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tothetune2010-11-19 09:50 pm
ofyourdeath.livejournal.com) wrote in tothetune2010-11-19 09:50 pm
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PANDAMONIUM
They scrapped a whole album, lost a drummer, and are besieged by pesky Draculoids. Why is it that the crazier thigns get for My Chemical Romance, the happier they seem?
by Josh Eels/Photographs by Ture Lillegraven
Around this time last year, all Gerard Way could talk about was how different the next My Chemical Romance record was going to be. The band were coming off two long years of supporting their 2006 album, The Black Parade, a rock opera about cancer and dying that sold more than three million copies worldwide. The two albums before that, 2002's I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love and 2004's Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, were also conceptual, chronicling a couple's journey to hell after dying in a desert shoot-out. But the new record, Way kept promising, was going to be back to basics. No epic plotlines. No crazy uniforms. No makeup. And definitely no shoot-outs in the desert.
Thus it is with no shortage of irony that the four members of My Chemical Romance find themselves in the Joshua-tree scrublands of Southern California, preparing to have a shoot-out in the desert. It's a Wednesday in September, 99 degrees, and My Chem are in the parking lot of an abandoned gas station 65 miles outside L.A., filming the video for their awesomely titled single "Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)." They're decked out in color-coordinated leather jackets and Mad Max biker boots, and carrying matching Duck Hunt-style laser guns. And they're preparing to do battle with a blood-thirsty pack of evil vampires
But hey--at least they're not wearing makeup.
So, about that whole back-to-basics thing: Who were they kidding? No band does big quite like My Chemical Romance. They love to commit, the more outlandish the idea the better. Want to cruise through the Mojave fighting bad guys? Sure! In a vintage Trans Am painted like the American flag? Okay! Driven by a stuntman from The Fast and the Furious? Why not? Wearing outfits that Way created with Tim Burton's costume designer? Fuck it! (Fans will have a chance to see the Trans Am themselves when the band bring it along on their upcoming arena tour, while a $70 box set of the new album comes with replica ray guns.)
My Chem's opus is called Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, and it's exactly as over-the-top as that title would lead you to suspect. The premise? The year is 2019, and some unspecified environmental catastrophe has befallen America. The survivors are ruled by a nefarious corporation called Better Living Industries, which employs an army of masked vampires called Draculoids. It's up to our heroes, a motorcycle-riding gang of "rogue artists" called the Killjoys -- a.k.a. My Chem -- to save the day.
"It's high concept," explains guitarist Frank Iero, 29, "but it's not a concept record." Met with a look of not-quite-comprehension, he laughs like a man who's been there himself. "Yeah," he nods. "When Gerard says it, too, I go, Okaaay…" But the band trust their frontman. "He likes to say we're his bullshit detectors."
"Gerard has a cool mind," says guitarist Ray Toro, 33. "He's tapped into things people are thinking about before they even know it." Way conceives of the band's looks, codirects their videos (this one with Nate Weaver and someone named Roboshobo), and even scoured costume stores for the Draculoids' masks. "He's the master, the dreamer-schemer, the giant beating heart," says Rob Cavallo, the album's producer and the new boss of Warner Bros. Records. "He almost reminds me more of Robert Rodriguez or Tarantino than any musical person -- he's an auteur."
"I don't know what he's not good at," says Mikey Way, 30, MCR bassist and Gerard's little brother. "He wasn't trained for any of it, but he's amazing at all of it." A few years ago Gerard, 33, wrote a comic book, The Umbrella Academy, that won the medium's equivalent of an Oscar; now he's helping adapt it into a film. He's also writing a Fabulous Killjoys comic book and recently pitched a Hollywood studio on another idea, based on a fairy tale.
Yet to Gerard, today running around in mirrored aviators and white jeans turned brown by dust, this kind of omnivorousness is the most natural thing in the world. "I love it all," he says during a break between setups. "There's not a lot of art forms where you can control your presentation and your ideas. I mean, you spend two years working on a record. Why wouldn't you spend two years working on everything else?"
The next afternoon, Way answers the door to his home in Los Angeles' Mt. Washington neighborhood in aqua-blue socks, a sleeveless black tee, and a pair of black cutoffs that would violate most school dress codes. The house, which Way and his wife, Lindsey, bought on Valentine's Day 2008, is cozy and secluded, with stucco walls and lots of exposed wood beams. It was built in the '30s by a woman from Mexico who made her fortune in the crouton business ("the Colonel Sanders of croutons," Way jokes), and a sign over the front gate still testifies to her grateful good vibes: CASA DE MIS SUEÑOS -- House of My Dreams.
