My Chemical Romance—“Welcome to the Black Parade”

We should have known that, despite the irony, the kid from New Jersey who defended the purchasing of serial killer comics would grow up to become the defender of the broken, beaten, and damned. Today, Rob recollects the discovery of his emo phase with the enduring anthem “Welcome to the Black Parade,” by My Chemical Romance. He recounts the rise of the young band in a post-9/11 New Jersey and the pinnacle of their success with the grandiose showmanship of the 'Black Parade' album. At the end, he is joined by former My Chemical Romance producer and mentor Geoff Rickly, lead singer of the band Thursday, who knew early on that the band would be a global phenomenon. Host: Rob Harvilla Producers: Olivia Crerie, Julianna Ress, Chris Sutton, and Justin Sayles Guest: Geoff Rickly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/60songsthatexplainthe90s/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@60songsthatexplainthe90s?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:45Speaker 00

  Hit the street, grab a can and get after it.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Hello friends, a quick note to say that 60 Songs is now available on YouTube. We made it. Success. That was easy. You can now watch full episodes of this show on YouTube and you can also check out our new social media accounts. On Instagram and Tik Tok, all using the name 60 Songs that explain the 90s. We have heard your cries of despair and confusion. And we have therefore embraced various popular online platforms. So watch us on YouTube, check us out on Tik Tok and Instagram. I'm on Bluesky and Twitter still under the name Harvilla, H A R V I L L A, but maybe stay out of it. I don't know. We'll put all the links for these in the episode description as well.

• 1:40Speaker 01

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• 1:48Speaker 01

  Do the words Nickelodeon Super Toy Run mean anything to you? Does this phrase resonate? Did your inner nine-year-old just freak out? Just a tiny little bit because mine did. When I think of heaven, deliver me in a black winged bird to a Nickelodeon Super Toy Run.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Once a year, two kids in America get to live out the ultimate dream.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  I still don't believe it. I think I'm gonna wake up in about two seconds.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  It's Nickelodeon Super Toy Run, a game grabbing, toy snagging rampage through a KB toywork store. Nickelodeon created it and only Nickelodeon's got it. Did you get everything you wanted?

• 2:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, anymore.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  The deflated melancholy in that last kid's voice, though. Did you get everything you wanted? And more, that's heavy. That's real. Also, the initial black and white footage of excited children really confuses me. Nowadays, when I see black and white stuff in commercials, I just assume it's a political attack ad. So Nickelodeon, the kids cable TV channel, back in the 80s and 90s mostly, so like pre SpongeBob. Nickelodeon had this shopping spree contest where you enter via postcard. And if you win, you get five full minutes to run through a toy store and fill as many shopping carts as you can with all the toys you want.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Either KB Toys or Toys R Us, depending on the year. They even flew a kid out to Hawaii to do this.

• 3:24Speaker 04

  On your order, get set, go.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  In a five-minute rampage, Doug found Toy Paradise in Tropical Paradise. Videos, sporting goods, telescopes, he grabbed it all. He even got stuff for the kid next door. And when it was all over, Doug had bagged almost $10,000 worth of toys.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, good for you, Doug. Keep it to yourself. I was crazy jealous of Doug. Dude, that would have been the best day of my whole life. Five minutes to grab all the toys you wanted. Imagine, there's me sprinting down the Toys R Us aisle that had all the Transformers and G.I. Joe guys with both my arms outstretched, going, just scooping them off the racks and into my ninth shopping cart. But G.I. Joe guys, those are pretty cheap though. Eh, like three bucks a piece, maybe? That is not an economically efficient use of my five minutes. I can't help but notice that pretty much every Nickelodeon Super Toy Run winner

• 4:22Speaker 01

  ends up with almost $10,000 worth of stuff. 9,000 bucks and change, suspiciously uniform totals year to year. I need a Moneyball type analytics breakdown of every year, every kid and the retail price of every item. How does one approach this situation? If you're just trying to make as much money as possible in hypothetical resale value? How many 10-speed bikes can you fit in a shopping cart? Like maybe 12? I would not thrive in this environment. It's too stressful. I used to go to buffet restaurants with my buddy Tommy. And Tommy was adamant that you had to beat the buffet.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Right? You paid $35. All right, now you gotta eat more than $35 worth of food. You gotta make this restaurant lose money. You gotta beat the buffet. So eat high value food only. I'm sitting at the table munching on a dinner roll and Tommy slaps the dinner roll out of my hand. No bread, that's empty calories. Bread is worthless. I'm like, dude, you need to calm down. I take a sip of Dr. Pepper. Tommy slaps the Dr. Pepper out of my hand. No soda, that's empty calories too. Go grab some crab legs, beat the buffet. Okay, okay. I lack that killer instinct. I fear I would have paralyzed myself trying to defeat the Nickelodeon Super Toy Run.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  And somehow I'd have ended up owing Toys R Us money. Grudgingly, I must admit, I'm better off living vicariously through these people.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  The winners went wild. 108 video games, one house, five bikes, eight board games, seven dolls, one mint, three beanbags, six action figures, eight stuffed animals, five models, one human skull, two sleds, nine radio controls. Over $9,100 worth of toys, so much stuff.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  See? Almost 10,000 bucks again, suspicious. That rundown is from 1991. Quick question, where'd you get a human skull? Yo, I must have overlooked the KB Toys Human Skull aisle. Back in 2015, the AV Club interviewed a couple mid 90s Super Toy Run winners, including Doug. And it's legit fascinating. An article written by my friend Mara Ekin. It turns out that you can't spend the whole five minutes going in the video game aisle because you'd make too much money and it would look boring on TV.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Also, your typical nine-year-old kid does not have the upper body strength to even do that because the toys are too heavy. So the kid would just go.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  I imagine Karl Marx watching some little league punk pancake himself trying to gullwing the remote control car aisle. It's a rich text. In that AV Club article, the winners talk about how their friends and classmates treated them differently. Once everyone found out about the Super Toy Run. You get kids outright asking for toys or just acting super weird and obsequious. Suddenly even the bullies are refusing to hit you during dodgeball games, et cetera. A lot of jealousy and cattiness. Kids are dicks, basically. One of the winners, Andrew Moose, 1995 Sacramento.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Andrew says, quote, "It also helped me figure out a lot about who my close friends were. The people who were close to you beforehand, before any of this happened to you. If it was still unchanged afterward, you knew. It's the kind of life lesson that sticks with you as you learn about people's intentions as you meet them and think about what possible motivations people might have when they meet you." End quote. Yikes. This kid spends five minutes in a toy store and he walks out talking like Drake. But no, I'm sure that's true. Sincerely, I bet that whatever you may have imagined,

• 8:30Speaker 01

  the lived experience of a Super Toy Run is bizarre and uncomfortable and profoundly alienating. So it's for the best that the closest I ever got personally to doing a Super Toy Run was in 2006, when the Lincoln Center Tower Records in New York City had a going out of business sale. And basically all the CDs were five bucks. And trust me, that was plenty weird enough.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  That's the cool little circus-type opening riff to the song I'm about to talk about. A remarkable cocktail of whimsy and pompousness in that little riff. No? You sit up a little straighter, but you also somehow recoil instinctively. You are suspicious. You're like, uh-oh, something really bizarre and uncouth is about to happen. This shit is gonna be both awesome and ill-advised. It's like your ringtone when your most toxic high school ex calls you out of nowhere 10 years later. We'll talk about this song in a second. I just wanted a little musical thing there. Okay, in 2006, I'm living in

• 9:46Speaker 01

  New York and Tower Records goes bankrupt. Tower Records, the once monolithic international record store chain with iconic US locations coast to coast, from Hollywood to Manhattan. Growing up in the 90s, back in the peak CD era, back when CDs cost $17.99 a piece and everyone loved it, and therefore the recorded music industry was gonna be booming forever. Back then, in LA especially, Tower Records is a cool, vital part of music history. Sure, but Tower Records is also definitionally a chain, a monolith, a corporate bully, an

• 10:27Speaker 01

  existential threat to cool, independent record stores like Other Music, that was a cool New York record store, or Empire Records. That's a movie. But now, it's 2006, and we're post-Napster and mid iTunes and pre-streaming era, and somebody could hypothetically download 80 gigs of classic Tropicalla records off the illegal torrent site Oink for free, and the music industry has imploded. And yeah, oof, even Tower Records is out of business now. Sorry, guys. My bad. Tower Records is functionally holding a going-out-of-business sale. And so I toot on up to the Lincoln Center store on the Upper West Side, because

