Gerard in NME
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Article Transcription
The Black Parade taught My Chemical Romance many things -- principally that they like punk rock more than pretending to have cancer in stadiums. Here Gerard Way tells Dan Martin how their fourth album outlines their new vision for rock music.
Pictures Pamela Littky
As all dead rock stars know -- presuming there's an afterlife and they can keep track of these kinds of things -- expiring can be a great career move. Your legacy's safe from creative decline and you're free to sell thousands upon millions of records forever more. But what of those for whom death is not the end?
My Chemical Romance did very well out of dying. Three years living in the skin of their gothic alter egos The Black Parade made them megastars and hoyed them out of the emo ghetto that, from Panic to Fall Out Boy, saw off so many of their peers. The brilliant accompanying third album, a baroque concept fantasy about the surreal flashbacks of a cancer patient in his final minutes, shifted over three million copies; earning the band the nickname Queen Day and frontman Gerard Way the status as one of rock's most controversial figures. It also nearly finished them off.
Those three years on the road left them physically burned by a punishing tour schedule (anyone who saw them headline Download in 2007 could witness they didn't need make-up to look ill any more). And when the right-wing media painted them as harbingers of some kind of suicide cult, theyw ere forced to become spokespeople for a cause they had never chosen. It's been nearly four years since the band have released any new music and, as the follow-up went further and further back, we weren't alone in wondering if they'd ever return at all.
Finally we're joined by Gerard Way and that (admittedly as-yet-untitled) new album. He looks healthier and more like himself than he has in years. It figures. After all, what follows is the story of how My Chemical Romance cheated death itself...
After a pause and a false start, Gerard attempts to explain what brought him and his band to this point. "'The Black Parade' definitely got bigger than we..." He stops himself from saying 'wanted' and changes tack. "When it got finished it was a different story," he explains, "but when it started it was supposed to be more of an art-rock record. It was supposed to have more of an artsy feel and it ended up being more polished. And I'm OK with that. But if I had to do it again I would make it more real. The people that it means the most to are the people who understand it the most, and I think the people that misconstrued it, it doesn't mean anything to them. That's maybe what was disheartening about the record becoming so large. That it was misinterpreted so many times to be this record about the dark side of life and a record without hope."
And so when the time came for the band to follow it up, it was hardly a surprise that the band was ready to change. To do something new. To reassess the kind of band that they wanted to be. They'd also realized that 'The Black Parade' was the sort of trick you can only pull off once.
This was a fact that escaped Green Day's return last year -- let's remember it was their sprawling 'American Idiot' that paved the way for 'The Black Parade' in the first place -- when they tried to better it with the silly, overlong '21st Century Breakdown'. Even Muse, whose 'The Resistance' isn't exactly shabby, haven't quite been heralded with the kind of acclaim that usually follows them around. This is where modern rock finds itself at the start of the new decade, in a place where it can't possibly get any bigger without alienating the people drawn to its magic in the first place. In an echo of the punks who came to flick v's at the arena dwelling dinosaurs who made the mid-'70s so boring, or the Seattle bands who resigned '80s poodle rock to slots on nostalgia tours with diminishing returns, there's a feeling that rock needs to strip back to ensure its very survival, to keep in touch with its audience. This is something that My Chemical Romance cottoned on to from the moment they entered the studio to make their fourth album.
Gerard isn't going to slam Green Day, but he wil say this: "I think it plugs into the fact that maybe people right now just simply want to have a good time, you know? Maybe they just want to feel free. Maybe they don't wanna rebel. I think if anything, that's maybe what's been going on in the last year. I just don't think people wanna throw Molotov cocktails anymore. I think people just wanna fucking rock."
He laughs.
"There's no better way to say that. It's one of the least intelligent things to ever come out of my mouth but that's kind of the point, you know? People just wanna fucking rock! Let's go out and escape! Let's go out and go on an adventure! I don't know that people want to make statements right now. I can't comment on anybody else's record, but I certainly feel something in the air, like, people just want the truth and they don't need a big story. And they also want to forget about the truth; they just want to let go and cut loose."
Which, of course, brings things right back to that most awful and inevitable reference point -- the economy.
"I think that's what this is all about, absolutely," nods Gerard. "If you think about other bands that were around at other times akin to what we're going through right now -- a band like Duran Duran; they came out of one of the worst economic times in British history, right? The Thatcher era, and nobody had jobs and they said, 'Fuck it, we're gonna pretend like all this isn't happening for a hot minute.' It's not about what's going on in the outside world, it's about what's going on outside this room."
So you're saying that withdrawing is the most engaged thing you can possibly be?
