Kerrang Article Scan - Part 1 Interview
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When the lights came down on My Chemical Romance's May 9, 2008 show at Madison Square Garden it was very nearly the end of the band. The five of them walked off stage in a whirl of mixed emotions.
This was the show they had dreamed of playing. This was the venue that Gerard Way and his brother Mikey had wanted to headline since the day they had seen Smashing Pumpkins play there in 1997. It was on that night all those years ago that they had decided to start a band; it would have been somehow fitting if, 13 years later, it had all come to an end in the same iconic hall.
The Madison Square Garden show should have been a moment of triumph and, really, it was. It was a culmination, a celebration and a conclusion to everything they had achieved. It was the finale to The Black Parade, the momentous concept album with which they had gone from being the band most likely, to the band that had. But somehow it didn't feel like quite the victory it should have.
As the last notes of Helena rang out around that vast ampitheatre, as fans screamed out their names, unaware the band would barely surface for two-and-a-half years, it could have been a time to reflect on all that had happened in the previous six years. In that time, from the release of their second album Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge in June 2004, they wandered into a whirlwhind in which their personal lives would be picked over, in which they would battle addiction, depression, and the slings and arrows of the British press. They had had triumphs the world over; millions of record sales, sold out tours, had played with their heroes and become heroes to others. They had also, though, been demonised as the leaders of a suicide cult, attacked, bottled and betrayed. And what they realised as they stepped from Madison Square Garden's stage was that they were tired of it all.
An overwhelming physical, mental and emotional exhaustion enveloped them like a vast black cloak. As Gerard stood towelling himself down in the dressing room, it was not to the past he was looking but to the future--and he wasn't sure if he saw a place for My Chemical Romance there. He turned to the band's guitar player Ray Toro.
"Ray said to me, 'Maybe you need a break, maybe you need to go and get stuff out of your system'," says Gerard now. "I remember saying that night, 'If we never do this again, thank you'. What's scary is that it felt like it was okay to say that. It felt accurate."
And he wasn't the only one. Each member of the band was thinking the same thing: they were thinking that maybe My Chemical Romance had run its course. Maybe there was no more gas in the tank.
"There was injury upon death upon illness [during The Black Parade Tour]," says the band's guitarist Frank Iero. "It really felt like we were being run along a cheese-grater. We were leaving bits of ourselves all over the world. When something drains you as much as it did after Black Parade, you end up not knowing if you want to do it anymore. You still have the love, but maybe not the want. There was something in the back of my head asking, 'Is this going to happen again? Are we done?'."
"That Madison Square Garden show really felt like it was the closing credits," says Mikey. "It was weird. It felt like it might have been the end."
It's strange when the four current members of My Chemical Romance look back on that time now. So much seems to have changed.
All are now married. Gerard--hair currently dyed a vivid red--has an 18-month old daughter, while Frank has arrived here in the comfortable surrounds of Los Angeles' Sunset Marquis hotel soon after the birth of his six-week-old baby twins. A lot of living seems to have happened since 2008, a lot of growing up.
Burgeoning families are not the only thing that is different, though. They are a member down after their former dummer Bob Bryar's depature from the band in March this year. But that's not the most noticeable change: what My Chemical Romance have about them now is something that seemed entirely out of reach two-and-a-half years ago, they have positivity. They have a happy, beaming confidence.
It's with them as they walk around the sun-drenched gardens here, Gerard's candy-coloured hair glinting in the sunlight, his brother's bright yellow T-shirt catching the eyes. It's in the smiles of greeting they give you as they say hello, the warm hugs and handshakes they offer, the charm with which they thank you for coming to talk to them. Extenuating circumstances there may have been, but there wasn't always this much colour in them. Especially not when The Black Parade got crazy.
"I was brooding back then. There was turmoil. There was a storm," says Mikey. "I barely remember that dude. We're all in a different spot in life now. Some people think that life takes decades to change, but sometimes it changes in a couple of years. We're all very optimistic. Everyone has grown up."
It's a far cry from where they were. Ask them to paint a snapshot of the end of The Black Parade's album cycle and they look bleak even talking about it.
"Physically it was hard, but the mental strain was the worst," says Ray. "We had been ground to the point where, creatively, we felt we had nothing else to give. That was the worst part."
"We were in people's faces too much," adds Frank. "Even when we were getting tired of it. At the end of that tour, the record had been out for two years. It was old hat."
