’ was no spilt-second decision. Fraught with fears about it’s reception and their own ability to even achieve such lofty artistic heights, their time in the studio was a jumping-off point into a chasm that may just have been an abyss. Instead, they found themselves at the top of the charts, and - judging by how hard it is to get hold of them these days - it’s been a softer landing than even they expected. Hammer first tried to catch up with them in LA, then New York, and finally settled in Japan - all in the span of a few days. Life for them, is moving pretty fast. They can hardly believe it themselves.
“I almost forgot we were in Japan,” chuckles drummer Bob Bryar.
HOW IS JAPAN?
Gerard Way: “I love Japan. It’s amazing. I’m just really excited to be back on tour again. That’s just, you know….I’ve been looking forward to starting this tour for quite some time.”
Bob Bryar: “It’s going really well. We’ve played the new record everywhere now and it’s going well wherever we go. It’s just weird to see. It’s awesome. It was kind of a risk putting this out!
WERE THERE POINTS WHERE YOU DOUBTED HOW ‘THE BLACK PARADE’ WOULD BE RECEIVED?
Gerard: “I had these Frankenstein moments like that once or twice a week, where I was asking myself, ‘am I nuts?’ I need confirmation from somebody that had showered in maybe a week that could tell me that I’m OK, and that we’re doing the right thing, and that we’re not ******** crazy…that I wasn’t driving us into the sun!
Bob: “Yeah, we definitely hit a point. We were just out to do something to make us happy. I knew that I liked it and knew it would be special to us, but I didn’t want people to go, ‘what are these dudes doing?’ Luckily that didn’t happen.
Ray Toro: “While we were in the studio it was all about having fun. The more insane or wacky the idea was, the more likely we were to try it. You tell yourself you don’t care but you really do. Of course you want people to like it.”
Gerard: “When it was done I knew that we’d created a monster.”
A MONSTER RECORD OR SOMETHING MONSTROUS?
Gerard: “Definitely a monster in a good way, but at the same time it’s such a personal monster. This was a really personal record; this is us laying it out there. It changed things. It’s not so much that when I was doing ‘Helena’ though. That was a lot tougher because I wasn’t really ready to deal with my grandmother’s death so head-on, and then when we put the record out it was, ‘OK, you’re going to be dealing with us for the next eight months.’ There was no death that spawned this record.
Bob: “It was definitely a challenge to make this. We were grouped with a lot of other bands and this album blindsided a lot of people. It made them re-evaluate us. This is the defining record. This is who we are. We took everything that we had. Every idea, every emotion, and we took it to a place we hadn’t been. We cornered ourselves. It’s going to be hard to beat this. It’s be a whole new idea…..maybe stripped down and raw?”
CONCEPT ALBUMS AREN’T VERY COMMON THESE DAYS.
Gerard: “Setting ourselves apart came naturally. People say, ‘you worked really hard to distance yourself.’ No, we just worked to do something really special and crazy and nuts. But it came more honestly and organically. We weren’t thinking, ‘we can’t do it like such-and-such band.’ It was, ‘we need to do something that’s going to blow people’s minds.’”
IT SOUNDS LIKE AN EXHUSTING PROCESS - WOULD YOU DO IT AGAIN?
Gerard: “That’s a good question! I actually don’t know if I’d be able to do it again. It was totally draining and painful. I mean, it was super fun, but physically it was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Going to bed at 6am, waking up four hours later and doing it all again. That was everyday. I was constantly obsessing over the record, not just musically but all the visual stuff that went along with it. That stuff took so long because we could never just bang out a record, put a collection of songs out. We just can’t do that.”
SUCCESS OFTEN BREEDS CONCEIT - HAVE YOU STAYED ROOTED?
Ray: “You have that core group of friends - your parents, your best friend, your girlfriend - and nothing changes with them. Just because you’re doing well they treat you the same and I love that. You still get s**t. I love that too! If I come home late I want to get s**t from my girlfriend. Or I want to get yelled at by my mom because I haven’t called her in a couple of days. That’s what keeps you normal.”
