Donna and Donald Way lived in a particularly bleak apartment in the gloomy little township of Belleville, a New Jersey suburb often mentioned in news stories about crime rings and mob trials. Donna, a hairdresser, had a penchant for horror films and eerie decor—at one point she filled an entire room with Victorian dolls. It was here, in a wood-paneled basement unit filled with gothic kitsch like petrified bats and lifelike human skulls, that their son Gerard spent most of his childhood. He posted up in a bedroom with only one window the size of a cinder block, fomenting the outcast mentality that would later manifest in My Chemical Romance.
Northern New Jersey would soon become home to a thriving hardcore and emo scene in the early 2000s, one that would eventually propel Gerard’s band to global recognition. But as children, the suburbs could be restrictive: “Our parents were kind of scared to let us out of the house,” Gerard’s younger brother, Mikey, said later. “It was mostly me and Gerard.” The Way brothers chose to make the best of their cramped environs. They were into horror movies and comic books, and made up characters and stories together to compensate for the loneliness. For Gerard, comics became more than a hobby; after becoming an amateur artist in his own right, selling his first comic book at age 15, he enrolled in the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
After graduating, Gerard nearly landed a TV pilot on Cartoon Network for a show about a Scandanavian monkey that could magically make breakfast out of thin air. But in 2001, when he saw the Twin Towers collapse during his morning commute, he found himself pulled away from his previous passion. Disillusioned and traumatized, he gave up his career, finding the world of TV executives insufficiently radical, too profit-driven and slow for the intensity of the post-9/11 era. Seeing local hardcore heroes Thursday perform at a small club flipped a switch: “I wanted to make a bigger impact,” he said later. After roping in his brother and local music nerd Ray Toro, who had the frazzled look and finger-picking acumen of a snobbish Guitar Center tech, My Chemical Romance was born a week later.
Today, My Chemical Romance are ubiquitous—a meme, a cult, an aesthetic. Though the term “emo” has long stuck to the band, their mix of vaudevillian pomp and four-on-the-floor punk progressions was more indicative of a new direction for the sub-genre. But they remained relevant long after the sound they championed died out commercially in the late 2000s. Rather than the pinch of nostalgia or embarrassment that often accompanies revisiting the histrionic lyrics of that era, My Chemical Romance subverted shame by embracing their gothic attire, wearing it like a base layer from which they could build unexpectedly melodic pop. When they announced their reunion earlier this year, fans embraced them not like a ratty relic of childhood, but like a long-lost heirloom that had finally been returned.
Perhaps their lasting appeal is because the band never wanted to strictly write about passing teenage anxieties. Their early songs were a direct response to the attacks of September 11. “Skylines and Turnstiles,” the first song Gerard wrote, teemed with heightened existential dread: “After seeing what we saw/Can we still reclaim our innocence?” The “Attic Demos,” recorded in 2001 in the attic of their then-drummer, barely made it past the North New Jersey punk scene—the production was tinny and compressed, Gerard’s voice was strained and out of tune. But the demo conveyed an earnest commitment to storytelling and a glimmer of ambition, enough to convince local punk stalwart Frank Iero to join as a rhythm guitarist: “There was just something about it where you could already imagine what it would sound like,” he said.
My Chemical Romance released their official debut, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, in July 2002. The record, produced by Thursday frontman Geoff Rickly and released on local punk mainstay Eyeball Records, had the hallmarks of the hardcore scene that surrounded them: guitars ripped through verses; clean vocals slipped into shredded screams. But My Chemical Romance stood out for its dedication to fantasy, writing the album loosely told from the perspective of a vampiric protagonist who must avenge his lover’s death. Their bombastic live shows, so violent and destructive they often led to broken glass, landed them a manager and, before long, a record deal with the Warner Bros. offshoot Reprise. Before the end of 2003, they’d outgrow the small Passaic clubs they used to frequent. By 2004, thanks to an optimistic album review in The Guardian, they’d be playing headlining shows across the UK, scoring a series of glowing write-ups in Kerrang! and NME before they even began recording their major-label debut.
The deal with Reprise gave the band access to their pick of producers. Their first choice, rock oracle Butch Vig, was busy, so they landed on Howard Benson, who had once worked with Motörhead but, more recently, had taken on the dregs of nu-metal with groups like Crazy Town and Hoobastank. Benson and My Chemical Romance were a strange pair. When he first arrived at the studio, wearing his usual uniform of sweatpants and a hockey jersey, the band allegedly mistook him for a pizza delivery guy. Everyone referred to him as “a sports coach” who would largely communicate in basketball metaphors. But Benson challenged the band to work on song structure and melody, pushing back against extra guitar solos and abrupt endings—saying things like, “‘What does this have to do with the rest of the song? You’re confusing the shit out of me,’” as Gerard later recalled. “That’s the point,” the band would yell in return.
