My Chemical Romance definitely bled to make The Black Parade. They set aside one room in The Paramour Mansion and it became dubbed The Heavy Room. Inside it, they tore each other to shreds. They made a rule that they would be absolutely honest with each other in there, sometimes brutally so. They would have no-holds-barred conversations about the record, their playing, their personal lives and their relationships with each other. It was an utterly draining form of bloodletting but they felt this honesty was vital.
"Mentally, we were beating each other up," said Ray. "We were getting to the root of some really deep problems. We would spend hours and hours in that room, having long conversations while the little demons we all carried inside of us came out. As close as we all are, we all have things within us that we hold to ourselves. No matter how much time we spend with each other, we all have our little demons inside the closet. Sometimes you have to let those things go. That's just one of the things that was going on in The Heavy Room."
"There were times when it got so hard making this record," said Gerard. "It was nothing personal between band members but we felt like we were all going through something hard and that became daunting, so we'd say to each other, 'Well, we're going to have to have another talk in The Heavy Room.' It was a room that drained our souls out. It drained everything out of you. It took all your energy because we just talked and talked in there. We talked about everything."
Rob Cavallo — who Gerard would come to describe as "our therapist, big brother, dad and uncle all rolled into one" — and the band's lawyer and friend Stacy Fass were the only people outside of the band who were allowed in. Cavallo would oversee their conversations, half a concerned onlooker, half understanding the necessity of the procedure. He thinks that the band's blunt honesty in The Heavy Room helped them avoid making compromises because they were more concerned about the work than protecting egos.
"All of them together are the nicest bunch of guys," he says, "but sometimes being nice isn't necessarily the thing that helps you. Sometimes you need to dare to be really honest and to confront those feelings so that everyone knows and momentum isn't lost. So we would go into the Heavy Room to do that.
"Whether it was Gerard breaking up with his girlfriend, or guys having certain feelings about what other guys were playing, or the direction of the record, we would go into The Heavy Room and talk it out. It was a safe place for people to say the truth without wanting to kill each other."
While some of the truths were hard to hear, the airing of them served to focus minds. The conversations in the room were not pleasant, nor were they easy. But there was something about the absolute honesty there that brought them closer.
Chapter 11: Welcome to the Black Parade, from Not the Life It Seems: The True Lives of My Chemical Romance by Tom Bryant, 2014
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