MCR’s Way rocked my life
When Gerard Way was growing up, legend has it, he wanted to be two things: a rock star and a comic book writer. He became both. He published his first comic book at 16, and a few years later he won an internship at DC Comics, the home of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, the holy trinity of sequential art.
Then in 2001, Way witnessed the attack on the World Trade Centre from across the harbour at his home in New Jersey.
The experience changed him as it did many people. He realised he had to take a chance to make the life he’d always dreamed of. Way wanted to save the world with music. So he did.
Mention Way’s ostentatious, raucous band My Chemical Romance these days and you’re more likely to get an eye roll and a titter than a stroke of the beard and nod of the head from music nerds. To each their own, I reckon. But I have to tell you, they saved my life.
Not literally, of course, I’m not an idiot. I just mean sometimes music just does that.
It changes you into someone new, as if that singular combination of melody, lyrics and rhythm has somehow jangled you up at a molecular level and now you see things – especially yourself – differently.
You’re really lucky if that happens to you. That’s what MCR did for me. I fell for them so hard it seemed perfectly reasonable to dash round the world like a besotted 20-something in a Nick Hornby novel, to follow them on tour.
Way – a reformed boozer and gun crime survivor (just like me), who struggled with his weight and his self-esteem (ditto), who stood up for the underdog and seemed to truly believe art could make the world better (me too, kind of) – was a huge part of that. If I believed in heroes, Way would be mine.
He didn’t have the nicest voice in the world – it’s angular and scratchy, with a petulant lilt that might sound cocky to the non-believer.
The ideas that voice delivered, though. Hilarious, liberating, sometimes fairly offensive, MCR challenged you to embrace your mortality like a lover one minute, and punch it in the ear the next. It was exactly the thing I didn’t know I desperately needed. And I wasn’t the only one.
For one shining moment, MCR was the biggest band in the world. So big, the UK’s Daily Mail started frantically clutching its pearls and calling them a ‘‘death cult’’ which, as everyone knows, is a sure-fire way to turn kids off a band’s music, let me tell you.
But Way wasn’t just some handsome, emo Pied Piper, luring kids away from wholesome pop into dark and distant lands filled with cancer victims, vicious high school croquet teams and
Liza Minnelli. He was saving souls!
‘‘I’m not OK,’’ Way sang, and he seemed to be saying that not being OK was better than being normal. Not being OK might even be a lonely, weird, isolated kid’s super power.
‘‘If for one minute you think you’re better than a 16-year-old girl in a Green Day T-shirt, you are sorely mistaken,’’ Way told an audience during the 2005 Warped Tour, immediately winning the hearts and minds of anyone who’s ever been a 16-year-old female music fan.
‘‘Remember the first time you went to a show and saw your favourite band. You wore their shirt, and sang every word. You didn’t know anything about scene politics, haircuts or what was cool. Someone finally understood you. This is what music is all about.’’
Damn straight.
We were all about it. In 2006, The Black Parade debuted at No 1 in New Zealand. In 2007, MCR played the Big Day Out, sharing a chock-a-block bill with Muse, The Killers and Tool, and they kicked ass.
That same year, Way’s first love came calling again.
Working with Brazilian artist Gabriel Ba, Way created The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite ,a series of comics about a mismatched family of
Freed from the limitations of time and space, all Gerard Way’s grandiose ideas . . . took superpowered flight with Umbrella Academy.
super heroes, who must overcome the trauma of their bizarre upbringing to, what else, prevent the end of the world.
Freed from the limitations of time and space, all Way’s grandiose ideas about embracing our mortality and our true selves, even the broken and ugly bits, about the power of one voice to change everything, about music that can literally and figuratively move the world, took super-powered flight.
Loyalty, betrayal, redemption, revenge and seemingly useless powers that turn out to be saving graces, Umbrella Academy may be a story about people who aren’t entirely human, but it’s also a rip-roaring love song to human potential.
(There’s also a talking chimpanzee named Pongo – Adam Godley – because why the hell not.)
And now it’s on your telly, thanks to Netflix, which dropped the 10-episode first season last week (season two is already confirmed for next year).
Playing on a number of well-worn comic book tropes in fresh and often hilarious ways, the show has the added bonus of a diverse, interesting cast that includes Robert Sheehan as The Seance, a guy who can call up the spirits of the dead, Mary
J Blige as a time-travelling hitwoman named Cha Cha, and Ellen Page as a living violin . . . sort of, anyway.
It’s been a while since I listened to MCR, but watching The Umbrella Academy reminded me of everything I loved about Way and his music. It’s the wild, unbridled, liberating excitment of being unapologetically yourself, however messy, of having a go, aiming high, going large and never going home.
I can’t think of a better reason to watch anything than that.