âTHE BLACK PARADE, THE TRIUMPHANT NEW ALBUM BY MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE MAY HAVE A TRAGIC STORYLINE, BUT ITâS NOTHING COMPARED WITH WHAT THE BANDMATES ENDURED TO BRING THE DISC TO LIGHT
PHOTOSÂ BY JON WIEDERHORN PHOTOS BY JUSTIN BORUCKI
STANDING ON A BALCONY nine floors above the teeming streets of New York, Gerard Way overlooks the city in which My Chemical Romance began assembling their ambitious new album, The Black Parade. The newly peroxide- blond frontman takes a deep drag from a cigarette and exhales with a sigh. He knows he shouldnât smoke, but itâs his only remaining vice.
âIf I hadnât been sober, I think The Black Parade surely would have killed me,â says Gerard, who climbed on the wagon in 2004. âWe were going insane the whole time, and I had to cling to my sobriety to stay even a little lucid. The album became like this beast that was consuming us.â
Following up a release as successful as 2004âs Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, which sold 1.4 million copies in the U.S. alone, is never an easy task. And the various scares the band experienced as they worked on the new record-drummer Bob Bryar had a near-fatal staph infection, Gerard seriously injured his foot, and some restless spirits at the studio where they recorded kept them all on edge-did not help matters. And neither
did MCRâs decision to make The Black Parade (Reprise) a concept disc. Together, Gerard and his bandmates-Bryar, guitarists Frank lero and Ray Toro, and bassist Mikey Way (Gerardâs younger brother)-decided to craft a record about a dying young man who is visited by a cast of strange characters that help him examine his short life.
But diving into the conceptual deep end proved well worth the hassle. The Black Parade is not only MCRâs most realized offering; itâs also one of the most eclectic, enjoyable rock records of the year. One listen to tracks
like âHouse of Wolves,â âThe Sharpest Lives,â and âDead!â makes it clear that My Chemical Romance can still rip a good metallic punk tune. But the bandmates are now equally influenced by epic albums like Pink Floydâs The Wall, David Bowieâs The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, and Queenâs A Night at the Opera.
âA lot of bands from the scene we came from try to strip down their music to âkeep it real,â Gerard notes. âBut the real you is what youâve always had inside you and what you strive to be. So when we started compiling the material we had written, we were like, You know what? This has to be a huge, theatrical record.â
MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE started working on ideas for The Black Parade in the back of the bus while on 2005âs Warped Tour, after which they flew to New York and rented a rehearsal space for two months. And thatâs when things started to get weird.
âI was living in Queens, and I had to commute on the subway every day,â Gerard says. âI was suddenly very scared and paranoid. I felt more like an outsider than I ever had, and I had no confidence, which is bad when youâre trying to work on a record. And I had no anonymity because there were a lot of teenagers on the train.â In reaction to the young fans he encountered on the underground,
Gerard wrote âTeenagers,â a T. Rex-style romp with the chorus line, âTeenagers scare the living shit out of me.â âThe song came directly from commuting when school let out and being so terrified of them,â the singer says. âI was like, Wait a minute. These are the same people that listen to our band. Why am I scared? And I realized it was because theyâre scared, too. Teenagers are made to feel like they can only solve their problems with violence. They lash out at each other in a really volatile way.â After several months experiencing the joys of mass transit, MCR had completed only a handful of songs and felt like a change of scenery (and climate) might do them some good. âI couldnât keepworking in New York,â says Gerard. âWe wanted isolation.â
id: Gerard leads the way to what will likely be the bandâs second platinum record
So the group relocated to Paramour Mansion, outside of L.A. Nestled high in the hills, the deluxe estate overlooks the trendy Silver Lake area and boasts spacious rooms, a gorgeous pool, lush gardens, a state-of-the-art recording facility-and a few special guests.
âThe place is definitely haunted,â Gerard says. âDoors would slam, and the faucets would turn on. Youâd get a bath drawn for you of freezing-cold water in your room, and you wouldnât know why.â As unnerving as its mischievous spirits could be, the Paramour was also inspiring, and contributed to the haunting vibe of songs like âThe Endâ and âThis Is How I Disappear.â More important, it led Gerard to come up with the bleak, surreal concept for the record. âI would have these night terrors, where it would feel like someone was choking me, and my heart would stop and I would stop breathing,â he says. âI would wake up in the middle of the night and write these notes to myself, and one of them read, âWe are all just a black parade.â So I started thinking about how this band is kind of a black parade, like a funeral-procession rock thing. And I used that idea to piece together this story about the idea that when you die, death comes for you however you want.â Gerard molded his concept into a narrative about a character he dubbed the Patient, whose strongest memory from childhood is of his father taking him to the city to see a parade. Two songs into the album, he dies, and the black parade comes for him.