Gerard: “I’ve made it a habit along with the other guys, of avoiding really conventional things like those LA partied….we don’t really mix well with those things, so we don’t go to them. I feel pretty normal still. When I come off tour it takes me a good three or four days, but then three or four days go by and I don’t even remember I’m in the band. It’s really strange. Actually, the weirdest thing that happened was after the last tour when I went to Portland, Oregon for about a week and just holed up in a hotel room. I did a bunch of writing - this is just before Christmas - and about four or five days in I felt completely back to normal. Almost as if My Chemical Romance was a total dream and I wasn’t even sure it had happened.
Bob: “We’re not going out to big parties to judge other people, that kind of bullshit. The only time where this all feels like too much is when people pry into our personal lives. People go, ‘oh I found this picture of you in grade school.’”
HAS THAT HAPPENED?
Bob: “Yeah, we’re all had it. People will find our yearbooks. Gerard and Mikey have had people outside of their house. I’ve had kids outside my house. We did a signing in Chicago one time and a few kids came by with pictures they took of my house and asked me to sign them. I was like, ‘why would you show this to me? This is weird.’ My mom is a waitress, and they somehow found that out and they’ll go eat and request her. That’s going a little bit too far.”
DO YOU MISS YOUR ANONYMITY?
Gerard: “Yeah. But you get an interview like this and it makes it easier because it’s stuff I want to talk about. And there’s a few guys who we’ve built a relationship with. That’s not anything to b***h about - that people want to read what I say. But my hair has nothing to do with what I want to say. It’s the needless ******** celebrity bullshit that makes me grind.”
BUT YOU’RE APPROAHING CELEBRITY STATUS YOURSELF.
Gerard: “It’s funny, I was seeing somebody who called me the most confident persona with the least amount of self-esteem ever. I’m extremely confident, I believe in myself, but I’m also self-deprecating to the point of humour. If I was saying, ‘yeah my s**t don’t stink’, that’d be faking it, and there’s so many people faking it out there. There’s a suspension of disbelief you’re supposed to have with these people but I don’t buy into it. I don’t mind being extremely extraordinary onstage, but I’m not going to bullshit people.”
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Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2007 3:36 am
There’s an inherent of defensiveness in these bandmates’ tone that suggests they’ve already taken more than their share of abuse, but it’s hard to imagine that being any real surprise to a group that owes more to classic rock acts like Queen these days than anything you’re likely to hear from more recently-hatched musicians. There’s a candour to Way that can’t be mistaken for anything other than genuine self-belief, thought to some it may seem like arrogance. It may fit into standard clichés about newfound stardom, but perhaps My Chemical Romance really were just having their fun in the studio and inadvertently wrote a hit - one that features a guest appearance by broadway legend Liza Minelli and a fair few moments of unashamed Brain May worship.
WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF THE CRICTICAL REACTION TO ‘THE BLACK PARADE’? DESPITE SALES, NOT EVERYBODY ‘GOT’ WHAT YOU WERE DOING…..
Gerard: “The critical reaction was just cynicism. I read something saying, ‘this is some major label thing and you can tell that the label directs them, yadda yadda yadda.;’ It’s like, ‘what label in the world would dress us like that? Have you seen what we look like lately? Who the hell would dress us like that?’ We had people at the label ******** terrified of the way we looked! They weren’t even sure it was going to work. Everybody just assumed it was going to be a hard sell. I remember we came over to do a press and the used a really old photo shoot because they were saying, ‘you’re going to scare everybody.’ Of course there’s jealously and resentment, but we’re lucky really lucky and we’re really blessed. I mean s**t happened real fast. It’s crazy. We can’t stop it. We didn’t sell ourselves up a river. We stayed true to our morals and our integrity and we still got huge. Some people might think that happened too quickly but there’s nothing we can do about that.”
ARE YOU EMBARASSED BY YOUR GOODFORTUNE?