• 11:10Speaker 01

  I ain't ever been there, and it's about to be too late. And pretty much all the CDs are $5. Holy shit. Unlimited $5 CDs. Oh, look, here's the 1974 album, "Kantar," from Brazilian singer and Tropicalla icon Gaúca Costa. Oh, weird. Actually, I don't need to buy this CD, because I already downloaded this record from somewhere, though I forget where exactly. Oh, that's too bad. Nonetheless, this song is called "Lágrimas Negras." That means "black tears." I think you'll soon find that this song is thematically appropriate.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  I just dig that song and thought you should hear it. Those lyrics are in Portuguese and translate roughly to, "He is the astronaut of longing with a mouth all red. Black tears fall, flow, and hurt." Thematically appropriate. You'll see. Okay, maybe I don't need that album for some reason, but holy crap, this should be the single greatest moment of my life. This is totally the rock critic equivalent of a super toy run, except I walk around Tower Records that day, and I feel this heavy, deflated melancholy. Like civilization has collapsed. Like I'm trapped in the belly of a dying beast, and I'm helping kill it.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  One $5 CD at the time. I'm at a funeral. That's what it is. I have unwittingly joined a funeral parade. We are beating the buffet to death. Part of the subconscious thrill of a super toy run is watching a kid stick it to the man, right? Back when a giant national toy store chain was a robust money-printing colossus. But now, here in the 2000s, forget rampaging, contest-winning children. Now, the biggest threat to Toys R Us is, you know, private equity. And CD stores are dying too, and we killed them, and we should feel bad, and maybe we even do feel bad. I wander into the Lincoln Center Tower Records hip-hop

• 13:39Speaker 01

  section, and I see two friends of mine, two big-shot music writers and critics and culture writers and future podcast stars. And I go, "What's up, fellas?" And they turn around, and they're both holding giant, towering, precarious stacks of $5 CDs. And they look at me like, "Oh, shit." They are alarmed at my presence. And they're like, "Hey, man, how's it going?" There was just such a striking mixture of glee and shame on their faces. I'll never forget it as long as I live. It was as though I had caught them raiding my refrigerator. It felt like I was approaching two raccoons that were eating giant stacks of pancakes out of a garbage can. They're like, "Oh, we were just..." I'm holding a

• 14:23Speaker 01

  giant stack of $5 CDs as well. Obviously, I'm buying all kinds of shit. This is one of the best days of my life, even if it does feel unnatural and surreal and funereal and vaguely depressing. I'm on a super emo toy run. I'm on a super emo toy run that's so emo that that day, I accidentally buy, for $5, one of my absolute favorite albums of the 2000s.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  The band is called Say Anything. That's also a movie. Say Anything are a rock band from Los Angeles. A rock band, and yeah, kinda objectively, an emo band. Emo being an extra-intense and emotionally direct offshoot of punk rock with multiple waves and iterations. But at its mid-2000s commercial peak, emo is basically sad, angry boys writing mean, angry songs about girls. That's what emo is. I have friends who listen to this show who get mad if I don't explicitly define every subgenre. They've been asking me what goth means for years, and I'm like, "Dude, I'm not defining goth. Go look it up." Say

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Anything are an emo band led by a reckless and fearless and filterless singer-songwriter named Max Bemis. And yeah, wow, Max just said the full name of his ex-girlfriend, Molly Connolly. And then he does it again.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  This song is called "Every Man Has A Molly." Reckless, uncouth, ill-advised. Okay, so I would hasten to add that Molly Connolly is not her real name, and also, she maybe, hopefully, doesn't really exist. We're doing emo meta-commentary here. We're taking things too far on purpose. There's a great book called "Where Are Your Boys Tonight: The Oral History of Emo's Mainstream Explosion, 1999 to 2008," by the music journalist Chris Payne. And in that book, Max Bemis says, quote, "Emo was always exaggerated. I'm gonna fucking

• 17:10Speaker 01

  die if you don't go out with me." I was like, "What if I took this even further and intentionally?" End quote. Yeah, man. What if? Chorus.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  And in that book, "Where Are Your Boys Tonight," the great rock critic and friend of the show, Ian Cohen, jumps in, and he says, quote, "A song like 'Every Man Has A Molly,' if you approach it from a certain perspective, you're like, 'Oh, this is everything wrong with emo.'" But Ian says, "Max knows exactly what he's doing. He's not condoning being that kind of person, you know? That's what I hope people understand." End quote. And I agree, but also, this song, we're doing the thing, right? You see this a lot. We're doing the thing where we identify a bad thing. Rampant, invasive, hyper-personal misogyny

• 18:22Speaker 01

  in emo lyrics, in this case. There's a bad thing. And then, having identified the thing, we then ironically critique the thing by creating a super-exaggerated parody of the thing. But now, in addition to shrewdly critiquing and mocking the thing, we're also just doing the thing now. Yes? We're doing a supercharged, extra uncouth version of the thing under the guise of denouncing the thing. It's a real conundrum. Anyways, I buy this Say Anything record for $5, and dude, I fucking love it.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is the triumphant climax of a song called Belt. Belt is track one on the Say Anything album Is a Real Boy. And the record begins with a song of rebellion. It's the terrifyingly exuberant gang vocals there. The mob, the riot, the battalion, the army, the nation of millions that screams, "My friends", in unison. The ironically bro-ish frat house Greek chorus going, "Yeah, yeah", on a whim, as Tower Records crumbles all around me. I acquire the 2004 Say Anything album Is a Real Boy. That's the title. Is a Real Boy. It's a Pinocchio reference.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  You can tell it's a Pinocchio reference because the album cover is a drawing of Pinocchio's nose lengthening because he's been lying. Pinocchio's got a very long nose. This is not a subtle enterprise. And you guessed it, that's why I fucking love it. Is a Real Boy has extreme, try-hard, uninhibited, ultra-verbous rock opera energy. The final track, track 13, is called Admit It. Three exclamation points. Here comes a whole lot of words. Hit the deck.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  I worry about how this album will sell because I believe it will determine the amount of sex I will have in the future. I self-medicate with drugs and alcohol to treat my extreme social anxiety. You are a faker. You are a fraud. Yeah, you're living a lie, living a lie. Your life is living a lie.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  That is 200 pounds of emo in a five-pound bag, right there. We have reached bold new frontiers of knowingly toxic oversharing. Say Anything frontman Max Bemis struggles very publicly with emo scene fame, with substances, and with bipolar disorder. The agonizing mental health struggles and triumphs of Max Bemis will be the primary animating force of Say Anything's whole weird, sprawling, discomforting, ur-emo, frequently awesome body of work. But this Is a Real Boy record is singularly bonkers. This song is called Alive with the Glory of Love.

• 21:37Speaker 04

  And when our city, vast and shitty, falls to the Axis. Yeah, they'll search the buildings, collect gold fillings, wallets and rings. Oh, yeah.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  And when our city, vast and shitty, falls to the Axis. Yeah, he means the Axis powers in World War II. They'll search the buildings, collect gold fillings, wallets and rings. Oh, yeah, that all means what it means. Max Bemis is Jewish. It comes up a lot. There's a 2002 Say Anything EP called Menorah Majora. That's good. That's pretty good. Here's Max in that Where Are Your Boys Tonight oral history book. Quote, "When I wrote Alive with the Glory of Love, I had just seen The Pianist or some Holocaust movie. It immediately made me think of my grandparents.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  What was it like to be in love during that time? The Holocaust was deeply ingrained in me from a young age. My first serious fear was people coming to my house and taking my family away. It was this apocalyptic thing I knew personally because my grandparents had been through it. I wanted to do some Moulin Rouge kind of song about that. Alive with the Glory of Love is about love in the face of the apocalypse. Let's take this as far as it can go." End quote. Not all of Max's bandmates in Say Anything were aware at the time that Treblinka was the name of a concentration camp.

