Sendmyresignation's MCR Metal Primer
Mar. 5th, 2023 03:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mcrmetalhistories
Or: you want to know how deep the My Chemical Romance Metal influences go
I’ve been a metalhead for a long time—it's a passion of mine and some of the music that speaks most to me. So, naturally, describing the impact of metal on one of my favorite bands is something I delight in. However, I think a lot of My Chem fans don’t really know much about metal at all and aren’t aware of how significant metal’s particular ethos, drama, and lyricism are to the band. Which, while unfortunate, makes sense– My Chem grew within and collaborated with the punk side of the subcultural spectrum so the knowledge about their influences tends to reflect what people are familiar with. But, considering my experience with metal, I want to take the opportunity to bridge the gap and begin a true conversation about an oft-understated part of My Chem’s musical motivations.That being said I’m not the authority on all things metal! I’m young in an old genre with a lot of history I’m still exploring. I’ve tried my best to give as much context and information as I have, so keep that in mind.
Another quick disclaimer: I’m talking about bands through the lens of influence and so will not leave out bands if they are significant enough to My Chem’s sound, regardless of their horrible histories (the biggest example here is Pantera, but everyone has different lines with other bands). There are a few reasons for this. For one, ignoring problematic bands is just not good music history. For another, I am frustrated by this view among punks (most My Chem fans aren’t necessarily punks but do tend to have more experience with that subculture) that metal is significantly less tolerant than punk spaces. Metal has problems with white supremacy, with homophobia, with misogyny, of course. But so does punk, both now and historically. I think punks often overlook the bigoted actions of people like Siouxsie Sioux, nazi skinheads, or Tim Armstrong when they contradict the idea of punk as singularity radical or leftist.
At its core, punk is a musical genre– you can perform punk music and be an asshole or a sellout or what have you. In the same vein, leftists, queer people, women, and people of color have always existed in metal spaces. To reduce metal to a subgenre of bigots and assholes erases those people from metal’s history. If you are genuinely interested in underground music, you should familiarize yourself with metal, its history, and its influence on the larger culture. To help you out on this noble pursuit, I've made a "little" playlist that parallels the write-up if you'd like to follow along at home. Hopefully there's something for you, lurking in this write-up.
With that out of the way! My Chemical Romance is strongly influenced by metal. To understand how My Chem function, what their goals were/are, and how they write and perform requires as much basic understanding of Iron Maiden as it does the Misfits. With this in mind, my goal with this post is to showcase these connections to metal both sonically and community-wise. In the first two sections, I’m going to split my focus between Gerard and Ray, going through each of their histories with the subgenre, but there will be some overlap between them and other members. Then, I will discuss the textual references in My Chem’s actual body of work. Finally, at the end will be a miscellaneous section of various metal bands the members have toured with, shouted out, or mentioned during their tenure in the spotlight. Hopefully, this collective body of information will showcase how embedded into My Chem metal truly is.
RAY TORO: HEAVY METAL SHREDDER
It’s probably easiest to identify metal’s contribution to My Chem’s sound through Ray and his particular style of playing.Again and again, Ray cites his musical education beginning with his metalhead older brother Louie, who introduced him to “Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Hendrix, Metallica, Motley Crue” and “Ozzy's music when [he] was 14, and right away Randy Rhoads became [his] biggest influence.” Ray recalls feeling compelled to pick up the guitar and spend all his free time practicing. He wanted to sound as good as his big brother; as a result, Ray developed a taste for the classics and a drive to commit himself to guitar. Unlike punk, metal as a genre and subculture does not prioritize the DIY ethic over musical competence, and for burgeoning shredders like Ray, playing guitar requires honing skill and learning your shit. In general, the duality of his influences (blues-driven greats like Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page and popular thrash shredders of a not-so-distant-past) set him apart from his peers in the 90s New Jersey hardcore scene as a musician with a metal foundation that lent itself to proficiency and showmanship.
(Ray in his childhood bedroom. Photo by Justin Borucki)
INFLUENCE ON: STYLE
Ray has described his style as him “throw[ing] everything together, classic rock and metal bands: Megadeath, Metallica, Pantera, Iron Maiden… I think I’ve always had more of a faster-riffing, minor key thing going on… I love the precision of a lot of metal players.”
However, Ray has always had a fascination with punk– Frank’s not the only My Chem guitarist that cites the Misfits as a contribution to his style. And while punk was certainly not his primary modality of playing, when he did start actually joining bands it was punk bands that he found himself in. Even with his evocative technicality and an underbelly propensity for shredding, the Rodneys are pretty typical “Oi-Punk” with a toilet sense of humor and no real aspirations. But The Rodneys did mark Ray’s inundation to the Jersey scene and allowed him to incorporate disparate elements of punk and metal into his performance. And later, working with Frank and Gerard just further emphasized this connection, especially on an emotional or attitude level. To me, this push and pull is what makes Ray such a unique guitarist– he’s taken legitimate influence from the music of his peers to create more authentic, emotive playing, without forfeiting the primary musical contributions of his youth.
However, Ray has always had a fascination with punk– Frank’s not the only My Chem guitarist that cites the Misfits as a contribution to his style. And while punk was certainly not his primary modality of playing, when he did start actually joining bands it was punk bands that he found himself in. Even with his evocative technicality and an underbelly propensity for shredding, the Rodneys are pretty typical “Oi-Punk” with a toilet sense of humor and no real aspirations. But The Rodneys did mark Ray’s inundation to the Jersey scene and allowed him to incorporate disparate elements of punk and metal into his performance. And later, working with Frank and Gerard just further emphasized this connection, especially on an emotional or attitude level. To me, this push and pull is what makes Ray such a unique guitarist– he’s taken legitimate influence from the music of his peers to create more authentic, emotive playing, without forfeiting the primary musical contributions of his youth.
(Shawn Dillon, George Collazo, Matt “Otter” Pelissier, Shawn Orr (friend of the band), Ray Toro. Photo via creepinup on tumblr)
Ray’s value of precision playing reflects the classical influence he’s honed over the years. Hands-down, Ray’s biggest stylistic inspiration is Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist Randy Rhoads, who is responsible for the soloing in songs like “Crazy Train,” “I Don’t Know,” and “Goodbye to Romance.” Ray brings up “Goodbye to Romance” often, indicating his commitment to the emotional sides of technical riff-making, as well as his appreciation for glam that allow him and Gerard work together so well (the chorus sounds a bit like Velvet Goldmine’s “Ballad of Maxwell Demon,” if you’re into that sort of thing). As Ray himself says:
“I was inspired by [Rhoads’s] mix of classical music and metal and started modeling a lot of my playing after his. I got interested in tapping, because he used little bits of that in certain sections of his solos just to move up the scale or move up the fretboard. I also started playing classical scales.” - Guitar World, The Record That Changed My Life
Ray’s solos most clearly demonstrate this approach in “Thank You For the Venom” and “Tomorrow’s Money”, both of which end with a speeding minor scale slide-down that is, in Ray’s own words (remember Ray’s “faster-riffing, minor key thing”) completely old-school, classically inspired metal. Additionally, both these solos use triplets– essentially 3 notes in a space that would typically only have 2, creating a natural rhythm– think of the very common modern triplet flow in trap music– which are much more common in metal musical notation than punk.
The balance of aggression and clarity, passion and precision, in his playing makes Ray, to me, one of the greats. And from the start of My Chem’s career, it certainly differentiated them from the rest of the hardcore scene.
Take for example the dyadic opening of Bullets. The album begins with the out-of-place soft classical piece “Romance.” Then it moves into “Honey This Mirror…,” which opens with a distinct chugging riff that is generally more characteristic of metal than it is of Jersey post-hardcore. Or consider “I’m Not Okay,” the single that broke My Chem into the mainstream: Ray’s flashy, Queen-esque solo demarcates a clear division in the shape of what was becoming mainstream rock music pre- and post-MCR success. Suddenly, some up-and-coming bands were starting to include guitar solos in their songs, something pretty markedly Not Punk. Not only were guitar solos generally out of vogue in the 2000s, considering their association with 80s hair metal but they had been viewed as the antithesis of hardcore more broadly. The technical proficiency and douchy-showmanship solos represented in the minds of punks meant hardcore tried to replicate the aggression of metal without the fanfare– a literal DIY approach to making fast, heavy music. But, suddenly, you can take any post-hardcore, metalcore, or Warped Tour type band (like A Day to Remember, Escape the Fate, or Famous Last Words) that formed in the wake of the band’s grip on pop culture and the pattern of technical guitarmanship, of using solos and then later breakdowns, becomes much more common than in the popular understanding of “emo” or the scene prior.
Ultimately, though, Ray’s metal sensibility was fundamentally tempered by his exposure to punk and hardcore in ways that focused his solos to fitting within the larger fabric of a song and its emotional and narrative journey. In that way, by forgoing the over-the-top flashy nature of metal soloing for a more subdued (in the sense of blending in with the rest of the band) approach, Ray’s solos feel like a natural evolution of post-hardcore musical experimentation and complexity through his unique musical upbringing in service of greater emotional resonance– the Demo Lover’s solo as one of the songs segmented “acts” I think really demonstrates this connection.