"Yeah," he says cautiously, "but you're engaged in it by saying, 'I don't wanna talk about this right now, i have to deal with it all day.' Or, 'I've been unemployed for seven months.' that's the grim reality where you wake up in the morning and you wonder how you're gonna feed your kids or pay your mortgage. I think, right now, poeple don't wanna take that into an arena -- if they can afford to go to an arena. The record we've made reflects the size of the venues we're going to play them in. We can play these songs in stadiums, we can play them in arenas, but we can also play them in punk clubs and maybe that's all people are gonna be able to go to next time around, who knows?"
All of which makes us think this: the only way to move on from 'The Black Parade', a record so preoccupied with death it featured a song entitled 'Cancer', is to follow it up with one concerned with life. And speaking of that new record...
When My Chemical Romance did finally finish touring, the band arrived home, chucked out their tunics and, after a period of "learning how to be human b eings again", returned to the studio in Los Angeles a year ago with AC/DC and Pearl Jam producer Brendan O'Brien.
Determined to change what they were from the band they'd grown weary of -- and because the last album had featured a guest vocal from Liza Minnelli, of all people -- the plan was to make a stripped-down garage punk record. There was to be no over-arching concept. There were to be no alter egos. And by their standards, the sessions were all wine and roses -- nobody quit the band in a fit of all-consuming depression, put it that way. Things just got traumatic in different ways. It wasn't long 'til they realized that they'd thrown the baby out with the bath water, and that MCR-do-the-MC5 alone just wasn't going to be good enough. So they threw it all out. What they ended up making was a garage rock-indebted record -- just one infused with the expressive tricks they'd learned writing a rock opera.
"When we made 'The Black Parade' we were terrified," recalls Gerard, "and I think that was a really good thing; I think we kept trying to terrify ourselves. This time, that was the goal. It had to be so scary that it was gonna be, 'Oh my god, this is gonna be the grand failure if people don't get it.' I think you have to do that every time. I guess we pushed so hard on 'The Black Parade' it was actually very hard to get ourselves scared by what we were doing."
Nevertheless, they managed. "It got slightly uncomfortable," he nods once more. "I wouldn't say tense, but it definitely made us look like holy hell. We definitely looked like we weren't sleeping because even if we were sleeping we were sat up in the night going, 'Oh my god.' It's really hard making records. I don't know that we particularly enjoy it..."
Things turned around with a song called 'Trans Am', now renamed 'Bullet Proof Heart', the likely first single. And perversely, they did it by returning to fiction. Broadly, it's about a boy in New Jersey, dressed in a Judas Priest T-shirt, called Johnny. And a girl called Jenny who might be his girlfriend, but who also (honk the pop fact sirens!) might also be the missing girl from 'Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine' by The Killers.
Sorry, but we're not going to believe that unless we hear Gerard say it out loud...
"Yeah, I was joking around about that with the guys because immediately they had said, 'Who's Jenny?' And I said, 'Well, you know, it's fictional. There's a Jenny and a Johnny. You don't get much more American than that.' Then I said, 'I don't know, maybe it's the Jenny from The Killers' song -- she never came home.' Ha! But you know, I love that band so much. I don't think musicians do that enough. I don't think they get inspired by their contemporaries in the right ways. I don't figure they respond to their contemporaries and I think it's kind of nice when that happens."
That the chorus actually echoes that of 'Mr Brightside' is only the strangest things about 'Bullet Proof Heart' -- what starts out as a New Jersey tribute, careering [sic] through minor key synths and ecstatic punk stabs, actually ends in pools of wibbly sci-fi sounds. The song signals what the album ended up as; a more straight-ahead, masculine rock record than they've done before (Gerard proudly names 'British Steel' by Judas Priest as a seminal influence) but delivered with the grand, overblown and just-a-little-bit-camp quality we liked in 'The Black Parade'. With the E word now as relevant to them as bluegrass is to Lady Gaga, the record sees them stake a more simple claim to be Earth's premier Rock Band. From what NME has heard (see sidebar), it sounds like they might just succeed.
"On this record you're gonna get the purest, best version of the band you could ever hope for," laughs Gerard. "I think it's everything people really like about the band, only in a much more direct way. So you're not getting bits of punk songs gnarled up Kurt Weill or a Russian folk song, you're not getting these little bit sof what you like about the band dressed up in other clothes. You're really just getting the band doing what it does."