Gerard: “Yeah it is really surreal. It’s not that it’s embarrassment of it, but it’s like boom! s**t man! Especially when people really feel passionately pissed off at you for achieving so much so fast. We’re like, ‘man, s**t wasn’t my fault! We just worked our ******** asses off!’ The way I always kind of saw it is that any resentment or being pissed off with us for achieving so much so fast or for having the amount of growth that we’ve had…..it’s like, ‘how can you get pissed off with that? What have we done wrong?’”
Ray: “We just got very lucky. You can’t fault people for getting lucky. We would still be doing this if we were still in a van. We worked our asses off. We haven’t stopped in five years. If we’re lucky because kids got turned onto it, that’s not our fault. We’ve slept eight people in a hotel room, we’ve slept in parking lots. If it takes five years or 20 years it doesn’t matter. We’ve always stuck to our guns, we’ve never exploited our fans. It isn’t how long it takes, it’s how we got here, and I know we got here the right way.
HAVE YOU GOTTEN A LOT OF ABUSE?
Gerard: “I’ll listen to most records and I’d think, ‘when was the last time you took a risk?’ A lot of people will b***h and complain about us….. ‘Dude you’re still making the same ******** pop punk record you’ve been making for 20 years,’ - what do you ******** expect? Are you that surprised? Are you that bitter about that fact that we’ve done something really sincere and really honest and it’s worked out? Isn’t that weird? We did the right thing! We didn’t try to sound like somebody else. We didn’t try to look like somebody else….and it worked!
BUT IT’S OBVIOUS THAT SOME PEOPLE MIGHT BEGRUDGE YOU FOR YOUR SUCCESS.
Bob: “That’s just something that people do. It’s just jealously. Put yourselves in our shoes - we’re playing songs that we love. What else should we do? Our music connects with people. Any band that wants to go, ‘we’ve been touring for eight years and nothing has happened,’ well that’s not our fault. But bands that are way bigger than us totally aren’t saying that. Like Green Day. You’d think that band would be impossible to be around but they were the nicest band we ever met.”
WHEN DID YOU MEET THEM?
Bob: “We did a radio Christmas show about two years ago I think, they said hi and all of a sudden we got an offer to do their tour. The first say we got there I thought they were going to throw our s**t up on the stage and kick us off at the end and give us a closet to live in. But that totally wasn’t what happened. I was sitting in our dressing room and Billie (Joe Armstrong, front man) came in and sat down next to me and said, ‘hey, how you doing?’ He introduced himself like I didn’t know who he was!”
DID THAT SET AN EXAMPLE TO YOU?
Bob: “Yeah. Because people will be go, ‘wow I can’t believe we’re hanging out with you, you guys seem like complete dicks.’ I’ve seen so many bands that get mildly successful and they do turn into the biggest dicks so I can’t blame [those people for thinking that about us.]”
GERARD YOU ONCE TOLD US ABOUT BUMPING INTO IRON MAIDEN’S BRUSE DICKINSON ON THE STREETS OF NEW YORK....
Gerard: “Yeah! My Chem was just starting…..that dude was completely normal. He wasn’t trying to uphold this bullshit illusion and meeting people like that on the way up was really good for me to see because it let me know I was doing things the right way. I can’t fathom why it is that people see me like I see him though.”
Bob: “We’re really nice [to fans] but as soon as you ******** with us then we are the biggest dicks that you’ve ever seen.”
IS THAT WHAT HAPPENED WHEN BERT MCCRACKEN WAS ON A MEGAPHONE AT WARPED TOUR TELLING PEOPLE NOT TO WATCH YOU?
Bob: “Yeah, pretty much! But you’ve got to take that dude with a grain of salt. You just can’t take him seriously….our reaction to that was getting on stage and blowing his band completely away.”
YOU RE-SHOT THE VIDEO FOR ‘I’M NOT OK (I PROMISE)’ FROM ‘THREE CHEERS FOR SWEET REVENGE’ , WHICH ORGINALLY PORTRAYED YOU LIFE ON THE ROAD IN THE EARLY DAYS. ARE YOU NOSTALGIC FOR THOSE MORE INNOCENT TIMES?