The balance of aggression and clarity, passion and precision, in his playing makes Ray, to me, one of the greats. And from the start of My Chem’s career, it certainly differentiated them from the rest of the hardcore scene.
Take for example the dyadic opening of Bullets. The album begins with the out-of-place soft classical piece “Romance.” Then it moves into “Honey This Mirror…,” which opens with a distinct chugging riff that is generally more characteristic of metal than it is of Jersey post-hardcore. Or consider “I’m Not Okay,” the single that broke My Chem into the mainstream: Ray’s flashy, Queen-esque solo demarcates a clear division in the shape of what was becoming mainstream rock music pre- and post-MCR success. Suddenly, some up-and-coming bands were starting to include guitar solos in their songs, something pretty markedly Not Punk. Not only were guitar solos generally out of vogue in the 2000s, considering their association with 80s hair metal but they had been viewed as the antithesis of hardcore more broadly. The technical proficiency and douchy-showmanship solos represented in the minds of punks meant hardcore tried to replicate the aggression of metal without the fanfare– a literal DIY approach to making fast, heavy music. But, suddenly, you can take any post-hardcore, metalcore, or Warped Tour type band (like A Day to Remember, Escape the Fate, or Famous Last Words) that formed in the wake of the band’s grip on pop culture and the pattern of technical guitarmanship, of using solos and then later breakdowns, becomes much more common than in the popular understanding of “emo” or the scene prior.
Ultimately, though, Ray’s metal sensibility was fundamentally tempered by his exposure to punk and hardcore in ways that focused his solos to fitting within the larger fabric of a song and its emotional and narrative journey. In that way, by forgoing the over-the-top flashy nature of metal soloing for a more subdued (in the sense of blending in with the rest of the band) approach, Ray’s solos feel like a natural evolution of post-hardcore musical experimentation and complexity through his unique musical upbringing in service of greater emotional resonance– the Demo Lover’s solo as one of the songs segmented “acts” I think really demonstrates this connection.
INFLUENCE ON: PARTNERSHIP
Even Ray and Frank’s partnership is fundamentally a rarity which calls back to the guitar duets of early rock and roll and heavy metal, not the Jersey post-hardcore scene. Even in the instances where dual guitars existed in emotional hardcore or post-hardcore or “emo”, they were not really writing parts to create the effect of extra-ordinary loudness or power; co-guitarist duos like Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto in Fugazi were often a byproduct of the social interconnectedness of local scenes considering their partnership evolved out of their other bands Minor Threat and Rites of Spring.
Instead, the Frank and Ray duo was a requirement born out of the scope and density of Ray’s written material on Bullets. A very brief history of dual guitars: bands like Wishbone Ash and Thin Lizzy in the mid-1970s began experimenting with guitar harmonics (basically doubling up guitar parts like you would a voice part) and laid the foundation for duel guitars to become integral in heavy metal. Judas Priest and Iron Maiden popularized it during the NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal) boom in the early 1980s before becoming a part of most major metal sub-genres. Generally, the dual guitar is oft-associated with glam to the point of parody or cliche, another hint of the Ratt, Def Leppard, and Van Halen that Ray borrows from. However, it’s much more the classic NWOBHM or the thrash strain that factors into My Chem’s sound since the foundational dual guitar is associated with the blues, while thrash has a grounding in punk, both of which provide greater space for Frank’s contributions.
Instead, the Frank and Ray duo was a requirement born out of the scope and density of Ray’s written material on Bullets. A very brief history of dual guitars: bands like Wishbone Ash and Thin Lizzy in the mid-1970s began experimenting with guitar harmonics (basically doubling up guitar parts like you would a voice part) and laid the foundation for duel guitars to become integral in heavy metal. Judas Priest and Iron Maiden popularized it during the NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal) boom in the early 1980s before becoming a part of most major metal sub-genres. Generally, the dual guitar is oft-associated with glam to the point of parody or cliche, another hint of the Ratt, Def Leppard, and Van Halen that Ray borrows from. However, it’s much more the classic NWOBHM or the thrash strain that factors into My Chem’s sound since the foundational dual guitar is associated with the blues, while thrash has a grounding in punk, both of which provide greater space for Frank’s contributions.
(K.K Downing and Glenn Tipton. Photo by Paul Natkin; Frank and Ray in Dublin. Photo by Ray Keogh)
In many ways, My Chem exemplifies the original Priest style of twin guitar. For example, “Through the Realms of Death” has two distinct solos from Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing which combined bluesy, dirtier riffing with the newer technical and whammy-filled soloing. Metal influences like Judas Priest set a precedent for the eventual marriage of Frank’s musical foundation in blues and Ray’s own style (though Frank doesn’t write solos for himself in MCR songs– he’s uninterested in that) and explain why Ray, of all the guitarists in the scene, consistently wrote parts meant for more than one player—that's what he'd be naturally drawn to in a finished song. This way of writing ultimately is the main reason Frank joined the band since Ray’s guitar parts were simply spread too wide for one person to play live (he had fallen victim to the metal propensity for harmony). Ray’s style necessitated a partner. And Frank’s blues background (not just classic blues rock like Cream but the original blues guitarists like Muddy Waters that created and shaped rock music), fit more congruently with Ray’s older metal style because that sonic influence was the contemporary influence of the foundational metal bands like Priest and Sabbath. It’s important to understand that modern metal, punk, and rock has lost a lot of that bluesy quality because it's no longer the fabric of influence anymore. Consider with punk how modern-day guitarists, who are taking from 70’s punk, are learning from the people who are taking from 50’s rock who learned from blues and therefore its become diluted, less common. There is no other guitarist in the scene that could play off Ray as well as Frank given the legacy of musicians he grew up and around.
But speaking to their partnership more specifically: the division between “lead” and rhythm guitar is less defined in metal than in traditional rock music. In standard guitar lingo rhythm guitars focus on driving the song, using chords to keep time and move the song forward, while leads play riffs and solos and also echo the vocals. However, in metal, when the riff, or the several-measure-long repeated “hook” or theme, is the core of a song, it can originate anywhere (listen to Metallica’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls” and notice how it’s the bass that sits on the riffs, often without voices, for extended periods of time). The importance of the bass, as well as the rhythmic complexity of metal riffing, allows for these riffs to also keep time and drive the beat. Iron Maiden, like many bands, considered themselves as a band of two lead guitarists, while thrash bands like Metallica or Overkill might only draw the distinction between who played solos and who didn’t.
So, when Ray says he’s a lead guitarist, it’s not because he takes the most important parts but rather that the “harmonized leads on the records are usually me.” My Chem is not actually metal so their guitars are not as intricate from a rhythmic perspective– instead, the “leads” Ray’s referring to are typical movements featuring harmonic melody (basically, he’s using chords and scales to create layering, often with double tracking). In this Ultimate Guitar interview on the Parade tracking and writing process, Ray that “that’s something I got from listening to classical music, where there's always movement in the chords. There is always melody along with the roots.” In the context of rock music, this classical inspiration lends itself to the “chugging” Ray likes to do, a kind of playing that is also a direct outgrowth of his metal upbringing and which naturally maintains a lot of a song’s rhythm. Outside of these moving parts (which can be riffs or just rhythmic pieces), Ray tends to play “fills”, not melodious parts like Frank (for a good example of a fill, or a small break between phrases, “Welcome to the Black Parade” has pretty textbook fills during the verse that starts with “Sometimes I get the feeling /She's watching over me”). As previously mentioned, in a traditional rock split between lead and rhythm, the lead guitarist would be supporting the vocal melody. But instead, Frank is the one naturally incorporating that into his parts. An easily identifiable example of this dynamic would be “I Don’t Love You” which starts with Ray’s little refrain that quickly shifts to the kind of foundational moving chords and arpeggios discussed above, on top of taking the short but visceral solo. Comparatively, Frank is playing the complimentary melodious part to Gerard’s vocal line (it's easier to recognize and hum along to). So, what at first may seem like a willingness on Ray’s part to “swap roles” is actually just a natural outgrowth of Ray and Frank’s individual styles and Ray’s harmony-and-riff-centric approach providing space for Frank’s contributions. And, with that in mind, if Ray was any other guitarist in Jersey, someone not raised in metal, their ability to bounce off each other would just not really work to be quite honest– they’d be too similar.
At the end of the day, if you want to understand Ray as a guitarist you have to understand the basic fundamentals of metal, particularly its overlap with classical (seen in Judas Priest’s opera inspiration and Metallica playing with a live orchestra). Obviously, the ways through which Ray sets himself apart from metal tradition is incredibly fascinating! But without a working knowledge of what those genre traditions are, the differences in his approach are hard to articulate because his style sits so far from the norm in post-hardcore/emo spaces. It’s not just the solos– it's how he plays them with the rare balance of restraint and emotion of a true once-in-a-generation talent.