• 23:24Speaker 04

  Our Treblinka is alive with the glory of love. Treblinka alive with the glory of love. Yeah.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  And what is there to say, really, beyond, oh, wow? It turns out you can say anything in an emo song and then go, "Yeah" at the end, and maybe it'll work. I loved this record. The grandiosity, the absurdity, the audacity. It induces awe in me. And not for nothing, it also induces profound and genuinely impressive discomfort in me. I cannot believe any of this is real, and I'm not 100% sure that it should be. In that book, Max Bemis talks about how his mother is Jewish, and Max's maternal grandparents basically disowned his mother for marrying his Irish Catholic father.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  And so by extension, Max's grandparents disowned him. Max says, quote, "I didn't meet my grandma until Alive with the Glory of Love came out. I played it for her on her deathbed. It was a huge compliment for her to recognize me as not a mistake. I know that's so dark, but it's true. I saw she appreciated me and appreciated the music. She loved it. She cried. She said I was beautiful." End quote. Oh, wow. I read that quote, and I put the book down, and I just thought about that for a while. So that's the scale, the emotional pitch we're working at today. Let's take this as far as it can go.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Let's take this as far as emo can go, as far as rock and roll can go, as far as any one album can go. Because that day in 2006 at Tower Records, as I did my little sheepish funeral march with a giant stack of $5 CDs, it wasn't just a funeral for a record store or a funeral for the record business. It was a funeral for the album. It was a funeral for the album as a concept, as an entity, as the default unit of musical greatness and lasting human achievement. Music is cheaper now. Music is free now, basically, usually. That's the good news. We got everything we wanted. But it turns out what we really wanted was more.

• 25:49Speaker 04

  When I was a young boy, my father took me into the city to see a marching band.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  My name is Rob Harvill. This is the 46th episode of 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, Cole and the 2000s. And this week, we are discussing Welcome to the Black Parade by My Chemical Romance from their 2006 album, The Black Parade. Dig the truly phenomenal snarl in My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way's voice right here when he sings the words to join the Black Parade.

• 26:31Speaker 04

  Because one day I'll leave you a phantom to lead you in the summer to join the Black Parade.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  If Gerard Way did a Nickelodeon super toy run, he'd just have six shopping carts full of human skulls. Gerard Way going duh-duh-duh-duh-duh down the human skull aisle. Total retail price, $9,200, ad break.

• 27:00Speaker 00

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• 27:45Speaker 00

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• 28:28Speaker 01

  I just reached out to one of my buddies who I saw at Tower Records that day, sheepishly holding a giant stack of $5 CDs like a pancake-eating raccoon. Don't tell him I described him like that. And I was like, remember when we raided the Tower Records going out of business sale, and it felt super weird? And he was like, what a glorious sad day that was. He says, "That day, I bought a CD from a rapper who's in prison for killing and eating his roommate." And I was like, "That day, I bought a CD with this cover." And I sent him the Say Anything phallic Pinocchio album cover. And oh, how we laughed. Dudes rock. You know?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Let's not ever lose sight of the fact that dudes rock. Speaking of dudes rocking, every time I hear the stark, eerie, solitary, iconic piano line that kicks off Welcome to the Black Parade, I think of one of my all-time favorite TikTok videos. If you're not watching this, it's fine. It's just a dude sitting on his couch, playing video games while he's listening to his friend's new mashup that involves Welcome to the Black Parade. And the camera zooms in on the dude's face as he listens. That's the setup. Here we go.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  And the instant that the Smash Mouth guy goes, "Somebody", the dude listening, he rolls his eyes so hard. His eyes roll so far back into his head. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen on the internet. I love it very much. Okay. Have you ever seen My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way appearing on Sally Jesse Raphael as a teenager? I had not. Gerard Way is born in Summit, New Jersey in 1977 and raised in nearby Belleville, New Jersey, with his younger brother, Mikey Way, who's born in 1980. On the first real page of that emo oral history book, Where Are Your Boys Tonight?

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Mikey Way says, quote, "Growing up in Belleville, certain parts weren't the safest, so you had to create escapes. You had to live in your head. Kids would ride bikes and play with friends, but that wasn't an everyday thing because the neighborhood my brother and I lived in was more dodgy. That's where the fantasy and world building came into play. We were always massive fans of fantasy, sci-fi, comic books. Through that, we got into Dungeons and Dragons and all that stuff. Everything we were into was tailored to somebody who didn't like to go outside anyway." End quote. Now it's 1993.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Sally Jesse Raphael is the host of a medium trashy daytime talk show called Sally. It's like Geraldo or Jerry Springer, but nobody throws chairs. I don't think. There are fewer, if any, thrown chairs on Sally. Today's episode of Sally concerns Boneyard Comics, an underground publisher doing a controversial series of comics about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. And some lady named Grace Ann thinks it's terrible that kids might read this, and she is leading the charge to censor these comics. That's the gist. Anybody in the audience got anything to say?

• 32:06Speaker 05

  Hi, I have a statement. I'm 16. I write for Boneyard Comics. Um, basically, it's Grace Ann. Yeah. Why don't you go after the media? Why don't you go after the other things? Why just comics? Comics aren't just for adults. So I'm- Comics are for everybody.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  And there he is. 16-year-old Gerard Way of Belleville, New Jersey. Comics aren't just for adults. Comics are for everybody. The two best comments on this YouTube video, in no particular order, are, number one, quote, "When I was a young boy, my father took me into the city to see Sally Jesse Raphael," end quote. Excellent. And number two, quote, "Sharp kid. I'll bet when he grows up, he'll be the savior of the broken, the beaten, and the damned." End quote. Also excellent. You can hear the New Jersey in Gerard's voice, and you can hear the teenage nervousness and hesitance in his voice as well.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  The New Jersey will stay with him. The nervousness and hesitance will not.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  And there he is. Gerard Way, less than a decade later, on a demo recorded by a young, fresh, unsigned rock band in an attic in New Jersey in late 2001 or early 2002. All the music is recorded in the drummer's attic. All the vocals are recorded in the drummer's bathroom. And all of it sounds like it, but the thunderclap of the word "break" right there in the line, "You're not in this alone. Let me break this awkward silence," the way you snap to attention when he hits the word "break," that's your first indication that Gerard Way is going places and taking you with him.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  He's gonna push you down a mountain in a shopping cart full of human skulls. Here we have a song called Turn Styles, a song later renamed Skylines and Turn Styles, as it appears on the 2002 demo recording from the New Jersey punk slash goth slash emo slash metal slash arena rock band not quite yet known as My Chemical Romance. Three existing songs on this demo, which is called either the Attic Demos or the Dreams of Stabbing and/or Being Stabbed EP. That's the actual title. Dreams of Stabbing and/or Being Stabbed.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  And that phenomenal title is your second indication that these fellas are going places. Although for right now, they're stuck in an attic in New Jersey, screaming and thrashing and staring out at the newly fractured New York City skyline.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Dig that rad, weedly-deedly electric guitar, though. Three people in this band right now. Gerard Way on vocals, Matt Plessier on drums. Matt won't be around forever, and drummers will be a lifelong issue for this band, but it's his attic. And Ray Toro on guitar. Ray Toro has long, flowing, majestic, wavy hair, and he shreds like Brian May from Queen, and he looks like a Simpsons character. Ray looks like Nelson's way cooler, older brother. I'm into it. As for these lyrics, "It reaches in and tears your flesh apart as ice-cold hands rip into your heart."

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, this song, Turn Styles, sounds like a punk slash metal song from a bunch of comic book and D and D types. This is primo horror movie imagery. But see, the thing is, by late 2001, that ain't necessarily just horror movie imagery anymore. Horrible apocalyptic reality isn't just for adults. Horrible apocalyptic reality is for everybody.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  And I'll be honest and say that the first time I heard those lines, "As ice-cold hands rip into your heart, that's if you've still got one that's left inside that cave you call a chest," I assumed these were sad, angry boys writing mean, angry songs about girls, right? Heartless girls with caves inside their chests. Yet another man denouncing yet another Molly. But no, the important part of what Gerard just sang is, "And after seeing what we saw, can we still reclaim our innocence?" He's talking about 9/11. On September 11th, 2001, Gerard Way is a 24-year-old Cartoon Network intern and graduate

• 37:32Speaker 01

  of the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He recently pitched his own animated TV show, and he's heading from New Jersey into the city that morning for a meeting, but the city shuts down before he can get there. Talking to Newsweek in 2019, Gerard says, quote, "One of the biggest reasons I started My Chemical Romance was because I was one of the people to witness 9/11 in New York City. That felt like the end of the world. It felt like the apocalypse. I was surrounded by hundreds of people on a dock on the Hudson River, and we watched the buildings go down, and there was this wave of human anguish that I've never felt before.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Since then, I've continued to think about what we would do at the end of the world if we knew we only had a little time left." End quote. So yeah, Gerard thought about it, and then he started a band with a bunch of songs about vampires.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  "The doctor ain't gonna help." This song is called "Vampires Will Never Hurt You," and it appears on a 2002 EP called Like Phantoms Forever. The formal debut recording on super cool New York City label Eyeball Records from the band now officially known as My Chemical Romance. Gerard Way on vocals, Ray Toro on guitar, Matt Plessier on drums, and two important new guys, Frank Iero also on guitar, and Gerard's brother, Mikey Way on bass. The classic, iconic My Chemical Romance enduring lineup is set. Gerard, Ray, Frank, Mikey, and a drummer.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Dig the sauce Gerard Way is about to put on the line, "Can You Stake My Heart."

