FEATURE:
Famous Last Words
My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade at Twenty
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I have not really explored…
PHOTO CREDIT: Bryce Hall
a lot of My Chemical Romance’s albums, though The Black Parade is one that I really love. It turns twenty on 23rd October. I am going to come to some features and reviews for this album. A massive commercial success, it reached number two in the U.K. and U.S. The New Jersey band only released one other albums after The Black Parade, which was their third studio album. Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys came out in 2010. The band have teased a possible new album. For fans of The Black Parade, there is going to be a twentieth anniversary reissue that you will want to check out. Rock Sound provide more details:
“In addition to touring and playing the album in full alongside a fresh new narrative through the last 18 months, the band will complete the story with this expanded collection, due for release on October 23. It can be pre-ordered from here.
The band had this message for fans about the release, stating:
“Twenty years ago, we wrote what would become ‘The Black Parade,’ our third record and the follow up to ‘Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge.’ At the time, we could never have imagined what the record would mean for the band. All we knew is that we had made something crazy, and something we couldn’t wait to get it out into the world.
Today, twenty years on, we celebrate its release. For the first time, we have included everything we finished during those sessions in a single collection.
As importantly, we asked James Jean to revisit the world of The Black Parade and create three new pieces of art. What he has crafted is a beautiful collection of a few iconic characters from the record during that era. James is truly a one-of-a-kind artist, and so important to how this record was presented to the world. We are extremely grateful for meeting him all those years ago, and agreeing now to make something new.
Our hope is that you enjoy this collection of music and illustrations as much as we do, because we wanted to honor how timeless and enduring you’ve allowed it to be.
Thank you for marching with us.
To the death!”.
In 2022, Kerrang! published a lost interview with My Chemical Romance’s lead, Gerard Way. Paul Elliott interviewed him. Way discussed The Black Parade and the band’s influence. He also spoke about an infamous performance at the Reading Festival, in which the band were bottled by Slayer fans. I do wonder if there are going to be new interviews with the band ahead of the twentieth anniversary of The Black Parade:
“Let’s start with The Black Parade and what this album represents. Was it always the intention to make such a grand statement?
Gerard Way (vocals): “That was the big goal. Let’s be honest: did the world need just another rock album? It’s almost redundant to even make those anymore. It was like, ‘Are we gonna give them another punk album, another post-hardcore record, just another rock record?’ And the answer was, ‘No – we’re gonna give them the rock record!’”
When you’ve talked about the inspirations for The Black Parade, you’ve mentioned two masterpieces from the 1970s, Pink Floyd’s The Wall and David Bowie’s The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars…
“I hadn’t even thought it about it until very recently, but it’s almost as if we’re trying to spearhead some kind of neo-classic rock movement. Bringing the pageantry and the theatre back. Paying tribute to those old songs – not ripping them off, but a total tribute. We wanted to capture that glory, that over-the-top-ness and that essence of classic rock in the ’70s.”
In terms of its lyrical content, The Wall was a heavy album…
“Oh yeah. It’s coming from a place of a guy in a rock band playing giant shows in arenas, and there’s groupies around, sex and drugs. And yet to a 15-year-old kid with his parents on vacation – that being me – I mentally identified with the alienation in that record. You know, I’m not a rock star at that age. How the fuck did I get it? But I did get it.”
Did you feel that making a concept album was a risk?
“It’s a huge risk! But here’s the thing – it depends on your outlook. It depends on having faith in the world. We had faith in ourselves, ultimately, but faith in yourself only goes for far, because then there’s that little trigger in your head going, ‘Oh, they’re not gonna understand.’ But if you remove that doubt, you go, ‘No, they’re gonna get it and they’re gonna fucking love it!’”
You’ve said that you want The Black Parade to be a timeless album. What exactly do you mean by that?
“I picture the record as an infant, and we gave that kid every advantage we could so he could live a long life. The last one [2004’s Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge] was a sign of the times, and all of a sudden emo came out of that – and God knows why, but I get it. But with this particular baby – and I always picture a little fucking kid with a mop of black hair – we gave him every advantage. It’s like we played him Mozart when he was in the fucking womb! We sent this kid to the best school and we’re gonna make sure he stays off drugs!”
The Black Parade is a huge hit that has created a real buzz about the band, even hysteria. How are you coping?
“It’s fun! I got to tell you, we made a record like this to create hysteria, to create a big splash. So when I see the craziness and I see the chaos, I love it. And to go back to Reading, it was a prime example. [After that show], I met so many people that said that was one of the most inspiring shows they ever saw, that they’d never seen a band get that kind of shit and not walk off, but instead say, ‘Fuck you!’ And at the same time, if there wasn’t the chaos, the whirlwind around the band, I’d be worried, because to me that’s rock’n’roll – chaos, adversity, shit-talkers galore, I love it. When I see bands that I’ve never even heard of talking shit about us to get press, I love it”.