Mikey wasn’t immune to the album’s charm: 
But speaking to their partnership more specifically: the division between “lead” and rhythm guitar is less defined in metal than in traditional rock music. In standard guitar lingo rhythm guitars focus on driving the song, using chords to keep time and move the song forward, while leads play riffs and solos and also echo the vocals. However, in metal, when the riff, or the several-measure-long repeated “hook” or theme, is the core of a song, it can originate anywhere (listen to Metallica’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls” and notice how it’s the bass that sits on the riffs, often without voices, for extended periods of time). The importance of the bass, as well as the rhythmic complexity of metal riffing, allows for these riffs to also keep time and drive the beat. Iron Maiden, like many bands, considered themselves as a band of two lead guitarists, while thrash bands like Metallica or Overkill might only draw the distinction between who played solos and who didn’t.
So, when Ray says he’s a lead guitarist, it’s not because he takes the most important parts but rather that the “harmonized leads on the records are usually me.” My Chem is not actually metal so their guitars are not as intricate from a rhythmic perspective– instead, the “leads” Ray’s referring to are typical movements featuring harmonic melody (basically, he’s using chords and scales to create layering, often with double tracking). In this Ultimate Guitar interview on the Parade tracking and writing process, Ray that “that’s something I got from listening to classical music, where there's always movement in the chords. There is always melody along with the roots.” In the context of rock music, this classical inspiration lends itself to the “chugging” Ray likes to do, a kind of playing that is also a direct outgrowth of his metal upbringing and which naturally maintains a lot of a song’s rhythm. Outside of these moving parts (which can be riffs or just rhythmic pieces), Ray tends to play “fills”, not melodious parts like Frank (for a good example of a fill, or a small break between phrases, “Welcome to the Black Parade” has pretty textbook fills during the verse that starts with “Sometimes I get the feeling /She's watching over me”). As previously mentioned, in a traditional rock split between lead and rhythm, the lead guitarist would be supporting the vocal melody. But instead, Frank is the one naturally incorporating that into his parts. An easily identifiable example of this dynamic would be “I Don’t Love You” which starts with Ray’s little refrain that quickly shifts to the kind of foundational moving chords and arpeggios discussed above, on top of taking the short but visceral solo. Comparatively, Frank is playing the complimentary melodious part to Gerard’s vocal line (it's easier to recognize and hum along to). So, what at first may seem like a willingness on Ray’s part to “swap roles” is actually just a natural outgrowth of Ray and Frank’s individual styles and Ray’s harmony-and-riff-centric approach providing space for Frank’s contributions. And, with that in mind, if Ray was any other guitarist in Jersey, someone not raised in metal, their ability to bounce off each other would just not really work to be quite honest– they’d be too similar.
(Ray and Gerard in the studio. Taken by Frank.)
At the end of the day, if you want to understand Ray as a guitarist you have to understand the basic fundamentals of metal, particularly its overlap with classical (seen in Judas Priest’s opera inspiration and Metallica playing with a live orchestra). Obviously, the ways through which Ray sets himself apart from metal tradition is incredibly fascinating! But without a working knowledge of what those genre traditions are, the differences in his approach are hard to articulate because his style sits so far from the norm in post-hardcore/emo spaces. It’s not just the solos– it's how he plays them with the rare balance of restraint and emotion of a true once-in-a-generation talent.
GERARD WAY: EVERYTHING AND THE (METAL) KITCHEN SINK
Gerard, in comparison to Ray’s metal journey, was the older brother into metal, introducing Mikey to the likes of Maiden and Helloween and Merciful Fate through Fangoria magazines and MTV’s Headbangers Ball (which was a scheduled block of metal-related programming, mostly music videos, that aired on MYV from 1987 to 1995). In fact, Helloween might be the band Mikey talks about the most, metal-wise, when reminiscing about growing up and listening to music with Gerard (this tidbit and their collective love of Headbangers appears at length in the Kevin Smith WTTBP Podcast). Gerard’s art and style is steeped in metal culture and iconography; it was some of the first music he listened to on his own, making it a foundational inspiration for him as an artist, and guided him towards the punk, hardcore, and glam that earned My Chemical Romance a place in music history.
MAKEUP-SLATHERED GLAM-PUNK VISIONARY*
*quote from Andy Greenwald for Blender Magazine
According to Gerard, he got into metal pretty young. The first album he remembers buying with his own money was Poison's Look What The Cat Dragged In when he was around ten (it came out in 1986, which checks out). He considered the record “a gateway to heavy metal” because it led him to Maiden and others.
According to Gerard, he got into metal pretty young. The first album he remembers buying with his own money was Poison's Look What The Cat Dragged In when he was around ten (it came out in 1986, which checks out). He considered the record “a gateway to heavy metal” because it led him to Maiden and others.
(Poison Look What the Cat Dragged In. 1986. We all start somewhere)
The record also reflects Gerard’s lifelong enjoyment of glam/hair metal, which he’s mentioned more than once as his “first love.” See this tweet for his short little hair metal playlist, “Aqua Net 4 Life” which features quite a few MTV Headbangers classics, like Firehouse and Helloween. This influence is interesting considering the way negative reviews of My Chem (and 2000s-era emo) often compared them, with derogatory intentions to the overly feminine in the scene, to hair metal. And Tom Mullen of Washed Up Emo continues to refer to the “third wave” as its hair metal period considering its acceptance into mainstream popular culture. There are certainly similarities, such as Gerard’s intentional transgression of gender boundaries in his performance/costuming, as well as My Chem’s desire for rockstardom. The performance of glam metal, its moments of campiness, came from the conflicting reality of the sex, drugs, and girls of the sunset strip in a scene which had the distinctly homoerotic musical and stylistical basis of 70s glam. Additionally, there was a play at earnestness, a faked vulnerability in hair metal ballads or the creation of stage characters, that created another theatrical expression for Gerard to draw upon in his own confrontations with the dualities of sexuality and emotional exhibitionism in rock music. But when you’re a child, those contradictions are not obvious yet. Instead, what Poison offered Gerard, initially, was a key to an entire subculture hidden from his view, as well as an image of the gender-fucked rockstar.
(Gerard Way's Top Ten Glam Songs courtesy of Rolling Stone.)
In many ways, Gerard discovered real, true 70s glam through metal as well, as “when he heard Iron Maiden's lead singer, Bruce Dickinson, cover Mott the Hoople's ‘All the Young Dudes,’ he discovered a whole other world.” This makes a ton of sense; early glam and shock rock (Alice Cooper, Queen, T-Rex, and the like) had a huge influence on the progression of heavy music. While Queen in particular isn’t metal, a lot of metalheads grew up on their music, and all those shredders used it to practice their chops.
Brian May and Freddie Mercury were important templates for both Ray and Gerard; to me, this testifies to their saturation in heavy metal’s music culture, especially in regards to performance and grandiosity. It’s been said before but glam is probably the most direct influence on MCR’s overall mission statement and aesthetic. Gerard started with what was a popular and accessible forms of musical drama in metal and found its origins, affecting the tone of the camp Gerard developed his own stage presence from. Glam metal, in the collective memory, has a sleaziness to it that differentiates Gerard’s stage persona from what someone singularity drawing on Cabaret or Slade would come up with– this accounts for the more purposely shocking or confrontational aspects of his performance, like the kissing at Pro Rev or writing “Faggot” on his neck. But glam itself gave Gerard a simultaneous gravitas which allowed their music to be properly and sincerely dramatic.
Brian May and Freddie Mercury were important templates for both Ray and Gerard; to me, this testifies to their saturation in heavy metal’s music culture, especially in regards to performance and grandiosity. It’s been said before but glam is probably the most direct influence on MCR’s overall mission statement and aesthetic. Gerard started with what was a popular and accessible forms of musical drama in metal and found its origins, affecting the tone of the camp Gerard developed his own stage presence from. Glam metal, in the collective memory, has a sleaziness to it that differentiates Gerard’s stage persona from what someone singularity drawing on Cabaret or Slade would come up with– this accounts for the more purposely shocking or confrontational aspects of his performance, like the kissing at Pro Rev or writing “Faggot” on his neck. But glam itself gave Gerard a simultaneous gravitas which allowed their music to be properly and sincerely dramatic.
IRON FUCKING MAIDEN
Gerard’s tastes evolved pretty quickly. Maiden is probably the single most significant metal influence on My Chem, specifically impacting Gerard’s stage presence as a frontman. In the Rolling Stone Six Pack Interview, he mentions that watching Live After Death (Iron Maiden’s live album/film recorded Long Beach Arena, California and Hammersmith Odeon, London in 1985 for their World Slavery tour; very The Black Parade is Dead) motivated him to want to be a performer. I’ve always thought Gerard’s bat buckle, the signature piece of his early frontman persona, was probably influenced by Bruce Dickinson big ass buckle in Live After Death, as was Gerard’s general propensity to running around and doing split jumps when he should have been singing.
