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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Chris Payne
Read between
September 23, 2023 - May 6, 2024
The music this book is about, whatever you want to call it—[early] 2000s emo, emo-pop, third-wave emo, mall emo, MTVmo, Steven’s Untitled Rock Show–core, fake punk bullshit for posers—can be traced back, somehow, someway, to hardcore punk, and thus, an outsider mentality.
The same way rock historians talk about 1977 and 1991, 2005 was the lynchpin of emo, the big bang of the 2000s.
Where Are Your Boys Tonight? contains material from more than three hundred hours of interviews with more than 150 people, ranging from artists to managers to critics to superfans. This book is not meant to be an encyclopedia of emo, but a narrative of a specific period in its history.
“Emo” was often used as an insult with homophobic undertones, mocking the vulnerability of the lyrics and performances.
Cast of Characters Part 1 HANIF ABDURRAQIB: author and poet (and Midwest native) JOANNA ANGEL: adult film star; cofounder, BurningAngel.com; author (and New Jersey native) JUSTIN BECK: guitarist, Glassjaw; cofounder, Merch Direct DAN BONEBRAKE: bassist, Dashboard Confessional, Vacant Andys CHRIS CARRABBA: front person, Dashboard Confessional, Further Seems Forever; vocalist-guitarist, Vacant Andys VINNIE CARUANA: front person, the Movielife, I Am the Avalanche TOMMY CORRIGAN: front person, Silent Majority; designer, Merch Direct EBEN D’AMICO: bassist, Saves the Day MIKE DOYLE:
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FRED FELDMAN: founder, Triple Crown Records GLENN GAMBOA: journalist, Newsday CHRIS GETHARD: comedian (and late nineties punk kid and New Brunswick resident) NICK GHANBARIAN: bassist, Silent Majority (and later, Bayside) CHAD GILBERT: guitarist, New Found Glory; front person, Shai Hulud AARON GILLESPIE: drummer-vocalist, Underoath JIM GRIMES: Chicago hardcore show promoter; front person, Extinction CHRIS GUTIERREZ: bassist, Arma Angelus; blogger and author PAUL HANLY: New Brunswick basement show promoter TARYN HICKEY: photographer ROB HITT: drummer, Midtown (and later, manager, Crush Music)
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CHRISTIAN MCKNIGHT: Long Island show promoter (and later, talent buyer, Bamboozle, Skate and Surf, This Island Earth festivals) MANI MOSTOFI: front person, Racetraitor BRYAN NEWMAN: drummer, Saves the Day JOHN NOLAN: vocalist-guitarist, Taking Back Sunday (and later, vocalist-multi-instrumentalist, Straylight Run) SEAN O’KEEFE: producer, Fall Out Boy, Arma Angelus JENN PELLY: author and journalist (and Long Island native) MATT PRYOR: front person, the Get Up Kids, the New Amsterdams ANTHONY RANERI: front person, Bayside TYLER RANN: vocalist-guitarist, Midtown KATE REDDY: guitarist, 108;
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RICKY SAPORTA: show promoter, Bomb Shelter Productions; photographer HEATH SARACENO: vocalist-guitarist, Midtown (and later, Senses Fail) TOM SCHLATTER: guitarist, You and I WALTER SCHREIFELS: front person, Quicksand, Rival Schools; guitarist, Gorilla Biscuits, Youth of Today ALEX SUAREZ: bassist, Cobra Starship; multi-instrumentalist-vocalist, Kite Flying Society (and Florida native) MIKEY WAY: bassist, My Chemical Romance PETE WENTZ: bassist, Fall Out Boy (and previously, bassist, Racetraitor; front person, Arma Angelus); founder, Decaydance Records, Clandestine In...
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If you had friends at high school who were like, “I’m going to a concert,” they’re not in the scene. If you’re in the scene, you go to shows.
It felt like we were being misconstrued. And nobody likes being misunderstood. I’d rather be ignored than misunderstood.
It’s okay to be hurt. It’s okay to be frustrated. It’s okay to have your heart broken. The things that men don’t normally talk about because we gotta be men, walk it off, and be tough.
I thought they were this perfect expression of fiery innocence and beauty.
RICKY SAPORTA: The Get Up Kids were on tour with At the Drive-In, and then I added Saves the Day, Ultimate Fakebook, and Six Going on Seven. And of course Midtown, my brother’s band. They were a really young band at the time and super psyched to be on that. TYLER RANN: Isn’t that lineup insane? For ten dollars!