The Black Parade, which was released in October 2006, was always an album that had exacted a mental duty, from its birth to its death. In the studio, recording it, Mikey was sent so far over the edge that he had to leave the band and seek therapy. The impact it would go on to have, and the frantic touring it demanded, also took a heavy toll on the band. Suddenly My Chemical Romance, and Gerard in particular, became both the leaders of a tenuous movement they wished to have no part of--emo--and its villains-in-chief. They were blamed for the suicide of teenagers by sensationalist journalists; when other black-clad teenagers were beaten by thugs in Mexico, it was My Chemical Romance who were, somehow, found to be at fault. And it was because The Black Parade had become much bigger than the band and they were shocked and appalled when they could no longer control what they had created.
"I think that's what ate me up a lot," says Gerard. "I felt like I should be able to control the reacton to the record, which you can't do. Then I felt that I could control it by explaining myself time and time again. Sometimes I was even apologising for myself--it was really namby pamby shit. How did I turn into that guy? How had I become the guy who was apologising for the work he and his friends had done?"
"We created something and unleashed it into the world and then, a year later, it had taken on a new life," says Frank. "People were interpreting it in strange ways. It was like a bastardised version of what we had done. It got weird."
"It was a record that was so misconstrued on so many levels," agrees Gerard. "It was really difficult and it took a toll on me. People in Mexico were getting hate-crimed on because they wore black and so anywhere we went, that's what people would talk about--they weren't talking about the music. That upset me. They were just talking about mascara and bullshit like that. I realised that the world is a wild animal and you can't change it or control it. You can't ride it; it's going to ride you. That's what I learned. I felt so small."
My Chemical Romance found it very strange adjusting to real life when they broke after The Black Parade. Just simply being home was different.
"It was very, very strange," says Frank. "Maybe it's a selfish thing, but when you're away, you think everything else stops. You only witness your world, then you get home and everyone is fucking old. Shit happens when you're gone that you don't understand."
Gerard moved from New Jersey to Los Angeles with his new wife LynZ, the bass player for Mindless Self Indulgence, and threw himself into writing comics, having already written The Umbrella Academy for which he won a coveted Eisner Award. He becan working on a new comic book project, too, The True Lives of The Fabulous Killjoys, and his head was awash with laser guns, muscle cars, and masked characters. It was a life away from the spotlights and pressure to which he began to feel he was better suited.
"The Eisner [Award] was realy big for me," he says. "It was scary at the same time, though, because it was another thing that said to me, 'Hey, you could go and do this. You wouldn't have a huge career, but you could make a living'. There was a part of me thinking: 'I don't have to be a singer anymore'.
"The thing about doing comics is that nobody asks you about your personal life, they don't ask you about the drugs you used to take, they don't ask you if you're breaking up. They talk about the work. I wish people would talk about the work in music. In music, people want to know what makes you tick; in comics, people don't care."
"I had some conversations with Gerard about whehter he wanted to do [the band] anymore around then," says Ray. "I kept telling him he needed a break and that he needed to live life. But his brain is always buzzing with new ideas; he's always wondering what the next thing is. What was scaring him was that, with the band, he didn't know what the next thing was."
"That's exactly what it was--I didn't know what was next," says Gerard. "I lost my voice and my confidence. I didn't know what I was trying to say anymore."
He wasn't the only member of the band to feel confused. Frank, too, felt he needed to get My Chemical Romance and The Black Parade out of his system. Remarkably, though, he decided to do it by going back out on the road. His side-project, the visceral hardcore of Leathermouth, was a chance to do something very different. Rather than wrap itself up in grand concepts, its violence and explosiveness simply provided him with a chance to reconnect with music through emotion. At the time, as 2008 became 2009, he spoke of needing to do it "just to stay sane".
"It was bonkers watching him play--they were fucking amazing," says Mikey. It was actually one of those things that made me think, 'Hey, remember all of this? It's awesome'. I started itching again. I was going out to see Weezer, Radiohead, the Pumpkins and that made me think: 'Dude, let's go do this again!'. I remembered what it was like to be a fan of music. I started understanding where I came from."
By January of 2009, My Chemical Romance were beginning to get back into the swing. Ray flew out to Los Angeles to work through ideas with Gerard.
"I think it hit a point where I missed creating so much," says the singer. "I was doing comics, but I knew what I really missed. I knew I wanted to make music. Was it the right time? Who knows?"
The band had been asked to contribute a song to the 2009 film Watchmen, which they considered an honour (they covered Bob Dylan's Desolation Row for the soundtrack). Getting back into the studio to record that rekindled their desire to play music together. So they started pre-production in FEbruary of that year along the AC/DC and Bruce Springsteen producer Brendan O'Brien. They were determined that this new record was going to be a very different beast to The Black Parade.