• 39:49Speaker 01

  He is the astronaut of longing with a mouth all red. Black tears fall, flow and hurt. Multiple people in that emo oral history book lovingly call early My Chemical Romance a vampire rock band. But see, these are songs about vampires animated by real life violence, real life unimaginable tragedy, real life apocalypse. And the gnarlier the imagery gets, the realer it feels.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  And as the fragments of my skull begin to fall, fall on your tongue like pixie dust, just think happy thoughts. That jaunty little tune is called Head First for Halos, and it appears in the debut album from My Chemical Romance, released in 2002 and called I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love. An album produced notably by Jeff Rickley, frontman for the phenomenal New Jersey rock/punk/emo band Thursday. For your reference, here's what Thursday's singing about a year later in 2003.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  That's the title track of Thursday's 2003 album called War All The Time. It is unpleasant to think about how that title and those lyrics do not qualify as fantasy, or science fiction, or overblown, made-up emo melodrama. No, that song is just straight news reporting. It's war reporting. Two of the best songs on the first My Chem record illustrate this blood-red blur between fiction and nonfiction. Fictionally, we got a super screamy ballad called Early Sunsets Over Monroeville, inspired by the famed gnarly 1978 George A. Romero zombie movie Dawn of the Dead.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  That's about as black as Gerard's tears get and as red as Gerard's mouth gets. The crucial flipside, though, is a song called Cubicles, which feels very truthful in real life, to me anyways, and it's about having a crush on your coworker, but it turns out that there's not enough room in this hell for the both of ya.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I really dig how early My Chemical Romance can veer expertly from hello, we are vampires, to oh no, there are zombies, to ah shit, my office crush quit or got fired. I dig this band immediately for evoking the crushing melodrama of both the inhuman and the painfully human experience. Truth is stranger and gnarlier than fiction. Okay, then, time to make these dudes famous.

• 43:33Speaker 04

  You like D and D, Audrey Hepburn, Fangoria, Harry Houdini, and croquet. You can't swim, you can't dance, and you don't know karate. Face it, you're never gonna make it. I don't wanna make it. I just wanna.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Here we have the opening seconds of the blockbuster video from My Chemical Romance's breakout hit called I'm Not Okay (I Promise). And I just love this brief dialogue between Ray Toro, who says, "You're never gonna make it," and Gerard Way, who says, "I don't wanna make it." The way Gerard is just staring dazed off into space. Meanwhile, Ray even sounds like a Simpsons character. I love him so much. Croquet? Do these guys really like croquet? In 2004, My Chemical Romance released their major label debut and breakout album called Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  This is the first song of theirs I ever heard, and my immediate reaction was, you guessed it, oh wow.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  And that, my friends, is a monster chorus, a monster punk rock chorus, a monster arena rock chorus, a monster emo chorus. The Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge album peaks at number six on the Billboard Album Chart. My Chemical Romance are rock stars now. They are a fixture on TRL, on MTV. They are starting to get major attention in the splendid Cleveland-based emo-friendly magazine Alternative Press, and they are star attractions at the fabled extra-mainstream 2005 edition of the Warped Tour. The fabled summer punk/emo apocalyptic heat teenage wasteland blowout, tearing shit up

• 45:47Speaker 01

  alongside Fall Out Boy and a young Paramore and whatnot. Now, in the mid 2000s especially, emo is not cool or critically acclaimed. And if I had to quickly illustrate what made My Chemical Romance uncool, I'd have to say it was the delightfully unhinged quality of the bridge to this song, I'm Not Okay, I Promise. The strokes don't comport themselves in this fashion. You know what I'm saying?

• 46:35Speaker 01

  They're actually playing croquet during that part of the video. Huh, they must really actually like croquet. But yeah, also, that's extremely awesome, that bridge. Yes? That bombastically reckless and uncouth bridge. Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge was initially gonna be a comic book-informed concept album. The liner notes describe this record as, quote, "The story of a man, a woman, and the corpses of a thousand evil men," end quote. Use your imagination, but once again, plain, old, grim, tragic, nigh unbearable reality keeps intruding.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  You may be familiar with track one called Helena, and named for Gerard and Mikey's beloved grandmother, who died midway through the writing process for this record. And suddenly, this whole comic book type story starts feeling kinda dumb. Gerard, talking to Alternative Press Magazine in 2004 about his grandmother's death, he says, quote, "When that happened, I was like, fuck, oh god, how am I going to deal with this story? Does it even matter anymore? Is it just fucking pretentious? Is it bullshit? And then I came to grips with it and said, fuck it, I'm going to write the songs that I want," end quote.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  And then, naturally, he wrote the first capital G great song of his band's career.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  That ascending chord change on the line, "Things are better if I stay," that's the shit right there, the part that goes that part. Also, at this point in the Helena video, Gerard is scream-singing in the rain while he and the band are carrying a funeral casket down the steps of a church. As rock and roll music, as thematic lyrical content, as a heavily comic book-stylized visual proposition, My Chemical Romance are outrageously uninhibited and exaggerated. According to Chris Payne's emo book on the 2005 Warped Tour, Frank Iero went to the doctor because he thought his sinuses were bleeding, and the doctor was like, dude, it's your

• 49:09Speaker 01

  makeup. But his band is outrageously embodying the horrors of real life. We are living in an era of war all the time. We do not need to invent new sources of human anguish. In fact, for our next trick, why don't we write a whole concept album about the original and forever undefeated source of human anguish? Have you heard the news that you're dead?

• 49:51Speaker 01

  The third My Chemical Romance album is released in 2006 and is called The Black Parade. This song is called Dead. Dead exclamation point, we are through fucking around, my friends. The Black Parade is a maximalist arena rock opera about the patient, the patient with a capital P, who is lying in a hospital bed, dying of cancer, and while he's dying, he's just, you know, thinking about stuff. Dead exclamation point is track two. Track one is called The End, The End Period. And I have to confess, The End Period never meant all that much to me until very recently,

• 50:33Speaker 01

  when I saw My Chemical Romance play The Black Parade, front to back, at a Columbus, Ohio hard rock festival. And then suddenly, The End Period meant a great deal to me, especially the part where they yell "save me" repeatedly.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  The organ, the maximalist Hammond B3 organ blaring in the deep background there. The organ really does it for me. We got big shot super producer Rob Cavallo behind the boards now, best known for his work with Green Day. We got Bob Brier on drums now. Bob will play drums in My Chemical Romance from 2004 to 2010. You know what else really does it for me? Gerard on a song called "This Is How I Disappear," screaming, "So I Can't Hurt You Anymore."

