Not the Life It Seems: The True Lives of My Chemical Romance
Read an excerpt from Tom Bryant’s MCR biography, Not the Life It Seems: The True Lives of My Chemical Romance, here!
Excerpt from Chapter 1: GIVE ‘EM HELL, KID
A scene from Belleville, New Jersey, sometime in the mid-eighties. A wrestling show is blaring its pantomime brawls from a TV turned up to near the max. In front of it, the two Way brothers are re-enacting every move, leaping on top of each other, yanking at each other’s limbs, pulling each other’s bodies around. It was as close as Gerard and younger brother Mikey would ever get to fighting.
Their early lives were lived in tandem, the two of them always together as kids – in part because the world outside their door was not for them. Out there, on the streets, was a place that Gerard would describe as ‘way too tough for me’. The stories of car-jackings, robberies and even mafia-related crimes (this was, after all, the area The Sopranos made famous) were rare and sensational, but enough to make responsible parents wary about what went on. So Gerard and Mikey got closer and closer inside, as outside got further and further away.
‘Our parents were kind of scared to let us out of the house because where we lived was pretty dangerous,’ Mikey said years later. ‘We didn’t have anyone else to hang out with. We had friends from the neighbourhood but it was mostly me and Gerard.’
New Jersey in the early eighties was not so different from what it is now. The blue-collar state, so fabled in Bruce Springsteen’s songs, was working class and as some parts boomed while the economy took flight other parts were left behind. The town of Belleville was part of the latter group – and while it wasn’t proud of that, it wasn’t ashamed of it either. It was a place of working men and working mothers, of nine-to-five all week, then Friday-night fun and Saturday-night hook-ups. It was the sort of place that kept its arms around you until, before you knew it, you’d been there half your life and didn’t stand much chance of leaving. You could get by, live a life, and die a death without ever escaping its confines.
It was into this world that Gerard Arthur Way was born on 9 April 1977 in Summit, New Jersey – just down the road from Belleville. His brother Michael James followed three years later on 10 September 1980 after the family had moved. Mikey, as he would become known, idolized his big brother and would follow him wherever he went, even attempting to literally run before he could walk when he saw what his older sibling could do. The bond between them was formed strong and early.
Their parents were Donald and Donna, their dad a service manager at a car dealership and their mother a local hairdresser. Donald embodied the blue-collar feel of the area: a hard-working man with hard-working morals who understood that it was his responsibility to keep the family afloat. He would instil these ethics into his boys.
‘My dad shaped me morally,’ said Gerard. ‘I have such a respect for women and I got that from my dad. He really drummed that into me. My dad’s a real man – he’s not a womanizer, he’s not a tough guy, he’s not a show-off; he’s a working-class guy who really worked hard to support his family. He never strayed and he worked hard for every single penny.
‘He didn’t do anything shady. He was never a big shot and there were a lot of those in my area because it was Jersey and full of Italian-American mafia kind of people. My dad was the opposite of all of them and I think he got crap for not being flashy. He wasn’t one of these guys in sharp suits. What he didn’t realize was that he was a real man. But I knew that.’
Yet Donald, though proud of his life, would tell his sons they didn’t have to become embedded into the New Jersey landscape like so many others before them, not if they didn’t want to. Instead, they could spread their wings and take flight. ‘From when I was a kid, my dad said to me, “You can be whatever you want,”’ Gerard said. ‘And he was dead serious. He kept saying it until I was in my teens.’ But what he meant was that his kids should go to college and get a good job, not trade it all in for the risk of a band. They didn’t listen to that last bit.
Donna, their mother, brought different influences. She had always had an interest in horror and fantasy, and when Gerard and Mikey were older, she would rent horror films for the family. She collected dolls, too, much to her kids’ despair.
‘She had hundreds of creepy dolls that she’d collected and there was a room in my house filled with nothing but creepy fucking dolls,’ said Gerard. ‘I would have to walk through this room to get to my room and at night I’d hold my breath and run through it because I was so terrified.’
But it was this that sparked both Gerard and Mikey’s early imaginations, and the pair would be inseparable as they played together. ‘We brought each other up creatively and emotionally,’ said Gerard. ‘We were very solitary together, if you see what I mean. We would entertain each other or talk nonsense for hours.’
