Meet the Goth-Punk Superheroes My Chemical Romance

This story was originally published in the July 28, 2005 issue of Rolling Stone.

Over ten years of tradition dictates that every night of the summer Warped tour ends the same way: In a parking lot full of tour buses, dozens of tattooed, mohawked punks gather to eat barbecue, sip beer and chat. barely legal alternative chicks who somehow made it
to escape security.

It's the first day of Warped 2005 in Columbus, Ohio, and the party is well under way when the five members of New Jersey goth-punk quintet My Chemical Romance pile into a white minivan and head off on a much more important mission: a trip to Wal-Mart will be stocked with diet sodas, cereal, horror movies and, God willing, Spider-Man pajama pants. As they enter the store, each guy grabs a cart and begins exploring.

“There were tours where we'd hit a different Wal-Mart almost every night,” says singer Gerard Way, 28, who cuts to the immediate left with his little brother, bassist Mikey, 24, in the toy section. Both dressed in black, the Way brothers wander the aisles, carefully examining a variety of Star Wars action figures. Unmoved by the selection, Gerard steers his cart towards the office supplies. “I need one of those plastic magazine racks,” he says, “so I can organize my Dungeons and Dragons books.”

So it is with My Chemical Romance: Five teenage comic book geeks trapped in the bodies of grown men who saunter around the stage in matching jackets and hideous makeup — “singing songs that make you cut your wrists,” as one lyric says — but go to sleep at night in tour bus bunks Teen Titans bed sheets. They prefer to think of themselves as superheroes rather than rock stars. And, like any respectable superhero, the members of My Chemical Romance are getting their own action figures later this year. “I don't think the My Chemical Romance action figure is going to get a kid to start their own band,” says Gerard. “I like to think it will have him saving kids from a burning building.”

Released last year, My Chem's major label debut, Three cheers for sweet revenge, he's got sold nearly 800,000 copies, thanks to two hit singles, “I'm Not Okay (I Promise)” and “Helena”. Film videos for both songs have made the band an unlikely regular on MTV Total Request Live and its members — the Ways, guitarists Frank Lero, 23, and Ray Toro, 28, and drummer Bob Bryar, 24 — Tiger Beat– pinup style for the Hot Topic generation. And beyond: Green Day, one of My Chem's idols, brought the group on tour this spring. Pink and John Mayer are fans. and Courtney Love said My Chem is twelve-year-old Frances Bean's favorite band.

Their music is a cross between Queen and the Misfits, combining the four-on-the-floor movement of old-school punk with the camp and theatrics of glam. But ultimately, it's not just the sound or the look that's helped My Chem connect — although many of their fans have taken to wearing bright red eye shadow in imitation of Gerard. It is the light behind the darkness of their songs that communicates Three Cheers' double entenders: Sometimes the good guys wear black, and sometimes, if all the freaks and geeks get together, they can change the world. As a result, the most common thing My Chem hears from their fans is “Your music saved my life.”

“You see us playing these songs about imaginary guns, cowboys, electric chairs, fucking in prison,” says Gerrard, referring to the cute punk cabaret tune “You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in Prison.” “Abstraction exists for a reason. It's for people to take what they want from it. This band is therapy for us. What we are saying through the show is “This may or may not be healing for you too. Either way, we're still going to do it.”

A few days before Warped's show in Columbus, Gerard is mingling on Third Avenue in Manhattan, sipping a vanilla soy latte. He recently chopped his chin-length black hair into a short flip flop for the upcoming My Chem The “Ghost of You” video. and has slimmed down significantly since he quit drinking and popped Xanax last year (at his heaviest, he carried nearly 200 pounds on his five-foot-eight-inch frame). However, when he walks, he hunches his shoulders as if he prefers to be invisible.

