They were obviously heavily inspired by what was going on in their backyard in Jersey, as the fingerprints of Saves the Day’s fizzy, feisty pop-punk and the romantically macabre post-hardcore of Thursday are all over their early material. One thing that a lot of people don’t talk about is how eclectic My Chem’s influences are, which is a large part of what made them such good songwriters. The “My” was added later to add a personal dimension to the name– in a typically dark and tongue-in-cheek way, it could also refer to the drinking and drug habits of Gerard, which would inform much of the subject matter on the first two My Chem records. Gerard’s younger brother, Mikey, learned bass so he could be in the band once he heard some early demos that they cut in Otter’s attic Mikey is also responsible for naming the band, after seeing Irvine Welsh’s book Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance in the Barnes & Noble where he was working. They roped in the impressively afro’d Ray Toro as guitarist when it was discovered that Gerard could not sing and play guitar at the same time. He witnessed the fall of the Twin Towers (later writing the first My Chem song, “Skylines & Turnstiles,” about the experience) and decided to walk away from cartoons and comics (for a time, anyway) to “do something with his life,” soon forming a band with friend and drummer Matt “Otter” Pelissier.
My Chemical Romance’s origins in 9/11 have been talked about to death, but in case you somehow have not heard the story: Gerard Way was a struggling New Jersey cartoonist in 2001 who took a ferry to New York to pitch a show to Adult Swim. Over a decade later, and my love affair with My Chemical Romance, vampire-like, refuses to die. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but the following week, I was bored and decided to listen to the band’s first album, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, on a whim.
I thought I’d do him a solid and download the band’s discography for him. This time, the song he wanted was “Teenagers,” by My Chemical Romance.
This wasn’t uncommon practice, because my dad had taught me how to pirate music when I was very young, so my brother would often ask me to download things for him. My little brother, Ethan, came home from school and said that he had heard a song he really liked and wanted me to put it on the iPod Shuffle that our family shared. I was definitely aware of Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge when it came out because “Helena (So Long & Goodnight)” and “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” were quite literally inescapable, but everything changed for me one sleepy day in 2006 or 2007. I actually didn’t get into My Chemical Romance until long after I had gotten into DIY hardcore. So, for my final article in this series, I want to talk about the band of all bands that you were not allowed to like, and a band that means more to me than any band I’ve covered so far aside from Fall Out Boy: My Chemical Romance.
I also learned that I can’t phone these articles in, and that I should only write about bands here that mean a lot to me. I’ve gotten tons of positive feedback, a surprising amount of traffic, and I even managed to parlay it into my first professionally published article. Instead, I’ve found myself exploring what a bunch of bands have meant to me over the years, examining my own experiences with nostalgia, reckoning with mistakes that my idols have made, learning how mainstream music has changed since the early-mid 2000s, and relearning what made me fall in love with these bands in the first place. I thought I would maybe get a few clicks on my previously-dead blog and perhaps find some interesting things to say about bands that people to this day don’t take quite as seriously as they should.
I started this project almost three months ago, thinking it’d be a longer series of shorter blurbs about bands that I got made fun of for liking by my hardcore friends when I was in middle and high school.