-Patient
, 21 2007 . 19:17 ()
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One day last August, Gerard Way boarded a plane to Japan with the gnawing conviction that he might not be coming back. Over the past year, the 27-year-old singer for the rock group My Chemical Romance had got it into his head that he had to be drunk to perform, and then needed Xanax to switch off his brain afterwards, and the combination was making him suicidally depressed. Way didnt like being suicidally depressed, so hed often add cocaine to the mix. Thats when his mood really got black. He spent the days before the flight saying goodbye to friends in New Jersey, just in case.
In Japan, Way spent all his time drunk. Before the final Tokyo show, he got so trashed on Heinekens and vodka tonics that he realized, even as he was performing, that he wouldnt be able to remember anything about it the next day. After he came off-stage he spent half an hour throwing up in a garbage can, until there was nothing coming up except bile. Tonight, he thought to himself, his hair caked with vomit, Ive drunk my last drink.
It was a vicious circle, he says matter-of-factly. I needed it to function but it made me want to kill myself. It made me extremely unpredictable and dangerous to myself. I didnt want it to get to the point where it became like a VH1 Behind the Music where they show this really bad picture of me 30 pounds overweight, throwing up on the floor in Berlin. I didnt want that to happen to this band.
Ways cold-turkey flight back to the bands home of Belleville, New Jersey, was excruciating almost 7,000 miles of skin-crawling, sweat-soaked willies. I got really emotional outside the airport when we landed. I didnt know if I was going to see these guys again. He went straight to his therapist and booked into Alcoholics Anonymous, knowing that in the same week My Chemical Romance had to replace their drummer, film a video and start their tour. And you thought youd had a hard week at work.
We got through the hard shit, says Way. This is the easy part. Any fears last summer that My Chemical Romance were going to implode into obscurity were knocked flat by their swaggering teen-dysfunction anthem Im Not Okay (I Promise). Inspired by the high school experiences of Way and his friends, it delivers angst-rock verities with a knowing wink, not to mention the kind of melody that ignites careers. The tongue-in-cheek video, filmed in the same L.A. high school as Donnie Darko, depicted MCR as proudly geeky misfits. It was a role that didnt require much rehearsal.
Way calls My Chemical Romances music death rock. Others have tagged it goth punk or emo. Some endearing individuals have overcome genre confusion by simply calling MCR faggots. Our guitarist Frank met somebody who said, How do you feel when people stop liking your band because they find out youre gay? says Way, curling his lip with pointed amusement.
KARSARE
, 16 2007 . 20:35 ()