• 52:01Speaker 01

  Lot of Iron Maiden in that high note, lot of Judas Priest, lot of King Diamond, lot of Queensryche, perhaps, lot of 70s and 80s metal, lot of Kiss, for that matter. Dig the Detroit rock city type excellence of this song, House of Wolves.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  There is not an ounce of restraint in The Black Parade, nor an ounce of concern about confining its influences to the Warped Tour, to emo, to punk rock, with or without the scare quotes. My Chemical Romance graced the cover of Alternative Press magazine in 2006, and Ray Toro talks about some of the band's influences lately. Queen, Journey, Pink Floyd, Creedence Clearwater Revival, but also various 70s musicals, including Annie, Cabaret, and All That Jazz. Oh, and also Phantom of the Paradise, the 1974 Paul Williams rock opera rewrite of

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Phantom of the Opera. A little bit of Coldplay on The Black Parade, also, if you want the truth. Tell me this song, "I Don't Love You," doesn't sound a little bit like Coldplay.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  We should talk sometime about how every major 2000s rock band has at least one Coldplay song. Linkin Park's Shadow of the Day, et cetera, another time. But yeah, 70s musicals are not necessarily cool rock band influences, whether you're into the Warped Tour or not. In Alternative Press, Ray Toro says, quote, "The intention was to make something that was classic, something timeless, something that 20 or 30 years from now, parents could play for their kids and say, 'This is what I was listening to when I was your age. Check it out. It's still fucking cool.' We wanted to make a record you could pass

• 54:34Speaker 01

  down. There's a lot of music out now that doesn't feel like that." End quote. Mission accomplished, Ray. But also, kids, do not be frightened if your mother plays you the song called Mama.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  This is my current favorite song on The Black Parade, simply for how gleefully deranged it is. Live in 2026, here's the part of Mama where the onstage pyro really kicks in. They light somebody on fire and they run across the stage. My Chemical Romance live are not fucking around, dude. Also, here's the part of Mama where friggin' Liza Minnelli shows up.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  It is objectively funny to me that My Chemical Romance got the Liza Minnelli to sing on this record. And right after she sings, Gerard goes, "But there's shit that I've done with this fuck of a gun," et cetera, et cetera. That is quite a flex. That is a flex that has never been and will never again be attempted. My previous favorite song on The Black Parade was Teenagers, which is just ludicrous.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Do teenagers now even know who George Thoroughgood is? George Thoroughgood, the 80s bubblegum blues rock star dude? Was he really born in Delaware? That's funny. George Thoroughgood from Delaware? Bad to the bone?

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Teenagers always struck me as George Thoroughgood with a mall goth makeover. But this chorus that starts with "Teenagers scare the living shit out of me," this song also points us toward the end, right? Not just the end is in death, but the end is in the end of My Chemical Romance. This band's got one more full album in them. Danger Days call in the true lives of the fabulous Killjoys in 2010. It's extra trashy and chaotic. It rules. My current favorite Danger Days song is called Vampire Money. And then they release a lower stakes compilation of older singles called Conventional Weapons. Then My

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Chemical Romance break up in 2013. The teenagers scared them off. The fame, the pressure, the escalating adulation, the inescapable sense that The Black Parade can never be topped. Even the critics and cool kids came around on The Black Parade. This is a fully canonized, all-time great album now. So of course, it's extremely rad that the band reunited in 2019. And now you can go see Gerard and Ray and Frank and Mikey and a drummer play The Black Parade live, front to back, and they light someone on fire, and all of it rules. And because they follow the tracklist exactly, they don't necessarily

• 58:26Speaker 01

  save their biggest song for last. Look out for track five, my friends. It's a doozy.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Track five is called Welcome to the Black Parade. Yeah, this album is so thoroughly consecrated that even the visual iconography is famous now, right? The ultra goth Sergeant Pepper uniforms, the black and white silent film visual style, the parade float of doom, but also hope. Plus Gerard's slashed and dyed hair, because as he explained to the New York Times, quote, "I wanted to appear white and deathlike and gaunt and sick-looking," end quote. That's the vibe now. And consequently, we are 75 seconds into this song, and Gerard Way is already scream singing his ass off. But please, let's give it up for the

• 59:31Speaker 01

  drummer as well. Bob Brier on drums. Bob sounds like he's sitting behind a 200-piece drum set, but somehow he's also falling down 15 flights of stairs. Bob gets his own ultra goth Sergeant Pepper uniform, but My Chemical Romance, almost from the beginning, is set in stone structurally as Gerard and Ray and Frank and Mikey and a drummer. Bob left the band in 2010, and he died on November 24, 2024. He was 44. Bob Brier is the first major player on The Black Parade to pass away. I didn't want to think very hard about that, honestly, but it gives me a very

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  heavy feeling. Drummers are an eternal problem for My Chemical Romance, but that doesn't mean they're not vitally important.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  Here's a truly shocking fact about the song Welcome to the Black Parade. It is only five minutes and 11 seconds long. I would have honestly guessed it was twice as long. You could have told me this song lasts 45 minutes. This is 200 pounds of song in a five-pound bag. The easy comparison is to call Welcome to the Black Parade the bohemian rhapsody of mainstream emo, but the fact that it's easy doesn't make the comparison wrong. Welcome to the Black Parade is the sound of a band truly going for it. There is an epic scale. There is a naked ambition.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  There is a sense that you've got five minutes and 11 seconds to grab all the toys you can. Another truly shocking fact about this song is that the chorus might be the least interesting part of the song, despite kicking plenty of ass all by itself.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  It's a fantastic chorus. Don't get me wrong. It's a classic warped tour, decimating, sing-along chorus. And My Chemical Romance has got tons of these, but few of these that are this fantastic. But I confess that when I listen to Welcome to the Black Parade, mostly I'm just sitting around waiting for this part.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  And there is unfortunately really no recreating the first time you hear Welcome to the Black Parade and no recreating the first time you hear this downward spiraling choral breakdown in particular. The sheer audacity of this song can only be experienced at maximum power once. This is oh wow incarnate. Here is Gerard Way talking to Alternative Press, quote, "I don't know why people want to be small. I'd ask them, what are you here for? Why do you want to be mild? The bands I loved never wanted to be average. Why should we contribute to the redundancy?" End quote.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  And so they don't.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  I'd never focused on these lyrics, really. "Give a cheer for all the broken. Listen here because it's who we are. And after seeing what we saw, can we still reclaim our innocence?" This song is somehow both dead serious and absolutely preposterous, just like the era that birthed it. But The Black Parade at its core is about our oldest, deepest and darkest fear. The great poet and author and friend of the show Hanif Abdurraqib, talking about this album in that emo book, Where Are Your Boys Tonight? Hanif says, quote, "People don't know what death is like. We don't know what waits for us when we die, if there's anything.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  I think approaching that with some understanding is frightening. And I appreciated The Black Parade for trying to, in a high-concept way, not be very comforting about the fact we're all gonna die. So I don't really feel comforted by The Black Parade, but I do feel comforted by the vision and the goal. Understanding that if there is something that waits for us after we die, it could be artfully articulated with a human imagination." End quote. Speaking of being artfully articulate, Ray Toro's guitar here kicks ass.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  And I can confirm, having experienced Welcome to the Black Parade very recently, live, in the midst of many thousands of people, I can confirm that the words "I don't care" are very pleasing and rousing to scream in unison with many thousands of other people. But part of the visceral thrill of screaming "I don't care" is that of course we do. And of course this band does. And that's the whole ballgame. We scream because we care. The world and the afterworld shows us no comfort, but we make our own comforts together.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  It felt in that moment, truly, like each and every one of us had won. 108 video games, one house, five bikes, eight board games, seven dolls, one mitt, three beanbags, six action figures, eight stuffed animals, five models, one human skull, two sleds and nine radio-controlled cars. And the total retail value, of course, was priceless.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  We are so thrilled and honored to be joined today by Jeff Rickley, frontman for the fantastic, beloved New Jersey rock band Thursday, in addition to being a producer and friend and mentor to My Chemical Romance. Jeff, it's so wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time.

• 1:06:17Speaker 06

  You know, I'm thrilled to be here, Rob.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Awesome. We're thrilled to have you. I'd love to talk first about New Jersey, like just the formative experience of being a young band from New Jersey. Like I've read that even if you can see New York City across the water, like it feels so far away. You feel as far away from the action as if you lived in Kansas or something. Like what does, what does New Jersey do to a young band exactly?

• 1:06:46Speaker 06

  Well, I think, you know, the proximity is actually what makes it so hard in some ways. It's sort of like a class divide where you can see it right there, but there's nothing you can do to be a part of it. So as a, you know, as a kid, it was like I would take the bus into the city and go to CBGB's. I'd go to, you know, all these great shows and I loved it so much, but I never had any idea of how to get access into the world to play there, to be a part of it, to, you know, it felt so far away. And I think because of that, you know, New Jersey bands often were kind of forced into starting their own little weird DIY spaces. I remember going to a garage in Westwood when I was a kid and seeing like AFI and people like that.