But Benson’s coaching pushed the album, what we now know as Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, to its emotive peaks. While recording “The Ghost of You,” a seething song about loss, Benson convinced the band to include a final chorus to end the song. (“We all hated having that chorus in that song,” Toro later said.) My Chemical Romance came from a world in which nothing trumped the brute force of a scream like Rickly’s or an overdriven guitar-heavy outro; the original ending had both. But Benson’s formulaic approach helped anchor the pensive ballad: With that final chorus—a defiant, unabashedly self-serious crescendo— the band displayed a glimmer of the massive arena rock they’d go on to write for 2006’s The Black Parade. “The Ghost of You” shot to top the UK Rock and Metal Singles chart.
On its face, Three Cheers was a lofty concept record about star-crossed lovers who die in a gunfight, who must then “bring the devil the souls of 1,000 evil men” in order to be reunited in the afterlife. But it’s a conceit loosely held. Instead of a vigilante shootout, Three Cheers ripples to life with “Helena,” a guilt-laden tribute to the Ways’ grandmother, Elena, who died while the band was away on tour. The track begins with a restrained, reverberating guitar and Gerard’s voice at nearly a whisper. Then, almost like a jump scare at a haunted house, the band comes in at full volume: a legion of distortion, led by a full-throated yelp from Gerard.
While the songs on Three Cheers are certainly allegories for ennui and narcissism, they are often equally escapist explorations into storytelling and world-building. We meet our protagonist outright in “Give ’Em Hell, Kid,” as he journeys up from New Orleans pumped full of stimulants and ready to exact his revenge. By the third track, “To The End,” he’s inside a mansion to murder a wedding party, dropping small details—homosexual undertones, allusions to William Faulkner—like little breadcrumbs. The narrative also helps to unite an otherwise disparate record; by the time the Morricone whistles kick in on “Hang ’Em High,” they seem fitting in service of the story. The band, and Benson, carefully balanced these large gestures to literary tropes with hooks and choruses that are more in line with a typical rock song. Still, like the band members cooped up in Jersey basements a decade prior, the fans who needed it found an escape, a record that didn’t just lament a sleepy one-horse town, but transported them out of it entirely.
On the most successful manifestation of the album’s concept, the jaunty “You Know What They Do To Guys Like Us In Prison,” the band strikes a memorable balance between drama and black humor, dropping the listener in on the arrest of the protagonist and then documenting his ensuing panic attacks behind bars. His concerns vacillate between the laughably mundane (“They all cheat at cards and the checkers are lost”) and the deadly (“My cellmate’s a killer”). But it’s the delivery of the penultimate line of the verse—“They make me do push-ups in drag”—that reverberates after the song ends. It’s a half-laugh, half-sob delivered with flair and a wink. The scattered references to queerness and gender-play—Gerard might sing a verse from the perspective of a girlish ex-lover—add a counterweight to the record’s overarching violence and masculinity, a self-referential nod to a frontman who would later publicly admit to struggles with gender identity. In a scene that was quickly turning to gendered hatred and dreams of femicide, these small rebellions against the rigidity of masculinity felt like the loosening of a pressure valve.
But the song that would become an anthem for fans and the hoards of copycat bands that grew in the album’s wake was lead single, “I’m Not Okay (I Promise).” The song is a comparatively straightforward outsider anthem, with choppy chords, gnarled vocals, and lyrics that state pent-up, vindictive frustration outright. As far as narcissistic depression goes, the chorus is admittedly on-the-nose: “I’m not OK/You wear me out.” With its sensitive, almost sophomoric outlook (“Forget about the dirty looks/The photographs your boyfriend took”), the song could have been self-parody, an encapsulation of emo’s self-pitying melodramatics. Yet, perhaps because the band took themselves and their message as deadly serious, “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” remains a classic—an unfiltered stream of pure catharsis, destined to be screamed at karaoke bars for the foreseeable future. From the gasping desperation of Gerard’s vocal performance, recorded alone in a dark attic, to the song’s pop structure, it approached the desolation in its lyrics with almost triumphant glee. Unabashedly melodic and unafraid to whimper and shout in the same verse, “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” captures the most exciting way to be at the end of your rope.
In the end, sentiment won out over concept. A year into the tour for the Three Cheers, Gerard began to sing a different tune about the meaning of the record: “Really, it's about two boys living in New Jersey who lost their grandma, and how their brothers in the band helped them get through it." And the beauty in Three Cheers lies in that mutability: It took the quotidian drama of suburban kids and blew it up into a life-or-death soap opera. Instead of digging its heels further into the pressures of adolescence, the album attempted to transcend them; in a world of Judy Blumes, it read like Stephen King.
My Chemical Romance thrived because they came to the realization that emotional outcasts deserved something to cheer for, even if their victories were imaginary. Teenage emotions aren’t cut and dried and high school has no set heroes and villains. In building a world that reflected imperfections and guilt, exhilaration and depression, My Chemical Romance never patronized their audience; their characters, like the band members themselves, embraced the in-between. Perhaps that is why, when The Daily Mail accused My Chemical Romance of creating a suicidal cult, teens cloaked in the colors of a funeral procession shot back with a surprisingly affirmative response: “MCR SAVED OUR LIVES.”