Gerard: “There was definitely an innocence period, and that [time in the original video] was about it. Even with ‘Helena’ though that was still there. But the more music that we make, the more creation of it. We’ve gotten more into, and that’s where you start to find the real innocence. If you keep that really pure it’ll stay there and there’s nothing that’ll touch it., that’ll touch the making of the music. Especially if you’re never making records to make money and you’re not motivated by mortgages or….we all live really humble lives. It’ll never affect our music.
Bob: “We’ve done vans for a long ******** time, and been in positions where we had to hitch rides and sleep on people’s floors. We’ve experienced it. Maybe not as much as some bands have, but it’s not like we’re out there acting like the biggest rock stars in the world.”
Ray: We’re still the same group of guys we were five years ago. But then you think about the places that we used to play compared to now, and that’s pretty ******** wild. When you sit down and think about it you get these, ‘holy ********!’ moments. Like, ‘holy s**t, I can’t believe we’re in Japan playing to loads of kids!’ Those quiet moments of reflection, where we think, ‘man, we’ve done it. We’re living the dream.’”
SO WHAT DID HAPPEN TO THAT BEATEN UP OLD VAN YOU USED TO TOUR IN?
Ray: “I think it’s parked on the lawn of one of our old tour manager’s house. The first day we got our tour bus, the van was on it’s death bed. It was slowly dying, as were we because the exhaust system was ******** up so it was shooting noxious gas into the cabin! We were passing out and hallucinating. It actually caught fire once while we were driving up to the Warped tour. That was the day we got our bus, ‘cos we’d put a lot pf miles on that van!”
And with that My Chemical Romance ate off to sound check at Tokyo’s hopelessly sold-out Club Citta.
It’s a fair guess that they won’t be taking a van to get there as well, but whether the road ahead of them really stretches as far as they can see is impossible to say. But the enthusiasm and confidence in their voices as they embark on the rest of the biggest tour of their lives - which swings by the UK starting March 20th in Plymouth - seems to suggest that they’d walk if they had to.
There we are. I hoped that cleared up a lot for everyone. It sure did for me.
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Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2007 4:05 am
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Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2007 4:12 am
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Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2007 11:14 am
Thank. You. So. ********. Much. For bothering to type out all that.
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Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2007 11:16 am
Meera Flame Thank. You. So. ********. Much. For bothering to type out all that. Ah, you're welcome.
I did it 'cos I love you guys. <3
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Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2007 11:28 am
Thanks for typing it out for us! I think they're still going to go strong for a while from that interview though...
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Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2007 11:43 am
Shura-Pendragon Thanks for typing it out for us! I think they're still going to go strong for a while from that interview though... Yes, well I hope so.
I would just die if they parted
emo
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Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2007 12:37 pm
Thanks so much! I hd fun reading it.. (this is link_saves_the_day)
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Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2007 7:25 pm
Thank you. That was very interesting.
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Posted: Sat Feb 17, 2007 2:28 pm
Metal Hammer are such whores....sorry but they b***h about them one minute and then praise them the next.
But besides that thanks for typing all that up you rock my shiny sock (i just put glitter on it so its pretty darn shiny i can tell you!)
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Posted: Sat Feb 17, 2007 3:12 pm
[.Transexual Walrus] Metal Hammer are such whores....sorry but they b***h about them one minute and then praise them the next. But besides that thanks for typing all that up you rock my shiny sock (i just put glitter on it so its pretty darn shiny i can tell you!) when that sock goes through the washing machine it might cause a glittery problem rofl put more on it!
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Posted: Sat Feb 17, 2007 5:01 pm
xBroken.Beaten.Damnedx
Gerard: “ But my hair has nothing to do with what I want to say. Remember this, you crazy humans. :3 (Even if his hair does kick a**) *Saddended by the number of hair threads* Anywho Thanks for typing out all this.
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Posted: Sat Feb 17, 2007 8:12 pm
Meera Flame Thank. You. So. ********. Much. For bothering to type out all that. wow.i think that if they try they can beat the black parade. should they take ray to japan?lol
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