The first of two reviews I want to get to is from Rolling Stone. Even if there were some mixed reviews for The Black Parade, there was a lot of positivity for it. It is a remarkable album that I think that everyone should listen to. I first heard it when it came out in 2006, but I have been revisiting it recently. It still creates this real impact:
“My Chemical Romance may be the oldest young band in America. None of the members — singer Gerard Way, his brother and bassist Mikey, drummer Bob Bryar and guitarists Ray Toro and Frank Iero — is old enough to have bought David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs on the day it came out. But The Black Parade, the New Jersey group’s third studio album, is the best mid-Seventies record of 2006, a rabid, ingenious paraphrasing of echoes and kitsch from rock’s golden age of bombast.
The opening fanfare, “The End,” blows up like an outtake from Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies, with glam-Godzilla guitars and spook-choir hurrahs. “Dead!” is a sleek, bleak bruiser, like Queen’s “Keep Yourself Alive” in widow’s weeds. And in the hyperoperatic “Mama,” Way — playing a soldier up to his neck in blood, raging against the woman who gave him life — briefly duets with Liza Minnelli, who belts her two big lines only to have Way sing back at her with vicious obscenity. It is brassy casting, as if Minnelli has been dropped into a Glenn Danzig production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. It also sounds like an idea Alice Cooper (the singer) might have had in 1976 while golfing with George Burns.
But this is not the Seventies, and My Chemical Romance are very much a band of their time — post-9/11. The first song Way wrote for the group (with ex-drummer Matt Pelisser) was “Skylines and Turnstiles,” based on his experience that day in New York, watching the Twin Towers fall in front of him. There is a lot of fire and rubble in these songs, too. And there are bodies all over the place — dead in the streets (“Welcome to the Black Parade”); near death in hospital beds (“Dead!” and “Cancer”); or just too numb to give a shit about morality (“House of Wolves”) or forgiveness (“I Don’t Love You”). Starting with a riff that stabs and stutters like an old Buzzcocks lick and packing a bridge that is pure Iron Maiden, “This Is How I Disappear” is an exciting, perverse goodbye, from one lost soul to the object of his suffocating affection. “And without you is how I disappear/And live my life alone/Forever now,” Way sings from the depths of obsession — and, it seems, his grave. The poetry is rickety, but the self-pity is arena-ready.
Next to that, My Chemical Romance’s 2004 album, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, is orthodox buzz-saw misery. Apparently, the band — which co-produced the vacuum-packed overkill of The Black Parade with Rob Cavallo, who also worked on Green Day’s punk-suite hit, American Idiot — now believes that if you’re going to feel sorry for yourself, you might as well do it with gusto. “When I grow up, I want to be nothing at all!” Way wails in “The End,” surrounded by what sounds like ELO with a case of G n’ R. The excess comes with diminishing returns. Cavallo and the group over-rely on the avenging-army drumroll shtick, and what is deliciously vintage for most of the record — Way’s bright, breathless yelp, with harmonies stacked to eternity; the lightning bolts of Brian May and Mick Ronson cutting through Toro’s and Iero’s widescreen grind — loses luster by Tracks Twelve and Thirteen, “Disenchanted” and “Famous Last Words.” The best last words should have been Track Eleven, “Teenagers,” a tight fist of T. Rex-style crunch with a great punch-the-air chorus: “They said all/Teenagers scare/The living shit out of me.”
Teenagers are the ones who should be scared shitless. They are about to inherit a hell on this earth that is more terrifying, day by day, than anything Way imagines here. In fact, the most realistic and contemporary thing about this album’s supercharged-Seventies Armageddon is his bitter, almost jealously guarded helplessness in nearly every song. Content to be the Queen of complaint (and damn good at it), My Chemical Romance offer no answers and give no hope — except for the shot of light that comes in the second manic half of “Welcome to the Black Parade,” whenever Way hits the vocal hook. “We’ll carry on,” he sings repeatedly, at full rock-hero tilt. He doesn’t say where. But the way he says it sounds great and worth believing, no matter how old you are”.
I will end up with a review from NME. The Black Parade was a departure and shock for fans who were expecting a repeat of 2004’s Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. As Wikipedia note about its legacy: “The album's popularity ended the dominance of emo pop, and influenced metalcore, pop and hip hop artists, and film soundtracks, as well as alternative culture and fashion”:
“You may want to sit down. We have some very upsetting news. My Chemical Romance are dead. And so is their friend ‘The Patient’. There was nothing that anybody could do.
Confused? Readers, the confusion hasn’t even started. ‘The Black Parade’ is an ostentatious concept-album-cum-rock-opera about death, and it’s about to turn the late MCR into the biggest band on the planet. The most obvious reference point is Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’, not just because both projects share a record label, producer, video director and an A&R department, but because it’s a piece of work that will challenge every preconception you ever had about the people who made it.
To recap, My Chemical Romance’s previous two albums have been one long horror story; ‘I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love’ and ‘Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge’ tells the story of two criminal ‘demolition lovers’ who are gunned down in the desert after their hometown is overrun by vampires. Then the boy makes a deal with Satan for the lives of him and his lover Helena in exchange for the souls of a thousand evil men. ‘A meditation,’ says Gerard Way, ‘on immortality. And this [new album] is a meditation on mortality.’
