(no subject)
In the parking lot of a horse track hidden in the industrial sprawl of Montreal, the lads of Fall Out Boy are preparing to take the stage for their thirty-second Vans Warped Tour gig this year.
Their tour bus is littered with half-drunk cans of Vans-sponsored water, balled-up T-shirts and copious amounts of candy (Pixy Stix, Blow Pops and watermelon Jolly Ranchers are their drugs of choice -- three of the four band members are straight-edge). Posters of Tupac and Rambo decorate the wood-paneled walls, and Pantera blare from the stereo, inciting a rampant round of air-drumming.
Though they're one of the punkfest's hottest acts this year, with a breakout album, From Under the Cork Tree, in the Top Forty since mid-June, the group's members don't indulge in any rock-star bad behavior. They're shy, courteous and almost always sober. Three of them -- singer Patrick Stump, 21, bassist Pete Wentz, 26, and drummer Andy Hurley, 25 -- still live with their parents. (Guitarist Joe Trohman, 21, has his own place in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood.)
Since releasing From Under the Cork Tree, their second album of candid and wickedly funny pop punk, Fall Out Boy (who are named for an obscure character on The Simpsons) have leveraged their formidable grass-roots fan base of Internet-savvy teens into a broad pop audience. Cork Tree entered the charts at Number Nine in May and has since gone gold. The adorably campy video for the first single, "Sugar, We're Goin Down," scored a Number One spot on TRL, and the song has been in endless rotation on modern-rock radio.
Emerging from the bowels of the bus, Wentz, FOB's bassist, lyricist and figurehead, motors past, introducing himself apologetically before signaling to his bandmates that it's time to hit the stage. He is small, dark and compact, dressed head to toe in black, his pants rolled up just enough to expose Tim Burton-esque red and black striped socks. Even with his black hair spiked in a space-alien cowlick, he is strikingly handsome, exuding the kind of disarming self-consciousness that makes you want to tuck him into bed and tell him it will be OK.
"My moods are oil and water -- they're always shifting, and they don't go well together at all," he says later, yanking dandelions out of the grass as we sit next to the racetrack. In a split second he's laughing at the bizarre sight of horses carting jockeys around the track a few feet away. "That's so fuckin' weird," he says.
Onstage, Wentz is more of a flamboyant glam rocker than an emo shoegazer. He wears a mess of black kohl eyeliner and swaggers through the songs, striking effeminate poses and licking his bass. "One of the things about emo and pop punk and whatever else we get lumped into," he says, "is that they're scared to be sexual, and that's what's so cool about rock music and hip-hop and R&B, too. These guys are doing these bizarrely sexual things, even if they're slightly homoerotic. It's always been a part of rock music."
The oldest of three siblings, Wentz grew up in the posh Chicago suburb of Wilmette; his father is a lawyer, his mother is a school administrator. "My childhood was pretty mundane," he says. "There was no tragic event, nobody got divorced, nobody died. I was bored a lot. I just skateboarded and was into fireworks and music." In high school, he got involved in Chicago's hardcore scene, playing in a handful of bands before becoming disenchanted with the politics of the local movement. "A lot of people in the hardcore scene swayed with Bush, and all of a sudden it became cool to say 'fag' and be kind of a jock," he says.
Joining up with Trohman, whom he knew well from all-ages hardcore shows, Wentz set out to create a group more like the bands he grew up listening to: Green Day, the Descendents and the Smiths. He lured Hurley from another hard-core band to play drums. Stump, whom Trohman recruited from his job at a local Borders bookstore, signed on as singer soon after; he became responsible for the band's exuberant melodies.
The band's first full-length album, 2003's Take This to Your Grave, was written in response to Wentz finding out his girlfriend had cheated on him with not one but two of his friends on the same weekend. The record expertly captures both the tortured introspection and the often hilarious, irrationally violent fantasies of anyone who's ever been dumped. (Sample lyric: "Let's play this game called 'when you catch fire'/I wouldn't piss to put you out.") The album sold more than 250,000 copies. In an odd twist of fate, Wentz's ex became famous in her own right. "She's achieved some kind of celebrity in Chicago for being the girl that the songs are about," says Wentz, shaking his head.
