My Chemical Romance's 'Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge': Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known facts
and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music and more.
A very happy twenty twenty five to you and yours,
and we are as ever your two mascara smeared mavens
of misanthropy, your theatrical mallpunks of trivia. I'm Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
That was fantastic, and I've Jordan run tug before we
go any further. You forgot one your hot topic heroes.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Oh that's good.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
I mean it's not you.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
It sounds good as yours, but you need the three.
It's the rule of three and Jordan. Today we are
getting to a longtime listener request and visiting those eternal
mal goths from New Jersey, not the Misfits, the other guys,
My Chemical Romance and their sophomore album three Cheers for
Sweet Revenge. Since researching this band that I have not

(01:00):
thought of in any substantial way since Friends of Ours
did a cover set once, I've learned that the Black
Parade is like their Sergeant Pepper's or I literally saw
someone making that comparison, but they are firmly lodged in
my consciousness as in the three Cheers for Sweet Revenge era,
and it's their mainstream breakthrough. So we're going with that,

(01:21):
but more what interests me, you know, on the face
of it, I would like to get out of the
get out of the way. I don't like this band.
I don't like the sounds that they make, I don't
like the words that they write so full stop, but
I think they are fascinating as part of I'm always
interested when subcultures go mainstream. I think that is such

(01:41):
a fascinating example of how American society and American pop
culture operates. And this is one of those bands. And
so it's an interesting way for me to talk about
what I call malgoth emo, you know, as opposed to
like true you know, people what people call true DC
emo or DC hardcore emo or Midwest emo. You know

(02:05):
that really crystallized in the mainstream in and around the
early opts. You know, it's such a fascil umbrella that
like everything from Bright Eyes I'm Wide Awake It's Morning,
to Dashboard Confessional to Taking Back Sunday, Taking Back Sunday,
Thursday y Yeah, and Brand New and MCR are all

(02:26):
lumped under that specific moment. Fallout Boys a band I
really hate.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
I forgot that that they were out of that seat.
Oh my god, I'm so used to that.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
Well, they were Chicago and they're they're another really interesting
example of like my chemical romance, like guys that were
in just like the hardcore punk scene and then we're like, eh,
what what if we decide to you know, make money? Yeah, exactly.
So that is interesting to me, and they are certainly
one of the more unique bands to come out of that.

(02:55):
So many other bands that came up in this we're
not taking the big swing the way that this band was.
And as much as it some of it greats on,
well all of it greats on, I have to applaud them.
Choices were made, and they continue to make choices, including
a lucrative reunion tour this year. So playing the album
we are not talking about as always, our timing remains stellar.

Speaker 3 (03:20):
You know.

Speaker 2 (03:20):
I did go back and relisten to this album though,
And they are good songwriters, I have to I have
to say, and I.

Speaker 1 (03:28):
That's a slightly better compliment than they make choices.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
Well, you know, it's funny because like their early stuff
is so hardcore influenced in like frantic and frashy, and
then they got this producer who will talk about who
was like, you guys need to write choruses, and they
turned out this beautiful Like you know, two of the
I Think Helena and I'm Not Okay are two of

(03:53):
the high water marks of this era of like pop punk.
It's pop punk, I mean, that's what we should call it.
It's popunk songwriting with like the guy shreds occasionally and
that's cool. But he was really watching these videos that
took me back and sat me firmly in that era
of like watching the I'm Not Okay video, watching the
Helena video and really viewing those and what this band

(04:18):
meant to so many people and continues to mean to
so many people. Viewing those that made me look upon
it a little more charitably. Even as I listened to
the album a couple of times and was like, never again,
what about you, I've spoken enough.

Speaker 1 (04:32):
It did not connect with me, which was surprising for
a burgeoning theater kid who exclusively wore sweaters and like
mob adjacent sixties clothes.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
Well, that's what I think. I hate about them, right,
is that I hate musical theater.

Speaker 3 (04:46):
You know, that is true.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
That is true, And so if you're the closer, you
get to that line pretty much. Unless you're David Bowie,
I am not interested. But yeah, I mean I also
what is your what are you? I'm more interested in
hearing as someone who was so opposed at every step
of their life to whatever the mainstream is, and not
in any political way just because you're weird. Yeah, I

(05:08):
was gonna say, yeah, what was your take of this
era of music? I mean, we would have both been
in high school at the same time, Like, did you
remember guys suddenly starting to wear like white belts? Yeah,
and do the stupid Pete Wentz hair swoop.

Speaker 1 (05:23):
I mean, the music itself kind of missed me, but
the actual style I liked well for two reasons. One,
a lot of the girls I liked like this music,
so that all Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
I mean, yes, dude, I mean the girl who I
was in love with through high school was like my
entryway to a lot of these bands with bands that
I actually kind of still like, like Minus the Bear
and Cursive. But you know, it's such a big tent.
That's what's so crazy about it because it would be
like bright eyes and then cursive, which doesn't make any
sense anyway. Sorry, I'm rambling, continue, I keep cutting you off.

Speaker 1 (05:57):
The style was kind of cool to me because again
I wanted it to be nineteen sixty five, and so
I saw the really tight pants and the wide belts
and the kind of vaguely beatly swoops and bands with guitars.
I mean, we were talking about this in a Strokes episode.
There were too many of those in the huge, mega mainstream.

Speaker 2 (06:16):
Dude, I would argue this is the last time rock
music had any significant influence on anything in the mainstream,
other than as a nostalgia act or as an increasingly
defanged signifier of like quote indie rock.

Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yeah, my first concerts were going to these shows actually
Safe Saves the Day, taking Back Sunday out Fine Trio.

Speaker 3 (06:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
I actually went and would wear my you know, super
super super thin like buttoned up like army sergeant's jacket
and hell like really like salvation army crushed velvet super
thin pants and Chelsea blasts. I mean, wildly dissimilar to
what I wear now or.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
Like what they started wearing around the around when they
broke through and we're wearing like marching band uniforms.

Speaker 3 (07:03):
Yeah. And also I have a marching band jacket.

Speaker 1 (07:05):
Yeah yeah, I mean, and I was thinking I was
doing like Jimmy Hendrix on Carnabie Street, but all my
friends were wearing similar things and it was.

Speaker 3 (07:13):
You know, in honor of people like my chemical romance. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:16):
So I liked everything about it except for the music,
which yeah, I mean, no offense. I was privately listening
to like The Who and the Kinks and stuff at home,
probably people that I would imagine on some level were
inspirations to these people.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
No, and that's the thing that I think is so interesting.
I mean, we'll talk about it. But like that thin pants,
thin cardigan thing, to my mind comes from Ghee a
Gee Piccioto, Rights of Spring and Fugazi, because if you
watch the one Fugazzi documentary, instrument like he is wearing
what you would consider the emo archetype, which is like

(07:53):
thick glasses. He's rail thin. Obviously, it just wears like
a cardigan or.

Speaker 1 (07:58):
Like a great single breast suit buttons all the way
up to your sternum.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
Oh it looks so cool, but yeah, I don't know,
it's uh. It is interesting, and I'm looking forward to
diving into some of the differences of the subcultures, so
you know, without further ado, uh, from the single step
of separation that exists between my Chemical Romance and famed
pharma bro Martin Screlly, to an all time horrifying rock

(08:27):
band frontman injury that Gerard Way suffered as in the
band's early days, to the place that MCR held in
the brief moment when emo, with all of its problematic
connotations and ill fitting descriptors, was the dominant form of
rock and roll on America's airwaves. Here's everything that you
didn't know about My Chemical Romances. Three cheers for Sweet Revenge.

Speaker 1 (08:55):
One quick thing before we dive in, and it's really
one of the only musical points I'll make this episode,
because I don't a lot to say about the music
I'm thinking of specifically, this band saves the day, but
I feel like I encountered this a lot. In like
the Taking Back Sunday Alkaline trio mal goth Emo contingent,
A lot of those songs seem to have chord changes

(09:18):
and melodies that seemed very I don't know if it
was like a Weezer thing or what but seemed very
like almost like ice cream chord fifties change. It's like,
do you know the song driving in the Dark by Saves.

Speaker 2 (09:28):
The Day No I Missed Saves the Day?

Speaker 3 (09:30):
It sounds like a fifties pop song.

Speaker 2 (09:33):
You know, it wouldn't surprise me. I do think some
of the signifiers from this are coming from pre mid
eighties hardcore. Like Misfits are interesting because they are like,
even though they started in like seventy eight like right
on the ground floor of punk. You know, they kind
of straddle that first wave and then you know, mid
eighties hardcore because they started to jack up their tempos

(09:55):
and get really out there. But you know, never forget that,
like half of their song fifty fifty scorts progressions, right. So,
like four bands, especially from the East Coast, especially from
New Jersey, where half of their taking influence from a
band that was writing in you know, fifties modes and
half of their choruses were a variation on the phrase
whoaoo or whoa oh, so yeah, I think that comes through.

(10:19):
But Weezer's fascinating because I don't think Weezer, you know,
even though being kind of lumped in because of some
of the similar esthetics, you know, Weezer's like Rivers's early
stuff was like he was thinking of like seventies guitar shred.
He was not thinking of he.

Speaker 3 (10:34):
Loved kids all.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yeah, exactly anyway, So we'll get to that in a second.
But before I get to that, did you know that
we have nine to eleven to thank for my chemical romance?
And that is a value free question.

Speaker 3 (10:49):
I didn't. I didn't know.

Speaker 1 (10:50):
It's true for all of my nine to eleven the Arcana, Yeah, you.

Speaker 2 (10:55):
Can add this one now. The band's frontman, Gerard Way,
was an introverted kid growing up in Belleville, New Jersey,
which was apparently something of a shoal. He told Wece
in twenty fifteen that I actually wasn't social at all.
I was just hanging out in the dark making comics.
I grew up without sunlight. We lived in a basement,
and there was this little sliver of sunlight that would
wake me up, like just a crack, and I would

(11:17):
reach to it. Sometimes. He's a quote machine and also unbearable,
So I want to get that out of the way first.
But yeah, I mean, apparently they just weren't out allowed
outside that much because it was genuinely dangerous in that
part of Jersey at the time. The way brothers Gerard
lead singer, writer and bassist Mikey a huge influence on
their lives was their maternal grandmother, Elena, and as anyone

(11:40):
casually familiar with the band and their lore, she was
a huge influence on them. She pushed Gerard to audition
for his first musical, where he played Peter Pan. She
taught him to sing paint, bought him his first guitar.
She bought the band their first tour van Wow. But
his mom, Donna, was a pair also somewhat of a goth.

(12:02):
She was a hairdresser, and she loved horror movies and
once at one point filled an entire room in their
house with Victorian dolls.

Speaker 1 (12:09):
Friend of the Pod Ali would love that, Yes true,
her book Broken Dolls.