‘The Black Parade’ unfolds in the physical realm; with no eternal zombie afterlife to cushion things when the day comes. Our story begins in the cancer ward (nice), with the tragic, young death of our protagonist, an average Joe known simply as The Patient. And so the first song (after the introduction, called ‘The End’) is called ‘Dead!’ the pre-title sequence, if you will. And straightaway, we’re on brave new ground musically as well ‘a crisp, vast, and fiercely melodic kind of stadium punk that is barely emo in the slightest. Actually, its closest parallel is ‘Holiday’ from ‘American Idiot’. But by getting that out of the way first, they then divert from their Green Day mentors, blasting into power-duo tracks ‘This Is How I Disappear’ and ‘The Sharpest Lives’, both showing off this band’s new richness of depth and texture in glorious 3D-technicolour. As The Patient enters the tunnel of light we hit critical mass with ‘Welcome To The Black Parade’ and things begin to unfold. Gerard apparently believes that when the reaper comes, it comes in the form of your life’s most vivid memory. Now, the point is that The Patient died before he got the chance to really achieve anything, so his most vivid memory is as a child, when his father took him to the city to see a marching band. And the rest of the album soundtracks The Patient’s life flashing before his eyes, and it turns out to be a lot more colourful and varied a flashback than he was expecting. And this is where ‘The Black Parade’s genius reveals itself. MCR have moved so far from the emo sound you know, that they’ve even renamed their band for this album. Under their new guise of The Black Parade, the group have the freedom to adopt whatever clothes, styles or ideas are necessary to tell each chapter. If there is an overarching style it is of all things musical theatre.
The first truly staggering moment is ‘I Don’t Love You’ (this album’s ‘Boulevard Of Broken Dreams’), which sounds like Keane would if they had any edge and loads of big rock guitars. ‘House Of Wolves’, debuted at Reading, is the least startling, mainly because it pre-empts ‘Cancer’, the song most likely to get the newspapers’ backs up. A short bridging sequence, it’s their first ever stab at total, pin-drop sensitivity. Just Gerard and a piano, it’s a first-person account of death from cancer that packs an emotional punch so devastating and graphic that you could never call it rock’n’roll ‘ isn’t that meant to be fun? But MCR want to surpass rock’n’roll: it pushes the boundaries of taste about as far as they’ll go, but a daily listen is going to be just an effective way of making people stop smoking as the Allen Carr book. The mood then lightens with ‘Mama’, a vaudeville riot that manages to out-Gogol Bordello Gogol Bordello, made even more overwhelming thanks to Liza Minelli’s showstopping cameo as Mama herself. If things are getting a little too theatrical, then ‘Sleep’ gives us the big body-builder Tool moment and punches their heavy metal card; if only once, because next they have to reinvent Status Quo as Roxy Music on ‘Teenagers’; another amazing boxfresh MTV smash. ‘Disenchanted’ is the calm scene gearing up for a preposterous finale; which comes with ‘Famous Last Words’, where The Black Parade revert back to My Chemical Romance, stepping back into narrator mode, both moral of the story and cinematic climax to this remarkable journey, and a distillation of what they do best; an earnest, impassioned, and hard-fucking-rock anthem which sees them finally become ‘the saviour of the broken, the beaten and the damned’. It’s about making the most of every moment because after all, you never know when the parade (or whatever you’ll see), will come to you. Pure Hollywood melodrama, but if you find the climactic refrain of ‘I am not afraid to keep on living, I am not afraid to walk this world alone’ cheesy, you’re going to have given up sometime around track three anyway. For everyone else, it’s proper, er, lump-in-throat time.
There’s one little surprise left, but we laughed so hard that we won’t spoil it for you, except to say that it once and for all disproves the accusation that this band are somehow humourless, as if the album hadn’t done that anyway. ‘The Black Parade’ understands that real tragedy is inherently a bit funny, and vice versa, and it’s that fact which sees them leave the jibbering bodies of a thousand emo jessies in their wake. The truth is they left that baggage behind long ago. If there’s any parallel it’s with somebody like Billy Corgan; not just because of the eerie similarity of Gerard’s new hairdo, or even the marching band thing, but because both people have bigger imaginations than punk rock usually allows. But having been through their problems with drugs and psychosis already, MCR just seem too much of a finely-tuned juggernaut to fuck things up like the Pumpkins. This album has given them the freedom to do anything they want next, but for now this is one to file alongside ‘American Idiot’, ‘Doolittle’ and ‘Nevermind’ on your greatest US rock albums shelf. Oh yes, My Chemical Romance ‘ the moderately camp two-trick outsider’s cult you thought you knew ‘ are dead alright. Long live My Chemical Romance, the outrageously-camp, loud and righteous new kings of the world. Those bottle-chucking haters are just going to have to get used to it”.
The Black Parade turns twenty on 23rd October. Alongside the anniversary edition of the album, I am sure the band will take to social media to share their thoughts. With rumours that they might be recording new material, there will be a lot of anticipation from My Chemical Romance fans. The Black Parade stands as one of the greatest albums of the 2000s. It is one that turned My Chemical Romance into Stadium-Rock royalty. Go and spend some time with…
A phenomenal album.