MUSIC INTERVIEW MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE RIDES THEIR LOFTY AMBITIONS INTO CRITICS’ HEARTS BY JOHN B. MOORE
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RANK IERO, GUITARIST FOR MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE, knows the backlash is coming. You simply don’t follow up a million-plus selling album with an ambitious concept album (which itself goes on to sell millions) without landing on someone’s radar. Iero has always been realistic about the group’s fate among critics: Even as he, frontman Gerard Way and their bandmates settled in last year to write The Black Parade, their ambitious goth/glam concept album that’s equal parts Queen and Ziggy Stardust, Iero warned that people would hate it, no matter how great the finished product was. Oddly enough, the backlash still hasn’t yet arrived. The record was met with praise from critics (reluctant praise from some, but praise nonetheless) and even managed to land on many “Best Of ” lists at the end of the year. The band’s equally ambitious stage show has only made the praise louder. As The Black Parade marches on, Iero took time recently to talk about the story behind the concept, a sober lead singer and, of course, the inevitable backlash.
kept saying to everyone, “Even if it’s a great record, people are going to hate it because it’s time to hate our band.” Honestly, it’s just shocking that people do like it and aren’t afraid to say that they like it. Did you do anything different when writing the record to make sure the concept would stick, like go off-site and remove yourselves from everyday life? Yeah, but we did that with the last record, too. We moved out to L.A. for a good six months and locked ourselves up in a house. We really didn’t have any kind of contact from the outside world. What you have to understand about our band is that it’s kind of a brand new band. We’re really only maybe two years old with Bob as our new drummer and
was really hard to make but we’re so happy with, playing to thousands of people that actually really love the songs and are singing them back to us. We’re putting on a show like Kiss, with fire and lights... it’s ridiculous! Every day I wake up and pinch myself. We don’t ever forget how lucky we are. Did you have any idea that the album was going to be this big? Absolutely not. People say things to you, but they have to. “You guys are going to be fucking huge!” Thanks, but that doesn’t mean anything coming from you. People always say that just because they feel they need to say something. I really thought everyone was going to hate this record. I told the other guys to be prepared for that. Then all of a sudden
You had to pull out of the overseas tour last month, didn’t you? I did. Right before we left for the tour I got all four of my wisdom teeth taken out. I thought I’d be fine, and the doctor said,“Don’t worry about it, you’ve got four days to heal. You’ll be alright.” Apparently what happened was that one of my wisdom teeth was so impacted that, when they ripped it out, they ripped out part of the wall. On the plane it ruptured and caused an infection. When I got off the plane in Japan I had a 104º fever, I was bleeding from my nose. It was terrible. Let’s talk about the new record. What’s the general concept behind The Black Parade? The main character, his name is The Patient. He’s kind of like your everyman and he’s on his deathbed. Death comes for him in the form of one of his earliest memories– the memory of his father taking him to the parade as a kid. This parade comes for him, and it’s a Black Parade that takes him through the journey of his life. And as this parade takes him away he starts to see different people he met along the way, different decisions that he’s made and different aspects of his life that maybe he’s not that happy with. Where you nervous at all about turning in a concept album? It seems like it would be easier just to turn in another version of Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. We weren’t so nervous about doing a concept record. We were more nervous about the record being good. We had tried to make a concept record with Three Cheers, to tell you the truth. It was more of a loosely-based concept, because we were new with it and also because real life started to creep in. When real life starts to happen around you and you’re not a seasoned writer, songs start to be about other things and the concept seems to break apart. With this, when real life would happen, we tried to put that into the concept. So it was our second concept record, and I
Gerard being sober. It’s a brand new entity. Gerard has been pretty open in the past talking about getting sober. Do you, as both a band member and his friend, see a big difference in him? Yes, absolutely. He’s smarter. It’s weird because I thought he was a fucking genius before, but the kid is sharper. Some of the stuff he comes out with, I don’t know... It’s surprising.
people started to like it and we were like, “Wow!” Like we knew it was something special, but we didn’t think anybody would admit that it was. When creating a piece of art, there’s always something that you look at when you’re done with it and go, “That’s not what how I wanted it to be.” There’s always something that’s not as good as you thought it would be. On this record, when it was all said and done, every second was better than I thought it would be. That’s how I knew it was special.
EVERY DAY I WAKE UP AND PINCH MYSELF. WE DON’T EVER FORGET HOW LUCKY WE ARE.
I know it’s still a little early because the album hasn’t even been out a year yet, but do you have plans to do anything more with The Black Parade, like turning it into a play or movie? Well, yeah, there has been some talk. But, like you said, it still is early. We’re just having fun right now bringing it to life on stage. Well, tell me about that. What does the show look like? Man, the show’s awesome. We’re just like kids in a candy shop. Right now we’re on tour playing songs that we love, from a record that
Were you listening to anything different when you guys were writing this time around? You know what? I wasn’t listening to anything at all. Was that a conscious decision? It was. Going into it, we listened to The Wall, Sgt. Pepper’s, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, Queen’s Night at the Opera. These were like our staples going into it, because we knew we were undertaking something
grand. These are records where artists really put their foot down and went off the deep end with things in a genius way. We really wanted to learn from the past in order to do something brand new. So we listened to those records a lot before writing the record, but once we started writing I didn’t listen to anything. What I drew upon was stuff my dad made me listen to as a kid– lots of T-Bone Walker and a lot of old blues, like Muddy Waters. That, and a lot of film. Even something as dumb as Nightmare on Elm Street. There’s a song that didn’t make the record, but it’s a B-side, where everything I wrote was inspired by that movie. Getting back to the stage show, do you play the entire record from beginning to end every night? Yes, we do. We decided it would be easier to drive the point home if we played it in that order. We thought if we changed certain things, we could leave the listener with a different idea of the outcome of the Patient. We thought that might be kind of cool, but didn’t want to confuse anybody. You’ve been in the band since the beginning. Aside from obvious lineup changes, how has the band changed since I Brought You My Bullets? Well, that was a band that had just started. We’d been together maybe three months before we decided to make that record. I was in the band about three weeks and it was like,“We need 10 songs for this record. Start writing!” Whatever we had, we recorded, and we had nine days to do it. It was rushed, and I don’t think the guitars were even recorded through real amps. It was all done on the computer, and really it was just for us. I remember the first pressing was 100, and then it went to 1,000 and we were like, “Oh man, we’re going to lose all our money!” People consider us a wellthought-out band, but it wasn’t. But there was something about the songs that was great, even if they were literally written 10 minutes before we recorded them. On the song “Early Sunsets Over Monroeville,” I wrote my part in the van outside the recording studio because we just didn’t have time. Having done this for a while, are you more confident about your songwriting now? I’m definitely more confident now. I learned a lot from every experience, from every producer we’ve worked with, and from every person we’ve met along the way. As a band, we don’t feel like [just because] we’ve done this for six years, there’s nothing more we can learn. We’re still learning. I’m still learning about my instrument, about different fingerings and recording processes. I’m not a gear-head, so I’m still learning about amps and pedals. I’ll always be learning. And that’s what I think is one of the cool things about this band: As good as we could become, we’re still like these little sponges that soak up everything anybody has ever told us. That’s what I think we used on this record. There are five members of this band that are best friends, and there’s no getting past that. When you’ve toured as much as we have and you’ve seen as much as we have and you’re under a microscope as much as we are these days, you learn that that’s your true family, and that you can count your friends on probably two hands. You just look out for each other. PG 23 • insiteatlanta.com • April 2007