Speaker 3 (12:13):
Her manuscript rather is now in the hands.

Speaker 2 (12:15):
Of Stephen King. I'd like to call him friend of
the Pod Stephen King. Yes, yeah, yeah. Anyway, because of
the crime in general indoors kids activities like comics and music,
Girard described himself thusly to Kerrang at one point, picture
of fat Kid.

Speaker 3 (12:34):
Okay, wait, hang on Okay, God.

Speaker 2 (12:38):
I think plumped up pretty good, working at a comic
book store and eating cheeseburgers all the time. On my
first day in high school, I sat all alone at lunchtime.
It was the classic story, the weird kid in the
army jacket, horror movie t shirt and long black hair.
I was more interested in music and being creative. People
were never really mean to me. They just mostly left
me alone. I think, really I just wanted to be alone. Anyway.

(13:03):
I'm trying not to pile on too much because I
know how much people love this band. Way has a
wonderful set of New Jersey bona fides. His first concert
was Bruce Springsteen, and he was held up at gunpoint
at the age of fifteen by a mugger wielding a
three fifty seven magnum, which for mugging is a little
like bringing an elephant gun to take potshots at rats
down by the dump. That's a Pennsylvania.

Speaker 3 (13:26):
Analogy if I've ever heard one.

Speaker 2 (13:29):
There's early. There's a footage of him on this Sally
Jesse Raphael Show in nineteen ninety three, where he is
defending a comic book company from making a comic book
about Jeffrey Dahmer and pinning the blame on the media,
which is so hilarious and so on point for him.
He was interested in music, but Gerard's first musical experiences

(13:50):
didn't go particularly well. He was kicked out of one
group that included future My Chemical Romance guitarist Ray Toro
for being too bad at the guitar.

Speaker 3 (13:57):
Were you in a band of high school, like a band,
the garage band?

Speaker 2 (14:01):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (14:01):
Cool, I didn't know that. What'd you play base?

Speaker 2 (14:04):
I play bass? Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah we weren't very good.

Speaker 1 (14:08):
Yeah we weren't either Waye decided to pursue art rather
than music of first graduating from the.

Speaker 3 (14:13):
School of Visual Arts in New York, and within.

Speaker 1 (14:15):
A short time landed an internship at Cartoon Network, where
he pitched the pilot about Check's notes, a superhero Scandinavian
monkey who wants to spread the goodness of breakfast to
the world.

Speaker 3 (14:30):
Is a script of this out there? I think it
got made, dude, what oh is it on like Vimeo
or something?

Speaker 2 (14:38):
I mean, you can see it online. It's called the
Breakfast Monkey. Apparently Cartoon Network turned it. Supposedly in the lore,
Cartoon Network turned it down because they were like, we
already have aquatine hunger for it.

Speaker 3 (14:50):
Okay, that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (14:51):
Actually, yeah, Gerard.

Speaker 1 (14:52):
Way was commuting into New York on the morning of
nine to eleven for his job when.

Speaker 3 (14:58):
You know, you know, yeah, you know yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
Way has spoken at length about what this meant to him,
this meaning nine to eleven, telling Noisy in twenty thirteen.
I did see some of the buildings go down from
i'd say fairly close. It was like being in a
science fiction film or some kind of disaster film. It
was exactly that kind of feeling. You didn't believe it.
You felt like you were in Independence Day. It made

(15:25):
no sense. Your brain couldn't process it. There was about
three or four hundred people around me, and I was
right at the edge. All these people behind me, they
all had friends and family in those buildings.

Speaker 3 (15:36):
I didn't.

Speaker 1 (15:37):
So when that first building went it was like an
a bomb went off. It was like just this emotion,
and it made you nauseous. As you put more succinctly
to spin in the band's two thousand and five cover story,
something just clicked in my head that morning. I literally
said to myself, Art, I've got to get out of
the basement.

Speaker 3 (15:55):
I've got to see the world.

Speaker 1 (15:56):
I've got to make a difference, a very beautiful, you
full sense of it. The very first my Chemical Romance song,
Skylines and Turnstiles, was written as a direct response to
this moment.

Speaker 2 (16:07):
Yeah. I mean, he's also talked about, you know, he
brought up the mugging thing to Rolling Stone at one point,
but he was like, you know, I just still believe
in like the world and just seeing everything after how
people came together in the spirit after nine to eleven, Like,
I still believe that that's the best of humanity as possible.
And I was like, that's really, you know, very endearing.

Speaker 1 (16:26):
That's funny because my main memory of the aftermath of
nine to eleven was like kind of scary jingoism.

Speaker 2 (16:32):
Yes exactly, especially in central Pennsylvania. For me, it was
just like terrifying. Kill the bastards, yeah exactly. We'll put
a boot in your ass.

Speaker 3 (16:41):
Yeah. Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:42):
Another of ways inspirations to form MCR was a show
by quote unquote Emo Contemporaries Thursday in New Jersey. Oh yeah,
And this will now segue us into a sidebar on
the thriving early aughts music scene in New Jersey at
that time. New Jersey has always had a number of
contributions to punk music in general, from the Misfits to

(17:05):
an Adrenaline OD in the late seventies and early eighties,
to a second wave that included bands like the Bouncing
Souls and Lifetime in the late eighties early nineties. Bouncing
Souls are Great, Lifetime's Great Lifetimes sophomore album is one
of my favorite album titles of all time, which is
simply thanks Bastards. Obviously Misfits rule, I don't know Adrenaline OD,

(17:28):
but this was roughly contemporaneous though, this Jersey pop punk
sort of thing with the now agreed upon timeline of
the evolution of what would come to be called emo.
The funniest thing about emo is that everyone hates being
called Emo. Yes, it is also just a deeply useless

(17:50):
label for so many of these bands, because, as we
mentioned earlier, everything that was encompassed under that label just
kind of meant like maybe you had eyeliner and war
like two small pants and T shirts, but it picked
out everything from guys who were super into like DC hardcore,
and then my Chemical Romance who were like theater kids,

(18:12):
but they agreed upon. Big Bang of Emo is the
second wave of DC hardcore punk in the mid to
late eighties. Two guys Ian McKay, who is in Minor Threat.
He's like Henry Rollins as far as a godhead of
punk music today. He is incredited with inventing the term
straight edge, and his band Minor Threat was like one

(18:33):
of the forefathers of hardcore. And Gee Picchioto. That name
is not fake, but man, Gee's so good. He is
like one of the most feral front people I have
ever seen. If you've seen the famous clip of a
dude who looks like an assemblage of toothpicks held together
with old rubber bands like jumping up and grabbing a

(18:56):
baseball hoop and forcing his feet up into it upside
down and then starting to sing a song while dangling
upside down, that's Gee and Fugazi. His band was called
Rights of Spring, and from Minor Threat, Ian McKay went
on to form a band called Embrace. Embraces. Really, I
like Embrace a lot. It's kind of like, is him

(19:18):
doing the shouting stuff because he's not that strong of
a singer, But it's about emotions and the rest of
the band kind of sounds like The Smiths if they
were like a little bit more into punk and Ghee
at the time was in a band called Rights of Spring.
Rights of Spring have become one of the most legendary
bands ever based off the strength of I Kid You

(19:43):
Not fourteen shows total and one record. They were this
just insanely emotional band that poured so much stuff into
their performances, like people would supposedly break down in tears
like after watching them and so gay and Ean though
are are important because they went on to collaborate in Fugazi,

(20:06):
which is confusingly not an emo band as you would think,
but is generally lumped into post hardcore, which is its
own weird thing that can also kind of be sort
of considered emo at points, and that was formed with
drummer Brendan Canty, who was in Rites of Spring Fugazz.
He's one of the greatest fans of all time. Right
to Spring, These is actually pretty crazy's it seems like

(20:29):
it's almost like tame by what has come after, but
like imagining seeing that after seeing like minor Threat and
just being like this man is like screaming and passing
out on stage and like doing all this emotional blood letting,
Like I understand how it was so important to people
at the time, and people just called it emotional hardcore

(20:49):
because this was coming out of the DC hardcore scene,
which by like people still play what they call DC
hardcore as like a codified subgenre, you know. So the
DC hardcore scene is so important in the history of
punk in the United States, and once people started just
singing about their feelings and not playing everything at two
hundred and forty bpm, people immediately labeled it emotional hardcore,

(21:12):
which got shortened to emo core and then eventually just emo.

Speaker 3 (21:16):
That's so stupid. It's just a terrible name.

Speaker 2 (21:19):
Emotion and everyone and everyone everyone hated it. Everyone hated it.
Ian MacKaye hated it, like nobody wanted to be called that.
But it was fascinating because this was you know, as
these things kind of happened, there were a few bands
popping up like across the country that sort of all
in retrospect, could be seen as progenitors of what this

(21:40):
would become when had broke into the mainstream. Jawbreaker out
of San Francisco is very famous because they were one
of the first bands to have like really deeply introspective,
almost poetic lyrics with varying levels of like chainsaw guitar punk,
and they almost they almost broke really big. They were
on tour with Nirvana at one point and then just

(22:02):
sort of got mishandled in the big grunge money rush
and made like one major label album that all their
fans from the earlier phase hate and didn't catch on
in a big way. So they fell into that classic thing.
But also around that time there was Sunny Day real
Estate that started in Seattle. I am fairly certain that
the current Foo Fighters bass player started out in Sunny

(22:25):
Day real Estate. Yes, So that's how it shows how
close heat that band was to the Seattle scene that
he knew Dave Grohl from Nirvana, and then the Midwest
in between those the two coasts of the countries, the
Midwest was creating what is now a similarly distinct style
of emo that people call Midwest Emo. And you can

(22:46):
recognize that because it's a lot of math rocky like
tweakly guitar stuff. There's a lot of guitar capos up
around five, a lot of tapping riffs, a lot of
really complex stuff, and then the worst singing you've ever
heard in your life kicks in ah. But those are
bands like capt'n Jazz, Braid Mineral, Jimmy Eat, World, The
Get Up Kids, Promise Ring, and of course American Football,

(23:09):
who have become a meme recently thanks to their or recently,
I don't know, five years ago thanks to their song
never meant. Somebody has synced it over school of rock footage.
Here it was a bunch of TikTok stuff. I think
that people started just syncing it to different stuff.

Speaker 1 (23:23):
I think the guitarists in my high school band would
like play this over and over at practice, but I
don't recognize it otherwise.