âDuring the rest of the story, he meets this entity of death and all these characters, like Mama, who represents anyone whoâs ever lost their son in a war,â Gerard explains. âItâs almost like these Canterbury Tales, where he goes along on this journey, and at the end he decides whether he wants to live or die.â With the concept in place, My Chem made the songs as sweeping and theatrical as Gerardâs lyrics. They accomplished this, in part, by combing through their own eclectic record collections and pulling choice elements that would set them even further apart from other melodic punk bands.
The first two minutes of âWelcome to the Black Paradeâ stemmed from Gerardâs love for Broadway musicals, the horns in âDead!â came from Mikeyâs interest in Blur and Britpop, and the jaunty feel of âMamaâ was informed by Tom Waits and Nick Cave. But the most poignant moment on the record, âCancer,â was (unlike its morbid moniker) something of a pleasant surprise. âI was very upset about something in my personal life, and thatâs when that song came out,â Gerard says. âIt was really spontaneous, and it was recorded pretty much live with Rob [Cavallo, the recordâs producer] on the piano and me in the vocal booth. Then we added layers of drums, which gave it a certain urgency. Itâs the song Iâm most proud of because it was the most pure emotion weâve ever captured, and it gets such an immediate response. You canât shake what the song is about.â
As the CD approached completion, some members of the band began to show signs of nervous exhaustion. The group was scheduled to fly to England to play the Reading Festival, and as the date grew near, Toro, who has a fear of flying, got noticeably agitated. Then, after the band tracked âWelcome to the Black Parade,â which was originally called âThe Five of Us Are Dying,â the guitarist lost it.
âI thought I had this premonition,â Toro explains. âI was flipping through the TV channels, and on the news. there would be something about a plane crash, and every time I woke up in the morning, the clock would say 9:11. I was playing Tomb Raider the night before the flight, and on the level I ended up at, there was this whole flashback to a plane crash. So right before the flight I was like, âThatâs it. Iâm not flying.â
Despite his misgivings, Toro boarded the plane, and when My Chemical Romance returned to L.A. (all of them still very much alive, thank you very much), The Black Parade was completed without further incident. Listening back to the record, the band members were in awe of what they had achieved and eager to share it with their fans. âThere was a real confidence that came to us,â Gerard explains. âHaving survived it, we felt like we were changed forever. I feel different as a performer now, and I think we really finally discovered who we were as a band.âÂ
But just because MCR were done with the record didnât mean that it was done with them. About a month later, the band was shooting a video for âFamous Last Wordsâ with director Samuel Bayer (Garbage, Smashing Pumpkins) on a set featuring walls of flame, when-seized by the moment-lero grabbed Gerardâs throat from behind and wrestled him to the ground. The singer rolled one way; his foot went the other. âIt bent completely backwards, and I heard a crack and felt this agonizing pain,â Gerard recalls. âI tore all the ligaments in my foot, but I got up and continued to perform.ââI didnât know what I was doing,â says lero, shaking his head. âI wasnât trying to hurt him. I felt awful. I still do.â Gerardâs injury was serious, and he still walks with a cane, but it paled in comparison to what happened to Bryar. At the end of the shoot, the pyro was so intense, the drummer could feel his leg burning, but he stuck it out for the rest of the song. By then, he had a nasty third-degree burn. And the misfortune didnât stop there. Bryar didnât take his antibiotics regularly, and he failed to keep the wound clean. By the time the band got back from a brief tour of Japan, the burn was severely infected. Then Bryarâs face swelled up and, after doing the MTV Video Music Awards preshow telecast and a special club show, stumbled into a hospital emergency room in intense pain. âI thought Iâd be there for 10 minutes, but as soon as they saw me, they got all serious and gave me an IV and said they had to do a CAT scan,â recalls Bryar.âThey did all these blood tests and kept me there for 14 hours.â Doctors discovered that Bryarâs leg infection had spread to his blood and caused an abscess in his face that was creeping dangerously close to his brain. If it had been left untreated for another two days, he could have died. âThe whole thing was such a nightmare,â Bryar says. âThis doctor stuck my cheek with a needle about six inches long and the width of an IV tube. Then he went in and out of the inside of my mouth with the needle about 10 times." Fortunately, the treatment worked, and Bryar left the hospital three days later.
With tragedy averted, My Chem are now focusing on touring for The Black Parade. Theyâll be in Europe for most of November, and when they get back at the end of year, theyâll start rehearsing for a U.S. arena tour that starts in February. "We want to put on a full show with props and staging like The Wall,â Gerard says. And MCR plan to keep the Patient alive long after theyâre done touring for the CD. âI would love to see the story turned into a play or a musical, and it could easily be a movie,â enthuses Gerard. âMaking this record, we cut ourselves open every day, pulled out every organ, and lay them on a table so it would be something weâre completely happy with. We want The Black Parade to exist for a long time.â
âI felt more like an outsider than I ever had, and I had no confidence, which is bad when youâre trying work on a record.â