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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Chris Payne
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January 10 - January 22, 2025
For me, the problems were compounded by how much weed I was smoking.
didn’t meet my grandma until “Alive with the Glory of Love” came out. I played it for her on her deathbed.
She loved it. She cried. She said I was beautiful.
A few years into the 2000s, you started to see the difference between bands that understood the internet and the bands that were stuck with, “Oh, we have an email address, it’s fine.”
Going to shows at the time, you could sense something was happening. It was palpable. You were part of this scene and everybody knew the words to the songs, everybody knew everything about the bands. And outside of that room of eight hundred or a thousand people, nobody knew who any of those people were. But in that room, it felt like you were part of something big.
We were doing crazy things with that tour because the bands were young. Like, “Oh man, we’re playing facing forward, we can’t sell the arena seats behind us.” And I’d go, “Hey, guys, we thought of an idea to sell the seats behind us. Let’s call it the Chaos Zone and aim some speakers backwards and charge kids twelve or fifteen bucks to come to an arena show.” And those sold out immediately.
Does innovation breed capital or the other way around? Maybe as always the snake just eats itself.
Steven’s Untitled Rock Show was there filming for Fuse opening day through the first three weeks.
Gerard shows how he does his face paint to me and I’m like, “Did you go to clown school to learn this?” He goes, “Art school.” I went, “Same thing.”
Underoath was interesting, because some of them were super devout, and some of them weren’t.
And there were also a lot of people who may have been religious but didn’t want to be misconstrued as a “Christian rock band.” That’s different than being just a rock band with people who are Christian.
“We’re Christians in a band, but not a Christian band.”
One time I said to Chad Johnson, their A&R at Tooth & Nail Records, “I’m surprised you don’t have a problem that I’m Jewish and managing them.” And he’s like,
“Well, you’re one of the chosen people. You should be leading us.” I think he was joking . . . a little? But not really.
All these buses about to cross the border, they’re going to have a fucking field day ripping them apart. So we’d do the Weed Olympics, everybody brings all their weed and you gotta smoke it all because you can’t bring it, you gotta get rid of your bowls and any paraphernalia.
Our guitar tech was a complete psycho at that point, a crust punk that wouldn’t shower. He got a staph infection in his hand because he poked himself with guitar strings by accident and then it got infected. He’s got this massive pus buildup
and Bert is just obsessed with it. That night, Bert was like, “I’m going to pop this.” It was one of the grossest things I’d ever seen.
I went to the doctor and they were like, “You’ve been going through withdrawals, we gotta give you more,” and I was like, “Nah, you’re not giving me nothing.” So I went cold turkey for thirty days straight and kicked it. About four months later, OxyContins started coming around my hometown as a recreational drug. I was like, “Oh I know these, I’ll take a couple.” The first time I snorted it, it was like I was back in the womb. It’s like the devil. It makes you feel everything you want to feel. If you want to disassociate and feel warm and nurtured, that’s what opioids do. It fucked me up.
It was important, preaching individuality and anti-bullying themes, it being okay to not be okay. The whole sentiment of “I’m Not Okay” is you’re not always gonna be happy, but that’s fine. There’s sometimes a stigma in society that you have to be happy all the time, and I don’t think that’s realistic.
To me, I hate going too deep with anything like this because I feel like there’s the possibility that you romanticize it. And there’s nothing really romantic about it.
I think on that day, I needed to fly to Europe or get ready to fly to Europe the next day; I can’t totally remember. But it all kind of came on a little too much. And I think I just wanted to shut my brain off, you know, what I mean? It wasn’t about, “Oh, you know, like, I want to kill myself.” It was more like, “I just want this feeling to stop.”
One thing I can tell you for sure is I was dismayed at how much Brendon sounded like Patrick. I switched mics several times but no matter what I did, there was still a pretty good similarity. I ended up panning them to different places in the mix so people could tell who was who.
Fall Out Boy was always into pranks. I think it was that straight-edge mentality—“We don’t get drunk, so we’re just gonna shit in your dressing room!”
sXe =/= decorum
The My Chem superfan wanted to like, be in the band; they wanted to be close to it and share those feelings. The Fall Out Boy superfans, to me, wanted to sleep with someone in the band. It was a much more sexually charged thing. If My Chem fans wanted to be the band, Fall Out Boy fans wanted to fuck the band.