Speaker 2 (23:30):
Now, I guess it started picking up as a meme
in like two thousand and fifteen, like people made us
sink of it with Super Mario sixty four sounds yeah. Anyway,
American Football I like them, But I found this quote
from Gerardway about the whole Emo thing. Basically, emo's never
been accurate to describe us. Emo bands were being booked

(23:52):
while we were touring with Christian metal bands because no
one would book us on tours. I think Emo is
in garbage. It's bull I think that there's bands who
in four dunally we get lumped in with that are
considered emo, and by default that starts to make us emo.
So on. On the East Coast, by the time intern
Gerard Way was watching nine to eleven in real time,
there was a thriving scene in New Jersey and Long

(24:12):
Island of bands playing loosely this style of music census fail,
Thursday Saves the Day, taking back Sunday brand new, and
of these bands, it was Thursday. They would have the
most direct impact on My Chemical Romance thanks to lead
singer Jeff Rickley, who had a house in New Brunswick
and would throw shows in the basement and that place,

(24:32):
and those shows had roughly the same I don't know,
roughly had the kind of impact that the DC hardcore
scene had. And Jeff Rickley, who seems by all accounts
to be a lovely man, never meant to start this thing,
but people talk about this house that he had like
it was CBGB's. I think Thursday started in ninety seven,

(24:53):
but by two thousand and five, after My Chemical Romance
a lot of the other bands broke through. The New
York Times was reporting backwards asking him and these other
bands about the new Brunswick scene, and so in two
thousand and five he Rick Jefferick told the paper we
just wanted to have a place for people in the
area to come see music. It wasn't the most original idea,

(25:13):
but I had house in New Brunswick I was renting
with a basement, and it just grew out of that.
It was a little sanctuary of a place. So many
kids would show up that we'd open the storm windows
so they could hear. One time we flagged down an
ice cream truck for three hundred kids. Alex Savedra, who
founded Eyeball Records, which was the first label to sign
Thursday and My Chemical Romance, among many others, added you

(25:34):
could fit maybe one hundred people in there, and then
you'd have kids in the driveway, in the backyard, kids
with their ears pressed against the windows trying to listen.
It was the sweatiest, smelliest thing, but it was incredible.
Gerard Way remembered in this co interview he did with
Jeff Rickley and Vice. We'd run into these guys at
a show, like another band's show, which is how you'd
always meet each other and think, actually, they're pretty cool.

(25:55):
I remember that benefit show where the lineup was Saves
the Day, taking back Sunday and Thursday, and you could
feel everything starting to gel.

Speaker 1 (26:01):
Well, those were like the Big Three, at least in
my high school. Maybe maybe recursive, maybe with bright eyes.

Speaker 2 (26:07):
Yeah, and especially on that. I mean, the whole Long
Island scene is so East Jersey and Long Island are
really linked as far as this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 (26:13):
Meanwhile, since nine to eleven, Way had coraled his younger
brother Mikey to play bass along with djummer Matt Pellisier
and guitarist Ray Toro. They quickly hit the same dive
bar and diy venu circuit the rest of their peers had.
After picking the name My Chemical Romance from Irving Welsh's
Ecstasy Three Tales of Chemical Romance, which Mikey Way spotted

(26:36):
in a Barnes and Noble he was working at, they
cut a number of demos and Pelessier's attic and then
a studio in the basement to capture both hives of
the experience before catching Rickley's eye. Gerard Way recalled seeing
Jeff Rickley for the first time in kerm kny kern
kurermy not kermey. It's not okay, So it's not with

(26:57):
Miss Picky calls Kermit the frog, it's krem as if.

Speaker 2 (27:00):
Kiarney stop putting an eminent with the.

Speaker 1 (27:02):
R in the end, it looks like an m alright,
this is folks. This is my first episode taped after
I turned thirty seven. You're about to witness me making
the fart bigger for the first time on my computer.

Speaker 3 (27:16):
This is a historic moment in my life. Okay, isn't that?

Speaker 1 (27:19):
And you are right, it is Kearney, just a fair
just I'm just seeing it is kier me a fairly
common word. Gerard waivercalled seeing Jeff Rickley, which is a
name I, for some reason cannot pronounce. For the first
time in Kiarney, New Jersey, in a joint interview for Vice.
You were real skinny, and you look like you were dying,

(27:41):
and you were so pale with this jet black hair.

Speaker 3 (27:43):
It looked like the son was killing him.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
Long pause.

Speaker 3 (27:47):
And I thought he was super cool. That was the look.

Speaker 2 (27:50):
It was, yeah, dude, less cool about this was for
me in Central Pennsylvania was that like a lot of
the guys of these local bands were in college, and
a lot of the kids go into shows were teenage girls.

Speaker 3 (28:05):
Correct. That is correct.

Speaker 1 (28:07):
Way played Rickley a nascent version of the My Chemical
Remants song Vampires Will Never Hurt You, which both admit
was quote horrible at the time. Rickley then came to
a practice and was so distracted by the nascent band's
current drummer's lack of aptitude that he didn't remember any songs.

Speaker 3 (28:24):
But he was struck by Waye's concept and.

Speaker 1 (28:26):
Vision for the band, and he agreed to produce a
record for them. Way described his vision succinctly in Tom
Bryant's book on My Chemical Romance, Not the Life it seems.
I wanted it to be more than a band, he said.
It was supposed to be this really intense art project.
Jimmy Sounds.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
To add to that, I will say that this band
had a very accelerated route to stardom that did not
seem fast enough for them. They had this big chip
on their shoulder because they toured really hard for a
year year and like a half before they signed with

(29:03):
Warner Brothers. So I find a lot of their like
it was us against the world like attitude really really grating,
Like you got someone to produce a record for you
within three months of becoming a band, and then fully
thirteen months after that, you were signed to warners like
cry Me a Fin River. Anyway, the band had a

(29:27):
full band. They had a full band demo of Vampires
Will Never Hurt You from the basement sessions that ultimately
just ended up being on their debut, which is called
I Brought You My Bullets You Brought Me Your Love
because of how intense the take was. But this crystallized
their need for another guitarist. Soon to be second guitarist,
Frankie Arrow told Krang I was hanging out why they

(29:48):
recorded the demo of Vampires Will Never Hurt You, and
I got really really high. Ray Toro, the other guitarist,
had laid down fourteen guitar parts, and somebody said, if
you add another guitarist, you could play live. Someone replied,
the only guy we've considered is too high to get
off the couch. That was the first time I thought

(30:08):
I might play in my favorite band. It scared the
shit out of me. Ero apparently joined while they were
recording their debut. He would run from the studio outside
to the van to like write and record parts and
then run back in to track them, which I thought
was really cute. They recorded this album again three months
after they formed, and you know, it kind of shows

(30:30):
their time in the studio was somewhat fraught. Gerardway had
a dental abscess and was dulling that pain with vicodin,
and Jeff Rickley quickly deduced that this was negatively impacting
his vocal performance. So, as Rickley recalled, I took the
vicodin away from him and started eating them while I
was making the records. And then there's this from label
co founder Alex Savedra, And this is in Dan Ozzy's

(30:53):
great book about sort of the mainstreamification of all these
subgenres punk, grunge, EMAI. It's called Sellout. Wade did finally
have a procedure to get that obsess addressed, but his
post procedure swelling was getting in the way of his vocals,
so Alex Savedra took matters into his own hands. I
punched Gerard in the face, he said, I thought I

(31:14):
knocked him out. At first, it shocked the out of him.
In hindsight, it was very jockish, but at the time
it made sense. I think the masochist in him really
enjoyed it. It definitely hurt but it amped him up.
It was a different kind of pain. He slaid that
vocal take right after and while before we get off
Jeff Erickley, I have to note that Martin Screlly, the

(31:36):
pharma bro thing that I teased earlier was that Screlly
was an angel investor in Jeff Rickley's band. Martin Screlley
was the weasel faced little kid who became a sort
of national villain when it was revealed that he'd made
so much of his money like jacking up various pharmaceutical
met medicine and then became like a He bought like

(31:58):
the million dollar Wu Tang album. And apparently he's also
a fan of Northeast Emo because he was an angel
investor in Jeff Rickley's record label that he found in
and when Jeff Rickley found out, he severed all ties
and I believe the label went under. And here's just
a fun back and forth from that Vice interview. Girod
Way pills were really a thing back then. I mean

(32:19):
they're a thing now, but I remember them being the
thing that was always passed around. It felt like everyone
was always trying to figure out how to get vicd in.
Jeff Rickley it did feel like that, mostly because that
was what I was trying to do all the time.
Drummer Matt Pelsier also refused to record to a click
track Rookie move, making overdubs difficult. Ray Torro later told

(32:41):
Kerrang of the album, you can hear the nervousness and excitement.
Every song speeds up, which gives them a lot of character.
I like the rawness, especially in the vocals. It sounds
very true.

Speaker 3 (32:52):
Are you pro anti click track? You know?

Speaker 2 (32:55):
I understands people argument against it, but also grow up. Uh,
you know, if you want to be a professional, it's
like it's like turning off spell checker and like sending
and writing. You know, it's just just it's a thing.
You want to be a professional. You want to make good.
You want to make it easy in the studio. On
the rest of your bandmates who have to play to

(33:17):
your dog drumming, play it with a click, okay, especially
with like when you're making guitar music, where's people are
going to be doing so many overdubs. If you know,
we have to deal with your speeding up by ten
clicks over a performance. That's a pain in the ass,
So suck it up. And play it a damn click
you children.

Speaker 1 (33:38):
That was Alex Hagel for click Tracks.

Speaker 2 (33:43):
The metronome I was. I was talking about this online
when I was when I was in this phase of
my life, when I was reading Henry Rawlins Spoken Word
and you know, affecting a really intense middle distance stare.
One of his things was talking about weightlifting, and he
was like, you know, if you're really into weightlifting.

Speaker 3 (34:03):
And I am.

Speaker 2 (34:05):
That's not a Henry Rollins impression, by the way, but
I can't do one. But he's like, if you're really
into weightlifting, you know you have to stop thinking of
the bar as your enemy. The bar is not your enemy.
The bar is your friend. It's there to help you
grow stronger. And that's what a click track is. The
click track is not something to fight against. It's there
to help you and make you better.

Speaker 3 (34:25):
I like that. I like that.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with
more too much information after these messages.

Speaker 1 (34:45):
Meanwhile, Dridway's lyrical and conceptual bent had already revealed itself.

Speaker 3 (34:50):
The album title itself remind us what that is.

Speaker 2 (34:53):
I brought you my bullets, you brought me your love
versus the other way around. I brought you your bullets.

Speaker 3 (34:58):
You brought you my bullets. You brought me.

Speaker 2 (35:00):
I brought you my bullets.

Speaker 3 (35:01):
You brought me your love. Bullets and love were exchanged.

Speaker 1 (35:06):
The album title itself came from a short story Jardway
had written in high school about Prohibition eraic gangster murders
in Chicago.

Speaker 2 (35:13):
I have to assume it's about the same Valentine's same aspect, right, yeah,
yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:19):
The song wan Rouville is a nod to your beloved
Pittsburgh area, town where George A. Romero filmed the first
two Neither Living Dead films, and where friend of the
Pond George Clinton and his band funked or possibly Parliament
I forget which. We're tripping on acid when they stumbled

(35:40):
upon the shoot for Neither Living Dead and thought that
jombies were presumably out to kill.