"You want to take the tour?" Way asks, an unlit Marlboro between his lips. The first stop is his office, stacked floor to ceiling with comic books, novels, and DVDs. On the desk next to his computer there's a life-size replica of a Boba Fett helmet, and hidden in a closet somewhere, a collection of droids. Way grew up in New Jersey, in an area where riding bikes wasn't safe, so he and Mikey had to invent their own fun, acting out Star Wars movies (usually The Empire Strikes Back, on account of the snow) and episodes of G.I. Joe. Gerard even remembers sending off sketches for action figures to the good people at Hasbro. (They never responded.)
Outside the bathroom -- where a potty-training toilet sits on the floor -- Way has to swerve to avoid stepping on a stuffed Elmo doll. In May 2009, Lindsey, who plays bass with electro-punks Mindless Self Indulgence, gave birth to their first kid, a daughter named Bandit Lee. Way says he loves everything about fatherhood, even changing diapers, with just one exception. "I'm not great at giving baths, because it makes me nervous. I don't want to bang her head. Lindsey calls me Safety Inspector. My whole life I was protective of Mikey because I felt that was my job, and that's totally transferred to Bandit."
For his day gig, he's the same way. In My Chem's music, Way casts himself as a kind of safety inspector of emotions, plugging baby-proof stoppers into the electrical sockets of adolescence. On The Black Parade he dubbed himself "the savior of the broken, the beaten, and the damned," and he established for the band the modest goal of rescuing the world. "I thought if we made an album that tried to change the world, or give it hope, it would really happen," Way says, cheerfully. "But all people found was death and destruction and misery and self-hate. I learned that the world doesn't want to be saved, and it will fucking punch you in the face if you try."
We make our way downstairs, through the master bedroom (fireplace, unmade bed, framed black-and-white photo of a romantic-looking couple splattered by blood), and into the backyard. It's a magnificent place, with a stunning canyon view. "I never really come out here," he says a little sheepishly as we poke past a small grove of orange trees, the fruit overripe and unpicked. Near the bottom of the hill there's another tree, boasting an oddly shaped green fruit. Way stops short. "I've never even seen this before." He plucks one and takes a bite. "It's an apple!"
For a guy who once famously sang, on their breakthrough single, "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)," that he was "not o-fucking-kay," Way seems…well, pretty okay. I ask him what he'd say now to the kid who wrote that song, and he laughs. "I would say, 'Fucking lighten up, dude! Don't torture yourself. You're going to meet an awesome girl and have a daughter, and when that happens, make sure you're fucking happy.' " But these days, he's charmingly self-mocking about the idea of "trying to win the world over with a musical, wearing marching-band uniforms, and singing about our feelings."
In 2004, just as the band was getting huge, Way had a bad night of boozing and pill-popping in Japan and decided to quit drugs and alcohol cold turkey. Recently, though, he's been enjoying the occasional drink. It's not about the high, so much as loosening his own self-imposed restraints. "[Sobriety] became such a thing," he says. "It was so goddamn important to everyone but me. You start to feel like the two guys in the Smiths who wanted to eat cheeseburgers but had to pretend not to. I understand that kids look up to me, that some people might have gotten sober because of me. But it's not an important thing for me anymore."
You're no one's savior, you mean.
"Hell no." He pauses. "But that was a fun image to play with. Because even if you miss the mark, you're probably gonna be a pretty remarkable person. Shoot for savior, and end up being rad."
On a sunny afternoon in September, Mikey Way is eating a hamburger at a Mexican restaurant in Hollywood, talking about his new adoptive hometown. East Coast pale and skyline-skinny (130 punds!), Way--indeed, all of MCR--is an unlikely sight among the toned, tanned Melrose masses. Yet aside from Iero, who lives with his wife and their seven-week-old twin girls back in Jersey, the band members are all Angelenos now. Toro and MIkey both admit they followed Gerard, more or less, but they're warming to the place. "When I first came here, I thought it was kind of awful," Mikey says. "But the more I came, I started to understand what people saw. In New Jersey, when the snow came, there were, like, three months where you're crippled. Here, the sunshine inspires you to go out the front door." (Toro, meanwhile, is just happy he "finally found a good slice of pizza.")
