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. 

I was able to watch most of Death Cab’s set, and while I loved seeing them and Postal Service play MSG two years ago, the sense of urgency wasn’t nearly as high this time. They still sound solid live, and Ben Gibbard looks like he’s having the time of his life, but this was MCR’s circus. A bizarre, vaguely Soviet circus. Just before they played the classic “Welcome to the Black Parade,” Way introduced the mayor of the band’s hometown, Belleville, New Jersey. Michael Melham presented MCR with a key to the city, and Way showed his gratitude by giving him a bouquet of wheat and a fish from the Gubric River. “This fish is excellent,” Way said in an Eastern European accent. It comes from the made-up country of Draag, a setting the band concocted for this “Long Live The Black Parade” tour. 

Was this album always so… Russian? Anti-authoritarian? (It’s the story of a guy with cancer who eventually reaches the afterlife, no?) On Saturday, a dictator in military dress watched over the stage while the band tried to please him. Cyrillic-like letters and amazing U.S.S.R.-era visuals, from silly TV commercials to overt propaganda, populated the video screens. A firing squad “executed” a few poor souls. Way ate and flung about cold spaghetti brought to him by an abusive manservant, who later turned into an evil clown. The frontman is shot dead in a dramatic fashion towards the end of the Black Parade portion of the show, and everyone else dies thanks to some kind of nuclear rocket explosion. Visually stunned, I found myself mumbling “what the fuck is this?” throughout the heavily pyro’ed set. 

As I stood there contemplating the effectiveness of MCR’s cheeky anti-authoritarian satire, I thought of Roger Waters’ tours behind The Wall. This was highly visual in a different way—more vaudevillian, less… inflatable-based?—but the act of making broad political gestures for a stadium rock crowd, with the chance that you could be misinterpreted, is a risky move. (Especially now, when fascism is on the rise.) But I don’t think that’s how the fans were interacting with the work at all—with a band as relentlessly world-building as MCR, you could see someone falling down the rabbithole with the album’s backstory, or a million other side quests that aren’t rooted in reality whatsoever. There were times when the crowd echo resonated louder than Way’s vocals. On the Black Parade all-timer “Teenagers,” most of what you heard and saw were 30-somethings screaming “teenagers scare the living shit out of me” (and meaning it).

When Way finally broke character in the show’s second act (a regular rock band setup in the round), he admitted it was silly—what he pulled with the fish on that poor mayor. It was like they needed to repay their karmic debt to the state of New Jersey, so they ended the show with a cover of Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” the band’s karaoke go-to. And I swear on my life: Bon Jovi himself could not have done it better.