Biography

*Demolition lover* Joined: 07 Jul 2007 Posts: 117

As the compelling, pale-faced frontman of dynamic rock outfit My Chemical Romance, Gerard Way is one of a few key musicians responsible for bringing emo and punk music into the mainstream eye at the turn of the millennium -- and successfully sparking a million conversations about what is and is not considered punk in the process. He was born on April 9, 1977, in Newark, NJ, and raised in nearby Belleville. His grandmother Elena was a huge source of inspiration and encouragement to him growing up, teaching the young Way how to sing, draw, and perform. Way's first public performance was as Peter Pan in an elementary school play, but just as that show was over, he made a conscious decision to immerse himself in art and comics (preferring things "slightly evil") rather than anything dealing with drama club. Since his neighborhood wasn't exactly the safest place, Way spent a lot of time indoors with his younger brother Mikey, creating imaginary worlds to which they could escape. Despite his passion for drawing, Way never lost his love of music and taught himself how to play guitar as a teenager. He was a withdrawn kid -- in contrast to his outgoing, life-of-the-party brother -- and Way spent a lot of time by himself sketching and listening to bands like Iron Maiden, the Smiths, the Cure, the Misfits, and Queen.
Following high school graduation, Way enrolled at the School of Visual Arts in New York to study cartooning and illustration. He spent some time interning at DC Comics, and after earning his bachelor of fine arts degree, eventually landed a gig doing work in toy design and animation; he even pitched an animated series to Cartoon Network at one point. Way had always wanted to be in a band -- especially after one particularly inspirational Smashing Pumpkins gig in 1997 with his brother -- and though he played in a few random ones over the years, it wasn't until the September 11th attacks that he really got the motivation to do something important with his life. He witnessed firsthand the collapse of the World Trade Towers from his office window, questioned how he was making a difference with his days, and soon wrote the song "Skylines and Turnstiles" about the 9/11 events back home in his parents' basement. Pressed with a sense of urgency, he confronted high school friend and drummer Matt Pelissier to start a band, and after convincing guitarist Ray Toro (whom Way felt was the best guitarist he knew), the seeds to My Chemical Romance were sown. Bringing aboard his brother Mikey on bass -- who brought with him the band's name -- and eventually rounding out their sound with second guitarist Frank Iero, My Chemical Romance recorded their first album within three months of forming. It was released in 2002 on local indie Eyeball Records and produced by the band's good friend Geoff Rickly, whose own local band Thursday Way had previously designed some T-shirts for.
As My Chemical Romance's popularity steadily grew over the next few years, especially after the success of their second album, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge (whose cover art Way drew), Way continued to battle -- as he had for many years -- depression, alcoholism, and drug abuse. This was especially compounded by the death of his grandmother, for whom he wrote the song "Helena" as a means of coping. After suffering through some very low lows, Way finally managed to get himself sober in mid-2004. By the time of the fall 2006 release of the group's wildly popular concept album The Negru Parade, Way appeared in the media noticeably several pounds lighter and with bleached-blonde hair in contrast to his prior jet-black locks. His transformation sparked many comparisons to Billy Corgan; Way denied those comments, attributing his look as merely a reflection of The Black Parade's sickly main character and its album themes of life and death. Through his band's success, Way never lost his passion for art and comics, and continued to sketch while on the road. He created a comic book series called The Umbrella Academy that was due to be released in late 2007 via Dark Horse Comics; Way wrote the story, broke it down into issues and designed the characters, leaving the actual drawing in the hands of two other artists, however. A few months after brother Mikey got married in March 2007, Way announced his own engagement. Now, he's single again.

Quotes

"If you don't go to high school you will definitely go to jail."

"I'd rather be a creature of the night than an old dude."

"So many people treat you like you're a kid so you might as well act like one and throw your television out of the hotel window."

"Be Yourself, Don't take anyone's shit and never let them take you alive..."

"So how was Christmas for you guys? Did you all get lots of nice black t-shirts?"

"If you're gonna buy me a present, don't spend more than twenty five bucks, you'll get a blowjob anyway."