• 1:07:30Speaker 06

  And, and then, you know, basement shows in New Brunswick before starting basement shows myself in New Brunswick. And the cool thing was, I think a lot of bands on tour also felt sort of like stalled out before getting a big show in the city. You know, it's a lot harder to play in the city with the economics of having a club open and filling clubs and stuff like that. So a lot of bands would stop at our house and play there, you know.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Did you get people from New York coming to New Brunswick? Like, did it ever work that way? Maybe it didn't. That's a long journey, I suppose, for someone living in Manhattan.

• 1:08:03Speaker 06

  It did, yeah. Bands like Sasha and stuff like that would come and play. I mean, basically, if you played ABC No Rio, you might also play our basement.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  That's good. It's a very convenient, it's a very cool way to frame it, I guess.

• 1:08:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  So does that make you tougher as a band, you know, that you've had to develop your own scene? You know, your own space to play? Like, was there a quality that you could hear or you could feel in New Jersey bands? That they had to create this whole infrastructure, you know, just to have a place to play? Like, was there a quality consistently that New Jersey bands seemed to have?

• 1:08:42Speaker 06

  I have a good friend who was a big part of the New York hardcore scene. He used to say that what he loved about our band and about other bands from New Jersey was that there was a sort of like hardness that you would expect from a New York City band, but there was also this kind of like suburban longing and romanticism that was absent from some of the New York bands. And I, when he said that, I, something about that rang true to me.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Right, right. That makes a lot of sense. I, you produced the first full-length My Chemical Romance album, I Brought You My Bullets. And my favorite song has always been early sunsets over Monroeville, which is this super anguished ballad. Like Gerard, he sounds like he's crying or possibly almost dying. Like when you're producing, you know, when you're guiding a young band in the studio like that, is it more of a therapeutic role than a technical role? Like, how much of what you're doing as a producer is sort of just managing the emotion of it?

• 1:09:40Speaker 06

  I think most of being a producer is managing emotions, to be honest. I think there are moments where you're you're called to be more of an engineer and to say, I don't I don't like the way that sounds. It's not working for me. Can we rehang the mic, you know, stuff like that. But I do think that the the big dividing line for a producer is, you know, kind of zooming out and looking at the whole and often the whole, you know, is more affected by the band's emotions and thoughts and belief in themself. The choices that they're making in real time than, you know, any of the actual sounds on the record. You know, the record sounds the way it sounds because John McClary, the engineer, did such, you know, hard work on it on on a very, very small, very small budget.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:26Speaker 06

  But yeah, I, you know, I'm really glad to hear you say that that's your favorite song on the record. That's the one that I'm most proud of for my contribution to the song, which I really went deep with them on and specifically with Gerard, you know, the ending has this sort of like swelling crescendo and then a dip and then it swells and then it dips and it kind of has this like journey that it's going on. And when we started it, Gerard was following the swells and the dips. And I said, you know, what if you never dipped? What if you were always going up? So that when even when the music starts to fall away, you just kept on pushing harder and harder till at the end, you probably won't be able to do it anymore. You'll probably have to kind of like burn out, you know?

• 1:11:10Speaker 06

  And I watched him rise to the challenge so beautifully. You know, this is the thing that I kept seeing with Gerard over and over again, was that there was nothing that I could ask him to do that he couldn't do better than what I was asking.

• 1:11:25Speaker 06

  And it really started where his, you know, his ideas were repetitive, his melodies were in a small range. And I've never seen somebody just, you prompt them a little bit and they just completely unfold into this world that you didn't see coming from them. And that song, I remember lying on the floor. I had taken a cigarette break with Mikey, the bass player, Gerard's brother. And we were talking about how tough this song was, you know, and then I remember lying on the floor and hearing him raise himself to this challenge and the the beauty of the song coming together. And when we went for another cigarette break, I said, I had a vision.

• 1:12:05Speaker 06

  I had a vision. You're gonna be the biggest band in the world. And he was like, like, as big as Thursday? And I was like, way, way bigger than Thursday. What are you talking about? We're like a niche band. I love Thursday, but we're like a very specific niche band. You're gonna be huge. And he was like, how big? And I was like, like, Good Charlotte big. Like, that's as big as I can imagine. Like, I don't know.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  That's pretty big. Yeah.

• 1:12:28Speaker 06

  It's pretty big. But I did have this moment where I I pictured, like, literally, I feel like I looked through time and saw them playing Matt Life Stadium that we played with them last summer. And I saw it. I saw that it was gonna happen for them. And there were years in between where I thought like, maybe, you know, maybe it'll start out a little before that, but I I really see it. And now, now, all these years later, I think, wow, they really did. Like, maybe I did see the future. Who knows?

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  It seems like you did. Did that seem more a matter of talent or like aspiration? You know, like, do you see the seeds of the Black Parade? Does it seem like they know where they're heading? Or maybe Gerard especially, like, he knows where he's heading from the beginning and he has that ambition and just the desire to get that huge and to get to that point is as important as like musical talents. Like, when you saw the future for them, was it more a matter of like, this is a great band or like, this is a band that's really, really going to go for it beyond even what great bands usually try?

• 1:13:28Speaker 06

  Um, oh, no, I feel like I'm about to give like a really woo woo answer and I don't know if I want to say it out loud, but but I do think that, you know, the difference between a band that's just really great and that has a very small following and a band like My Chemical Romance, who's one of the biggest bands in the world, has so little to do with talent or even drive. I think everybody that stays in music for a long time just has a passion to do it and to, you know, a calling, you know, an almost religious like calling to do it. But I think that some bands are just standing like in a spot in the subconscious, you know, the collective unconscious, that's just really close

• 1:14:09Speaker 06

  to something that is there already but has been unspoken, you know, and I think that

• 1:14:16Speaker 06

  visioning, envisioning them being this huge band was more seeing how they were uncovering an idea that felt like it was inevitable. You know, somebody was gonna find it. It was right there and they just sort of grabbed it out of the air and said, like, we've got it and we're not gonna let go of it. You know, we're gonna hold on to this thing and bring it into the world where it belongs. And I do kind of feel like somebody probably would have done it if they didn't do it. So, um, yeah, but all that, of course, they needed the talent to be able to do it. They needed the drive to keep with it when it's hard, because it's so, so hard to make anything happen in the world, you know?

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:54Speaker 06

  But really, like, I started to see them connecting with it and it was just like the life was breathing through them. You know what I mean? These ideas were just like coming out so fast. They couldn't even control it.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  Did you think that you saw it before they did? You know, just Mikey being like, we could be as big as Thursday. We could be as good Charlotte. Like, I I always sort of separate Gerard maybe having more of a big picture vision than the rest of the guys. But like, did you see that greatness in them generally before they did, that they were close to something, even if they didn't realize it yet?

• 1:15:28Speaker 06

  Way before they did, I think.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  That's the producer's job, I suppose. Yes.

• 1:15:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I tried to just kind of, one, be their cheerleader who said, like, you can do it. And two, you know, I was, I was pretty heavy handed at times. I'd say, like, you need another guitar player. Like, because when we started, you know, Frank wasn't in the band yet. And I was like,

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:15:50Speaker 06

  You're playing two parts on everything. Like, I'm already thinking about you doing this live. I'm already thinking about you sacrificing without another guitar player. I'm already thinking about, like, you need somebody who can sing with Gerard and back him up and feel like he's another member of the gang. You know what I mean? You need like a gang when you're in a band.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:16:06Speaker 06

  And and I also just thought,

• 1:16:10Speaker 06

  you know, that I could be quite harsh. And I was like, this drummer's not gonna cut it. You know, like, I was like, literally before we start the first record, you should fire him. And they were like, that's our boy, you know, like, he's from the neighborhood. He's our guy. And I was like, this is gonna happen eventually. Like, it's not gonna work eventually because he was also really like stubborn as a drummer. And I was like, I can see that Ray and Gerard are the guys with the vision, you know, Ray is like the musical director, Gerard is like the everything else director, the executive producer, whatever you want to call it. So you're gonna have to like have somebody who falls in line. That's really important. So, you know, it's like a mix of those things, but I knew like this band's gonna go somewhere and you gotta like get all this stuff together so that it can work.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  I guess now is the time to ask, like, Bob Brier is fantastic on The Black Parade, but like, Bob Brier didn't last as the drummer either. Like, what is it with this band and drummers? You know, is this the band's fault or is it drummers as a category of human?

