12th
formspring.me
Why would you ask My Chem why they are making music when they were paying you?
the only band I had toured with prior to touring with My Chemical Romance was Piebald. I was a hardcore kid at heart and had no clue what it meant to be working for a band or be part of a professional touring road crew at that point. I did a full U.S. tour with them opening up for Every Time I Die and Give Up the Ghost. then another tour where we opened up for Midtown and Reggie And The Full Effect. it was on that tour that I wasn’t really bonding well with the guys… Touring had nothing to do with getting paid for me. it had to do with (and still to an extent has to do with) traveling and hanging out and not working a 9 to 5 office job. At the time they were singing songs about bats and vampires and shit that i couldn’t relate to and just didn’t seem to have any weight, at least that’s how I felt at that time, and I felt like they were not feeling music in the same way that i was, that’s not to say that they weren’t feeling it, cause looking back I think they were, just not the same as I was. Anyhow, I remember it vividly, we were driving to a sold out show at the house of blues in Chicago and everyone was doing their own thing in the van, reading, sleeping, listening to music… I was reading a book called Punk Planet: We are the Interviews which had collected interviews from notable Punk and hardcore musicians, I was reading the interview with Ted Leo and in the interview he was talking about how there was no sincerity in the music that was coming out these days and how bands were just forming to gain notoriety and fame and didn’t have a message but still called themselves punk or hardcore… something like that, these are not direct quotes, and all of a sudden I sat up and got the attention of the band (it was just the band a TM and myself) and went on this 5-10 minute rant on how Ted Leo was right and that My Chemical Romance and a lot of other bands at that time were bullshit…. Gerard told Ray who was driving to pull over and Gerard pulled me aside and told me that he was gonna send me home cause he couldn’t have somebody with them who didn’t believe in what they were doing ( and rightfully so) now should I have done that… well I think yes and no, I was a punk kid who was saying something he believed in, but at the same time I was (as you say) working for this band and should have just held out till the end of the tour which was only 3 days away.
That’s my My Chemical Romance story. not sure if i’ve ever put it out there in such detail before.
I have a bunch of cool home movies that i took from those two tours but they are on hi-8 film and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get it onto my mac