So the two of them explored life in a Belleville duplex (a house divided into two separate homes). They turned to each other for friendship, for ideas and for fun. The interests they developed sparked from each other, the outside world rarely creeping in except from the TV. Gerard, from an early age, would invent scenarios and daydream.
‘What I had to do – and my brother had to do – was really create our own space in our heads,’ said Gerard. ‘I drew pictures, I made stories up, I lied a lot – I lived inside my own head.’
Not that he knew it then, but it would be the birth of a creative process that would take him far away from the closed front door, far away from Belleville and far away from New Jersey. Those stories he made up would spiral into wild comic book ideas and fantastic musical schemes. They would unfurl in grand concept albums and detailed plot arcs on records that he and his brother would go on to make. Back then, though, it was simply for escape.
Music began, slowly, to become important to them. By the age of nine, Gerard would hear the Top 40 songs his parents played on the radio. But he had a more important musical influence – his maternal grandmother, Elena Lee Rush, who lived upstairs in the Ways’ duplex. Elena was a talented artist who had converted their garage into a ceramics studio. She would encourage the boys to follow their own imaginative paths when she looked after them, whether it was drawing or creating pottery with her.
Elena liked to play her upright piano and the music would drift down to the apartment below. Gerard or Mikey would wander up and she would stop, shy. But they would ask her questions, ask her to continue and she would – pleased they were taking an interest. And then, ever so slowly, she would urge them towards taking part in talent shows and school plays, always pleased to nurture their creativity.
‘She was so instrumental in my life,’ said Gerard. ‘I guess I just found music because, when I was growing up, she just let me find stuff. She let me find what I was good at and then she would sit with me and encourage me.’
Elena noticed Gerard might have talent of his own and bought him a cheap Silvertone acoustic guitar for his ninth birthday. Also among his presents was a Slave I Star Wars model spacecraft. If Gerard was honest, he preferred the spacecraft. It was partly because the guitar meant he had to start taking lessons, something he didn’t particularly enjoy. ‘That was a big mistake, I probably shouldn’t have started, because then I immediately became disinterested,’ he later admitted. But it was the beginning of something, and he would return to that guitar again and again as he gradually learned to make it do what he wanted, rather than what his lessons demanded.
Gerard was a sensitive child and overweight too, something that kept him divided from his peers at his first elementary school. He struggled there, never quite fitting in, and later moved schools.
‘I used to be fat,’ he admitted. ‘That’s the ultimate outsider – the fat kid. Girls aren’t interested in you, you don’t fit in and you’re always easy to make fun of.’
He suffered from terrible dreams, often waking up in a panic. ‘I was terrified of death,’ he said. ‘I used to wake up in the middle of the night having nightmares about my family. It took me a good five years to get over that. I was afraid to go to school because I thought I’d lose somebody.’
He changed schools before the fourth grade and, determined not to be the awkward kid, got more involved in all the new school had to offer. Which is why he ended up, aged nine, auditioning for a part in the school play. ‘I just opened my mouth and I was able to sing,’ he said. ‘And then my grandma was really excited about it. I wasn’t so excited about it – I guess I just wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. Then, after I got the part, I was stuck into doing it.’
His grandmother happily made him a costume and encouraged him all the way. But he was less sure. Perhaps, he reasoned, it wasn’t wise to mark his arrival at a new school by stealing the lead part in the play and then singing onstage while wearing tights. ‘Of course, it’s a great fucking idea to play Peter Pan in your first year in a new school . . .’ he later admitted, sarcastically.
But it proved one thing to him: he could sing. And it would not be quite so damaging to his reputation as he thought. Slowly but surely, Gerard made friends and settled in – never quite part of the mainstream, but no longer the outsider. Then, when he went to Middle School, aged eleven, that changed again. Cliques and groups formed and once again he retreated back into fantasy worlds, playing the Dungeons & Dragons board game he had become obsessed with and spiralling away from reality once more.
At home, his grandmother still encouraged his artistic urges, particularly drawing. However, she was dismayed that he was increasingly finding darker inspirations – in part because of his interest in horror, in part because of the imagery of the fantasy games he enjoyed. And if Gerard was into it, then so was his brother Mikey.