Speaker 2 (35:46):
Them, just recoiled.

Speaker 3 (35:48):
Yes, I love that anyway.

Speaker 1 (35:50):
The song wan Rouville supposedly sets up the plot to
the band's follow up record, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge,
with the tale of two Bonnie and Clyde ask loves,
as was the tradition of the time. My Chemical Romance
released three singles, Vampires Will Never hurt you, honey, this
mirror isn't big enough for the two of us.

Speaker 3 (36:09):
And head first for Halos.

Speaker 1 (36:11):
These were released as free downloads on Pure Volume, Wow, TBT,
and MySpace, which helped their fan base grow as they
continued an intense live schedule. Geard Way later said that
the only goal of the debut album was to launch them.

Speaker 3 (36:26):
As a touring concern.

Speaker 1 (36:27):
But these singles did better in the UK than they
did the United States, which makes sense because that would
have been around the time that Darkness was huge, right,
Oh yeah, like Theater Kid, Mescara Energy. It makes sense.

Speaker 2 (36:38):
I just want to point out, Oh sorry, let me
let you finish this graph. Finish this graph.

Speaker 1 (36:42):
This was, as you mentioned, part of the chorus for
a lot of American bands at that time doing better
in the UK, bands like the Strokes.

Speaker 3 (36:50):
And that's the only band you listed.

Speaker 2 (36:53):
In Pool probably oh.

Speaker 3 (36:54):
Yeah, Interpool, that's fine.

Speaker 2 (36:57):
And the rest.

Speaker 1 (36:58):
Yes, the British were very early adopters to the my
chemical romance phenomena can we say phenomena?

Speaker 2 (37:05):
And the Used apparently, which is a band I've also
not thought about in decades, But the Brits loved The Used.
I would also like to by virtue of living in
the Bay Area. Point out that AFI walked, so My
Chemical Romance could run interesting. And I think the Gerard

(37:26):
Way knows this because he's not mentioned them as an influence.
But AFI started like a solid ten years before them,
and their big commercial breakthrough seing the Sorrow that Girls
Not Gray was off of and where Davy Havot came
out looking like sex on toast, that came out like

(37:48):
a full year before My Chemical Romance started recording Three
Cheers for Sweet Revenge, by the way, So you know,
just want to give shouts to AFI, who are a
good band, and we're doing this like wildly theater. I mean,
Davey Havoc played the main character of American Idiot on

(38:10):
Broadway like he was a theater kid, and he was
doing this whole eyeliner misfits ripoff stuff when Gerard Way
was still at SBA. So I just want to point
that out because I think Girard knows that and doesn't
talk about it anyway. The band's live shows were notably
insane around this time. They were all self medicating to

(38:31):
various degrees for everything from stage fright to the usual
just depressed twenty something guy Mikey Way and Gerard would
both end up in rehab decades later. Mikey told Korrang
that at their very first show, he drank seven beers
in five minutes, which has to be some kind of
a record. With their increased touring, Girard's intake also increased.
Alcohol was a coping tool. He told Kerrang. There were

(38:54):
just so many hours to kill and the music was
so intense. It was about a lot of dark, up things,
and I had to live through them every time we played.
That's why I was drinking. The band for a while
had a page on their website that logged their injuries
as like fake medical logs. H and Jerrar's most gruesome
came when Frank Guierro kicked him in the butt on stage,
which accidentally propelled Gerard Way face first into a fan

(39:18):
and the resulting headbut collision. Mike Sandwich severed his frenulum,
which is that skinny bit of tissue that connects your
upper lip to your gums, and so you can see
in interviews that he like kind of talks out of
the side of his mouth, which I think he developed
as a way to compensate for that. So that's disgusting,

(39:39):
but props to them.

Speaker 3 (39:40):
I'm going to need a minute.

Speaker 2 (39:41):
Oh it's gross.

Speaker 3 (39:43):
Has it affected his singing and his diction when he sings?

Speaker 2 (39:46):
I don't you know. I don't know. I don't think
he's talked. He's talked about it a little bit, but
I don't know. Let me search. I've searched a lot
of weird things. I just searched Gerard Way monkey, so
let me now search Gerard Way frenulum from the My
Chemical Romance sub sub reddit.

Speaker 1 (40:03):
Text one if you think the injury to Groadway's friendulum
affects his singing indiction, and text two if you think
it does not.

Speaker 2 (40:12):
I don't know. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe you get it. Yeah, whatever,
I spent too much time thinking about that.

Speaker 1 (40:18):
My Chemical Romance toured relentlessly after Bullets came out. Way said,
we played with Christian bands, metal bands, hardcore bands, indie bands, anyone.
Only five or ten people were there to see us,
but they were our people, and they'd be noisy too.
I once watched someone clock a kid who'd been having
a go at us in the face.

Speaker 3 (40:37):
It was awesome having a go at us. It's very
English that.

Speaker 2 (40:40):
Is very brave. What an affectation for a kid from
North Jersey. It's like saying I was in hospital, and
you know I went to hospital shortly after I couldn't
for the life of me stop them from getting into
a row.

Speaker 3 (40:52):
Gave me a fright and really messed up my holiday.

Speaker 2 (40:57):
Sorry. Sorry, listeners like the listeners like the span of
his listener request. I think part of liking this band
is admitting to the cringe though. I hope, I hope
you all have a good sense of humor about it.

Speaker 1 (41:08):
We had a friend of the pod comment on the
Weezer episode saying that you like it's very cute all
Heigel's going out of his way to try to spare
Weezer fans feelings, and we Weezer fans are actually the
most intense when it comes to shreshing Weezer. Yeah, thanks
to the growing buzz for my chemical romance, they signed
with Warner brother subsidiary Reprise Records, founded by Freaks Sinatra.

Speaker 3 (41:30):
I want to.

Speaker 2 (41:31):
Add, yeah, whatever's.

Speaker 3 (41:33):
Just a funny combination.

Speaker 2 (41:34):
It is. Yeah, it's true. Also in New Jersey.

Speaker 3 (41:36):
Icon oh true true true true.

Speaker 2 (41:39):
And in the grand tradition of emo guys into young girls.

Speaker 1 (41:44):
Oh, we have the exact day they signed August thirty first,
two thousand and three. What do you think you were
doing in August twenty first, two thousand and three to start.

Speaker 3 (41:53):
Sophomore high school?

Speaker 2 (41:54):
I was twelve?

Speaker 3 (41:56):
No, you weren't.

Speaker 2 (41:57):
No, you're right, No I wasn't. I was. Oh God,
I was.

Speaker 3 (42:01):
You're about to turn sixteen?

Speaker 2 (42:02):
You're about turned sixteen?

Speaker 3 (42:05):
Summer I was sixteen, some we were fifteen.

Speaker 1 (42:08):
It was somewhere between freshman and sophomore year of our
high school.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
In nothing. I think, probably playing a lot of tetris.

Speaker 1 (42:17):
Oh, this is the summer that I was in love
with like the original emo girl brush I had and
her screen name. Our relationship consisted almost like solely of
talking on Aim late at night and her Instagram is what.

Speaker 2 (42:29):
I was doing for sure, actually was having a lot
of AIM conversations.

Speaker 1 (42:33):
And her screen name was I think it was I
think it was a taken back Sunday lyric. It was
a certain tragedy and a series of numbers.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
Oh did you have the did you know the people
who put the X at the beginning of theirs? Like
X a certain tragedy? X? Was that just a central
Pennsylvania thing.

Speaker 1 (42:49):
No, I think she had numbers. I think I think
she just yeah, I don't know. That was that because
it had been taken and they needed the I.

Speaker 2 (42:56):
Meanly that a straight edge It's definitely that or a
straight edge thing. I mean because like in Central Pa,
there was like a really there was it wasn't is
like a pretty strong legitimate hardcore scene, and that splinters
in so many directions, but like you know, there was
there were definitely a lot of kids who are like

(43:16):
did the exes at shows and everything.

Speaker 1 (43:19):
Well, as you mentioned earlier, My Chemical Romance signed to
Warner Brothers approximately thirteen months after their first album was released,
which is hey, hell of a trajectory.

Speaker 2 (43:31):
What a time to be alive.

Speaker 1 (43:32):
Part of the press announcement of their signing included the
phrase this is an evolution and you could be part
of the change, Oh my god, or stuck eating your
own on a quest for fire.

Speaker 3 (43:44):
Pick that apart for.

Speaker 2 (43:45):
Me, I mean, like I said, quote Machine, Yeah, but
a big talker.

Speaker 3 (43:52):
Are they big enough to be talking this way? No?

Speaker 2 (43:55):
But that's kind of always the appeal. And that's what's
so interesting about him is talking about like getting shammered
so that he could just be this character on stage,
like and starting to even like at some points in
the depths of his like insane drinking a bottle of
vodka a day on tour, being like, now I have
to become Gerard, you know. And that's I mean, that's

(44:17):
that's part of what goes into why I find this
band fascinating. Is that whole bit of like, you know,
traditionally when you think of like hardcore and punk, you know,
this whole idea of like, oh well, we just roll
up on stage and our our normal clothes and like
we just you know, do it, and this it's authenticity
blah blah blah blah. But like this band consciously, because
he was a theater kid, was like, no, I have

(44:39):
a separate role as this front man. But deep down
I am like a fat kid who lived in the
basement and was obsessed with comics and dungeons and dragons.
And that's cool. I would like to add that at
the time I was developing, you know, burgeoning body dysmorphia, Uh,
it was a breath of fresh air to see a

(44:59):
full fit, gured frontman who promptly got unhealthily skinny when
he you know, detoxed. But yeah, man, compared to like
those Twigs in like Blood Brothers and all of these
other bands, it's just nice to see. Anyway, I thought

(45:20):
it was Jackie Chan that did it too, Jackie Chan,
Bruce Lee van Am, Yeah, just a steady diet of
action films.

Speaker 1 (45:27):
I didn't realize that it was also hardcore front man also, No, I.

Speaker 2 (45:31):
Mean just but like everyone was like deathly skinny at
that time. That was just like how men looked. I'll
get into this later. In two thousand and five, Gerard
told kerrang And what is un unspeakably funny quote to me,
I've been obsessed with revenge ever since I heard the
Black Flag song. Revenge just so funny to me. Like

(45:57):
I've been obsessed with rainbows ever since I heard the
Judy Arland song Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

Speaker 3 (46:03):
Okay, mates, I heard the Radiohead album in Rainbows.

Speaker 2 (46:06):
Yeah, did you not know of revenge as a concept before?