(Bruce Dickinson in Live After Death; My Chemical Romance including Gerard's bat buckle. Photo by Justin Borucki)
Mikey wasn’t immune to the album’s charm:
“Mikey would grab Gerard’s Silvertone acoustic and strap it around his shoulders on a piece of string as Live after Death played. Still not ten years old, he would leap on the sofa, banging at the cheap, out-of-tune guitar, pretending to be a part of a band” - Not the Life it Seemed (6)
A small but nonetheless important detail (to me) is that Ray and Gerard attended the same Maiden show shortly before My Chem started, which I would argue rekindled their friendship and was the catalyst of their creative partnership. They initially met in the 90s through Shawn Dillon, who Gerard met in art school and was in The Rodneys with Ray. Gerard and Mikey had seen the Rodneys perform live at some point, but never became close friends with Ray and (based on the tone of retrospective interviews) might have drifted apart after Gerard graduated. Obviously, the interim timeline is incredibly tenuous (especially when you add Nancy Drew into the mix), but, according to a scanned interview on the comm mychemicalmedia, “Cruising For Crazy,” which Gerard and Ray wrote together for Breakfast Monkey, “predates My Chemical Romance by four months.” Considering Iron Maiden’s schedule during their Brave New World tour (significant because it was Bruce Dickinson’s first tour back after he departed from the band for much of the 90s), the only time Ray and Gerard would have had the opportunity to see Maiden before this period would be the August 5, 2000 date at Madison Square Garden. In the Rolling Stones interview Gerard mentioned the show, the specific wording says they “reconnected” after attending “the show together” and immediately dovetails into a discussion of My Chem’s demos, suggesting without the show Gerard might not’ve been close enough to Ray to call him in 2001 and that this particular MSG show, like many other’s in the members’ past, was a point of creative inspiration and connection for the two of them.
(Iron Maiden Live, The Wicker Man was the opening track to their at-the-time new album Brave New World)
METAL, PUNK, AND CROSSING OVER
While Maiden remains the most significant metal band in My Chem’s influence/legacy vault, Gerard was surrounded by metal throughout high school. According to this BBC Radio 1 interview, a group of senior metalheads requested he draw them all tattoos during his first week of high school and, as a result, he fell into that crowd. Notably, in the Carry the Fire podcast, he mentions “that’s where I would learn about certain bands that they were into, like Murphy’s Law and the kind of things they were listening to back then,” that were more aligned with punk than metal. Murphy’s Law in particular had a considerable influence on metallic hardcore and crossover thrash. Murphy’s Law were deep in the NYHC hardcore scene—so were about as local to Gerard as metal could get—but were name-dropped by metal bands like Anthrax and S.O.D. (Fun fact: Tucker Rule has actually drummed for Murphy’s Law– another absolutely insane connection).
In my opinion, metal spaces have always been much more charitable to punk music than vice-versa. It makes sense that Gerard, a kid who was into thrash would just as readily accept hardcore through bands like Murphy's Law, Agnostic Front, and Cro-Mags. Gerard has even admitted he didn’t get into the Misfits until he saw Metallica bassist Cliff Burton’s skull tat and did some research.
In my opinion, metal spaces have always been much more charitable to punk music than vice-versa. It makes sense that Gerard, a kid who was into thrash would just as readily accept hardcore through bands like Murphy's Law, Agnostic Front, and Cro-Mags. Gerard has even admitted he didn’t get into the Misfits until he saw Metallica bassist Cliff Burton’s skull tat and did some research.
“I learned about the Misfits from the tattoo on [late bassist] Cliff Burton’s arm. Later on, Dave Mustaine—who used to be in Metallica—started Megadeth and covered the Sex Pistols. Because those bands were into punk, they in turn provided a gateway into that culture… Me wondering what that tattoo was on Cliff Burton’s arm was kind of the beginning of that.” - Altpress Interview: My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way on how Metallica influenced his art, music
(Cliff Burton, Kirk Hammett, Lars Ulrich, and James Hetfield circa 1985. Photo by Ross Marino)
This too demonstrates Gerard’s willingness to transcend the barriers between harsh genre boundaries. While difficult to quantify now, the division between punk and metal subcultures mattered a lot in the 80's. Before crossover bands like DRI, Suicidal Tendencies, and the like, Motörhead was the closest thing to an overlap between metal and punk (unsurprisingly, another huge Gerard inspo).
More concretely, the ideological gap was so huge that cross-genre bills used to result in physical violence between “long-hairs” (metalheads) and “short-hairs” (punks). Simply put, to punks, the lifestyle was just as important as the music itself—if not more. But to metalheads, music was the core, the thing bands chipped away at to become better, more virtuosic players. But, in the spirit of Gerard’s crossover roots, My Chem held both sides of the aisle in high esteem, which structures their expectations as a musical act. They were a live-show oriented band reared on the performance styles of kinetic, ephemeral bands like Thursday and called themselves a “gang”. At the same time, they were adding the single most tracks to a song in recorded music history (at least, in 2006), a feat which reiterates their commitment to the precision of the album and the necessity of technical details which they inherited from sprawling, experimental projects like Master of Puppets or Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime. Their ability to pivot came directly from the fact all four of them (even Frank, who has a Kill ‘Em All tattoo!) grew up in a period where thrash metal reigned supreme.
More concretely, the ideological gap was so huge that cross-genre bills used to result in physical violence between “long-hairs” (metalheads) and “short-hairs” (punks). Simply put, to punks, the lifestyle was just as important as the music itself—if not more. But to metalheads, music was the core, the thing bands chipped away at to become better, more virtuosic players. But, in the spirit of Gerard’s crossover roots, My Chem held both sides of the aisle in high esteem, which structures their expectations as a musical act. They were a live-show oriented band reared on the performance styles of kinetic, ephemeral bands like Thursday and called themselves a “gang”. At the same time, they were adding the single most tracks to a song in recorded music history (at least, in 2006), a feat which reiterates their commitment to the precision of the album and the necessity of technical details which they inherited from sprawling, experimental projects like Master of Puppets or Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime. Their ability to pivot came directly from the fact all four of them (even Frank, who has a Kill ‘Em All tattoo!) grew up in a period where thrash metal reigned supreme.
(Frank's macaroni tattoo shows off his Kill 'Em All script)
SEX ON THE RADIO?
As a consequence of metal’s popularity, especially thrash like Slayer, there was backlash. In the 1980s, this coalesced with the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center, a group founded by politicians' wives and family members responsible for the Parental Advisory labels on music) and the concurrent Satanic Panic which was a socio-political phenomenon born out of the moralized, often religiously-motivated (whether by evangelicalism or a general Christian nationalism), conservative climate of Reagan’s America. The Satanic Panic was more complicated than any One Thing– the brunt of state injustice fell on child care providers wrongfully accused of satanic ritual and CSA– but was really a reaction overwhelmed by fears about sex, class, and loss of Christian hegemony. And in this context, music about “satanism” and sex was a threatening, corruptible influence. People mass burned Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast” in organized protest. Teenagers like the West Memphis Three were wrongly convicted of crimes because of their class-status; the way they dressed and the music they listened to contributing to the perception of them as “dirtbags” and “trailer trash”. All over the news, ideas about “tape-masking” and backwards subliminal messaging were pitched and spread without qualms. The concurrent AIDS Crisis also made any depictions of sex and sexuality an easy target for conservative fearmongering. And, taking advantage of this culture of fear and unrest, the PMRC decided to take great issue with the idea of children listening to music, specifically sexually-explicit music, that could be a bad influence.
Gerard was too young to really feel the social effects of the Satanic Panic on himself (he was ostracized for other reasons, based on how he talks) but the PMRC had a tangible effect on his ability to get more “profane” music– he had to have his grandfather buy him his first Misfits record and had to hide his and Mikey’s Slayer tapes so his mom didn’t find them.
Gerard was too young to really feel the social effects of the Satanic Panic on himself (he was ostracized for other reasons, based on how he talks) but the PMRC had a tangible effect on his ability to get more “profane” music– he had to have his grandfather buy him his first Misfits record and had to hide his and Mikey’s Slayer tapes so his mom didn’t find them.
"[Getting bottled at Reading] never made me stop loving Slayer, as I had been listening to them since middle school, when I would have to hide my cassettes from my parents because of the PMRC and the Satanic Panic scare of the 80’s"- Gerard’s 2018 Year in Review where he was rocking the vintage Reign in Blood sweater
(Slayer South of Heaven. 1988. Classic.)