For the follow-up this year, Wentz and Stump were flown to L.A. to record for three months. During that time, the war in Iraq was raging and the Asian tsunami was all over the news. "I started getting really crazy anxiety -- I couldn't leave the house, I couldn't do anything," says Wentz. Compounding that was the pressure to live up to the success of Grave. "On the last record, you just wanted so bad for anyone to listen," he says. "And with this record, all of a sudden it felt like everybody in the world was listening and was ready to pick apart every single word." A lot of the songs on Cork Tree still center on themes of self-doubt and helplessness, but this time Wentz is less obsessed by his ex-girlfriend than by his band's newfound fame. "Sugar, We're Goin Down" is a pointed take on the pressures of fans' expectations, with lyrics like "Am I more than you bargained for yet?/I've been dying to tell you anything you want to hear/That's just who I am this week."
Touring for more than ten months of the year, Wentz decided to move back home for practical reasons. "My parents treat me like I'm fourteen," he says. "They make me clean my room and stuff like that. They're always like, 'I don't care what MTV says you are.'" Wentz adds that living in the room where he grew up makes him more sensitive to adolescent angst: "I only keep myself this sick and twisted in the head because people love the words, and it's so easy to do when I'm at home and by myself in my room. It's the same environment I was in when I was having those feelings originally."
Those feelings are also the subject of an illustrated book that Wentz wrote and published called The Boy With the Thorn in His Side (also the title of a Smiths song), a fairy tale based on a recurring nightmare he had as a kid. It's all part of Wentz's ambitious and public attempt to make sense of life and his place in it.
And luckily for Fall Out Boy's many fans, he's still a long way from figuring it out. "There's enough in my brain that feels loose and weird, like 'Fresh paint, don't sit on anything inside it,'" he says, "that I could write for a while and it'd still be interesting."In the parking lot of a horse track hidden in the industrial sprawl of Montreal, the lads of Fall Out Boy are preparing to take the stage for their thirty-second Vans Warped Tour gig this year.
Their tour bus is littered with half-drunk cans of Vans-sponsored water, balled-up T-shirts and copious amounts of candy (Pixy Stix, Blow Pops and watermelon Jolly Ranchers are their drugs of choice -- three of the four band members are straight-edge). Posters of Tupac and Rambo decorate the wood-paneled walls, and Pantera blare from the stereo, inciting a rampant round of air-drumming.
Though they're one of the punkfest's hottest acts this year, with a breakout album, From Under the Cork Tree, in the Top Forty since mid-June, the group's members don't indulge in any rock-star bad behavior. They're shy, courteous and almost always sober. Three of them -- singer Patrick Stump, 21, bassist Pete Wentz, 26, and drummer Andy Hurley, 25 -- still live with their parents. (Guitarist Joe Trohman, 21, has his own place in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood.)
Since releasing From Under the Cork Tree, their second album of candid and wickedly funny pop punk, Fall Out Boy (who are named for an obscure character on The Simpsons) have leveraged their formidable grass-roots fan base of Internet-savvy teens into a broad pop audience. Cork Tree entered the charts at Number Nine in May and has since gone gold. The adorably campy video for the first single, "Sugar, We're Goin Down," scored a Number One spot on TRL, and the song has been in endless rotation on modern-rock radio.
Emerging from the bowels of the bus, Wentz, FOB's bassist, lyricist and figurehead, motors past, introducing himself apologetically before signaling to his bandmates that it's time to hit the stage. He is small, dark and compact, dressed head to toe in black, his pants rolled up just enough to expose Tim Burton-esque red and black striped socks. Even with his black hair spiked in a space-alien cowlick, he is strikingly handsome, exuding the kind of disarming self-consciousness that makes you want to tuck him into bed and tell him it will be OK.
"My moods are oil and water -- they're always shifting, and they don't go well together at all," he says later, yanking dandelions out of the grass as we sit next to the racetrack. In a split second he's laughing at the bizarre sight of horses carting jockeys around the track a few feet away. "That's so fuckin' weird," he says.