The pair had begun to discover new music too. Like the fantastical worlds they were enthralled by, this music contained elements of horror, darkness and showmanship. Iron Maiden’s Live after Death, the album culled from the influential metal legend’s mammoth 1984–5 tour, was the first record to grab both Mikey and Gerard. Beginning with a roaring crowd, and opening with the iconic ‘We Shall Fight on the Beaches’ speech from the British wartime prime minister Winston Churchill, it has long been heralded as one of heavy metal’s great live albums. A bombastic, rollicking, spitting and wildly entertaining romp, it is stuffed with their biggest songs: ‘Aces High’, ‘2 Minutes to Midnight’, ‘The Trooper’, ‘Number of the Beast’, ‘Run to the Hills’. It thrilled the Way brothers – so much so that Mikey immediately decided that music was what he wanted to do with his life.
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. It would be how the pair lived out their rock fantasies, envisioning themselves in front of glorious crowds from the mundanity of their shared bedroom.
They explored more and more music, from the theatrics of Queen, to the horror-punk of local legends Misfits – both bands with a strong visual element and, like Maiden, a commitment to performance as well as music. The grand imagery of the Misfits’ music played into the Ways’ growing love of horror films, which ranged from the relatively tame Lost Boys to the vampire film Fright Night. They splattered their room with pictures and posters from horror movies – ‘Anything that would bum my parents out, basically,’ admitted Gerard – as they increasingly explored a darker world. They would hide away albums like Slayer’s South of Heaven because of the skull on its cover, and had to convince their maternal grandfather to buy them the Misfits’ classic 1982 horror-punk album Walk Among Us after their mother refused when she saw it included a song called ‘Devil’s Whorehouse’. It would go on to be an album that deeply inspired the pair of them.
Gerard would lead the musical explorations, frequently discovering new music that his brother would pick up on – often from watching MTV’s influential Headbangers Ball. ‘He would consistently play something that would blow my mind,’ said Mikey. Gerard began to expand his tastes beyond metal and the brothers switched allegiance from Headbangers Ball to the alternative rock of 120 Minutes. As Nirvana exploded onto the scene in the wake of 1991’s Nevermind, so the grunge movement began to appeal – as did its forebears in the shape of the Pixies. Punk and metal lost favour and the likes of Smashing Pumpkins took over.
Gerard also began to listen to the Britpop that was filtering over from the UK as he discovered Blur, Oasis and Pulp and then went back further to hear those bands’ influences in the shape of The Smiths and The Cure. One moment still resonates with him. The family were on a long car journey to the Busch Gardens theme park in Virginia in 1992. Gerard, fifteen, sulked on the back seat of the car with his Walkman. He hadn’t wanted to go on the trip and would have preferred to stay at home, alone with his comics. Instead, he plugged in one earpiece, shared the other with his equally bored brother and they listened to a tape of The Smiths compilation, Best . . . 1. It opened up a new world for him.
‘I liked punk rock, but after that cassette I didn’t take it as seriously any more. There was a split between me and punk rock at that point,’ he said. ‘Those Smiths tapes saved our life on that drive. Mikey and I would sit there in the back of the car, with one Walkman earpiece each, sharing The Smiths. That’s something I remember to this day.’
It was an important journey. Inspired by the rich, dense music and the poetry and bitterness in Morrissey’s lyrics, Gerard’s thoughts turned to making music. In middle school, still fifteen, he joined his first band – Dracora – who were an instrumental act solely because they didn’t have a singer. Mikey says they sounded like Led Zeppelin during the periods in which they drew influence from Lord of the Rings, though he is perhaps blinded by brotherly loyalty. Gerard says they sucked. He was kicked out when Dracora attempted to add ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ to their set. Gerard, it turned out, was a lousy guitar player and couldn’t come close to playing the Lynyrd Skynyrd staple.
Crushed and a little resentful at being fired, he decided to abandon playing music entirely. But he was still desperate to find a place and a role in life – he decided it would be art, and particularly comics. So as he put down his guitar, he picked up his pen, starting off by tracing strips – largely those made by Marvel – before beginning to draw his own.
He was talented too. He would lock himself into his grandmother’s tiny office – wedged in among her books and without much room to sit, let alone create – and he simply drew and drew. He found a job in a comic book store in Bloomfield, the next town from Belleville. He felt at home flicking through the racks, away from school and lost in the elaborate worlds on offer inside the magazines.