Speaker 1 (46:11):
Anyway, I've been obsessed with the concept of being happy
ever since I heard for a Williams song Happy. I've
been obsessed with being heart ever since I heard Rams
Everybody Hurts.

Speaker 2 (46:23):
I've been obsessed with destroying ever since I heard the
kiss song Destroyer and also strutting. Ever since I heard
the kiss song Strutter anyway, I've been sorry.

Speaker 3 (46:35):
Dudes who look like ladies ever since I heard the
Arismi songs.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
I've been obsessed with young dudes ever since I heard
All the Young Dudes by Mata Hoopl featuring David Bowie. Okay,
I'm calling it into that bit. Choose the best ones
in the edit. So this band of young white men
who'd recorded a debut record three months after forming and
signed with a major label less than a year after that,

(47:00):
decided to make their Persecution the theme of their sophomore record.
As Gerard Way went on to explain, revenge started to
mean something to this band. We thought we could get
even for all that's happened to us in our lives,
for being raised by good parents in a really bad area.
Revenge that could mean we could break out and see
the world. Most of all, revenge for all the people

(47:22):
who never believed in us. Again. You toured for like
a year, dude. All of our friends in Brooklyn were
touring for like five to six regularly before and losing money.
And I mean Seth who wrote our Seth Applebaum of
Ghost Funk Orchestra who wrote our theme music. You know

(47:43):
Mad Doctors, his surf punk band Mad Doctors were a
touring band before he got into Ghost Funk. Also, Ghost
Funk has been touring for like years and they don't
have a Warner Labori's contract you children, you literal actual children.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
My chemical Gloria Maas was actually right follow up material
while on tour in two thousand and three. But the
Way Brothers were rocked by the.

Speaker 2 (48:07):
They were rocked like a Hurricane, a song they had
been obsessed with ever since. Rocking like a hurricane by
the Scorpions.

Speaker 1 (48:15):
Well they okay, they were rocked by the death of
their beloved grandmother.

Speaker 3 (48:19):
But it's it's so much what.

Speaker 1 (48:22):
They were rocked by the death of their beloved grandmother.

Speaker 3 (48:27):
Well, I mean the word choice there, shattered. Sure, they
were shadowed.

Speaker 2 (48:33):
They've been obsessed. They'd been obsessed with being shattered ever
since they heard the Rolling Stone song shattered. I can
do this all night.

Speaker 1 (48:44):
The Way Brothers were shattered by the death of their
beloved grandmother, Elena.

Speaker 3 (48:48):
I'm gonna be able to I'm gonna get through.

Speaker 1 (48:50):
This, who died the day after they got back from
a tour in November two thousand and three, Gerard says
in the band Bile not the way it seems every
single emotion you go through and your grieving is on revenge.
When you really break down the record, it's about two
little boys losing their grandmother.

Speaker 3 (49:06):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (49:07):
This would be most apparent in the records opener Helena,
which was the familiar nickname for the Way's grandmother, which
not only acts as a farewell to her, but as
a vehicle for Way to air his guilt over spending
most of the last years of her life on tour.

Speaker 3 (49:21):
Oh, but that's actually really wanted it.

Speaker 1 (49:23):
I was, really I know. It's a really angry open
letter to myself, he told Korrang. It's about why I
wasn't around for this woman who was so special to me.

Speaker 3 (49:31):
Why I wasn't there for the last year for life.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
I have to assume. It's also a reference to the
nineteen ninety seven Misfits album with their non Glenden Ziglude singer.
The album is called Famous Monsters, and they had a
song on there called Helena, which is a loose retelling
of the nineteen ninety two or One Bomb of a
movie boxing Helena, starring the recently deceased Julian Sands, and

(50:00):
and then Twin Peaks star Sherylyn Fenn and directed by
Jennifer Lynch, David Lynch's daughter like Bill Paxson's in that too.
Oh good for him, Yes, yes, good for her. So
then this is all. The segues into the complicated narrative
of Three Cheers, which the band's hit singles Helena and
I'm Not Okay actually exist outside of the rest of

(50:21):
Three Cheers. For Sweet Revenge is a story of the
Demolition Lovers, who are the aforementioned Bonnie and Clyde s
characters that may have originated with the band's debut. The
plot is, according to a widely circulated quote by Gerard Way,
the story of a man and a woman who are
separated by death in a gunfight, and he goes to hell,
only to realize by the devil telling him that she's

(50:42):
so alive. The devil says, you can be with her
again if you bring me the souls of a thousand
evil men. So he hands him a gun and he says,
I'll go do it, okay man. In a two thousand
and five interview, Gerard mentioned that they he did come
up with an ending to the narrative only after the
record was finished. Obviously, he kills nine hundred and ninety
nine evil men, and then he realizes what the last

(51:06):
evil man he has to kill is himself. I should
point out that the man is objectively more successful than
I am by almost any measure. I mean, he wrote
The Umbrella Academy, which went four seasons on Netflix and
was by all accounts a widely well received show. So
as much as I want to clown on him for

(51:26):
this whole thing, he apparent he has writing bona fides
that I sure don't, as well as musical ones. So
the band's original choice for how to spend their major
label cash was nineties ots rock Godhead butch Vig, who
was not available. I believe the timing lines up because
he was producing AFI's sing the Sorrow with Jerry Finn,

(51:50):
who's like the other huge La Berkeley sound punk guy
mostly widely associated with Blink win A two and Epitaph Records.
But that's just a little entry in my let's all
remember Afi anyway, So they couldn't get butch Vig because
he was recording the guy that they stole all their
shit from So they eventually went with Howard Benson, who

(52:12):
is this rock producer who got his start doing eighties
punk's Tsol and then did four Motorhead records in the nineties.
But by the early two thousand he'd become something of
a new metal guru for guys who couldn't afford Ross Robinson,
like Pod, Crazytown and Hubastang. In band's two thousand and
six documentary Life on the Murder Scene, Gerard Way said

(52:38):
Benson had made four Motorhead records, and that's what got
us interested about him. What also got us interested about
him was the fact that he contacted us, and that's
how we like to work. Benson's recollection of this time
period is a little different. Nobody wanted to produce them
because their record before mine was a thrash record. This
is to Grammy dot Com. My manager said to me,

(52:59):
you need these guys. Something is going on with them.
When I met them, they had no songs to play
for me. But I looked at the singer in the
eye and I'd done enough at that point in my
life where I had a feeling about this kid. He
was going to be a star. I asked him, are
you worried about the three thousand fans you have or
do you want to have three hundred million fans? What
kind of record are we going to make? He goes

(53:21):
the three thousand fans. I was like, okay, we can
do business now. Before I show Gerard Way for saying that,
Howard Benson gave a previous interview to Loudwire in twenty eighteen.
That makes Girardway seem like less of an ass. I said, Girard,
how much do you care about the three hundred or
four hundred fans you have now? Or do you really

(53:42):
care about three hundred or four hundred million fans? Which
one is? He said, I want to be huge, So
that's a little more charitable. Also from that same interview,
funny quote. I listened to their first record for about
ten seconds and thought this stuff sucks. So the band's
basement show roots a little. With the circumstances of their
sophomore record, Gerard Way said, you showed up to this

(54:04):
big studio. There's a lot of money and like crazy equipment.
They had microphones that cost more than your first car,
and Benson was not a one to one match for
them either. He showed up to the studio wearing sweatpants
and a hockey jersey, and the band supposedly thought he
was a pizza delivery man. This, along with his habit
of using basketball metaphors, made the band start referring to
him as a sports coach, but his radio rock instincts

(54:27):
made him push back against their indulgent guitar fireworks and
abrupt song transitions for the Better. Way later said that
Benson asked once, what does this have to do with
the rest of the song. You're confusing the out of me,
to which the band responded, that's the point. There's another
equip in life on the murder scene where Gerard Way
is talking about Howard Benson. He was like, yeah, he

(54:49):
really showed us how to write songs. And then the
guitarist comes in and he's like, yeah, it's spelled c
ho r Us. Benson did recall the band being extremely
hard working, but he still wasn't hearing a true hit
single somewhere in the recording process, so the bands then
A and R man Craig Aronson, was going through a

(55:09):
bunch of old demo tapes that they brought to him,
and he all the way at the ass end of
this one demo tape, he found just a recording of
Girard just singing the chorus I'm Not Okay a cappella
over and over again, and he brought it to Benson
and he was like, Yo, check this out, and Benson
said to the band, immediately go write a song around this,

(55:30):
like this is your hook. The rest of the song
came together. They were rehearsing in LA and recording in
LA and Benson, to his credit, was like, I could
tell them to go write a song and they would
that they would have one by the next day. So
that's very cool. Good for them, And as recently as
October of twenty twenty four, Howard Benson was calling I'm

(55:51):
Not Okay the most influential record I've ever made. It's
also cool that they didn't have a middle eight, so
they just threw it a queen guitar solo. That was
always one of my favorite parts of that song. Revenge
really is the band, Gerard said in the documentary Bullets
is the band trying to find itself. By the time
we hit Revenge, we had really become my chemical romance.

Speaker 1 (56:12):
We had always been very open about self medicating his
way too, as you mentioned earlier, to becoming the hyperactive
frontman character he assumed.

Speaker 3 (56:20):
But things began to karoom kareem.

Speaker 1 (56:22):
Out of control around the time the band were making Revenge.
He told Spin in two thousand and five, I was
so scared of performing that I worked out the exact
chemical combination, a chemical romance, if you will, to get
me functioning in the band. I would drink from when
I woke up until set time. I lived, breathed, and
for the show. Jesus, I wore my stage clothes, the

(56:46):
leather jacket, the boots all the time, as bad as
they smelled, even when they were falling apart, I wouldn't
take the costume off. Gross I had no separation in
my head. It got so bad that I started to
refer to him as Gerard. I actually started becoming someone
else entirely. We mentioned a truly disgusting messianic move. In

(57:07):
one interview with Spin, he said, I got six hundred
kids to spit on me. The audience hated us, and
they still did what I said. I want to know
what the content was This, Like Paul Schaeffer in the
in spinal taps.

Speaker 3 (57:19):
Like you hate me, I want you to I want
you to kick my ass kick? Is that the same?

Speaker 2 (57:24):
I don't know that he if you. I mean I
watched some of their live performances, and I do have
to give them that this was a truly they were
a truly baffling band. Like the two guitarists set up
facing Gerard at the center, so like it's three dudes
as of the front line doing harmonies and like crazy

(57:46):
guitar leads, and Gerard is just like pinballing around the
stage and really, like I mean, he isn't he is
an astounding front man. I have to give it to him.
But yeah, so I don't know. Maybe the crowd was
real acting poorly and he wanted to get something out
of it. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (58:07):
Well, maybe this next part might explain some of it.