"Surrounding myself with fans makes me feel like I'm not going through it alone."
"The Devil got landed with a shitty job, he has to deal with assholes everyday, he's probably bored as hell."

"When I was writing it, I was remembering how hard it was to be a 16-year-old in high school. I always wanted to be an artist, so I was this loner kid who just got drunk all the time. I only had one real friend. There was a girl I really liked, and she ended up taking really sleazy photographs with her boyfriend, and that really crushed me, I was just swimming in this pit of despair, jealousy and alcoholism."

"It erases everything I hate about myself. Nothing can hurt me. I feel completely invincible. I feel like everyone else on that stage is invincible and we're capable of anything. There's no stopping us."

"I'd enjoy it if a guy grabbed my ass. I guess it all depends on how he grabbed it, too."

"When you are kissing a guy with a beard, it's different."

"There's such a lack of sex in music"

"It takes me a while to tell stories. I think it's because I was drunk for three years"

"I was this weird loner kid who got drunk by himself all the time." (talking about high school)

"I have a nihilistic attitude so it's like, the new gay... it's popular." (Gerard on why we should give a damn about MCR)

"Look at me, with my pretty bracelet and tiara... I'm a fuckin' princess!"

"Were not a festival band, playing during the day was something we had to get over, I was like uhh this sun stuff kind of sucks"

"When we first started out I had a really big issue and a lot of my loved ones had a really big issue with the fact that I was totally in pain up there and there was a time when I tried to hurt myself off stage, but I got over that. Like, you should never want to hurt yourself. You should love yourself. Sometimes you have to kind of die inside in order to rise from your own ashes and believe in yourself and love yourself and become a new person and I think that that is going to be a lot of what the next record is about, not to plug it or anything. Like, it's going to talk about dying and coming back to become what you totally want to become. We are all becoming what we want to become."

"What I Like about The Sims is that I don't have a normal life at all, so I play this game where these people have these really boring, mundane lives. It's fun. My Sims family is called the Cholly family. I don't know why I picked that name; it's kind of random. The teenage daughter is my favourite, because I just had her go through this Goth phase. She's really kind of nerdy and she just became a concert violinist, which is pretty huge for the family. And she got into private school. But she started wearing black lipstick and she dyed her hair purple. It's pretty huge."

"I went to school in drag, in art school and my day was completely different because everybody thought I was a chick. You should see me as a chick. So I went as a girl, as like an experiment and it worked really well and everyone was really nice to me but I couldn't talk obviously...you know train conductors were really cool to me on my commute...HA! I looked hot as a chick!"

"Craziest thing that ever happened to me was being attacked by a black bird. It pecked the shit out of my head. We were at this hotel called The Phoenix in San Francisco. We were leaving to go to a show the next morning and the bird just fuckin' attacked my head. And the next day Slipknot were there, they were coming in as we were leaving, and they got attacked by birds too."

"Yeah, obviously we use vampires as a metaphor for something else, something deeper than just the supernatural. But there's just something about the bloodsucking walking dead, that can say so much to people. There are really so many people trying to get control over you on a daily basis and steal your soul in some way, take a part of you..."

"Um, lots of people grab my ass. I'm actually starting to get this thing now where people grab my package. That actually happened once in Boston, it usually doesn't happen. We went over to England and it happened at almost every show. I don't really enjoy any kind of invasion of privacy like that I guess. Grabbing my package is obviously a integral invasion of privacy I'm not into that at all."

"That's what happens when you're all borderline psychotic and therein lies the beauty of this band - our duality. There's a duality to each band member too. There's a desire to have this constant conflict. If we write a write a song and it turns out really poppy, we have to make the lyrics really fucked up. There's psychosis to everything we do for sure. One day we're probably gonna write this number one pop tune that will be about a massacre!"

"If for one minute you think you're better than a sixteen year old girl in a Green Day t-shirt, you are sorely mistaken. Remember the first time you went to a show and saw your favorite band. You wore their shirt, and sang every word. You didn't know anything about scene politics, haircuts, or what was cool. All you knew was that this music made you feel different from anyone you shared a locker with. Someone finally understood you. This is what music is about."