For a while there, getting out that front door was hard. "Towards the end of the Black Parade tour, we were all shell-shocked," Mikey says. "It was out of our control. I wasn't happy." An anxious person to begin with, he had to take a brief hiatus, ostensibly to get married, but mostly to decompress and regroup.
Iero had a tough time, too. "Living that record, truly living it--putting on those costumes for two years, being away from family and friends--that was hard." By the time the cycle wrapped in May 2008, they "were exhausted creatively, physically, and emotionally." For a while, Iero wasn't even sure they'd make another record.
When the band went into the studio a few months later with producer Brendan O'Brien (Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam), the plan was to make a raw, down-and-dirty punk record. In an interview with SPIN last April, Way worried that success had made him complacent and name-checked the Stooges and the MC5 as touchstones. The band had set down a bunch of ground rules detailing what they weren't allowed to do, to strip away The Black Parade's extravagant theatricality. It made sense in theory, but it was also kind of perverse--ditching the try-anything grandiosity that made them great in the first place.
"We were so squashed down by the heaviness, we wanted to run away and do everything opposite from that," Iero says. But as the sessions progressed, that less-is-more approach began to backfire. "It turned into another rule we had to abide by."
For a long time, the band couldn't shake the feeling that the music was too joyless, too flat. "In my heart, I knew some of the stuff could be better," Toro says. "But it was a big fear to throw it all away." It wasn't until the record was being mixed that they finally admitted to themselves that they could do better. THey called the label to say they wanted to go back into the studio with Cavallo to record a new song. One song became two, two became four, and before they knew it, they'd decided to scrap everything and start over. (Three of the initial songs were re-recorded for the new album; Toro says they hope to release the rest someday, possibly for free.)
It takes a lot of fearlessness--or recklessness--to abandon a project you've been working on for more than a year, and apparently not everyone was on board. Four days into the band's sessions with Cavallo, it was decided that drummer Bob Bryar would leave the group. THe band won't go into specifics. ("There's legal stuff going on," Toro says.) Studio vet and current Meat Love drummer John Miceli plays on the album; Michael Pedicone, formerly of the Bled, will tour with them, but they have no plans to add a full-time replacement.
"It quickly became apparent that [Bryar] was obstructing their creative process," Cavallo says. "It was a sad thing, but he was throwing water on their fire."
"There were great reasons were were together for five years, and you don't want to forget those," says Iero. "But you can't be in an artistic-driven band with a person who doesn't love creating."
Iero, the band's punk conscience, sees the album's Killjoys versus Draculoids narrative partly as a metaphor for the age-old struggle between art and commerce--for "that corporate seeping in, trying to steal the magic, and your resistance against it." In reality, though, "that corporate" may be their greatest weapon. For years My Chem had the good fortune to work with Warner Bros. chairman Tom Whalley, one of their longtime champions. Then, when Whalley left the label in September, he was replaced by Cavallo--the band's closest collaborator of the past five years and a guy Mikey Way calls their "fifth member." It's ahrd to imagine a dynamic between overambitious rock band and major label suits that's less antagonistic.
"Most people's impression is that the label is there to step on the bands," says Toro. "We're one of the few bands that has a great relationship with our label. We've become friends with them." As such, they're unusually adept at using the machine to their advantage. Iero estimates they'd sunk six figures into the album before they decided to start over; by Gerard's estimate, there are only five bands who could have gotten the same go-ahead (and even that seems high).
"There was zero hesitation," says Craig Aaronson, the band's A&R rep. "They wanted to take it to another level, and we wanted to make sure they had the resources to do that." Cavallo maintains that Warners would have done the same for any act on the label. But after some prodding, he also admits, "When it comes down to it, there are favorites.
"Clearly we would rather the band have the concept ahead of time," he says wryly. "But life isn't always perfect. My Chemical Romance have sold millions of records. We need, and want, to continue that success. Wo whatever it takes, we're going to do."
You should check out our art studio," Gerard Way says. "It's not far."
He climbs behind the wheel of his black Porsche Carrera, cranks up the stereo (KUSC--classical) and heads down the hill to a space the band rent a few miles away. Lindsey, a painter and dioramist has a studio in the same complex, and on the way Gerard gushes about her art and career more enthusiastically than he does his own. (Fact: Mrs. Way has become something of a mentor to an aspiring artist named Frances Bean Cobain. "We were her favorite band," Gerard says. "Courtney [Love] brought her to a show for her birthday, and now me and Lindsey are friends with her. She's a fucking rad kid.")