Speaker 1 (58:09):
Part of the alcoholism both brothers face, Gerard says, was
both familial and environmental. Where we're from a suburb of
the city, there's nothing to do but drink, fight and fink.
It's very easy to get caught in this working class
punch the clock, get bombed, and try to find someone
to poke lifestyle.

Speaker 3 (58:29):
God. But after Elaine his death, way went downhill. Faster.

Speaker 1 (58:35):
I couldn't deal with her death, he said, and I
took my first Sanax.

Speaker 3 (58:38):
After that, it's snowballed.

Speaker 1 (58:40):
I would get wasted for a show, then need to
shut my brain off for a night because my brain
is always moving a million miles a minute. The pills
allowed me to relax and sleep, but then cocaine came
into play and everything went out of whack.

Speaker 3 (58:53):
Way unfortunately wasn't alone in this.

Speaker 1 (58:55):
Frankie Ero would go on weekend long pill binges while
recording in La, waking up with no memory of the weekend.
At least once, Way showed up unable to sing because
it was coke and take.

Speaker 2 (59:06):
The night before, during a two thousand and four gig
in Kentucky, hammered Gerard Way found his way under the
stage of the venue and refused to sing from or
even come out of his hiding place for the rest
of the night. A few days later, in Kansas City,
he snorted an eight bawl of coke on top of
his now daily bottle of vodka and puked in the street.
After playing a festival in Japan to ten thousand people,

(59:28):
Way proceeded to throw up into a trash can for
something like forty five minutes, after which he told his
bandmates he'd had his last drink. He signed up for
AA the day after they landed in Jersey after that
kind of a fun strokes parallel to draw here. You
know how Ryan Adams is a piece of who got
Albert Hammond Junior hooked on heroin? I do a big

(59:50):
part of this drinking problem was definitely the fault of
the Used frontman Burt McCracken. A guy sucks. I know,
it's smell crazy in there. He looks like an awful
I think. In the Spin, Andy Greenwald, who wrote a
book on EMO called Nothing Feels Good and wrote for
Spin a bunch of cover stories, talked about McCracken flicking

(01:00:13):
boogersh Yeah. The Used and my Chemical Roan's also teamed
up for what is one of the worst things I've
ever heard in my life, which is a cover of
under Pressure. And if you look at the live performance
that they did, Burt McCracken looks like Charitably, I would
describe him as a maulnourished raccoon raised in Florida on

(01:00:40):
bath salts, and apparently he Gerardway has described him as
my tour guide to sort of rockstar debauchery. So I
don't know that guy his band, although the drummer from
the Used is now the drummer for Rancid, so I
have to assume he's a pretty chill guy. Anyway, they
got hammered one night and they missed soundcheck the next day,

(01:01:04):
and this debauchery, which Greenwald Andy Greenwall was present for,
was the inspiration for the song you Know what they
do to guys like us in prison, which compares the
life of touring rock bands to well, you get it.
That was the worst moment of my life, Gerardway told
Kerrang in two thousand and five. I also think losing
my grandmother and the drinking were probably connected. When I quit,

(01:01:26):
I could see myself clearly, and I wasn't sure how
much I liked it. I wasn't confident about anything. I
was just depressed. Also, when you get sober, everyone is
very honest about everything you've done. That can be hard.

Speaker 1 (01:01:40):
We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back with more too much information in just a moment.

Speaker 2 (01:01:56):
They finished recording in February, and Revenge hit the streets
in June that same year. Two thousand and four. The
band didn't have their red, white and black color scheme,
which might sound a little familiar to you, because you
know there's that whole band called the White Stripes that
had done this a couple of years earlier. But what
are you gonna do? They didn't have that in place

(01:02:18):
right from the jump. That was apparently something that they
got from the wardrobe for the Helena video. They also
started wearing bulletproof vests on stage, which is kind of funny.
I'm reminded of Carlos d from Interpol used to walk
around with like a detective's gun holster, like empty, but

(01:02:38):
just like wearing it like a as an affectation anyway,
Naturally for bandfronted by a comic book artists, the trio
videos that accompanied Revenge A Signals are genuinely good. I
mean I went back and rewatched them and I was
actually really quite blown away. They were all done by
Mark Webb, who was a music video director who went
on to do Five Hundred Days of Summer and then

(01:03:01):
two of the less well regarded Spider Man movies, The
Amazing Spider Man Series one and two starring Andrew Garfield.
He told Rock Sound in twenty twenty. I did a
Green Day video early on for the song Waiting, then
I did a good Charlotte one. But my relationship with
my Chemical Romance was the beginning of videos that started
to catch on a little bit more. And I know

(01:03:21):
that I'm Not Okay, which is their first video I did,
was a very low budget video, and I think that
was a surprise for everyone. They had such a personality
and it really connected in a way that was kind
of hilarious. We shot it over two days, and I
think expectations were relatively low, at least for me, and
then when that blew up, that was the beginning of
my association with that genre of music. In a way,
Mark has a way of giving you exactly what you want,

(01:03:43):
Gerard told MTV in two thousand and five, Like for
Not Okay, we said we wanted something that kind of
reminded us of Rushmore, and he went out and researched
what speed of film Wes Anderson shot the film. Att
studied a whole bunch of camera angles in the film.
So as far as I can tell, the video for
I'm Not Okay was filmed first in August of two
thousand and four, partially at Alexander Hamilton High School in
Loyola High School in LA. It is legitimately funny. Did

(01:04:07):
you rewatch this? Like I told you too?

Speaker 3 (01:04:09):
I have it.

Speaker 2 (01:04:09):
I'm sorry, couldn't be ars to do even that.

Speaker 3 (01:04:11):
Oka you on it?

Speaker 2 (01:04:13):
Okay. It does have some genuinely funny moments. Frankieero does
that you've got something in your eye at one point
to a girl, and then he leans into kiss her
and just picks something out of her eye and wipes
it on her before getting up and walking out of
the shot. They also like all tackle a mascot at
something in a way that I found genuinely funny.

Speaker 3 (01:04:33):
Haven't we both? Let's both watch it right now.

Speaker 2 (01:04:35):
I already watched it.

Speaker 3 (01:04:37):
Watch me watch it?

Speaker 2 (01:04:38):
Yes, okay, doing anything for you?

Speaker 3 (01:04:43):
Oh yeah, okay, I have no memory of this. Okay,
all right, interesting now I'm just suppsed to see anything else.
Was films with that high school?

Speaker 1 (01:04:52):
Oh this is good, This is good, A so called
life Sweet Valley High, Beverly.

Speaker 3 (01:04:57):
Hills nine to two one. Oho.

Speaker 2 (01:04:58):
Okay, my sister, that was your entry point. That's how
we got you interested. Okay, okay. Anyway, Helena was from
next at the Emmanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, which
you may recognize from Sister Act two legally Blonde two
and John Wick one The Weakening. For the two day
shoot first weekend of January and two thousand and five,
the man put out a call to their fans to

(01:05:19):
show up and be paid extras. In the music video,
which there is a making of, they all look extremely
happy to be there. It's very cute. The dancing in
the video was choreographed by Michael Rooney, son of Hollywood
legend Mickey Rooney. Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:05:33):
Also, now I'm paying attention.

Speaker 2 (01:05:35):
This dude's bona fides are crazy.

Speaker 3 (01:05:37):
You had my attention and now you have my interest.

Speaker 2 (01:05:40):
He choreographed Byork's It's also quiet fat Boy Slims, Oh,
Fat Boy Slims, Praise You and Christopher walk In and
Weapon of Choice and Kylie Minogue's I just can't get
you out of my head all that and Helena too.

Speaker 3 (01:05:54):
Wait and he's Mickey Rooney's kid, kid and he walks
in video.

Speaker 1 (01:05:59):
Incredible, incredible, CV wow.

Speaker 2 (01:06:04):
I talked to Gerard about what Helena was about, which
was about his grandmother. I think he might have mentioned
a funeral of some kind, but I don't think he
had a super specific idea of what to do. Mark
Webb said to Rock Sound, I was sort of stuck
on the treatment for a while, and I was washing
my dog in Hollywood, okay man, and his old line
from a TV show called Nightcourt popped into my head,
which was, let's put the fun back in funeral. I'm

(01:06:26):
not attributed to word a nightcurt as far as I know,
but sure I remember that was the first line of
the treatment that I wrote, and from there it was
about the structure of it and making it into a pageant.
The moment that defined the video is when Helena actress
Tracy Phillips wakes up and dances when everyone's head is bowed,
and then she falls back and grabs the bouquet. That's
the last dance, as it were, of that character, and

(01:06:47):
I think that's what made this special. That was the
turning point that I think when I came up with
that specific idea. Ray Toro mentioned in one interview in
two thousand and five that when the coffin for the
video shoot showed up, it was exactly this one is
the way his grandmother had been buried in which is
a little eerie. But I don't know that I actually
believe him about that. But sure.

Speaker 3 (01:07:08):
Also, how many different kinds of coffins either? You know?

Speaker 2 (01:07:11):
You know, actually a lot my dad does is a
handyman for a funeral home. So what Oh yeah, it
feels like a contractor for a local fume and parlor.

Speaker 3 (01:07:23):
Or the coffins being recycled and being refurbished. Why do
you need a handyman?

Speaker 2 (01:07:28):
Oh no, they're just no, no, no, he doesn't fix
the coffins. He fixes like their doors and plumbing. Okay,
but uh yeah, there's a lot of different kinds of coffins.
Costco sells coffins.

Speaker 3 (01:07:39):
Now, did you know that kiss sells coffins?

Speaker 1 (01:07:41):
That's true, they do bil Heigel coffin repair man.

Speaker 2 (01:07:46):
Friend of the Bod coffins.

Speaker 1 (01:07:51):
It was raining for real on the day of the
hell in a shoot, which made it fairly miserable, but
ultimately added to the ambiance of the entire thing. It
also features some cg imagine a pretty early CGI duplicating
one row of extras in the.

Speaker 3 (01:08:03):
Pews to an entire church. So they just control seed.

Speaker 2 (01:08:08):
Yes, control copy.

Speaker 3 (01:08:10):
Yes, that's incredible.

Speaker 1 (01:08:12):
Yeah, this is a trick that they also did in
their next video, but the band's most extravagant visual moment
was the World War Two themed video for The Ghost
of You, which cost over a million dollars in two
thousand and five dollars, which makes it close to one
point six today. Featured not only an era appropriate dance hall,
but a saving Private Ryot esque.

Speaker 3 (01:08:33):
Storming of the beaches sequence.

Speaker 2 (01:08:35):
Dude, it's crazy. I mean, like again, I know you
didn't watch this, but like it is a legitimate artistic achievement.
I mean they filmed it in an actual, you know,
American legion, and like did all this period accurate stuff,
like all the uniforms and hair look great, and then
they just staged a normandy scene. It's really wild.

