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The Eyeball House, as it was known, was not only the label’s base of operations; it was a place where all touring friends were welcome. It had enough bedrooms for bands to crash for the night and enough safe parking where they could leave their vans without fear of break-ins.
Gerard did spend most of his time alone in his bedroom in his parents’ basement, a cramped space with a tiny window that only let a sliver of sunlight peek through. Since he couldn’t see much of the world from his room, he created his own.
One September morning in 2001, Gerard was commuting to his office job when he looked up from the Hoboken station to see thick clouds of smoke.
Every comic book hero has an origin story, and this tragic day would kick off the mild-mannered Gerard Way’s journey to form a band called My Chemical Romance.
At a time when the entire scene was concerned with the right cut of jeans and the perfect color of New Balance sneakers, My Chemical Romance wasn’t trying to be cool, tough, or stylish; they were indulging their own fantastical interests.
Once Lewitinn finally accepted that she was never going to get the charming online version of Way to come to life, she ended their fling, but was adamant that they stay friends.
Not only did Iero help thicken the band’s rhythm section; his occasional shrieking backup vocals added a spazzy hardcore element to My Chemical Romance that borrowed from the screamo sounds commonly heard in New Brunswick basements.
Saavedra’s fist not only slugged better performances out of Way; it also pounded a notion into the singer’s head that would become an integral part of how My Chemical Romance operated. Sometimes, Way learned, he’d need to embrace the pain.
It wasn’t just industry insiders who were discovering the band through the internet. The band members, particularly the Sidekick-addicted Mikey Way, had a sixth sense for using the web to their advantage, and were corralling new fans wherever they gathered online.
Hype around My Chemical Romance spread the old-fashioned way—by word of mouth—but thanks to the facility of the internet, it was happening at a rapid pace.
The band added two new members to their team to help achieve this—Matt Galle, a Boston booking agent hired to land them as many tours and gigs as possible, and Stacy Fass, a lawyer brought on to handle everything else. “We had a lawyer and a booking agent,” says Iero. “We were set. That’s all we needed.”
One of the guys who managed them told us that if you call venues ahead of time, you can get chips and salsa.
Gerard Way’s penchant for theatrics, in particular, elicited some eye rolls from older cynics who found the group too wimpy. The band wasn’t for everyone, but the people who got into them really got into them.
Geeks, nerds, outsiders, and misfits gradually gravitated to My Chemical Romance, and collectively dubbed themselves the MCRmy.
Women, especially, were made to feel welcome by My Chemical Romance.
in the wake of Thursday’s recent high-profile signing to Island Def Jam, the prolific New Jersey scene and adjacent Long Island scene were being mined by record labels for promising stars in the burgeoning worlds of emo and post-hardcore.
“You have to fall in love with the label and not the A&R,” says Iero. “We loved the A&R at DreamWorks, but the label itself we knew wasn’t the right place for us. I remember meeting with Mo [Ostin], the head of DreamWorks Records at the time, and he had no idea who we were.
While Benson’s focus on Gerard’s vocals might have left the rest of the band in the shadows, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge did a commendable job of capturing what made Way a unique rock vocalist.
The record tackled heavy subjects—depression, suicide, and doomed love—but did so in a way that was either empowering or winking at their own melodrama.
The music industry was standing on the edge of a new dawn by 2005, one in which an artist’s worth would be measured not in record sales or radio plays but in downloads and friend counts.
But My Chemical Romance, a band that had been promoting themselves on the internet since the days of America Online, was ready to lead the charge in this new world.
Myspace’s rising popularity among teens raised on webcams and dial-up modems blurred the line between the underground and the mainstream.
Instead of telling kids what they should listen to, as labels had done for decades, Reprise let user feedback determine the singles. The label’s approach was so successful that it was cited as a winning strategy in a marketing book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.
“Using BigChampagne file-trading data, the label could see growing interest in ‘Not OK,’ but also heavy trading and searching on the track ‘Helena.’ On the basis of that, it made ‘Helena’ the next single, and, helped by requests from the band’s core fans, that song got airplay.