• 1:17:09Speaker 06

  Well, I think each thing that happened with their drummers was different and that makes it feel like a curse. You know what I mean? It's like, not that one's so difficult. It's not that one's not, you know what I mean? It's like, you can Goldilocks and it's still not working. Bob is a great, Bob was a great drummer. I remember meeting Bob. We toured with Thrice extensively and he was working for Thrice at the time and he used to set up the drums and play like Converge. And we'd be like, whoa, like, your drum tech's like,

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  It's impressive.

• 1:17:38Speaker 06

  Really good, you know?

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:40Speaker 06

  But, you know, personalities are such a thing in bands. I was talking to a friend yesterday who said his his band broke up and told me the story. And I said, man, it's amazing when a band doesn't break up.

• 1:17:52Speaker 06

  There are so many personalities. I can't believe bands ever last. You know, I can't believe mine has lasted. We all like butt heads. So, yeah, I think he's, he is certainly a good enough drummer that he could have been their drummer forever. I'll put it that way.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  All right. You've talked about hearing "I'm Not Okay, I Promise" for the first time. You were really not psyched. Like, you've said, like, that you thought they were dumbing themselves down. Like, was your concern that they would, you know, go pop in some sense? Like, did you see the mainstream universe as more of a threat to them than a goal for them?

• 1:18:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I, you know, looking back on this, I I do have a little bit of a like, I wince a little to think of it. That I didn't trust my friends more than just hearing the first song. I'm thinking like, that's not, I I expect more is basically my thought. And my thought is like,

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:18:47Speaker 06

  every, every song should be reaching for changing the world, you know, like, I don't want to hear anything that can fit a for a radio format. And if it does hit a radio format, like, it better be Born to Run. You know what I mean? It needs to be something that you're just like, geez, okay, I guess you can put that on the radio, but like, that's bigger than the radio, you know? So, yeah, when I first heard "I'm Not Okay," I kind of, I heard a song that would fit next to Blink 102 on the radio and

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 1:19:14Speaker 06

  I hadn't heard the rest of the record yet, so I didn't know how subversive "I'm Not Okay" kind of was as like sort of a Trojan horse to get them on the format and then set them up and knock them down with Elena. You know what I mean? It's, I do feel like maybe I should have believed in them a little bit more than kind of being like, Mikey, what is this? This sucks.

• 1:19:35Speaker 06

  And by the time I saw the video. Yeah.

• 1:19:40Speaker 06

  Well, at the time, still, you have to remember, I still was kind of like mentoring them and so

• 1:19:44Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 1:19:45Speaker 06

  You know, if you're gonna ask my opinion, I'm gonna give you my opinion, which maybe sometimes you don't want to hear my opinion, you know? Now I love that song. And to be honest, as soon as I saw the video for it, I got it. You know what I mean? I got, I got that it wasn't the format. It was sort of their weird, here's a bunch of losers trying to make a hit song, you know, kind of together. I I got the spirit of it after I saw the video and then I was quite embarrassed for having been so hard on them.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  I'm sure they appreciated it more than they resented it, your hardness on them. I think, I think we can say that your mentorship was a huge success overall. If, even if you didn't agree with every individual step that they took.

• 1:20:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, I think it's also important to step out away from your mentor too. Everybody needs a point where they can say like, maybe I don't need to listen to everything that you say. And that, you know, like as history has proven with I'm Not OK. I mean, I love that song every time I DJ, I put that song on. So I think it's, it's really good that I gave them a swift kick out of the nest and they flew, you know?

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you talked about hearing Helena for the first time is like the opposite reaction that you loved it immediately. And like, that's what you sort of wanted for them going forward. What is it about Helena that made that song great and made it like the direction that you wanted them to be heading in?

• 1:21:13Speaker 06

  Well, there was never another song like it before. You know, I think that's important to me is like, if you want a hit song, yes, it should be immediate. It should grab you. It should tell you like, this is the song that belongs on the radio. But I also want it to be that feeling of hearing, you know, Smells Like Teen Spirit for the first time where it was like, what is this? You know what I mean? Like this changes everything. And that was always my thought with what we were doing, what Thursday was doing, what all our friends were doing was like, you know, great bands asked us to go on tour with them, bands like, you know, Lincoln Park and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And my thought was like, that's what came before. Like if we're not in this to completely destroy the nineties and start something new,

• 1:21:55Speaker 06

  then we're a bunch of losers hanging on the coattails of our like forebears. You know what I mean? Like out with the old, kill, kill our idols, you know, let's get out of here. And so that was kind of my thought with I'm Not OK and why Helena was like, yes, new, new. We gotta go new, it's gotta be something new.

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  Well, I, I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that Welcome to the Black Parade has born to run energy to it. Like in, in the sense that like, this is a song that doesn't feel like it would work on the radio or it wouldn't work on MTV or whatever, but it makes the format, you know, adjust to it. It's a song that's so huge and so weird, but yet so undeniable that it becomes, you know, a classic, a pop song, a classic rock song, you know, even despite itself. Like, did you get that sense from Welcome to the Black Parade that they'd made it?

• 1:22:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I, I just can't even tell you the joy that I felt the first time I heard Welcome to the Black Parade. Uh, I was literally in tears and part of it was, you know, that um, so much water had gone under the bridge, you know, when they became a huge success. Um, you know, they had had lawyers and managers and all kinds of people. And like, there had been some strain on our relationship and uh, not, not terrible strain, but enough that it was like, well, they're doing their own thing and I just got to be over here doing my own thing and I can watch from a distance, but like, I'm not involved in the day to day with them anymore. We say hi, we check up on each other, we love each other still, you know, we've played tours together. But like, you know, there's, there's plenty of daylight between us.

• 1:23:32Speaker 06

  And so I saw and heard Welcome to the Black Parade, um, like everybody else did. And it just, it just floored me because they had gone to where, you know, beyond where I even dreamed of them going. Uh, every, every little thing that I had hinted, maybe they should do, you know, one of the things I told Gerard is like, you know, you're a great comic book artist, you're a great writer. Like treat this band like that, like I want to see you write yourself as a character in a, in the movie that, that you want to, you know, the one that you want to see.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  He did it.

• 1:24:07Speaker 06

  And Black Parade, boy, did he do it. And it was so grand and so beautiful. And I remember we got asked to their first UK and European tour, which, you know, is probably where their biggest, the UK. And playing Wembley a couple nights with them and just watching these set pieces and the fire and like the, you know, being rolled out on a stretcher and like, I just, it was just like, I don't know. I just can't describe it. I just felt like, I can't believe I get to be a part of this. Like, I can't believe that I was, that I had some small hand in shepherding them in. Uh, it's like, it's pretty incredible feeling, I have to say, yeah.

• 1:24:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. I've always thought of the Black Parade and like War All The Time, the Thursday album, like they're sort of twinned in my mind. Like Gerard very famously started the band after witnessing the nine 11 attacks and realizing I have to do something with my life. You know, there's always a real life core of apocalypse behind everything that they did and everything that you did. Like, what's it like trying to be a band, you know, making intense cathartic emotional music, you know, during wartime, during this national tragedy? Are you inspired and fueled by that reality? Are you weirdly almost competing with that reality?

• 1:25:24Speaker 06

  That's a really interesting question because I think a band like Thursday needs music to be, you know, personal and, and also have um, space for ambiguity and dreaming and complexity and subtlety. And I, I feel like often like protest music uh, can be quite one dimensional if it's effective protest music. You know what I mean? And so I really was like, I really struggled with how to process, um, you know, the feeling of, of being in, in the studio while watching my country invade a, you know, another country that probably has nothing to do with this, uh, this tragedy that's unfolded.

• 1:26:05Speaker 06

  And just feeling like, oh, I think, I think we're turning into the bad guys. Like, I don't know what I thought of America growing up in New Jersey, but um, you know, I was always kind of anti Jingoist nationalist sentiment, but like, this was like a real like dread. You know, like you said, it felt apocalyptic. And um, I think that War All The Time really captured that in a beautiful way. And it's, it's funny to think back that War All The Time came out before Three Cheers. And so Black Parade was still a way off. And I think that you can tell that War All The Time has a sort of immediate kind of confusion and chaos and reckoning of this thing that's happening now.