"It felt that the right thing was to strip everything back," says Ray. "We wanted to strip away things like the costumes, we didn't want to hide behind anything. It was with this mind-set that we started writing. We made a lot of rules about what the band could do, what it could sound like and what it could be."
The rules they made were many and varied, but all seemed to relate to one thing: that My Chemical Romance should reject their past and grand conceptual ideas completely.
"I spewed out a bunch of those rules," says Gerard. "There's going to be no concept was the first. There would be no interesting song titles was another--although I think I said 'pretentious' rather than 'interesting'. I was starting to damn anything we'd done in the past. There were going to be no costumes, no pageantry, none of that. I think I was confused. I thought that rejecting everything would help us move forward."
They knew exactly what they didn't want to do. They just weren't sure what they should actually be doing.
"I don't think we had a clear picture for a while," says Frank. "We knew we were inspired to create, but I don't know if we knew what we wanted to create. [The Black Parade] was so daunting, from the process of making it, to touring and living it for two-and-a-half years. To have to go right back into that again, meant that our natural reaction was to run away from it. We were rebelling against what had gone before and who we were. We wanted to fuck our world up. But in doing that, I don't think we achieved our potential.
They pared everything back, removing the eloquent flourishes that had formerly characterised their musing to make a streamlined, sparse and direct album. Gerard spoke of the record as a love letter to rock 'n' roll. What the music didn't have, though, was heart.
"We had fun writing the songs," says Ray. "A lot of them were very raw, very driving and full of energy. But the soul just wasn't there."
"We stripped layer after layer after layer," says Gerard. "And it took the recording of an entire record for me to realize, 'Oh wow, there's nothing left'. I was really terrified. I thought, 'Is this it? Is this the record taht we put out and people go, 'They've lost it, they've lost their ambition'?"
"When we started mixing," says Ray. "Gerard was very vocal about the fact that it just didn't feel right. He kept calling me, saying 'Something's off here'."
In fact, the singer was working through the songs they had and trying to compile the album's tracklisting. He knew there was a problem when he could only find two songs he liked. During the mixing process, they began throwing more and more sounds at their music in a vain effort to get more from it.
"We were piling on more vocals and started playing with keyboards," says Gerard. "That was the first experimentation that happened during the entire process and we had already recorded the album! The only experimentation happened during the mixing. That's pretty scary."
"They weren't bad songs, they just didn't have that greatness," says Frank. "Everyone we played it to loved it. But we didn't and that was the problem."
"It was very strange, we were wondering if we were crazy," adds Mikey. "It was like getting married to soemone who everyone thinks is great and you're thinking, 'Yeah, but you don't know her...'."
Somewhere among the rules, restrictions and regulations, they had got lost. They were no longer My Chemical Romance. Gerard decided he needed breathing space, so he disappeared to the desert with his wife and daughter, renting a lonely bungalow in the wilderness. What happened next would change everything.
"I had an epiphany. I had a vision," he says. "I had always imagined that this record took place in the desert, but it didn't sound like it for some reason. While I was there I wrote a song called Na Na Na and I realised that's what I wanted. I was writing all these crazy lyrics and they were fearless and fucking reckless. I had this vision in my head and everything I had been working on in the comic--the masks, the laser guns, the cars, everything--started to swirl around in my head."
When he returned to the band, he showed them what he had done. A charge went through them all.
"It was a 'Holy shit!' moment," says Mikey. It felt like the beginning again."
"We stepped into the new thing right then, we stepped into that new sound that we had hoped for," says Gerard. "We literally just walked into it. And it was loud, noisy and we knew we better hold onto it. We knew there were no rules anymore--we just had to go do it."
The old record, the one they had tried and tried and tried to make work was pushed to one side.
"Na Na Na changed the game," says Ray. "We had to reassess everything at that point and start afresh. We couldn't ignore the new energy. Music is like a flowing river--you can't swim against it. If you do, you're fucked."
So they stopped everything they were doing and started again. Where once, they had been repressed, they now felt free. Ideas came tumbling out and they knew it was time to start again.
"This album started as a love letter to rock 'n' roll and it turned into a nail bomb," says Gerard. "When we realised we were going to re-record teh album, I turned to Mikey and said just one thing: 'Danger days, here we come again'."
What they did next was to set about making the greatest album of their careers...