My Chemical Romance spoke to the next era of young music fans who were even more burned out, more jaded, and more paranoid.
Entire corners of the internet were devoted to MCR fandom. The MCRmy endlessly dissected lyrics and videos on message boards and forums, cobbling together elaborate theories.
But the self-perpetuating cycle of drunken rock star antics was going too far. For Gerard, drinking turned from recreational to habitual to detrimental.
Not helping mark the distinction was the fact that he never cleaned or took off his stage outfit.
As the 2000s wore on, the descriptor “emo” started to morph and mutate until no one was really sure what it meant anymore.
Once used to label bands of the punk scene’s more thoughtful variety, like Texas Is the Reason, the Promise Ring, and Sunny Day Real Estate, emo became something else entirely after the internet took hold of it.
“Emo” now encompassed the gamut of alternative music, from the folksy acoustic approach of Bright Eyes to the whiny metal stylings of Hawthorne Heights.
Jawbreaker’s initially misunderstood Dear You, which had served as a cautionary tale of major-label disaster scenarios since its release by DGC in 1995, was starting to take on a second life, though.
But in My Chemical Romance, Schwarzenbach finally saw a musical heir in which he could take pride.
For better or worse, My Chemical Romance cemented their place as the poster boys for the new internet era of emo, though it wasn’t a title they relished.
Independent labels like Drive-Thru, Victory, and Vagrant had rosters full of bands in this nebulous new wave of emo that had been flirting with crossover success.
But it wasn’t Cavallo’s success in the pop world that most appealed to My Chem, Iero says. It was, out of all the releases in an impressive discography, his masterful capturing of Jawbreaker.
Baxter had an artsy, off-kilter take on punk that reminded him of Ian MacKaye’s post–Minor Threat project, Fugazi.
In its most natural state, McIlrath’s voice had an alterna-rock quality that gave the band a sound that might be more palatable to the average listener, Burkett thought. They sounded, as he puts it, “like a punk rock Bush.”
Rise Against became a chameleon act, able to fit on any show’s bill and trying their hardest to win over every crowd.
“Fat Mike would offer us money,” Principe says. “He’d say, ‘I’ll give you a thousand bucks if you take a drink.’”
“Not the whole band, just Joe,” Burkett clarifies. “How can you go through life not trying things? It’s no way to live! Joe is like that with everything. He likes pizza and soda; that’s it. It wasn’t that I wanted him to become an alcoholic, I just wanted him to try things.”
The Unraveling had often been touted as “the album by the ex-members of 88 Fingers Louie,” but with Revolutions Per Minute the band aimed to make the name Rise Against known.
Stevenson’s reputation as a cantankerous grump preceded him, and Rise Against found him to be an intimidating presence at first—a true product of the combative punk scene that had birthed him.
Stevenson instilled in McIlrath a lesson the young frontman would keep in the back of his mind every time Rise Against stepped onstage: Don’t start a punk band unless you’re willing to go to war every night.
The most surprising takeaway from these meetings was that A&R reps were not the slimy businessmen the punk scene had made them out to be. In fact, many of them came from the punk scene themselves.
“I don’t begrudge anybody,” Burkett says. “I’m still friends with all the bands that left Fat Wreck Chords.
“There were huge bidding wars with some of those bands, and we were hearing about some of those prices, but I think that era was already over by the time Rise Against signed. We were one of the last bands in our world to sign to a major label, and there were just sort of crumbs left.
DreamWorks’ dire straits weren’t unique. Just days prior, Sony and BMG had also reached an agreement to combine forces. Mergers and acquisitions were becoming commonplace survival methods throughout the industry as sales of physical music nosedived.
Richardson didn’t possess the same cultural touchstones that had immediately endeared Stevenson to Rise Against.
The guys had a hard time settling into Richardson’s production approach. To ensure perfect tuning and timing, he insisted on recording one measure at a time.