Speaker 1 (01:08:56):
Did they like make enough as a band to warrant
this or did they just believe in the heavily no?

Speaker 2 (01:09:02):
I mean so apparently Three Cheers was recorded for two
hundred grand, which is like, oh pocket change as far
as a major label in two thousand and three two
thousand and four was concerned, so I think that they
might have the promotional department might have been like, yeah,
we're saving a bunch on these guys, so let's kick
them some money for the videos, and I mean I'm

(01:09:23):
not Okay and Helena were legitimate hits. I mean those
were TRL like that was back when that meant something.
Those were like real, legitimate video hits. To the point
where at a VMA's when Fallout Boy won, Pete Wentz
pulled the pulled the Garth Brooks thing and was like,
this award should have gone to my chemical romance.

Speaker 1 (01:09:44):
Nah and a making a clip for the Ghost of
View video way. Remember that he pitched web on the
idea of quote making a real movie during a lunch
break on the hell on a shoot, then asking him could.

Speaker 3 (01:09:54):
You do World War Two?

Speaker 1 (01:09:56):
I feel like World War Two lends itself to comic books,
so well, imagine that must have been like where that.

Speaker 2 (01:10:01):
Oh yeah, there's a rich history of World War Two
in common books. I mean, you know, Captain America was
literally fighting the Nazis.

Speaker 3 (01:10:07):
Oh yeah, true, too true.

Speaker 1 (01:10:09):
The shoot took place at not only an American Legion
Hall and the Hollywood Hills stocked the World War Two
re enactors, but also a section of beach in Malibu.
The World War Two landing boat they used flooded almost immediately,
and the following scene required both an armor and demolitions expert.

Speaker 3 (01:10:25):
As you write, it really is one of those last days.

Speaker 1 (01:10:27):
Of rock bands having money clips, and it's definitely worth
a rewatch.

Speaker 2 (01:10:32):
It's nuts, I mean, they have guns and blowing up.
I don't really have a segue for this, but I
think it's really important to address my chemical romances relationship
with the queer community. It's interesting this period in time
in Emo's mainstream moment, which is kind of what we've
been talking about in relationship to them, as sort of
a hard pivot in rock music away from all the

(01:10:55):
really ugly knuckle dragging macheese motion that had just been
popular like two years earlier and probably still was, to
be fair, I mean, Limp Biscuit was still selling out
stadiums this time. But it's interesting because it's kind of
the I would say, the first time since hair Metal
that that rock musicians were presenting as like little well

(01:11:17):
as twinks, let's be honest, Dandy's Dandy's yeah, you know,
wearing women's jeans for sure. Yeah, anyway, but yeah, I
do think that's interesting. I mean, people talking a lot
about like Kurt Cobain wearing a dress and different people
and grunge, making nods to that in different sort of ways,

(01:11:38):
but not as much as this, and certainly not as
much as my Chemical Romance, and my Chemical Romans was
doing it explicitly and very purposefully. They used to weigh
and y Errow would kiss a lot on stage. He
also kissed Burt McCracken a lot on stage, which again
something that Gerardway definitely knows. Bruce Springsteen kissed Clarence Clement

(01:11:59):
on the mouth every night the eighties to make the
Red Staters in his audience uncomfortable. But it also does
go back to the DC scene. There was a guy
in a band called beef Heater named Thomas Squip who
would hug anyone who started to get too aggressive. When
people were like beef in in person, he would just
hug them instead of escalating, and also troll homophobes by

(01:12:19):
sticking flowers up his ass. According to the Andy greenwoll
Emo book Nothing Feels Good, Geordan news this very dated
language to make the sentiment to spin. In their two
thousand and five cover story, he said, it's extremely important
for these kids to realize that they can do and
be whatever they want. Arptor was big for that instead
of drinking a bunch of beer and calling a kid
a hard f slur because he's smaller than you and

(01:12:41):
wearing black, why don't we just have a good time
and big jar headed dudes got that. To be able
to break through those layers of muscle and get to
their hearts was one of the biggest victories this band
has ever had. We go on stage every night and
look like the most dangerous cupcakes in the world. And
that's another victory because these kids aren't booing us or
calling us blank, they're saying fuck, go for it. Clearly,

(01:13:04):
this warped tour experience, at least their first time, was
something of a watershed moment. In Rock Sound in two
thousand and four, Girard explicitly recalled hearing the lead singer
of a band call an audience member the f slur.
He said, everyone I talked to about it made excuses
for the singer, like, oh, he's been doing that for
ten years. So I made it a point to address
homophobia on stage every day. Some of the bands playing

(01:13:27):
this tour think homosexuality is funny. They're still living in
nineteen ninety two, and that's the kind of shit that
made high school unbearable for some of my friends. I
had a hard time in high school because like that,
and I'm straight. It's this jock mentality that should have
nothing to do with punk rock or rock and roll
for that matter. So then, according to Girard, when Warped
Tour founder Kevin Lyman heard that the two bands were

(01:13:47):
going back and forth them this way, he just scheduled
them to play back to back on the same stage.
So way says, we played, and then they played, but
instead of playing, they just talked on us, called us
friends said, took in the ass. But at least he
wasn't picking on some sixteen year old kid who's going
to go home and feel like he was unwelcome at
that show. Based on my nerdy research into the Maurice

(01:14:10):
stage where my Chemical Romance was playing on warp Tour
two thousand and four and the other bands that were playing,
I feel extremely comfortable in pointing the finger out the casualties.
Who were you know, this street punk band from New
York that really took the fashion side of being a
disgusting punk rocker to the extreme. They all had separate

(01:14:34):
gravity defying haircuts and were all wearing elaborately studded stuff,
and they were not good people. I remember when they
came to the show, came to my hometown and played
an all ages show there. They were they almost refused
to play after pulling up because they couldn't have beer
because it was an all ages venue, so they just
sat in the lofted area drinking beer before they played

(01:14:55):
and refused to come down to even use the bathroom.
So they just pissed on the floor and it started
dripping onto the record stacks below and some of the
kids who were hanging out there, so they are pieces
of and Jorge Herrera, who is the founding member who
retired in twenty seventeen, has been dogged by a lot
of gross rumors about how he behaved around women on tour,

(01:15:18):
which is no surprise there. So although that band has
a couple bangers, Gerardway expanded on this in an Alternative
press interview around the same time. The scene is extremely homoerobic,
especially the whole emo sensitive thing. Everyone's wearing women's pants,
everyone's got women's haircuts, everyone's wearing youth medium shirts. I

(01:15:38):
don't have accurate I don't have to come out and
say it it's blatantly obvious. It's been more about getting
in touch with your feelings and being there for each other.
And my chemical rowance did generally go above and beyond
some of their peers and like senses fail. For example,
Frankie Erra was frequently photographed and a homemade Homophobia is
Gay shirt, and the band recruited queer icon Liza Minelli

(01:16:01):
for the Black Parade and their follow up to three Cheers,
What Yeah? What does she do on that? Saying like
two lines. The band has continued to engage with the
queer community. Way revealed that he was using the them
pronouns in twenty fifteen, and Frankie Ero even solicited his

(01:16:21):
Twitter following for advice on how to make binders like
chess compressors for trans masculine people as merch at one
point in twenty twenty two, So you know, good on them.

Speaker 1 (01:16:32):
Yeah, and now we're into a section that you call
my chemical sales. Band manager Brian Scheckter says in the
Life on the Murder Scene documentary, the funniest thing about
Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge is that the label and
I had agreed that if we could sell three hundred
thousand copies.

Speaker 3 (01:16:47):
We would be happy.

Speaker 1 (01:16:48):
The first week of sales, I predicted three thousand, and
we had no idea what was going to happen.

Speaker 3 (01:16:53):
The very first day, we kept getting phone.

Speaker 1 (01:16:55):
Calls about how great things were going, and I think
right about then that's when we realized something weird was
going to happen. The fact that the very first day
had sold twice as many as the previous record had
sold in its whole life span. At that point, I
think we realized something big was about to happen.

Speaker 3 (01:17:09):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:17:10):
They just continued working through the summer, and then it
was just a flood of good news. They sold like
one hundred and twenty thousand records through that summer. Things
got very big and very busy for the band in
the second half of two thousand and.

Speaker 3 (01:17:21):
Four, and they had somewhat of a hard time adjusting
to it.

Speaker 1 (01:17:25):
Their album hit number thirty in the Billboard two hundred
charts and eventually went triple platinum, which means what three
million Wow did better than expected by a magnitude of ten,
and the high concept trio of videos made them MTV darlings.
One fallout boys you mentioned earlier, one of VMA instead
of My Chemical Romance, Pete Wentz said, Helena quote should
have won from the stage. My Chemical Romance opened for

(01:17:49):
Green Day on a tour and went for playing Warped
Tours Morris stage, Morris is it the English way?

Speaker 2 (01:17:54):
Maurice?

Speaker 3 (01:17:55):
Maurice? Why is it the Maurice stage?

Speaker 2 (01:17:57):
They're all named after like obscure punk rock celebrities. I
have no idea.

Speaker 1 (01:18:00):
Okay, they went from playing Warped Tour's Maurice Stage.

Speaker 2 (01:18:04):
Do you ever go to warp Tour?

Speaker 4 (01:18:06):
No?

Speaker 1 (01:18:07):
I went to the WBZ and River Rave, which had
like AFI and Slither and people like that, but Slither.

Speaker 2 (01:18:14):
Yeah, what band are you referring to? Tomout Seether.

Speaker 1 (01:18:17):
Yes, that's exactly what That's exactly what it is, thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:18:22):
I remember going to warp Tour and seeing the Casualties
along with a couple other bands flogging Mollie. Oh, and
then a number of the girls who I were friends
with abandoned me to go and do gross things with men,
possibly my age.

Speaker 3 (01:18:41):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:18:42):
Oh yeah, there's this band called the River City Rebels
who were from somewhere I was like horn horn punk
and the.

Speaker 3 (01:18:51):
Horn punk as in yeah, yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 (01:18:56):
Yeah, and they definitely had like existing relationships with women.
Girls I knew in high school, like sixteen seventeen year
old girls would like were their groupies. You know. Essentially,
it was disgusting that band.

Speaker 1 (01:19:15):
No, my main memory was seeing the Dresden Dolls Aman
the Palmer's band that blew my mind in two thousand
and three because it was like Emo but Bavarian.

Speaker 2 (01:19:25):
Unsurprising to know that Gerardway name dropped them as one
of his favorite bands in one of these interviews. I
was reading, Oh, I'm sure, yeah, totally a dog band.

Speaker 3 (01:19:34):
I'm sure that was.

Speaker 1 (01:19:35):
But when I was God fifteen seeing them live, oh.