‘That was really my solace,’ he said. ‘The guys at the comic store were my closest friends. They were older than me, in their thirties. I think that’s why I grew up fast because I knew a lot of older dudes. They were grown men, with a bit of a childish side to them – otherwise they wouldn’t hang out in a comic book store with someone like me.’
Working late one night, he and the two other store clerks were watching the anime film Record of Lodoss Wars. Suddenly, two men in hoods burst in and pulled what Gerard later described as ‘a giant gun’ on him. The robbers were after limited edition comic books, which they assumed would be more valuable than they were. They forced Gerard onto the floor on his knees and put a gun in the back of his head. He later recalled the incident and said he was a little disappointed that his life didn’t flash before his eyes. Instead, he was more worried that, if he was shot, he might not be able to finish the Daredevil comic book he was reading. ‘Man Without Fear was out at the time. I was thinking, Oh man, I’m never going to get to finish Man Without Fear. I swear to God, that’s what I was thinking!’
The other clerks cleared out the register and handed the robbers what they wanted and then, almost as soon as the thieves had run back out of the shop, the shocked staff burst out laughing – almost uncontrollably. ‘It was the craziest thing, it was stress laughter because they had scared the shit out of us,’ Gerard said.
Rather than traumatize him unduly, the experience taught him that life was not something to be wasted. He was determined to break out of New Jersey – out of ‘that rut of drinking, fucking and working a shit job. The whole mundaneness of it all,’ he once told me. He redoubled his efforts to draw, certain that this was his way out. He approached the maverick comic book publisher Hart D. Fisher, whose Boneyard Press had recently published a controversial comic book on the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, with an idea of his called ‘On Raven’s Wings’. Fisher agreed to publish the relatively graphic horror story, which lasted two editions – though Gerard’s name was oddly changed and the author credit went to ‘Garry Way’. Although the comic didn’t last long, being published told Gerard he had talent and that he could do something with art.
‘I’d set the benchmark very high for myself because, at fifteen, I wrote my first comic that got published. I’d already accomplished something when I was fifteen and I felt that I needed to live up to that.’
But though comics were a passion, music was still a big force. Despite putting down his guitar following his firing from Dracora, he was still listening to music avidly. Two weeks after the robbery, the comic book store closed and Gerard began to work part-time at the local A&P Supermarket chain. With his earnings, Gerard saved up to buy a Mexican Fender Stratocaster – the cheapest Strat you could buy, but a beautiful thing for a teenager to own. He decided it didn’t matter if he wasn’t a great guitarist – but what did matter was that he should be a great songwriter. He compared technically brilliant guitar players like Steve Vai to the simple punk of a band like Green Day and had an epiphany. ‘Steve Vai is a really great guitar player,’ he reasoned. ‘But I can’t hum any of his songs, yet I know all these Green Day songs.’ Gerard began to write songs for himself. And instead of trying to dazzle with technical brilliance, he wanted to write songs that would lodge themselves in people’s brains. It was a smart move.
At school he noticed a change. He had graduated to high school and discovered that the musical landscape had moved on in the wake of Nirvana’s Nevermind album, and now, for a brief period, alternative rock was the mainstream. The kids who had been listening to it before it broke – once bullied and derided for their taste – were now respected. Gerard was one of those kids.
‘Suddenly, any kid that was outside smoking cigarettes and listening to those bands was cool,’ said Gerard. ‘Everybody who was a little weird or a little punk became very cool. All those jocks and cheerleaders would look to people like me for advice on what to listen to. That was very strange. I doubt it was ever like that again in school.’
Soon after starting high school he found a group of people into similar music as him, and though he would find the experience there reasonably lonely, it was largely through his own choosing as he was not short of friends. Mikey goes so far as to say Gerard had a ‘Ferris Bueller thing going on’; he had the mystique and cool of the hero of the classic eighties high-school film.
‘One of my first days in high school I sat all alone at lunch time,’ Gerard said. ‘It was the classic story – the weird kid in an army jacket, a horror-movie T-shirt, long black hair. This group of metal heads – who were the only outcast group at the school at the time, who all listened to Agnostic Front and stuff – turned to me and said, “Hey, why don’t you sit with us?” That was cool, we could all sit together and nobody would fuck with us. Not that I hung out with them after school.