The PMRC climate left such a mark on Mikey and Gerard in particular that, decades later, dealing with the band being maligned by music journalists as a “suicide cult” Mikey made a direct comparison between themselves and the hysteria that surrounded metal:
"[Mikey] wearily points out that we have been here before. "In the 1980s, people thought Judas Priest was promoting suicide," he sighs. "They were like, Dee Snider from Twisted Sister? Dude's in league with the devil, man!" - The Guardian, They have come for your children
It also, in my opinion, left a significant impact on the way Gerard quantified and understood complicated ideas about sex in music or the opposition musicians can face. Carp @geoffrard has already written this fantastic post about sex and post-hardcore that focuses on Joanna Angel, Riot Grrrl, Thursday, and My Chem which gives greater context to the scene they operated in. To add to that discussion, I would contend Gerard’s experience with the PMRC (considering he was older than most of the scene) probably influenced his particular sexually-driven performance/lyrics alongside Riot Grrrl. In his own words, he wanted to bring sex back into sex, rock, and roll because that was the salient, controversial way rock music functioned for him. As a result, the very foundation of his learned musical history explicitly set him apart from a scene that avoided mentions of sexuality and which had greater ideological ties to less sexually open movements like Straight Edge. In the end, with the particular cocktail combination of shock rock, glam, and metal in his upbringing, it makes total sense why Gerard’s method of stage-performance subversion would be in-your-face, sexually-driven, theatrical, and homoerotic.
METAL IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM
Moving moreso into the period right before, during, and after the founding of the band, Gerard was no longer hanging out with metalheads, but he was still constantly namedropping metal bands new and old whenever possible. On his Myspace page, he mentioned Maiden’s Powerslave alongside the new additions of Arch Enemy’s Wages of Sin, and At the Gates’ Slaughter of the Soul in his top 5 albums, suggesting a love for melodic death metal (Gerard even mentioned AtG when discussing artists My Chem were most influenced by in one of their first print interviews). Interestingly, At the Gates had a huge impact on the metalcore scene developing concurrently with the big emo boom, think Killswitch Engage touring on Taste of Chaos or Every Time I Die blowing up. And it's unsurprising that My Chem had a lot of connections to these artists. Gerard’s mentioned a lot how, because of their sound, they were put on whatever bill would take them in the early days, particularly Christian metalcore bands like Underoath. More significantly, Gerard was featured on Every Time I Die’s “Kill the Music”. Then, in other non-metalcore features, like his screams at the end of “The Devil in Mexico” or his screamed harmonies in The Oval Portrait’s “From My Cold Dead Hands” are coming from a different place of emulation than the typical post-harcore yell (compare Geoff and Gerard’s harshes in “Jet Black New Year”) and suggest a natural affinity for a gnashing, sharp melodeath-type vocal that differentiated Gerard from the more hardcore-influenced screams of his peers.
(Gerard Way Myspace profile)
But while Gerard was still plugged into metal releases after the 1980's boom, the primary developments in American mainstream metal were disconcerting for him. Nu-metal is a complicated subject, a oft-malienged genre born out of the coalescing funk, alternative, hip-hop, and industrial influences on metal throughout the 1990's. What began with experimentation by groups like Faith No More, Fishbone, Primus, and Rage Against the Machine started factoring into a particular sonic template of bands produced by Ross Robinson. Nu-metal can be most effectively characterized by its down-tuned guitars, solo-free riffing, varied vocals, and the inclusion of rapping or sampling. By the late 90's, when Gerard was in college and going to shows, these nu-metal bands had been properly scooped into popular culture when bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit had blown up. For Gerard, in his recollection, the music itself rarely factors into his distaste for nu-metal. It's hard to articulate this in retrospect but nu-metal’s propensity for being an outlet for aggression (with an emphasis on male aggression) without challenging any aspects of the status-quo did create a really toxic environment of unmitigated bigotry, particularly toward women. And while nu-metal is more than its most popular actors, the subculture itself had absorbed homophobia and macho-ism as its rhetoric of choice. For Gerard, as he said in this Nerdist podcast, these jockish metalheads were the primary cultural force My Chemical Romance was responding to, second only to post-grunge’s lackluster t-shirt and jeans. In fact, My Chem’s general performance at ProRev (put on by Linkin Park, who were often shoved into the nu-metal box) can be attributed to antagonizing the exact audience Gerard had come to loathe.
(Typical Projeckt Revolution Crowd; from Rolling Stones' Justin Dylan Renney)
But Gerard’s response to the music landscape of the new millennium extended past the community they were building into the actual thrust of the music. The aspect of My Chem that immediately differentiated them from any other band in the scene was their subject matter– the storytelling, the horror, the use of metaphor– it all came down to the lyrics. And, ultimately, this kind of focus on narrative is much more grounded in a heavy metal ethos than it is in punk or hardcore. Horror especially has become so entangled within metal’s subculture as to be a fundamental part of the aesthetic and the lyrics. Even before Rob Zombie wrote metal tracks for his own slashers, Dokken was on the Dream Warrior’s soundtrack. Bands like Maiden, Slayer, Death, Possessed, and Decide all had their own heavy metal horror songs. Hell, even Black Sabbath got their name from a Boris Karloff film. And, while The Misfits had an undeniable impact on My Chem’s sound, they very much did not fit into the norm of punk. Even more, songs like “Early Sunsets Over Monroeville” are much more sprawling and emotionally centered than horror punk is generally. On a deeper level, the literary reference that went hand-in-hand with the horror (think “A Rose for Emily”), which was its strongest during Bullets and Revenge, is an easy holdover from Iron Maiden and their love of Poe and Coleridge. For Gerard’s lyricism, the horror was not just a palette to paint transgressive ideas but a method of creating a story or telling a pre-existing one in a new way. Considering metal’s propensity for accepting the fantastical, horror was as salient a tool for communicating epic tales as dragons and swords could be. It’s this history early on that really allowed Gerard to turn a short story idea into an album like I Brought You My Bullets… since the classic rock concept record influence hadn’t yet factored into the way My Chem structured their stories just yet. If anything, records like Operation: Mindcrime and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son gave Gerard enough ammunition to craft album-long narratives without going full Parade. At the end of the day, this was a project nursed on the dismal, gloomy worlds of metal and comics and dark, rainy goth clubs– not basement shows and college smoke sessions.
With all of this context in mind, it becomes clear that Gerard’s experiences as an older metalhead in a scene full of younger punk college students had an indelible impact on not just the sound of My Chemical Romance, but the way they performed, the lyrics they wrote, the stories they developed, and the way they navigated music conceptually. What makes My Chem different, what created that special spark that allowed them to keep getting bigger and bigger is multi-faceted. It cannot be reduced to one particular thing. That being said, My Chem’s willingness to incorporate metal aesthetics and songwriting into their repertoire was certainly one of those things that fed the flame. To understand how this band works, why they wrote the songs they did, you have to consider this history and hold it in the same regard as My Chem’s influences in Britpop, Riot Grrl, and even fellow contemporaries in the scene.
With all of this context in mind, it becomes clear that Gerard’s experiences as an older metalhead in a scene full of younger punk college students had an indelible impact on not just the sound of My Chemical Romance, but the way they performed, the lyrics they wrote, the stories they developed, and the way they navigated music conceptually. What makes My Chem different, what created that special spark that allowed them to keep getting bigger and bigger is multi-faceted. It cannot be reduced to one particular thing. That being said, My Chem’s willingness to incorporate metal aesthetics and songwriting into their repertoire was certainly one of those things that fed the flame. To understand how this band works, why they wrote the songs they did, you have to consider this history and hold it in the same regard as My Chem’s influences in Britpop, Riot Grrl, and even fellow contemporaries in the scene.
METAL MATERIAL
Now, let’s go through each album and actually see the textual and sonic references to metal music on My Chemical Romance’s artistic output.
I BROUGHT YOU MY BULLETS, YOU BROUGHT ME YOUR LOVE
Early Sunsets isn’t the only song on Bullets inundated with horror-movie history (though it is perhaps the most metal– I think the Dawn of the Dead t-shirt is a requirement to joining a metal band, its a surprisingly common moniker across genres from Cliff Burton to the creation of horror metal). Both of My Chem’s first music videos for Vampires and Honey, are overtly horror-related. Vampires is an easy, expected Dracula-esque video shrouded in darkness. But Honey intersperses footage of the band performing with scenes from the 1999 Japanese horror movie Audition– a classic cheap metal video move.
(Cliff Burton rocking the Romero)
Speaking of Vampires, in this tweet Gerard mentions the lyrics of glam metal band Cinderella’s “Somebody Save Me” (Somebody get the doctor/ I’m feeling pretty poor) inspired the verses in Vampires.
In Not the Life it Seems, when discussing the writing behind Sorrows, Bryant mentions that Ray wrote the music and brought it to Gerard in the early part of Bullets process. Gerard says it sounded “really aggro and metal – there were bits we cribbed off [German metal band] Helloween in it” (26). To my ear, the opening riff of Sorrows bears some similarity to an early part around the 1-minute mark in Helloween’s 13-minute epic “Halloween.”
In another tweet, Gerard mentions they were going for a kind of “thrash” Beatles with Headfirst, which explains the mix of saccharine pop melody with the frantic guitar. Listen to any thrash track from the eighties and you get a taste of the kind of tempo-pushing they were modeling with that song.