'Bullet Proof Heart' also set the tone for what became the theme; in bringing the band full circle to their blue collar roots. "It's a fictional metaphorical song really, but one about leaving home and running away -- about doing whatever you can to run away. Because that's the point of starting a band -- you get in the van to run away. I didn't want to end up where I grew up, and that's not to speak ill of Jersey at all. I love New Jersey, but I didn't want to end up with a job I hated that just floating through life. I wanted to escape. And so I definitely felt at times when we started in the band that there were forces, albeit in my head, that were conspiring against us to keep us in town to keep us in a basement, and you have to rebel against that."
This bleeds through into the other key track, the MC5/Hives-baiting 'Death Before disco' (some of these garage jams survive, by the way. There will be no Foxboro Hot Tubs-style goof projects in this manor); described by Gerard as an "anti-party party song".
"It's like, not the dark sife of it, it's the boring side of it. We can party, but it's gonna kill us and it's just kind of reminding people of that. That song is really a working class anthem. It's really about the power of rock'n'roll verses the power of fame; the power of bullshit. It's about the haves and the have-nots. It's a bit of a class war song, really."
And the line "the good times will give you cancer", like the chorus to the 90-second Ramones romp 'Black Dragon Fighting Society' ("We have a medical emergency!" shouts the singer over and over again) surely signals a fixation with hospitals that Gerard should maybe get looked at?
A pause. "I don't know if there's any hospitals in this record so much as there's ambulances."
Riiiiiiiiiiight.
"But ambulances to me represent something completely different. They're emergencies, and sirens. There's a lot of sirens on the record. There's a lot of emergencies happening."
Indeed, if any song supms up the spirit of the album, it's the line in blustery opener 'Save Yourself': "This ain't a room full of suicides".
"Yeah," he agrees, "it's saying this is a room full of survivors. And this record's about the truth and living and survival. It's not about posturing any more. It's not about Godlike figures, it's not about posing. I'ts about getting back to what we were, which is a working class rock band and embracing that while at the same time being alrger than life."
This is what My Chemical Romance have made; a reality check with a massive boner.
Of course, something else happened during My Chemical Romance's time away. On May 27 last year, Gerard's wife Lyn-Z gave birth to their daughter, Bandit Lee. Now, every rock star is allowed one mushy parenthood song, and Gerard's is 'Light Behind Your Eyes', the album's token ballad. But this is not, thankfully, his Daddy Record. Not quite.
"It certainly had something to do with it," he admits, "but in a really un-obvious way. It wasn't like I was sitting here writing a record about being a dad. But I realized afterwards I was leaving a message for my daughter when she's 15. the original My Chem music was me speaking to who I was in high school. This will be me speaking to who my daughter could become."
And if the message of this album is directed to a person's kid, that's going to be as sincerely meant as anything anybody could ever say, right?
"I was writing about the victimisation of the audience, and that to me was the best thing the band could possibly say at the moment, about not being a victim. I realised that if anything were to ever happen to me, I would want my daughter to know that her dad and his band weren't victims. And I don't think there was any real solid evidence of that up to now. It's about empowering the audience."
And here's the paradox. While MCR's music is now different -- they've stripped back, they've gone back to basics, they've trimmed off the fat -- what's at the heart remains identical. And that you wouldn't ever change.
Sidebar Transcription
OUR TOP 5 SONGS ON THE FOURTH MCR ALBUM
'Death Before Disco'
A hyperactive garage-punk firestorm. "This ain't a party! Get off the dance floor! ou wanna get down! I want a gang war!" shrieks Gerard. MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer heard the track in the studio and the lyrics namecheck his band's classic 'Kick Out the Jams'. Also sounds like The Hives. In a good way.
'Save Yourself'
Gerard's in full-on audience-empowerment mode on this classic rock rallying cry, showing glimmers of the Judas Priest vibe he insists is on there. "This ain't a room full of suicides" is the key lyric, and the theme of survival burns through it ("You can live forever if you've got the time"). It's as if he wrote it with the Daily Mail's 'war on emo' article in his hand...
'The Only Hope For Me Is You'
A straight-up rock anthem with flashes of Slade behind the razor-sharp guitars. The simplest of love songs builds up to epic pomp-rock climax filled with string stabs and melodramatic pianos.
'Light Behind Your Eyes'
The ballad. Unashamedly sentimental, like 'I Don't Love You' through a softer lens. Gerard laments departed friends, channeling a 'live for today' message in a song addressed to [his] daughter.
'Black Dragon Fighting Society'
A 90-second garage firebomb wound up even tighter than 'Death Before Disco', with Gerard barking "this is a medical emergency!" over and over again. It's a thrilling example of the band's range; a stoopid Ramones-y punk jam on one leve, with heavy metal shredding all around it.