SCOTTIE REDIX: It was Napster days, so even though it was the record release show, we all had the Saves the Day album. I remember everyone singing that shit, word for word. And they played that whole album.
HEATH SARACENO: I remember watching Saves the Day’s guitarist Ted. I’d heard that Chris had forced down-picking of everything at all times for a heavier sound, like Metallica’s Master of Puppets. It’s such a tempo that your wrist is gonna give out because no one can do that, except for like, James Hetfield. I tried it at home, and I considered myself to have a pretty good right hand, but I couldn’t play Saves the Day’s shit. So I was paying a lot of attention to their guitarists’ right hands, because I was a fucking nerd. I would watch them at a chugging, down-picking part. They fucking did
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“Yo, you were that little kid from the Get Up Kids show who had a big mouth.” And I was like, “Yeah, you were the booking agent who was kind of a dick!”
MIKEY WAY: People were poking fun at Through Being Cool because it was more polished, but those people also memorized all the words, you know what I mean?
Shit just used to sprout in Long Island. If you were four guys hanging out in a room at the end of the day, you’re gonna be a band, there’s no way around it.
Pete always wanted his own thing to catch on, where he could say, “This is my thing that I built.”
Everybody played shows at a place called Club Q in Davie, a really country city in South Florida. They have a huge rodeo there. People ride horses up and down the street. In old westerns, when they get off their horses to go in the saloon, and tie the horse’s reins around that pole thing? I’m not a cowboy, so I don’t know what you call them, but those are in front of the stores in Davie.
So my high school internship was interning at a partially gay bar/partially all-ages punk rock venue, when I was sixteen years old, booking shows.
DAN BONEBRAKE:
CHRIS CARRABBA: Strongarm were a Christian band . . . I wasn’t a Christian and I didn’t know there was such a thing as Christian bands. I didn’t know that was a thing people did.
MIKEY WAY: I was standing there like, “Oh, this is really important. We’re going to talk about this show someday.” CHRIS CARRABBA: I had these bands that believed in me before other people believed in me. Before you could say, “Oh he’ll sell X amount of tickets.” GABE SAPORTA: Just get your van, follow us, and we’ll say, “Hey, this is our friend Chris, he’s gonna play fifteen minutes before we go onstage.” We didn’t ask promoters. People just responded to him really well.
Holy shit, music is real when you leave South Florida.”
2000 was like the last year of the nineties instead of the first year of the 2000s, if that makes any sense. 2001 was something new.
JIM ADKINS: I started having panic attacks in ’99 when we were on tour for Clarity. The way I knew how to deal with it was to write about it. The song “Bleed American” is basically like . . . literal. It’s literal! I was trying to figure out what to do with panic attacks while at my parents’ house with the TV on, so I didn’t feel like I was alone.
Punk rock is and should be inclusive. That’s the one thing I know. No matter what your definition of punk is, everyone would say that it’s inclusive, it welcomes outsiders. Freak flags welcome. Wave ’em around.
LUKE WOOD: What other labels were into them? All. JIM ADKINS: What’s really funny is Capitol was one of them. We were like, “Okay, for us to take a meeting with you, you have to give us back our masters and zero out our balance.” They were like, “Nah, we can’t do that.” Like, okay!
They were a fucking nerd herd. They would play Dungeons & Dragons and read comic books. And that was their life. And Gerard had this awesome mind to him, just so creative. His imagination was huge. You’d drink a few beers and talk to Gerard for hours about just the most insane ideas for characters, storylines. That made me confident something would come from what they were doing. Between Gerard’s mind and Ray’s talent for writing, they were gonna get there.
I had grown so used to the music industry being like, Britney Spears. And then all of a sudden, Thursday was on MTV.
“Dude, I got a band I think you’d love, they’re called My Chemical Romance. They’re like, evil pop-punk.”
Pete developed this thing that was like, “Infamy is bigger than fame.” If half the people hate you, the other half are going to defend you to the death.
ANDY GREENWALD: I wrote a story for Spin—it was in Chicago, and My Chem was opening for the Used, before Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge came out. I had one night in a room at the Hard Rock Hotel in Chicago with Bert and Gerard. Gerard wrote “You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in Prison” about that night.