In Not the Life it Seems, when discussing the writing behind Sorrows, Bryant mentions that Ray wrote the music and brought it to Gerard in the early part of Bullets process. Gerard says it sounded “really aggro and metal – there were bits we cribbed off [German metal band] Helloween in it” (26). To my ear, the opening riff of Sorrows bears some similarity to an early part around the 1-minute mark in Helloween’s 13-minute epic “Halloween.”
In another tweet, Gerard mentions they were going for a kind of “thrash” Beatles with Headfirst, which explains the mix of saccharine pop melody with the frantic guitar. Listen to any thrash track from the eighties and you get a taste of the kind of tempo-pushing they were modeling with that song.
THREE CHEERS FOR SWEET REVENGE
For their first record on Warner imprint Reprise, Howard Benson became My Chemical Romance’s producer. Benson’s most successful material usually fell into Christian metal and nu-metal (like Flyleaf and P.O.D), but it was his work on Motörhead’s 1993 return-to-form record Bastards that really appealed to the band. And, in my estimation, the same frenzied flurry of guitars is applied to most of Revenge’s b-side material. Warner and My Chem not only picked a producer with considerable heavy music experience, but one who could allow tracks like “Hang ‘Em High” and “I Never Told You“ to still have a major-label polish without sounding washed out or diluted. Benson is a business-oriented producer but I think My Chem got lucky with a guy that would let Ray and Frank run amock on the b-sides, while also having a mixing engineer (in Rich Costey) whose experience was more rock and metal focused as well. When you compare Revenge to any album from the same period (thinking specifically of bands mixed by Tom Lord-Alge, who worked on Enema of the State and Under the Cork Tree), I think Revenge has a sonic longevity that has beat the shiny, pop-punk production of the early 2000s. This is a direct byproduct of My Chem ending up with a team that understood their vision and had, in some small degree, backgrounds in metal and post-hardcore that accentuated the band’s strengths, even on a precarious major label debut.
(Lemmy, Phil Campbell, and Howard Benson during Bastards recording. From Mötorhead's Official Twitter)
Benson’s contributions are also responsible for the loosening of metal’s hold on Revenge. It’s not that Revenge is “less” metal or heavy, but that the metal riffs are more integrated into the pop-melodious sound Benson and Reprise were searching for. Instead, Revenge sees My Chem as a more mature band, focused on using their wide, instrumental palette to build a more harmonious mix of their influences. Most of the metal that peaks through is in the content. As discussed, the bloody, comic book drenched concept underneath Revenge is classic Heavy Metal Horror Movie. But this metal influence goes deeper. Prison, one of My Chem’s staples, borrows from a common metal trope of death penalty monologues. While the Demo Lover in Prison is not sentenced to death, his ruminations that he might end up in the electric chair are straight out of the Metallica “Ride the Lightning” playbook. Not to mention that Maiden’s “Hallowed Be Thy Name” is another hallowed metal classic– these are quintessential narratives in metal’s musical canon. Gerard lyrically twists the common conceit of a prisoner staring down death and subverts it, turns it inward with a healthy dose of glam-caberet charm and homoerotic underpinnings.
One of the few real moments of direct inspiration, for me, is in I'm Not Okay's opening. The additive riffing in the intro from one guitar, to two, and then the drums comming in feels very reminiscent of Slayer's "Behind the Crooked Cross", a choice that does a lot to open the song with a sense of tension and momentium even if the songs diverge pretty significantly afterward. For My Chem, when they break out of the intro it makes the song feel expansive and open enough so that the infectious earworm sticks, while the song itself has room for vulnerability.
Speaking further to the late-album tracks like “Hang ‘Em High” and “I Never Told You”, they’re not just mixed well, but utilize common metal guitar techniques to create these hefty, descending walls of sound. Take the beginning of Hang ‘Em High, right when the guitars screech out of their spaghetti western twang and Gerard starts screaming. That effect in the guitar, when the melody devolves into noise, draws on thrash metal. I’m specifically thinking of these scratchy moves across the string that happen in tracks attempting to mimic some sort of “decent” or fall into hell- think the slow, creepy opening of Slayer’s “Hell Awaits” or, more accurate in tempo, Dark Angel’s “Darkness Descends”. A similar effect is also used in I Never Told You, benefiting from the hell technique for its own narrative purpose.
Bury Me in Black, however, as perhaps My Chem’s heaviest song, is a pretty clear rip of existing metal riffs. The first opening groove has the aggression of a “Cowboys From Hell”-style Panera, while the instrumental break is all Slayer’s “Raining Blood”.
THE BLACK PARADE
Black Parade Is a very 70s record, in terms of its influences, which means metal sneaks in there, but usually through its hard rock and glam revelry that draws on the same building blocks as what metal was taking from. This lineage has already been discussed with Queen and Alice Cooper and the like, but there are a few other specific causalities I wanted to touch on in this section.
First and foremost, Ray’s guitarwork in Dead is as classic as it gets– at least until he’s adding Woody the Woodpecker noises in the solo. But the overall effect is like Ray is innovating on very classic set pieces, creating new dimension to very old staples. The solo is an easy rip on “Johnny B. Goode”, one of the biggest early tracks in rock history. And the general effect, the bounciness the song exudes, is imparted by its Cheap Trick, “I Want You to Want Me” flair. Cheap Trick is not explicitly metal, but that late 70s stadium rock is the connective tissue between Rock ‘n Roll and American Heavy Metal– it's a piece of the history.
This is more of a stretch, but I Don’t Love You, in my estimation, is a pastiche to the point of parody of 70s rock balladry. Specifically, Meatloaf (who is a principal influence on Gerard’s performance, considering his expressed love for Eddie from Rocky Horror) and his plaintive “Two out of Three Ain’t Bad” seems to be inverted and stretched to its limits on Parade. This type of melodrama becomes the template for hair metal ballads, which Gerard and Mikey probably saw hundreds of on Headbangers.
Another 70s metal-esque influence is KISS’ “Detroit Rock City” on Wolves, giving the ripping blues and rolling guitars a bit of pomp and glam. KISS in particular is one of the most important “transitory” acts between the 70s rock and 80s pop metal and their influence on My Chem keeps them locked into that old-school concept record timbre.
Speaking again to the classic stadium and glam influences on Parade, Teenagers is well-established as a T-Rex homage.
In general, Ray was listening to a lot of Ozzy Osbourne while writing songs in the Paramour. Specifically, in the limited edition boxset’s lyric booklet, Gerard and Ray both mention Ozzy in relation to Famous Last Words, as a conscious and unconscious influence. At the height of the Paramour paranoia, after Mikey had left and they were trying to write music, Gerard mentions this tidbit:
First and foremost, Ray’s guitarwork in Dead is as classic as it gets– at least until he’s adding Woody the Woodpecker noises in the solo. But the overall effect is like Ray is innovating on very classic set pieces, creating new dimension to very old staples. The solo is an easy rip on “Johnny B. Goode”, one of the biggest early tracks in rock history. And the general effect, the bounciness the song exudes, is imparted by its Cheap Trick, “I Want You to Want Me” flair. Cheap Trick is not explicitly metal, but that late 70s stadium rock is the connective tissue between Rock ‘n Roll and American Heavy Metal– it's a piece of the history.
This is more of a stretch, but I Don’t Love You, in my estimation, is a pastiche to the point of parody of 70s rock balladry. Specifically, Meatloaf (who is a principal influence on Gerard’s performance, considering his expressed love for Eddie from Rocky Horror) and his plaintive “Two out of Three Ain’t Bad” seems to be inverted and stretched to its limits on Parade. This type of melodrama becomes the template for hair metal ballads, which Gerard and Mikey probably saw hundreds of on Headbangers.
Another 70s metal-esque influence is KISS’ “Detroit Rock City” on Wolves, giving the ripping blues and rolling guitars a bit of pomp and glam. KISS in particular is one of the most important “transitory” acts between the 70s rock and 80s pop metal and their influence on My Chem keeps them locked into that old-school concept record timbre.
Speaking again to the classic stadium and glam influences on Parade, Teenagers is well-established as a T-Rex homage.
