Speaking with Exclaim!, My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way discussed what led to scrapping a full two albums’ worth of material.
“I think the first attempt at this record was a reaction to the ambition of [2006’s Black Parade], unfortunately,” Way says. “And, I guess, thinking if we kill the ambition, strip it down, cut our hair and present ourselves as respectable and make a very safe rock record that will avoid for us any hardships, potentially, and we won’t rock the boat or make so much noise. Which means we could keep doing what we like: make music together. But Danger Days ended up being a rebellion against that rebellion, like saying, ‘We have to do this again if we really believe in this and each other.’
"It was definitely a reaction to the toll it took, but we took it and turned it into something really positive. If it took a heavy toll on us again, we’d say, ‘Okay, it’s taking a heavy toll on us so let’s go on a really fun, bright, colourful dance party adventure, so then we get to live that every night. We don’t have to live something so dark.’”
In which Adam Lambert calls MCR ‘emo-tronic’ and cites The Black Parade as a precedent for his own theatricality.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
One of the most terrible things about the English education system in Ireland is its ruthlessness. I know no image for that ruthlessness in the natural order. The ruthlessness of a wild beast has in it a certain mercy—it slays. It has in it a certain grandeur of animal force. But this ruthlessness is literally without pity and without passion. It is cold and mechanical, like the ruthlessness of an immensely powerful engine. A machine vast, complicated, with a multitude of far-reaching arms, with many ponderous presses, carrying out mysterious and long-drawn processes of shaping and moulding, is the true image of the Irish education system. It grinds night and day; it obeys immutable and predetermined laws; it is as devoid of understanding, of sympathy, of imagination, as is any other piece of machinery that performs an appointed task. Into it is fed all the raw human material in Ireland; it seizes upon it inexorably and rends and compresses and re-moulds; and what it cannot refashion after the regulation pattern it ejects with all likeness of its former self crushed from it, a bruised and shapeless thing, thereafter accounted waste.
Given the aftermath of Black Parade, is there anything you wish you’d done differently?
Gerard: The only thing I wish I’d done differently was paying attention at all to the reaction to the album. I beat myself up about doing that, but it was really hard to ignore.
Frank: That’s the thing, when it’s in your face every day and people are telling you about it and asking if you feel responsible. It’s like, fuck, man. You’ve got me in a cage and you’re just poking me with a stick at that point. And no, I don’t feel responsible, it’s not my responsibility. But it’s hard when that’s all you see. You’re in the bus, in a venue, in the bus, in a venue, in a bus, in a venue and that’s what people are telling you is going on, and damning you for it. When really all you’ve done is travelled to the next city and performed. That’s all you’ve done. And people are telling you that millions of miles away some kid got beat up for loving your band. That’s fucked up.
Gerard: That happened a lot. I remember getting to Australia, turning on the TV and they were talking about kids at Big Day Out getting beat up and it’s like, what the fuck, man.
I think it’s a different thing this time, though. I don’t expect to turn on the TV and see much of that. Not that I’d care this time. I can’t in order to keep doing it. I can’t care about that any more. Like, the aftermath really has to be a secondary thing that I can’t give a shit about. I think that’s kept the art pure, I think that’s why it’s so vibrant and fuck you and awesome and fearless, and the music sounds just like it looks, and the visual promises you so much danger and excitement, and the record delivers that. I think that doesn’t happen very often.
But to put the bad stuff in perspective, you just have to Google ‘My Chemical Romance saved my life’…
Gerard: Yeah I know! But that’s a hard thing too. Because well… Frank, the way he puts it about them: they did that, not us.
Frank: They don’t give themselves enough credit. I think it’s great to inspire that, and to be the record that helps you get through something, but that’s all it is. It helps you to do that; you’re the one who actually did it. Our kids are really strong. They like to give us the accolades, but in fact it really is them. They’re the heroes.
On The Black Parade he dubbed himself “the savior of the broken, the beaten, and the damned,” and he established for the band the modest goal of rescuing the world. “I thought if we made an album that tried to change the world, or give it hope, it would really happen,” Way says, cheerfully. “But all people found was death and destruction and misery and self-hate. I learned that the world doesn’t want to be saved, and it will fucking punch you in the face if you try.”
…
You’re no one’s savior, you mean.“Hell no.” He pauses. “But that was a fun image to play with. Because even if you miss the mark, you’re probably gonna be a pretty remarkable person. Shoot for savior, and end up being rad.”
I met Gerard Way in Glasgow at the end of 2006 not long after the release of The Black Parade by his band, My Chemical Romance.
The video for the single “Welcome To the Black Parade” had seemed to me a perfect articulation of a kind of, let’s call it “necrodelic,” current I was hoping might show up in popular culture, so I was eager to catch up with him. Those punk, post-apocalyptic echoes of Sgt. Pepper, the elegiac chiming guitars and doomed young soldiers, the Freddie Mercury bravado that compressed the polar extremes of emo and military macho together into a perfect synthesis: the blend was thrilling and showed a pop group with ambition, a vision, and a reach that immediately attracted my attention.
The Black Parade played relentlessly while I was writing psychotic Joker prose for the 663rd issue of the Batman comic, and on all through the endless, cold, dark nights and cigarette-burn days of the miserable Scottish winter.
So by the time Gerard and I sat down together it was already a mutual admiration party. He had the iconic silver crop then but the dye was making his scalp crawl and he’d started to talk about ditching the look. We got on like old pals and spent the afternoon before the band’s sound check talking about comics, travel, rock ‘n’ roll, life, death, Malcolm McDowell, and all that.
Grant Morrison, Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite foreword.
[The Black Parade] was a record that was so misconstrued on so many levels. It was really difficult and it took a toll on me. People in Mexico were getting hate-crimed on because they wore black and so anywhere they went, that’s what people would talk about – they weren’t talking about the music. that upset me. They were just talking about mascara and bullshit like that. I realized the world is a wild animal and you can’t change it or control it. You can’t ride it; it’s going to ride you. That’s what I learned. I felt so small.
Gerard Way, Kerrang October 2010
“The Black Parade… was always an album that had exacted a mental duty, from its birth to its death… Suddenly My Chemical Romance, and Gerard in particular, became both the leaders of a tenuous movement they wished to have no part of – emo – and its villains-in-chief. They were blamed for the suicide of teenagers by sensationalist journalists; when other black-clad teenagers were beaten by thugs in Mexico, it was My Chemical Romance who were, somehow, found to be at fault. And it was because The Black Parade had become much bigger than the band and they were shocked and appalled when they could no longer command what they had created.”
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