‘I didn’t really get bullied. Lots of people bullied me more emotionally and called me a loser but I never got beaten up or anything. It was never the popular kids that did it either, it was the other weird outcasts, the kids who were going to be criminals and everyone knew it. People were never really mean to me though, they mostly just left me alone. I think I wanted to be alone too.’
He would get through his day then head straight home to the sanctuary of his room. There he would lose himself in drawings and in music, happy to be on his own and happy to have no one to please but himself. ‘Having the group was a bit of a turning point I guess and, oddly enough, not having the peer pressure to do drugs and that sort of stuff,’ he said. ‘But I was more interested in music and being creative. I had no real desire to hang out; I was writing stories and drawing comics. I’d been doing that for years.’
He wanted to be a comic book artist. He was a fan of writers like Grant Morrison, Richard Case and Todd McFarlane, particularly enjoying Morrison’s Batman run. For him the appeal was that Batman was just an ordinary person doing something extraordinary – rather than a hero with supernatural powers. It suggested to him that he too could do something extraordinary with his life.
By 1995, Gerard was chasing the dream hard. He had slimmed down, graduated from high school and enrolled in a four-year fine arts degree at the respected School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. Gerard was particularly interested in the cartooning and animation courses on offer – but also in the freedom afforded by being in the city. Outside of New Jersey, in an environment where creativity and individuality were encouraged, he began to expand his horizons by going to goth clubs and meeting like-minded artists. The problem was that he still lived at home with his parents. Some of his friends shared a house and he envied their independence as he commuted back and forth from Belleville. Yet as much as he found his new surroundings invigorating, he says he still felt like an outsider.
‘Even when I had friends and even when I was in art school, which is a school of outcasts, I still felt like an outcast,’ he said. ‘That’s one of the things that doesn’t work about art school – you have hundreds of outcasts together and so nobody talks to each other. They all sit there, in black! You get hippies, kids in black and graffiti kids – that’s an art school.’
With Gerard off in Manhattan, Mikey was left alone at high school and he didn’t fit in. Mikey, like his brother, had once been overweight but in the summer between tenth and eleventh grade, he dieted hard. Over five months, he lost seventy pounds. The change was so pronounced that the school’s counsellors approached him and asked if he was on drugs.
‘They thought I was on heroin, or something,’ said Mikey, ‘so all the cool kids came up to ask me what I was on. They’d be like, “What have you got?” I was like, “Nothing, dude.” So they’d ask how I lost so much weight and I’d go, “Erm, exercise?”’
He was heavily into music, obsessive about The Smashing Pumpkins. He would follow them up and down the East Coast whenever they would tour, spending the money he earned from working in Belleville’s Comic World or the local supermarket on train tickets and bus rides to out-of-the-way venues. He says his look – skinny and young – meant he would get followed by strange men with dark intent in train stations late at night. Still, his passion for the band meant he gladly braved the dangers.
Mikey would occasionally pick up Gerard’s Fender guitar – though he was intimidated by how much it had cost. He watched videos of bands like Radiohead and Smashing Pumpkins playing, looking at their fingers on the fretboards and trying to figure out how they played. He worked out the Pumpkins’ ‘Disarm’ first, constantly rewinding the video and trying it out for himself.
He convinced Gerard to come and see the Pumpkins play at Madison Square Garden in 1996 while his brother was at art school. Gerard was reluctant, prone to spending his time alone and not always willing to put down his art projects. Mikey was insistent.
‘I dunno if I can go, I’ve got homework,’ Gerard said.
‘Dude, you’ve got to come,’ Mikey said. ‘This is the most inspirational thing I’ve ever seen, you’ve got to come.’
Eventually Gerard was persuaded. It was a show that would change both of their lives.
As the brothers were sat watching the band, Gerard turned to Mikey and said, ‘This is what we’ve got to do.’
‘I know,’ Mikey replied. ‘This is exactly what we’ve got to do.’
They never forgot the moment and it planted a seed that would come to fruition later in their lives, while Madison Square Garden continued to shine like a shrine. To play there would be everything.
Be sure to pick up a copy of Not the Life It Seems to read the rest!