In general, Ray was listening to a lot of Ozzy Osbourne while writing songs in the Paramour. Specifically, in the limited edition boxset’s lyric booklet, Gerard and Ray both mention Ozzy in relation to Famous Last Words, as a conscious and unconscious influence. At the height of the Paramour paranoia, after Mikey had left and they were trying to write music, Gerard mentions this tidbit:
“One night it was around 4 A.M., and I heard Ray playing “Bark At The Moon” at max volume in the live room. Ray was always playing really late at this point and it would break my heart, because it sounded like he was fighting with his guitar, frustrated that he couldn’t play our songs. I would lay in bed and just get upset, but this night I walked down there, smelling like a garbage can covered in six days of facial hair (which isn’t that much). I poked my head in the live room and he was just riffing, banging his head while sitting in a chair. I walked over and said hello, then we talked for a bit. Small talk. As we talked I was messing around with Rob’s guitar, kind of aimlessly playing and hit upon this riff. It was heavy, and not like Black Sabbath heavy but emotionally heavy. Ray then played around with it and a vocal melody came right away. It was clearly about what we were going through and so much more.” - Black Parade Booklet
In the same source, when both Frank and Ray go song by song and discuss their connection or intentions, Ray talks more specifically about Rhoads’ impact on the record and on Famous Last Words particularly:
"Randy Rhoads is one of my favorite players, and I wanted a solo similar to his style on the record. This is where the inspiration for the solo came from. I wanted something shreddy, desperate, and emotional, so I listened to my favorite Rhoads solos and went to sleep. The next morning, the first thing I did was pick up my guitar, black a demo of the track and played whatever came to me. I always liked how Randy would double a few notes of the solo in a different rhythm, or add a harmony on one or two notes, so I did the same thing in the studio. You can really hear it at the last two hits of the solo.”- Black Parade Booklet
The emotional resonance of Famous Last Words comes in large part because of how personal and earnest the song is. But from an instrumental perspective, Ray’s consistent drawing on Rhoads opened up a matching emotional vulnerability that truly makes My Chem’s form of musical honesty work– it's embedded into the very fabric of the guitarists who taught Ray how to play (and, in my opinion, you could make a similar argument for Frank and the Blues). And this, at its core, is why Famous Last Words reverberates so strongly in our hearts and through time.
CONVENTIONAL WEAPONS
CW is much more a punk-oriented record, even at its heaviest. The sonic cocktail of the original, unreleased album was old-school proto-punk like MC5 and the Stooges (though MC5 were speedy and heavy and influential enough to be considered a proto-metal rock record in the vein of Blue Cheer.). However, Gerard has mentioned Judas Priest’s “British Steel” as a significant CW influence– “[the record] reminded me in an odd way of all the best stuff of '80s what is called cock rock, but not all of it was. Judas Priest is considered metal, but it's great rock 'n' roll” (taken from spinner- now defunct- quotes by way of NME). Early 80s Priest, particular tracks like “Living After Midnight” or “Breaking the Law” have an anthemic, stadium appeal which was foundational for heavy metal’s development and fit My Chem’s penchant for gravitas while, as Gerard said, still being classic and hard-hitting rock songs. Other songs on the same record, particularly “Rapid Fire”, however have the calculated speed and aggression of a lot of CW and even the hold-overs on Danger Days.
Kiss the Ring’s varied, repeated assertion of staying clean has always stricken me as a reference to Motörhead’s own “Stay Clean”– Gerard’s particular vocals even mimic the annunciation of the original.
Kiss the Ring’s varied, repeated assertion of staying clean has always stricken me as a reference to Motörhead’s own “Stay Clean”– Gerard’s particular vocals even mimic the annunciation of the original.
DANGER DAYS: THE TRUE LIVES OF THE FABULOUS KILLJOYS
Danger Days, on the surface, seems like the record to have the least metal influence– it's not as heavy, it's danceable, it's drawing on poppier instrumentation like synths. But actually, those synths are the metal influence, believe it or not. Before electronics began to seep into rock music in the 2010s with the oversaturation of eurodance in popular music, My Chem were drawing on a completely different electronics history. As this interview with Rob Cavallo put it, Danger Days is distinguished by its “extensive and highly imaginative use of various keyboards throughout the album… old analog synths.” These synths are pure 80s and not just 80s pop– by that point metal had become inundated in keyboards and synths throughout the decade from MTV hair metal all the way to the bastons of heavy metal Iron Maiden. Take this quote about Maiden’s synth-embrace after years of professing they would never use them:
"In 1986, just three years later, those ulterior motives would be revealed with their album Somewhere in Time, which relied heavily on guitar synthesizers. This use of guitar synthesizers, where notes are matched to the guitar simultaneously, alienated many fans and critics. However, it opened the gates for the full on synthesizer embrace on 1988’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son which was met with both critical acclaim and chart success."- Vice Instigate Sonic Violence: A Not-so-Brief History of the Synthesizer’s Impact on Heavy Metal
(Gerard and his Somewhere in Time Poster)
It must be said that other Gerard and Ray influences like Ozzy’s solo music, Mercyful Fate, and Queensryche also all used synths but it is the tech-futurist, apocalyptic approach of Maiden’s 80s-synth records which makes them the primary influence on My Chem’s old-school, Bladerunner-esque synths and Danger Day’s general world-building. This foundation is why, even at their most pop, with the necessity of drum machines and samples, My Chem have a definitive edge and weight which, in my opinion, has differentiated Danger Days from most of the rock-electronic music of the last decade. It’s fitting, in a way, that Danger Days utilizes the tools of a past electronic-rock renaissance to craft songs with lyrics like “Ain’t a DJ gonna save my soul, I sold it long ago for rock and roll” and “They sell presentable, young, and so ingestible, sterile and collectible, safe, and I can't stand it” about getting people off the dance floor and killing the party. It’s proof that it's not the instruments they’re decrying when they say popular music and fame are bastions of excess and emptiness but a sort of consumeristic packaging of either the “good times” (in these examples) or rebellion that is destroying earnestness and the messy reclamation of life, these qualities My Chem has always staked their claim on.
Otherwise, though, there aren’t as many direct metal references. The closest we get? The line “Hit the gas (Kill ‘em all)” in Na Na Na is a nod at Metallica’s debut record Kill ‘Em All.
Otherwise, though, there aren’t as many direct metal references. The closest we get? The line “Hit the gas (Kill ‘em all)” in Na Na Na is a nod at Metallica’s debut record Kill ‘Em All.
Live Performance:
The only instance I know where My Chem have covered a metal song is “Home Sweet Home” by Mötley Crüe during their third American leg of Parade touring in Las Vegas as an intro before Cancer.
STAR-STRUCK AND METAL
Here is a non-definitive list of as many metal references, mentions, or invocations on behalf of the members of My Chemical Romance during their break-up and after they got back together.
First and foremost: Gerard used to make these playlists on Twitter during his internet renaissance. Most of these were short, with 5 or so songs, and mostly contained 90s alternative music like riot grrl, shoe gaze, and britpop. But another, “Thrashmataz” was considerably longer and was singularity thrash metal like Suicidal Tendencies, Sodom, and Municipal Waste. It’s a good time and showcases that Gerard’s affinity for thrash and crossover exists outside of just the bigger names or the name drops he’s made in interviews.
There was also, of course, the infamous “stripclub in Des Moines stripping to Danzig’s Dirty Black summer making mad chicken nuggets” which is just a part of this wonderful series. Danzig’s 90s solo material really exemplifies the weirdness of metal, considering it was folded into the post-Nirvana alt-metal landscape.
Gerard also randomly responded to a Pete Wentz tweet to talk Judas Priest: “I feel like I’m more “Living After Midnight” than “Turbo Lover”, personally”.
Perhaps my favorite of these offhanded metal mentions is this one from Instagram wherein Gerard showed off some Warhammer 40k Realms of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness merch and gave a Bolt Thrower shoutout because they have an album with the same title (metal is fundamentally nerd music). Bolt Thrower is a band I absolutely love, easily one of my favorites, and this little shoutout illustrates Gerard’s lesser-known fondness for Death Metal.
First and foremost: Gerard used to make these playlists on Twitter during his internet renaissance. Most of these were short, with 5 or so songs, and mostly contained 90s alternative music like riot grrl, shoe gaze, and britpop. But another, “Thrashmataz” was considerably longer and was singularity thrash metal like Suicidal Tendencies, Sodom, and Municipal Waste. It’s a good time and showcases that Gerard’s affinity for thrash and crossover exists outside of just the bigger names or the name drops he’s made in interviews.
There was also, of course, the infamous “stripclub in Des Moines stripping to Danzig’s Dirty Black summer making mad chicken nuggets” which is just a part of this wonderful series. Danzig’s 90s solo material really exemplifies the weirdness of metal, considering it was folded into the post-Nirvana alt-metal landscape.
Gerard also randomly responded to a Pete Wentz tweet to talk Judas Priest: “I feel like I’m more “Living After Midnight” than “Turbo Lover”, personally”.
Perhaps my favorite of these offhanded metal mentions is this one from Instagram wherein Gerard showed off some Warhammer 40k Realms of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness merch and gave a Bolt Thrower shoutout because they have an album with the same title (metal is fundamentally nerd music). Bolt Thrower is a band I absolutely love, easily one of my favorites, and this little shoutout illustrates Gerard’s lesser-known fondness for Death Metal.
(Nerd Shit and Metal Shit have always been the Same Shit.)
In 2012, Gerard contributed art (created and hand-painted landmines) based on “One” for the Obey Your Master Metallica art exhibit held in LA’s Exhibit A Gallery. In the AP interview about the event here Gerard mentions his favorite Metallica song is “Welcome Home (Sanitarium),” as well as discusses how metal led him to punk music.