Speaker 2 (01:19:39):
Yeah, I mean trust me, I had friends who were
way into them, but God anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:19:43):
My Chemical Romance went from playing Warped Tour's Maurice stage
to co headlining it, and in the UK they eventually
outsold their old mentor slash running Buddies in the USED.
In an interview with Slate, Andy Greenwald, who as you
mentioned earlier wrote The Totemic and Nothing Feels Good at
the Emo scene, said that my Chemical Romances theatrical bent, may.

Speaker 3 (01:20:02):
Have helped them outlast many of their peers.

Speaker 1 (01:20:05):
I was just blown away by their ability to go
bigger and bigger, and also would have meant about the
distance that the makeup and the costumes and the comic
books created that distancing, dramatic effect that allowed emo emotions
at the heart.

Speaker 3 (01:20:17):
Of the songs to travel.

Speaker 1 (01:20:19):
It was like it allowed it to go national without
snapping the way the Dashboard confessional songs, which were literally
about his ex girlfriend's air could not.

Speaker 2 (01:20:27):
Do you agree with that?

Speaker 1 (01:20:28):
I don't think I know enough about either to be
able to make a really strong stance.

Speaker 3 (01:20:34):
I was thinking about that with You're.

Speaker 1 (01:20:37):
Gonna make fun of me from him about to say
and I deserve it, and I do deserve it. I
was listening to a podcast earlier today about Paul McCartney,
and somebody made an argument that his solo work was
actually better than some of his Beatles' work because it
was actually more personal and revealed more about himself.

Speaker 3 (01:20:54):
And the example that he used was a song Christmas time.

Speaker 1 (01:21:00):
Song called Tomorrow, which actually uses the same chord changes
to Yesterday, but it's a different it's much more uptempo,
and it's about him going on a picnic with Linda,
and it's very sweet. And he said that that song
actually meant more to him because it was actually revelatory
as opposed to Yesterday, which was sort of more vague

(01:21:22):
and in painted in broad strokes, Whereas I thought that
was stupid because the fact that yesterday was painted in
broad strokes, but that anybody could attach their own meaning
and personal experience to it, which makes it universal.

Speaker 2 (01:21:33):
Yeah, that's why it's the most covered song of all time.

Speaker 3 (01:21:36):
You more on.

Speaker 2 (01:21:37):
Yeah, so stupid.

Speaker 3 (01:21:40):
Yeah made me mad.

Speaker 2 (01:21:42):
It's so frustrating how people don't understand their art and
like what makes it good. It's such a fascinating blind
spot when people are like, I get it in some instances,
but they.

Speaker 1 (01:21:52):
Love the voyeurism. They want songs to be a diary.
Some people do, at least.

Speaker 2 (01:21:56):
Yeah, I just that's so funny to me that he
was like, I'm going to re write one of the
most famous songs in history to be about a picnic
with my wife. Surely this is a thing I need
to do to express my artistic like you already wrote yesterday. Dude,
you didn't need to rewrite yesterday, you minge.

Speaker 3 (01:22:17):
I mean, it's not over. It's like I mean you
as a musician, I'm sure, but.

Speaker 2 (01:22:21):
This is Paul though, because you know, we're talking about
a guy who wrote like a beautiful song about his
sheep dog ah and a guy who heard what did
he hear that he wanted to What was the song
that they wanted to top with Helter Skelter.

Speaker 3 (01:22:33):
It's never been officially determined.

Speaker 2 (01:22:35):
I thought it was.

Speaker 3 (01:22:36):
He said it was.

Speaker 1 (01:22:38):
I can see for miles. But that song would have
been out for like almost a year when they recorded
Helter Skelter, so the timeline doesn't quite work.

Speaker 3 (01:22:44):
But that's the song he cites.

Speaker 2 (01:22:46):
But yes, it is akin to him being like I
want I would like to create the most nasty guitar driven,
distorted bass song of old time proto heavy mental I'm
going to call it.

Speaker 4 (01:22:57):
And it's about childhood slide go up to the bottom
and go back to the bottom, and then you go
up again and down again. Clown shoes.

Speaker 2 (01:23:13):
Yeah, I don't know. I think it's interesting, an interesting point.
I mean, Greenwald has is much closer to it than
either of us are. But I do think that's sailing it.
You know the idea of having a remove and making
all of these really personal things into a plot that
lets people a narrative that lets people view it without

(01:23:38):
necessarily being hurt the same way that that really internalizing
something without that distance and that affect. Might I think
that's a really I think that's fascinating. Yeah, I mean
it's it's kind of like, yeah, it makes sense to me.
He listened to a guy singing I'm Gonna kill myself
and he just looks like some schlub off the stage,

(01:23:58):
and you're like, oh, that's a really good song. But like,
I feel uncomfortable thinking about suicide. But if it's like
a guy preening around in a marching band outfit and
being like, this is part of a plot about two
lovers and one of them goes down to hell like
bo But I could see how you would be like, yes,
this is a movie, and I can access those feelings
now without being scared about them, you know. I think
that's fascinating. The band's follow up to Three Cheers for

(01:24:21):
Sweet Revenge, The Black Parade, has seemingly grown into their
de facto greatest work. It didn't. I mean, this is well,
I'm quoting other people here because this is I had
gone into college. What happened in the interviewing period was
that I went into college and stop paying attention to
any pop culture period. God, I was so happy had

(01:24:41):
a Nokia cell phone these social media was on his Facebook.
It sold much better and solidified the band's hold on
arena level star stardom. It debuted at number two, right
behind the Hannah Montana album, which is crazy to me.
Jeremy Gordon wrote in twenty sixteen in Spin that The
Parade was well reviewed, but it hasn't accrued the same

(01:25:02):
reputation as these other classic albums. It was almost entirely
ignored in lists of the best albums of the two
thousand run by tastemakers and cannon formers like Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Steragum, Billboard, Paste, Complex, Enemy,
and Spin, although I think it is now on the
Rolling Stone five hundred list, just behind p Funk, which

(01:25:25):
is personally insulting anyway. It's making was also quite fraud.
The band struggled with the destabilizing effects of fame, although
I did find this funny quote from Gerard about the
recording process, which if taken out of context, is hilarious.
For days, I played the Passion of the Christ with
the sound off. The band also faced a burgeoning backlash

(01:25:49):
to Emo's brief time in the sun with very real
world results. In two thousand and seven, my Chemical Romance
fan Sophie Lancaster was beaten to death by a mob
of strangers in Lancashire in England, targeted, police said because
she was dressed in a gothic style. The following year,
MCR were linked in the news to a thirteen year
old girl in Kent named Hannah Bond, who committed suicide.

(01:26:12):
Coverage of her death zeroed in on her love of
emo music, and one Daily Mail headline screamed why no
child is safe from the sinister cult of Emo. Even
the coroner in that case, Roger Sykes, wrote the emo
overtones concerning death and associating it with glamour I find
very disturbing. Bond has been memorialized in quite a lot
of online circles, and in two thousand and eight, I

(01:26:35):
want to say there were a number of My Chemical
Riants fans who assembled in London, like about one hundred
kids got together to protest the male's treatment of the band.
In this case, I don't remember any of this, but
it is very sad. Either way, My Chemical Raymants soldiered
on for the next five years following the Black Parade
with the more pop leaning Danger Days, an album I

(01:26:56):
know nothing about except that the lead single off of
it was like the word nah, like thirteen fourteen times
in a row. Nope, like Nona nah. And then it's
like no no no no no parentheses, no no no
no no na, which is medium funny and also I
hate it. Their breakup announcement began with a perfectly My
Chemical Romance opening line, we were spectacular, ah, cryptically adding

(01:27:22):
My Chemical Romance had built within its core a failsafe,
a doomsday device. Should certain events occur or cease occurring,
would detonate. I shared my knowledge of this flaw within
weeks of its inception. It took about a year for
Gerard Way to open up about the device, telling NME
that he'd relapsed into alcoholism after Danger Days and worried

(01:27:44):
that his daughter would grow up without a father. The choice,
he concluded, was break the band or break me. Since that, though,
the band has reunited for what I assume are very
lucrative shows. Do you remember when they were in a
weird feud with Nick Jonas because they were both rehearsing
in the music building in Manhattan and I don't know,
maybe it was a different Jonas brother, but someone was like,

(01:28:06):
my chemical Romeance is rehearsing next to me, and that
like spoiled the news of their reunion tour.

Speaker 3 (01:28:11):
Oh my god, No, I don't remember that.

Speaker 2 (01:28:13):
This year they are embarking on a reunion tour for
the Black Parade, which I assume is already out of
reach financially for our dear listeners except for the rich ones.
I don't have a follow up to that. Way has
successfully transitioned into his original life goal of being a
comics guy. His original comic, The Umbrella Academy. As I

(01:28:34):
mentioned earlier, it was adapted into a successful four season
Netflix show. The other band members have different solo careers,
their dads, this, that, and the other, and Way I
think summed up the band's entire arc to NME at
one point in a great quote. Back then, nobody in
the normal punk world was wearing black clothes and eyeliner
except for afi Ah. Editor. We did it because we

(01:28:58):
had one mission to polarize, to irritate, to contaminate. But
then that image gets romanticized, and then it gets commoditized, commodified.
I think he meant sorry, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna.
I'm gonna leave them with this actually quote from the
band's breakup.

Speaker 3 (01:29:19):
Note.

Speaker 2 (01:29:20):
This probably sounds like something ripped from the pages of
a four color comic book, and that's the point. No compromise,
no surrender, no shit.

Speaker 3 (01:29:31):
To me.

Speaker 2 (01:29:32):
That's rock and roll, and I believe in rock and roll.
I can't take that away from a man, so shut
up me a New Year. I mentioned at the top
of the episode that this was a listener request and
it came to us via a fan named Melissa, who

(01:29:54):
reached out over Instagram and with one of the most
heartwarming things I've ever heard. Melissa said that I work
in a very large cancer center where I could easily
find myself getting caught up in the depression that comes
along with working in an environment that requires workers to
be desensitized to the loss you see every day. Your
podcast helps to lighten my spirit and my day, So

(01:30:18):
that's incredible, first of all, difficult for me to process.
So this episode is dedicated to her and the work
that she does, and I hope I am not too
mean to her very favorite band, because that's the TMI
guarantee for every moment of sincerity comes the poison. Folks,

(01:30:38):
thank you for listening. This has been too much information.
I'm Alex Hagel.

Speaker 3 (01:30:42):
And I have Jordan Runtogg. We'll catch you next time.

Speaker 2 (01:30:49):
Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's
executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog.

Speaker 1 (01:30:56):
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

Speaker 2 (01:30:59):
The show was recent written and hosted by Jordan Rundogg
and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (01:31:03):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.

Speaker 2 (01:31:06):
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and.

Speaker 3 (01:31:08):
Leave us a review.

Speaker 1 (01:31:09):
For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}My Chemical Romance's 'Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge': Everything You Didn't Know