• 1:26:45Speaker 06

  And Welcome to the Black Parade very much feels like it's been considered and it's watched, like the effects unfold around them. And so they're very different points in the timeline of, of this sort of like posts, I don't know, post America landscape that we found ourselves in. And uh, and I really love that about both the records is they have these, you know, separate reckonings with this event. So um, yeah, it's, it's interesting. I know, you know, when they started touring, um, Welcome to the Black Parade recently, that they started by, uh, you know, talking about for the workforce drowning and War All The Time

• 1:27:29Speaker 06

  and like keeping, like singing little parts uh, from our songs in their songs. And I, I always thought that that was such a beautiful, um, that was a beautiful nod to, you know, to us. And uh,

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  Did they tell you they were doing that?

• 1:27:43Speaker 06

  No, I just saw a clip of it one day and was like, whoa, you know, what's going on here? And you know, they've been taking Tucker, our drummer, on tour with them as part of the stage show. So it's, it's been really cool to watch and uh, I'm actually trying to figure out if I can change some flights and some upcoming touring so that I can see some, some more shows because I want to catch it before it's done. You know what I mean? Who knows if they'll ever uh, stage something like this again, so.

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  Right. I saw that tour just a couple of weeks ago and you know, they played the record in exact track order, you know, and they treated it like a theater piece, you know, as you said, the fire, you know, the costumes, everything. But like, you know, Thursday's done, you know, tours honoring albums, you know, anniversaries, things of that nature. Like, is it, do bands like doing tours where they play an album like in exact track order? Like, is that fun, invigorating for you? Or does that threaten to get a little boring?

• 1:28:42Speaker 06

  I think it's a pretty mixed uh, reactions from different bands. I personally love it. I really love revisiting records in whole.

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 1:28:51Speaker 06

  Um, it brings me right back to where I was when I made it. And it's like this amazing time capsule that like, most people don't get in their lives, where they can like, sort of like relive moments. And you sort of measure the distance between where you were then and where you are now in that moment of like inhabiting both. And I love it. And I also think like, you gotta play it in order. It's gotta bring it, it's really gotta like, it's gotta get you there. But I'm also very specific that I believe that music is a kind of, live music is a kind of ritual that you're enacting. And that like every night it should be the same and you should be sort of losing yourself and forgetting who you are while you're playing. You shouldn't be thinking about like, I want to add this part.

• 1:29:32Speaker 06

  Like I, I'm so anti that, like, oh, you know, and there's a lot of people who live for kind of like the live music changes night to night. Like, yeah, improvisation, I'm not down with that. Like I want, I want my brain to disappear and I want to lose myself in something that's been enacted over and over again. And I want to be a conduit for other people to lose themselves in it. And so for me, it's like, I think it's the greatest thing ever when you can do a record and people care.

• 1:29:58Speaker 06

  I would choose that over playing like a bunch of new music any night. So I'm pretty different than a lot of my peers.

• 1:30:05Speaker 01

  I'm thrilled to hear you say that. I was worried you were going to say, oh, man, it's so boring and I hate it, but we gotta do it. But I just, I'm, I'm so glad that you love it. That's, that's really wonderful to hear, actually.

• 1:30:15Speaker 06

  Lucky for me being that people still care about uh, the old records that we put out. So, so very lucky that I like it because otherwise what's the point, you know?

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  I love Danger Days, you know, the last full of my Chemical Romance album. But like, looking back now, is everything this band did after the Black Parade like a little anticlimactic? Like, is that album, in that moment, just so huge and beloved that it's hard to live up to or move past it?

• 1:30:43Speaker 06

  Well, it's interesting you say that because I think there are certain records that are just such clear artistic triumphs in the way that we were talking about before, where I was saying like, it was like, close to the collective unconscious and it just resonates and it's like this magic moment. And then, there's, there's things beyond it, which I often find as compelling or more compelling because it does speak to late style, you know, the kind of like the Edward Said phenomenon of getting weirder and deeper as you get older. And so for me, that's like, that's the band's kind of music, you know, other musicians go like, it was really cool. Like, I know people didn't get it, but it was like, really cool. And that's how I feel about Danger Days. I think there are songs

• 1:31:27Speaker 06

  like Scarecrow and stuff like that, that are just like, that's like, the best thing they've ever done. What are you talking about?

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  I love that record. I love it so much.

• 1:31:33Speaker 06

  And there's Na Na Na Na, you know, them really embracing some of the like, post-punky, glammy stuff that they always love. Like, the Brothers have such weird, cool taste in music. So you got like, Ray on the one hand, who's like a queen, Iron Maiden, kind of like, came from the metal world. And then you've got like, Mikey, who's just like a Brit-pop kid. And then Gerard in the middle is like, obviously, kind of like a David Bowie type himself. So I just like, I love Danger Days because it was this real, like, carefree abandon, like, let's have some fun type of a record. And I remember, we had made No Devolution, and they had made Danger Days. And I remember sitting with Gerard in front of his house. We went to the car to play music, because it sounded so much better than our stereos inside. And we were just going song for song, playing each other's

• 1:32:16Speaker 06

  stuff and cracking up, that we were both having similar ideas about like, really bending the form and putting pop elements in, and putting electronic elements in, and noise, and this and that. And like, we went in totally different ways, because you know, Thursday's a lot noisier, and My Chem's a lot more like, legible in some ways. But we were just like, you know, it was just one of those moments where we're like, oh, you're still having fun, I'm still having fun, you know?

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's beautiful. That's incredible. I was gonna say, like, Gerard has called Thursday his all-time favorite live bands, you know, and you've been instrumental with this band from the very beginning. Like, what ultimately do you think My Chemical Romance learned from you with all your mentorship? And what do you, what did you learn from them?

• 1:33:03Speaker 06

  Oof. You know, I hope, I hope that they learned from us just to commit fully and don't look back. You know what I mean? I think that's like, a big thing. Like, Thursday has always left everything on the stage. We've always like, committed fully to a new direction, or a new sound, or a new album, and kind of just said like, it is what it is. Like, you can come with us, but we feel called to go in this direction. And there's not really any denying the call. You know what I mean? I've been thinking about this a lot today and last night, that if you're given the privilege of kind of like, having a muse and have, you know, seeking something through art or music, then like, there's no, there's nothing that can take you away from that. You know what I mean? You can't look at it and say like, but I think people like this other thing better. It's like,

• 1:33:46Speaker 06

  hey, what the muse gives, the muse can take away, right? So like, I better just stay over here and keep going with what's calling my name. And, and so I hope that they took that. But like, I've taken so much from them. I've learned so much about myself. I've also like, learned why Thursday wasn't going to be the band that changed the world to the extent that My Chem did, which is that like, I don't have the personality or the desire to be famous. I think, I would, I think it would literally kill me. I've already come close to managing to not survive Thursday. So, you know, the idea of like, magnifying

• 1:34:28Speaker 06

  everything that I find painful about being a known figure, you know, the, the, the ways in which I'm misunderstood, magnifying that times, you know, a million, or 10 million. I just can't imagine it. So, I've learned a lot from them. I really, I love and adore that band. And, yeah, every day, I feel like I learned something new from them personally. So.

• 1:34:55Speaker 01

  Well, they, they wouldn't have made it without you. I think we can say that, that, fairly, that it's, it wouldn't, none of it would have happened if not for you, I think.

• 1:35:04Speaker 06

  That's very sweet. I always think they would have made it some, they would have made it somehow, anyway. That's what I always think. Like, they really like, they just had this drive. And I always think like, they would have made it without me. It may have been different, and it may have taken them longer, but I just think that they're pretty undeniable, and that they were gonna be My Chemical Romance at some point.

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:25Speaker 06

  But I appreciate being a part of it.

• 1:35:29Speaker 01

  I think you can take some of the credit. Maybe not all of it, but I think you can take a goodly amount of the credit. This has been wonderful, Jeremy. Thank you so much for talking.

• 1:35:38Speaker 06

  Thank you, Rob. Thanks for having me. I love the show. So, such a pleasure.

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  Thanks very much to our guest this week, Jeff Rickley. Thanks to our producers, Olivia Creary, Julianna Ress, Justin Sayles, and Chris Sutton. Animations and graphics by Chris Callaton. And special thanks to Cole Kutchner. And thanks to you for listening. And now, let's all go listen to Welcome to the Black Parade by My Chemical Romance. We'll see you next week.