This was the first year I saw people walking around with bodyguards. When this scene blew up, all the straight-edge dudes that were in hardcore bands became bodyguards for these guys, because they were all big and jacked.
This was the show where, allegedly, Nick Jonas got busted in the bathroom . . . he was using insulin and there was some kind of security there that thought he was doing drugs.
He read so many CEO jerk-off biographies.
My first reaction was like, “Dude, neck down! You should know this!”
Lifetime became one of these bands, like Jawbreaker or Refused, these mythological bands that people just worshipped posthumously.
Louder Now came out and we’re like, “Oh man, we crushed this. No one can touch ‘MakeDamnSure’ or ‘My Blue Heaven!’” And then they played us Black Parade and it’s just like . . . motherfucker.
“You saved my life” became a big keystone. We would flip it back at them: “You saved your life,” because it’s the truth. We didn’t really do anything, you know what I mean? Maybe we made them realize they could save their life, in whatever way they meant
“These fucking emo bands wearing fucking girl jeans, fucking painting their nails . . .” I mean, it’s playful in nature but it definitely falls into the gender thing, the “you should be a man” . . . which is funny because punk was always like, “Go against the system!”
I felt Say Anything . . . Is a Real Boy kind of focused on what was not redeeming about emo. In Defense of the Genre was about what I felt was redeeming.
Gerard Way could write in character, but he couldn’t do music journalism inside a song like Max could.
People couldn’t handle the innocence. I remember someone saying to me, “I can’t listen to emo, it’s too sincere.” Like, dude, what?
wasn’t playing Warped Tour, I just went to it. Spencer or Aaron came up to me and gave me a shirt that said, “UNDEROATH: We Do Believe in Dinosaurs.” And there was an image of a dinosaur with blue hair, which was clearly me. That was awesome. I loved that. That’s a good one, you got me. I am a fucking dinosaur.
One thing that came out of one of my Fall Out Boy cover stories is that Pete’s related to Colin Powell.
“You’re dressed up like a baby right now, how are you gonna diss me?”
people were getting choosy about their punk and hardcore ethics.
we reshot the entire live performance for $20,000, because they wanted me to change my haircut.
They didn’t give a shit about anything else. That’s the story of the $20,000 haircut.
At that time, MTV was looking for cred because Fuse had become the default home base for up-and-coming bands. Fuse was a bit more of a trusted source; it wasn’t as commercial.
They thought if they fed us booze all day we would end up fighting. But it’s like, we’ve been touring for years. We know how to drink around each other. Any fights we could have gotten in, we’ve already gotten in. Now, everything is just fun. So yeah, just endless amounts of booze.
Was that a jump-the-shark moment for the scene?
No offense to anyone, but like, TRL is fucking wack. Like, yes, it was basically the Ed Sullivan Show of that generation but culturally, artistically, it was horseshit. It was Billboard on television. It was never cool.
When your fans start dressing like you, you gotta find the next thing.
One reason I think 2000s emo got so big was because it was kind of inappropriate to have party music as the background to two wars and probably the deadliest terrorist attack in American history. The response was music that captured the energy of the youth, which was this fucked-up world we’re living in .
They wanted to ask about Fall Out Boy, and I’m like, “I don’t have any news on Fall Out Boy!” They kept pushing and pushing and I go, “You know what? For the purposes of this interview, just pretend I’m not in Fall Out Boy for this interview.” And that got snipped to “I’m not in Fall Out Boy.” And that became the headline the next day.
It’s weird, because in the annals of Fall Out Boy history, it’s, “And then they surprised everybody with a record, they had this whole plan, this amazing rollout, blah, blah, blah.” We didn’t know any of it. We didn’t know we were going to do a record. We put out a song. We approved the music video the morning we put it up.
When I was interviewing Fall Out Boy for an AP cover story in 2015, they did an in-store signing at Vintage Vinyl in New Jersey. It was girls and guys, but I remember these girls were crying. They would be like, “Fall Out Boy’s my favorite band.” And I would be like, “When did you get into them?” And they’re like, “Two and a half years ago.”
I’ve come to terms that, similar to the term “punk,” emo is in the eye of the beholder. So is emo Rites of Spring and Sunny Day Real Estate, or is emo My Chem and Fall Out Boy? And the answer is “yes.” It is whatever it is to you.
