Every great tale needs a solid start. But My Chemical Romance’s got off on uneasy footing. A reshuffled pack, some toothache, one slap and a lot of anger later, though…
In May 2002, Geoff Rickly had lost his driving licence. The singer of Thursday, however, had agreed to produce My Chemical Romance’s debut album, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, during a 10-day break from touring his band’s seminal 2001 post-hardcore record Full Collapse. So he hitched a ride every day to Nada Studios in New Windsor, New York with his buddy Frank Iero, who was then fronting New Jersey punk rock group Pencey Prep.
On the drive over each day, the pair would discuss the record’s progress. Geoff was worried that MCR’s drummer, Matt Pelissier, wasn’t up to scratch and would hold them back. He was also confused about the band’s guitar set-up, as their sole six-stringer Ray Toro had written multiple guitar parts for the songs being recorded. “I’d say, ‘I don’t know what they’re going to do when they start playing live. This is crazy. They need another guitar player,’” Geoff tells Kerrang!. He also had a feeling that the perfect candidate was sitting in the driver’s seat next to him. “I kept going, ‘Dude, I think you should be in this band…’”
It was Gerard Way that had assembled My Chemical Romance’s original members. The 24-year-old art school grad had grown disillusioned with life and spent a lot of time in his parents’ basement drawing comics. That was until the most violent wake-up call on September 11, 2001 when, while working in New York as an intern for Cartoon Network, he witnessed the collapse of the Twin Towers. It gave him an urgency to do something with his life.
“From then on, I was in my parents’ basement with a small practice amp and an old Fender guitar,” Gerard told Kerrang! in 2007. “That’s when I wrote Skylines And Turnstiles [as a reaction to 9/11] and some of the earlier material. I wrote those songs sitting in my pyjamas with notebooks all around me. It was me going, ‘All this stuff has been inside me for years and I want to get it out.’ I wasn’t depressed at that time exactly, but I was certainly a hermit.”
He first played these early demos to recruit drummer Matt Pelissier, before later involving guitarist Ray Toro, with whom he had previously been in pop-punk band Nancy Drew, and enlisting his brother Mikey on bass. In fact, it was the younger sibling who would christen the project, having come across Irvine Welsh’s novella collection Ecstasy: Three Tales Of Chemical Romance while working in a Barnes & Noble bookstore.
The band had only existed for three months when they booked Nada Studios, a pokey set-up run by John Naclerio – a friend of the band’s new label, Eyeball Records – and situated in his mother’s basement. The first track that the group laid to tape was Vampires Will Never Hurt You, the same song that had persuaded Thursday’s Geoff Rickly to climb aboard after hearing a demo. What was intended to be a preliminary recording wound up being used on the finished record, thanks in part to an anguished performance from Gerard – extremely riled from his toothache and lack of painkillers – which left nobody in the room in doubt that they were working on something unique.
“Nothing beats that recording of Vampires…, even the stuff we’ve spent a lot of money on,” Gerard would later say. “We were worried Vampires… wouldn’t work. But it was the greatest thing we’d ever fucking heard. We piled into the van and drove home afterwards and we couldn’t stop listening to it. It was just the loudest, gnarliest, darkest, most melodic song I’d ever heard. It was fucking amazing.”
It was after the recording of Vampires… that the members of MCR took the idea of adding a second guitarist seriously, as they were now being urged to by Geoff and Eyeball head honcho Alex Saavedra. As for who it should be, that was a no-brainer. Frank was already a friend of the group. They were big admirers of Pencey Prep, and he had been in the studio during the recordings.
“I was hanging out while they recorded the demo of Vampires Will Never Hurt You and I got really, really high,” Frank told Kerrang!. “Ray had laid down 14 guitar parts and somebody said, ‘If you add another guitarist, you could play this live.’ Someone replied, ‘The only guy we’ve considered is too high to get off the couch.’ That was the first time I thought I might play in my favourite band – it scared the shit out of me.”
After finally being formally asked to join, Frank’s last-minute involvement with Bullets… was fitting of its raw and rushed production; the few guitar parts that were left to write he would figure out in the van outside, before running back into the studio to record them. Meanwhile, drummer Matt’s refusal to use a click track gave the songs a noticeably unsteady tempo.
“You can hear the nervousness and excitement,” Ray later said to Kerrang!. “Every song speeds up, which gives them a lot of character. I like the rawness, especially in the vocals. It sounds very true. I get emotional, too. Early Sunsets Over Monroeville is unlike anything we’ve ever done since – it’s amazing.”
Much of the storytelling of their debut Gerard cribbed from the reams of notebooks that he had filled with comic book ideas while in his parents’ basement during his early 20s. Even the name I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love was originally the title of a short story he had written about gang murders in Chicago.
These early tracks gave sharp glimpses of the accomplished narrator the frontman would later become. Monroeville – which takes its name from the Pennsylvania mall where George A. Romero shot the 1978 horror Dawn Of The Dead – is a bleak tale of zombiefied lovers, while Headfirst For Halos is a fist-pumping whirl of self-medication and mortality, with the killer line, ‘And now these red ones make me fly, and the blue ones help me fall / And I think I’ll blow my brains against the ceiling.’ Closer Demolition Lovers, meanwhile, casts the same murderous couple who star more prominently at the heart of the concept of Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge.
These stories also helped Gerard embrace his role as frontman, giving an ordinarily introverted personality the chance to flourish centre-stage for the first time.
“It’s almost like method acting,” Gerard told Kerrang!. “Vampires… was definitely the first instance of that. Each song had to have a completely different approach.”
Upon the release of Bullets…, Kerrang! writer Rae Alexandra honed in on the jagged themes of Gerard’s writing in her review of the record. She wrote: “Way’s vocals are one part vicious attack, one part desperate plea and one part nervous breakdown. Whiny emo this ain’t; murder, vampires, ghosts, suicide, drug dependency – they’re all here… Razor-sharp metal riffs, bouncy punk melodies and post-hardcore intricacies cling to each other, tugging at heartstrings while avoiding cliché. My Chemical Romance are astonishing. And they are going to be huge.”
It was a bold prophecy few others were honestly making back then. But it was one that wouldn’t take long to be fulfilled.
