Why My Chemical Romance is bigger than it's ever been

Los Angeles Times

5 days ago

Twelve years after a breakup that didn't stick — and one year shy of the 20th anniversary of its biggest album — My Chemical Romance is on the road this summer playing 2006's 'The Black Parade' from beginning to end.
The tour, which stopped Saturday night at Dodger Stadium for the first of two concerts, doesn't finally manifest the long-anticipated reunion of one of emo's most influential bands; My Chem reconvened in 2019 and has been performing, pandemic-related delays aside, fairly consistently since then (including five nights at Inglewood's Kia Forum in 2022 and two headlining appearances at Las Vegas' When We Were Young festival).
Yet only now is the group visiting sold-out baseball parks — and without even the loss leader of new music to help drum up interest in its show.
'Thank you for being here tonight,' Gerard Way, My Chem's 48-year-old frontman, told the crowd of tens of thousands at Saturday's gig. 'This is our first stadium tour, which is a wild thing to say.' To mark the occasion, he pointed out, his younger brother Mikey was playing a bass guitar inscribed with the Dodgers' logo.
So how did this darkly witty, highly theatrical punk band reach a new peak so deep into its comeback? Certainly it's benefiting from an overall resurgence of rock after years dominated by pop and hip-hop; My Chem's Dodger Stadium run coincides this weekend with the return of the once-annual Warped Tour in Long Beach after a six-year dormancy.
Then again, Linkin Park — to name another rock group huge in the early 2000s — recently moved a planned Dodger Stadium date to Inglewood's much smaller Intuit Dome, presumably as a result of lower-than-expected ticket sales.
The endurance of My Chemical Romance, which formed in New Jersey before eventually relocating to Los Angeles, feels rooted more specifically in its obsession with comic books and in Gerard Way's frank lyrics about depression and his flexible portrayal of gender and sexuality. ('GERARD WAY TRANSED MY GENDER,' read a homemade-looking T-shirt worn Saturday by one fan.) Looking back now, it's clear the band's blend of drama and emotion — of world-building and bloodletting — set a crucial template for a generation or two of subsequent acts, from bands like Twenty One Pilots to rappers like the late Juice Wrld to a gloomy pop singer like Sombr, whose viral hit 'Back to Friends' luxuriates in a kind of glamorous misery.
For much of its audience, My Chem's proudly sentimental music contains the stuff of identity — one reason thousands showed up to Dodger Stadium wearing elaborate outfits inspired by the band's detailed iconography.
In 2006, the quadruple-platinum 'Black Parade' LP arrived as a concept album about a dying cancer patient; Way and his bandmates dressed in military garb that made them look like members of Satan's marching band. Nearly two decades later, the wardrobe remained the same as the band muscled through the album's 14 tracks, though the narrative had transformed into a semi-coherent Trump-era satire of political authoritarianism: My Chemical Romance, in this telling a band from the fictional nation of Draag, was performing for the delectation of the country's vain and ruthless dictator, who sat stony-faced on a throne near the pitcher's mound flanked by a pair of soldiers.
The theater of it all was fun — important (if a bit crude), you could even say, given how young much of the band's audience is and how carefully so many modern pop stars avoid taking political stands that could threaten to alienate some number of their fans. After 'Welcome to the Black Parade,' a bearded guy playing a government apparatchik handed out Dodger Dogs to the band and to the dictator; Way waited to find out whether the dictator approved of the hot dog before he decided he liked it too.
Yet what really mattered was how the great songs still are: the deranged rockabilly stomp of 'Teenagers,' the Eastern European oom-pah of 'Mama,' the eruption of 'Welcome to the Black Parade' from fist-pumping glam-rock processional to breakneck thrash-punk tantrum.
Indeed, the better part of Saturday's show came after the complete 'Black Parade' performance when My Chem — the Way brothers along with guitarists Frank Iero and Ray Toro, drummer Jarrod Alexander and keyboardist Jamie Muhoberac — reappeared sans costumes on a smaller secondary stage to 'play some jams,' as Gerard Way put it, from elsewhere in the band's catalog. (Its most recent studio album came out in 2010, though it's since issued a smattering of archived material.)
'I'm Not Okay (I Promise)' was blistering atomic pop, while 'Summertime' thrummed with nervy energy; 'Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)' was as delightfully snotty as its title suggests. The band reached back for what Way called his favorite My Chem song — 'Vampires Will Never Hurt You,' from the group's 2002 debut — and performed, evidently for the first time, a chugging power ballad called 'War Beneath the Rain,' which Way recalled cutting in a North Hollywood studio 'before the band broke up' as My Chem tried to make a record that never came out.
The group closed, as it often does, with its old hit 'Helena,' a bleak yet turbo-charged meditation on what the living owe the dead, and as he belted the chorus, Way dropped to his knees in an apparent mix of exhaustion, despair, gratitude — maybe a bit of befuddlement too. He was leaving no feeling unfelt.