I Took a Party Bus to ‘The Black Parade’

Confession: I am merely a casual My Chemical Romance fan. It seems important to note since this is an intense fandom—if you’re of a certain age, you probably knew or know someone for whom MCR is everything, a band that saves lives. For me, they were always an Adjacent Emo Fandom, for which I had a lot of respect but was a little too old to take part in myself. Though I owned a burned copy of 2004’s Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge and played “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” on repeat for a few months, my chosen emo fighters in the early-mid 2000s were Brand New and Saves the Day. By the time The Black Parade arrived in 2006, I was wandering the indie rock corridor, far from the Hot Topic bands of high school.

My Chemical Romance have aged better than a lot of other acts in the emo / pop-punk milieu, in part because their theatrical songs are concerned with the supernatural and the fictitious. Frontman Gerard Way and co. would get personal to discuss their mental health struggles, but unlike a number of their peers, they didn’t write nasty misogynistic lyrics and later get accused of sexual assault by female fans. They’re comic book and horror nerds, wholesome in an Addams Family kind of way. And The Black Parade is a classic as far as bombastic rock operas go, like Tommy for a generation of gothy, fantasy-minded outcasts who watched 9/11 happen on TV as kids.

I thought it’d be fun to go and see if I could catch a little secondhand nostalgia from my fellow emo millennials, all dressed in red and black. That, and the 2004 mish-mash, MTV2-ass lineup sweetened the pot: local post-hardcore heroes Thursday and tweemo favorites Death Cab For Cutie opened the show. So off to New Jersey I went with a friend, an off-duty dad and former punk quietly microdosing shrooms, having the time of his life. MCR’s publicity team even chartered a party bus to take media types over to MetLife Stadium in NJ from the city. It arrived too late for us to catch the first act, meaning we replaced the surreality of seeing Thursday play a stadium with the ridiculousness of riding up to a My Chem show in a stretch, a wee bit tipsy.