As we pull into the parking lot, Lindsey Way just happens to be leaving. A bleached-blonde beauty, she's tall and tattooed, wearing a gold necklace with a charm that spells out BANDIT. Gerard hops out and rushes to give her a kiss. "I'll be home soon," he tells her. "I love you."
Inside the studio, I have a realization: This is what Gerard's brain must look like. There are colored-pencil sketches of costumes and cars; slogans scrawled on a chalkboard in pastel pink and yellow (ART IS THE WEAPON; THE AFTERMATH IS SECONDARY; LOOK ALIVE, SUNSHINE). The whole room is awash in primary colors, all laser-beam reds and egg-yolk yellows. Everything is bright, bold, splashy--the opposite of the "bummers" Mikey says they're known for.
If My Chemical Romance are a franchise, then Danger Days is the reboot. Gone are the scowls, the omnipresent black; instead, says Toro, "We're bringing color back." For proof, look no further than Gerard's hair. For The Black Parade, it was chopped short and dyed white, to symbolize death; now his locks are a vibrant red.
"Black became such an expected thing," Gerard says. "It's like this vampire culture that's forced on us. It's taking this monter that's really awesome and ugly, and throwing makeup on it, taking the fangs out." I ask him for his take on Twilight and the whole sexy-vampire trend, and he sighs. "To be honest, he says, "I hate it. I grew up watching amazing fils like From Dusk Till Dawn and Near Dark, and I think even if vampire aren't ugly, they should be really fucking dangers. I mean, what the fuck--you don't see anyone dating the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The craziest thing that the guy is like, a thousand years old, trying to fuck a 16-year-old. What if that guy looked his age? He's so much more emotionally advanced than her. It's not fair!"
Way delivers the rant with a smile, but there's some bite behind it. The last song on Danger Days is called "Vampire Money," which is about bands jockeying for a spot on the Twilight soundtracks, and My Chem's refusal to follow suit. "People were chasing that vampire money so hard," Way says. "And people kept assuming we were going to, too. I know Paramore did it, and they're sweet kids. But we're nothing like them."
Way thinks a lot about the business of music. "We're in a real fucking fear-driven industry right now," he says, lighting up a Marlboro. "Why are we slumming it, battling it out with other guys with guitars to get a better spot on a radio format that kinda sucks and is losing its foothold anyway? Everything is going into pop. So how do you make rock important again? By fucking moving into enemy territory."
For Way, that means taking the tools of pop and turning them against themselves. My Chem have never been short on hooks, but Danger Days goes even further, delving into contemporary pop's most reliable tricks--slick-sounding keyboards, propulsive dance beats, Glee-ready Broadway melodies. "To a lot of people, pop is a dirty word," he says. "But it's all about using pup as a weapon. I told the guys I wanted this record to sound like you're pointing a .357 at the sun, squeezing the trigger until it's empty." He also loves Lady Gaga, and even wanted to tour with her before she took of into the stratosphere. "A lot of the imagery in 'Bad Romance' is what we've been playing around with for years," he says. "I sometimes wonder if she'd heard one of our records or seen what we'd done."
As Way talks, you can hear those old savior tendencies starting to creep back in. The epaulets and crew cuts may be gone, but that doesn't mean there isn't a war to be fought. (As Craig Aaronson says: "Gerard is very driven, and he wants to win.")
Way is quiet for a second remembering a story, "After Black Parade," he recalls, "a friend said to me, 'Don't retreat into this rock stuff yet. You may think you just made Magical Mystery Tour, but you really just made Revolver.'" In other words, there are still worlds to explore, costumes to don, gunfights to be had. Boundaries to push.
Way smiles. "I still haven't found the crazy shit yet."
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Great article, thanks for the scans and the transcript!
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:-(
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(Anonymous) 2010-11-20 05:54 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
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(Anonymous) 2010-11-21 12:20 am (UTC)(link)no subject
/probably makes no sense.
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(Anonymous) 2010-11-20 07:29 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
(Anonymous) 2010-11-20 08:34 pm (UTC)(link)He probably thought there would be less backlash if he picked on Paramore.
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honestly, this article is good and all, but it's not really painting them in that great of a light to me. at one point the article even looked like gerard-central, and it was going great, then cavallo came in strong about bob with frank (REALLY WHAT WAS THAT) in the rear, and now i'm just very :|. i came in super :D and now i'm just :|.