Onstage, Wentz is more of a flamboyant glam rocker than an emo shoegazer. He wears a mess of black kohl eyeliner and swaggers through the songs, striking effeminate poses and licking his bass. "One of the things about emo and pop punk and whatever else we get lumped into," he says, "is that they're scared to be sexual, and that's what's so cool about rock music and hip-hop and R&B, too. These guys are doing these bizarrely sexual things, even if they're slightly homoerotic. It's always been a part of rock music."
The oldest of three siblings, Wentz grew up in the posh Chicago suburb of Wilmette; his father is a lawyer, his mother is a school administrator. "My childhood was pretty mundane," he says. "There was no tragic event, nobody got divorced, nobody died. I was bored a lot. I just skateboarded and was into fireworks and music." In high school, he got involved in Chicago's hardcore scene, playing in a handful of bands before becoming disenchanted with the politics of the local movement. "A lot of people in the hardcore scene swayed with Bush, and all of a sudden it became cool to say 'fag' and be kind of a jock," he says.
Joining up with Trohman, whom he knew well from all-ages hardcore shows, Wentz set out to create a group more like the bands he grew up listening to: Green Day, the Descendents and the Smiths. He lured Hurley from another hard-core band to play drums. Stump, whom Trohman recruited from his job at a local Borders bookstore, signed on as singer soon after; he became responsible for the band's exuberant melodies.
The band's first full-length album, 2003's Take This to Your Grave, was written in response to Wentz finding out his girlfriend had cheated on him with not one but two of his friends on the same weekend. The record expertly captures both the tortured introspection and the often hilarious, irrationally violent fantasies of anyone who's ever been dumped. (Sample lyric: "Let's play this game called 'when you catch fire'/I wouldn't piss to put you out.") The album sold more than 250,000 copies. In an odd twist of fate, Wentz's ex became famous in her own right. "She's achieved some kind of celebrity in Chicago for being the girl that the songs are about," says Wentz, shaking his head.
For the follow-up this year, Wentz and Stump were flown to L.A. to record for three months. During that time, the war in Iraq was raging and the Asian tsunami was all over the news. "I started getting really crazy anxiety -- I couldn't leave the house, I couldn't do anything," says Wentz. Compounding that was the pressure to live up to the success of Grave. "On the last record, you just wanted so bad for anyone to listen," he says. "And with this record, all of a sudden it felt like everybody in the world was listening and was ready to pick apart every single word." A lot of the songs on Cork Tree still center on themes of self-doubt and helplessness, but this time Wentz is less obsessed by his ex-girlfriend than by his band's newfound fame. "Sugar, We're Goin Down" is a pointed take on the pressures of fans' expectations, with lyrics like "Am I more than you bargained for yet?/I've been dying to tell you anything you want to hear/That's just who I am this week."
Touring for more than ten months of the year, Wentz decided to move back home for practical reasons. "My parents treat me like I'm fourteen," he says. "They make me clean my room and stuff like that. They're always like, 'I don't care what MTV says you are.'" Wentz adds that living in the room where he grew up makes him more sensitive to adolescent angst: "I only keep myself this sick and twisted in the head because people love the words, and it's so easy to do when I'm at home and by myself in my room. It's the same environment I was in when I was having those feelings originally."
Those feelings are also the subject of an illustrated book that Wentz wrote and published called The Boy With the Thorn in His Side (also the title of a Smiths song), a fairy tale based on a recurring nightmare he had as a kid. It's all part of Wentz's ambitious and public attempt to make sense of life and his place in it.
And luckily for Fall Out Boy's many fans, he's still a long way from figuring it out. "There's enough in my brain that feels loose and weird, like 'Fresh paint, don't sit on anything inside it,'" he says, "that I could write for a while and it'd still be interesting."In the parking lot of a horse track hidden in the industrial sprawl of Montreal, the lads of Fall Out Boy are preparing to take the stage for their thirty-second Vans Warped Tour gig this year.