He makes it past a dozen teenage girls in pink and blue t-shirts waiting in line for a Tyler Hilton show at a downtown club, but a few blocks later we hear some college-age dudes coming up behind us and Gerard stretches out in anticipation . “You're a mess!” shouts one, followed by “Emo sucks!” and then a final “You're crap!” for good measure. Way shrugs and says, “I used to be just that kid, the one who came to town from Jersey to hang out at St. Marks Place and act like a punk.”

Except for Bryar, who hails from Chicago (and joined the band last year), the guys in My Chem grew up in the working-class New Jersey suburb of Belleville. “It's hard to break out of the routines there,” says Mikey. “If I wasn't in this band, I probably would have been stuck doing some retail work. We lived near malls, and that's exactly what you would do. A lot of people I know ended up as managers at Gap.” Mikey and Gerard – whose parents, Donna and Donald, are a former hairdresser and car dealership service manager, respectively – worked a variety of low-wage jobs together, doing everything from stocking peas to the frozen section food at a local supermarket. to shelve books at a Barnes & Noble. (It was while taking Irvine Welsh's Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance that Mikey came up with the name for the band.)

Gerard had stopped playing music around fifteen after his band kicked him out because he either couldn't or wouldn't learn to play “Sweet Home Alabama”. He turned to his other great passion, drawing superheroes, and ended up studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York. After graduating in '99, he hit the pavement with his sketches and nearly struck gold while interning at Cartoon Network, where an executive loved his idea for a show called The morning monkey about a flying monkey with a Björk-like accent who had the ability to make waffles, French toast, or any breakfast food appear out of thin air. Way was meeting with production companies and talking about licensing deals. But that was all before September 11, 2001, which had as profound an effect on Way as it did on anyone living or working in New York at the time.

“Something just clicked in my head, and that's when I said, 'Fuck art' for the first time,” he says. “I thought, 'Art doesn't do anything for you. It's just something on a wall, it's completely disposable and it doesn't help anyone.' And I was like, “Fuck Monkey breakfast, because all it will do is line someone else's pockets.' I felt that I had given my life to art and that it had betrayed me. And then on Thursday I saw him play in this club for fifty people and it changed me.”

Gerard reconnected with his old neighborhood friend Toro after they attended an Iron Maiden show together. They recorded a three song demo with original drummer Matt Pelissier and then recruited Iero and convinced Mikey to join their new band. They built a fan base through live shows where they spat in each other's faces or threw their instruments. “We just went out there and tried to destroy things,” says Gerard. “I didn't want people to stand there and look at it like it was art. We wanted it to be explosive and cathartic.”

Although the band was initially the setting for Gerard to “deal with PTSD, my own shortcomings, depression and suicide,” the inspiration for many Three cheers it came from the death of his maternal grandmother, Elena Lee Rush, in 2003. “Elena,” he says, “is an angry open letter to myself for being on the road for so long and missing the last year of her life.” . Elena and her husband, Arthur (who died this spring), lived with the Tropes. he taught Gerard how to sing and how to draw, and even bought their first van at My Chem.

Last year, Gerard was convinced that Three Cheers was a concept album about “two lovers who die in the desert in a fight. The guy goes to hell and meets the devil, who tells the guy that he can only be reunited with his lover if he brings the devil the souls of 1,000 bad men.” A year later, Gerard is sober and has a different vision for the album. “There is a pseudo-concept,” he says now. “But it's really about two boys who live in New Jersey and lose their grandmother and how their band brothers help them get through it.”

My Chem have a few European dates and their first headlining tour ahead of them this fall, but they've already started writing songs for a new record that Gerard expects will still be smart and dark but probably more direct. “There's so much I want to say about real life now,” he says. “We begin to see the beauty of the world and truly understand our relationships with other human beings such as our loved ones. What's wrong with writing a song about missing someone instead of vampire killers? There is a common saying in My Chemical Romance that 'This is bigger than us,' but what I've realized is that, at the same time, there's nothing bigger than the lives of the five guys in this band.”