But the break-up era scraps of metal were nothing compared to the onslaught of metal mentions we’ve gotten since the band got back together and the tour started. In fact, these recent connections are more inundated with the modern metal music scene, with My Chem oftentimes specifically leveraging their legacy and ubiquity to introduce contemporary weird and extreme metal to younger fans and new audiences. Which I think is so fucking cool.
To start with, for the Frank Iero and the Future Violents song “Medicine Square Garden”, the band was killed by GWAR, which is a shock-ironic metal band that has been around in different iterations since the 80s. They’re perhaps most famous for their ridiculous spectacle live shows (I had a friend get sprayed in fake blood from one of the creature’s giant dicks at a fest once).
But the break-up era scraps of metal were nothing compared to the onslaught of metal mentions we’ve gotten since the band got back together and the tour started. In fact, these recent connections are more inundated with the modern metal music scene, with My Chem oftentimes specifically leveraging their legacy and ubiquity to introduce contemporary weird and extreme metal to younger fans and new audiences. Which I think is so fucking cool.
To start with, for the Frank Iero and the Future Violents song “Medicine Square Garden”, the band was killed by GWAR, which is a shock-ironic metal band that has been around in different iterations since the 80s. They’re perhaps most famous for their ridiculous spectacle live shows (I had a friend get sprayed in fake blood from one of the creature’s giant dicks at a fest once).
(Photo by Tucker Rule)
Of course, speaking of Frank, during the intermediate break-up period he worked on a black metal project, bloodnun, with Joey Southside from The Banner. Their first self-titled demo came out in 2013 and then Beneath the Unholy (their split with Vide) was released in 2021. The demo is really nothing serious or particularly groundbreaking, but the recent split was actually pretty good imo. If you didn’t like bloodnun before and, therefore didn’t check out the newer material, I do recommend it! It goes more in the depressive/atmospheric direction and has a chill to it I vibe with.
Gerard also lent his vocals to a black metal project after the reunion– he was a guest on Ibaraki’s Rōnin. Ibaraki is Trivium vocalist Matt Heafy’s collaborative black metal-ish project with Ihsahn from Emperor (there are too many proggy, metalcore moments to really quantify this as just black metal– if anything Gerard is the heaviest presence on the song he’s featured on). Gerard and Heafy have been talking about collaborating on something for years on and off so this wasn’t a surprising development, especially given Gerard’s recent affinity for black metal (he wore a Darkthrone t-shirt a lot around 2018).
Gerard also wore a Venom t-shirt, the original, innovative, and incredibly important first-wave black metal band, during rehearsal for their recent tour.
Gerard also lent his vocals to a black metal project after the reunion– he was a guest on Ibaraki’s Rōnin. Ibaraki is Trivium vocalist Matt Heafy’s collaborative black metal-ish project with Ihsahn from Emperor (there are too many proggy, metalcore moments to really quantify this as just black metal– if anything Gerard is the heaviest presence on the song he’s featured on). Gerard and Heafy have been talking about collaborating on something for years on and off so this wasn’t a surprising development, especially given Gerard’s recent affinity for black metal (he wore a Darkthrone t-shirt a lot around 2018).
Gerard also wore a Venom t-shirt, the original, innovative, and incredibly important first-wave black metal band, during rehearsal for their recent tour.
(Venom Welcome to Hell shirt in rehearsal. Photo by Beemer)
After Teenagers got momentarily TikTok famous, the band put out the playlist “We Were All Teenagers Once” full of music each member listened to as an adolescent. Unsurprisingly, there are bands like Metallica, Pantera, and Iron Maiden. There was also Queensryche’s “Spreading the Disease” which vindicated my long-held belief that Operation: Mindcrime is a My Chem influence. It could be either Ray or Gerard’s choice but in my heart of hearts… it's such a Gerard song. It has to be him.
Of course, one of the most significant instances of My Chemical Romance celebrating new heavy music came in the form of their openers. Underground bands like Devil Master, Dilly Dally, and Youth Code all made appearances. All these bands had also previously been featured on Gerard’s epic 2019 “Music New & Old That I Enjoyed This Year” playlist alongside a lot of stoner and doom metal as well. Gerard has given shoutouts all tour but it was in Milton Keyes where the tone was particularly metal-appreciative. He mentioned Devil Master and Creeping Death (a Texas-based death metal band). He paid his respects to the late Riley Gale, of Power Trip, saying he wanted to take them on tour but, unfortunately, could not.
Of course, one of the most significant instances of My Chemical Romance celebrating new heavy music came in the form of their openers. Underground bands like Devil Master, Dilly Dally, and Youth Code all made appearances. All these bands had also previously been featured on Gerard’s epic 2019 “Music New & Old That I Enjoyed This Year” playlist alongside a lot of stoner and doom metal as well. Gerard has given shoutouts all tour but it was in Milton Keyes where the tone was particularly metal-appreciative. He mentioned Devil Master and Creeping Death (a Texas-based death metal band). He paid his respects to the late Riley Gale, of Power Trip, saying he wanted to take them on tour but, unfortunately, could not.
One specific band Gerard mentioned in MK but also directly interacted with during the American leg was Mercyful Fate/King Diamond. Gerard rocked the Mercyful Fate sweater for LA3 and then in Dallas his shout-out to “the King” right before they played vampires was a reference to their lead singer King Diamond hanging out backstage (he later tweeted about it!). If you are a fan of My Chem I beg of you to check them out– if you can get pass the falsetto, there is a definite correlation between both bands and their sense of theatricality.
I also wanted to mention Jane Pain, even if she’s involved with much more than just metal. After the New York show, the infamous bathroom shoot we still haven’t seen started to spread around. The photographer responsible for that was Jane; she’s a longtime noise/punk musician and photographer (you’ve probably recognized her for the guitar/Hitachi Magic Wand shot below). She also started a killer blackened punk metal band, Melissa, in 2021. Frank wore some of their merch during the tour. Which is just another example of My Chem’s proximity to underground scenes, as well as their appreciation for the musicians out here being wild and queer and filthy. I highly recommend engaging with Jane Pain’s music or her devotion to noise and punk spaces through the portraits of the people who are at its core.
I also wanted to mention Jane Pain, even if she’s involved with much more than just metal. After the New York show, the infamous bathroom shoot we still haven’t seen started to spread around. The photographer responsible for that was Jane; she’s a longtime noise/punk musician and photographer (you’ve probably recognized her for the guitar/Hitachi Magic Wand shot below). She also started a killer blackened punk metal band, Melissa, in 2021. Frank wore some of their merch during the tour. Which is just another example of My Chem’s proximity to underground scenes, as well as their appreciation for the musicians out here being wild and queer and filthy. I highly recommend engaging with Jane Pain’s music or her devotion to noise and punk spaces through the portraits of the people who are at its core.
(SHV. Jane Pain, Photos From Summer. Frank Iero in the Melissa EP tee. Photo by Steve Thrasher)
But, here we end where this project begin. On November 19th at the Belasco Theater, Gerard went to a show supporting his friends in Frozen Soul. The show also featured Napalm Death, Brujera, and Millions of Dead Cops– another grouping of bands confirming Gerard’s propensity for the genres between punk and metal (like crossover, grindcore, blackened punk and roll, ad naseum). On Tumblr, the immediate reaction did not mention the band, nor did they really appreciate the line-up. This struck me (first and foremost because it seemed a little rude to use the band’s stories without really crediting them/explaining who they were but I digress) because it showcases the way the musical partnerships that each member of My Chem cultivates are secondary to them as individuals. Which is fine! Ultimately, not everyone is going to care about a random metal band. But, to me, its part of a larger pattern of behavior where every member of L.S. Dunes is cropped out of photos, where Thursday is only understood insomuch as they directly relate to My Chem’s history, where the collective of peers My Chem has fostered and worked with is easily dismissed. This, in my estimation, comes from a general unwillingness among My Chem fans (in my experience) to branch out of their pre-established music taste. This moment, to me, just reiterated many of the frustrations I had been having with what is obstensibly a music fandom being oblivious to music history. So, in the spirit of doing something productive instead of lying around and complaining, I made this post.
(Gerard at Frozen Soul on Bass Player Samatha Mobley's Instastories + Full Show lineup.)
And now here at the end (and beginning) of things, I hope this long mediation on the ways in which the metal subculture has directly shaped My Chem’s sound throughout their history doesn't just introduce some of the band's musical roots but also reveals what I would consider an enduring part of why they’ve had such a visceral longevity as a cultural force through performance, emotion, content, and even small things like production and album structure. But moreso I hope this will spur greater exploration and understanding of the fundamental interconnectedness of music. Whether it's through influences or the localized scene that birthed My Chemical Romance or the development of “emo” as a genre, the band and its members are tied into the interwoven fabric of musical partnerships and legacies that makes all music so wonderful and historically resonant. And through this web there is so, so much beautiful art to discover.
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