{"id":98194,"date":"2025-07-28T01:58:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T01:58:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/98194\/"},"modified":"2025-07-28T01:58:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-28T01:58:11","slug":"my-chemical-romance-brings-the-black-parade-to-dodger-stadium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/98194\/","title":{"rendered":"My Chemical Romance brings ‘The Black Parade’ to Dodger Stadium"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Twelve years after a breakup that didn\u2019t stick \u2014 and one year shy of the 20th anniversary of its biggest album \u2014 My Chemical Romance is on the road this summer playing 2006\u2019s \u201cThe Black Parade\u201d from beginning to end.<\/p>\n

The tour, which stopped Saturday night at Dodger Stadium for the first of two concerts, doesn\u2019t finally manifest the long-anticipated reunion of one of emo\u2019s most influential bands; My Chem reconvened in 2019<\/a> and has been performing, pandemic-related delays aside, fairly consistently since then (including five nights at Inglewood\u2019s Kia Forum in 2022 and two headlining appearances at Las Vegas\u2019 When We Were Young festival).<\/p>\n

Yet only now is the group visiting sold-out baseball parks \u2014 and without even the loss leader of new music to help drum up interest in its show.<\/p>\n

\u201cThank you for being here tonight,\u201d Gerard Way, My Chem\u2019s 48-year-old frontman, told the crowd of tens of thousands at Saturday\u2019s gig. \u201cThis is our first stadium tour, which is a wild thing to say.\u201d To mark the occasion, he pointed out, his younger brother Mikey was playing a bass guitar inscribed with the Dodgers\u2019 logo.<\/p>\n

So how did this darkly witty, highly theatrical punk band reach a new peak so deep into its comeback? Certainly it\u2019s benefiting from an overall resurgence of rock after years dominated by pop and hip-hop; My Chem\u2019s Dodger Stadium run coincides this weekend with the return of the once-annual Warped Tour<\/a> in Long Beach after a six-year dormancy.<\/p>\n

Then again, Linkin Park \u2014 to name another rock group huge in the early 2000s \u2014 recently moved a planned Dodger Stadium date to Inglewood\u2019s much smaller Intuit Dome, presumably as a result of lower-than-expected ticket sales.<\/p>\n

The endurance of My Chemical Romance, which formed in New Jersey before eventually relocating to Los Angeles, feels rooted more specifically in its obsession with comic books and in Gerard Way\u2019s frank lyrics about depression and his flexible portrayal of gender and sexuality. (\u201cGERARD WAY TRANSED MY GENDER,\u201d read a homemade-looking T-shirt worn Saturday by one fan.) Looking back now, it\u2019s clear the band\u2019s blend of drama and emotion \u2014 of world-building and bloodletting \u2014 set a crucial template for a generation or two of subsequent acts, from bands like Twenty One Pilots to rappers like the late Juice Wrld to a gloomy pop singer like Sombr, whose viral hit \u201cBack to Friends\u201d luxuriates in a kind of glamorous misery.<\/p>\n

\"Gerard <\/p>\n

Gerard Way, from left, Mikey Way and Ray Toro perform as My Chemical Romance.<\/p>\n

(Etienne Laurent \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n

For much of its audience, My Chem\u2019s proudly sentimental music contains the stuff of identity \u2014 one reason thousands showed up to Dodger Stadium wearing elaborate outfits inspired by the band\u2019s detailed iconography.<\/p>\n

In 2006, the quadruple-platinum \u201cBlack Parade\u201d LP arrived as a concept album about a dying cancer patient; Way and his bandmates dressed in military garb that made them look like members of Satan\u2019s marching band. Nearly two decades later, the wardrobe remained the same as the band muscled through the album\u2019s 14 tracks, though the narrative had transformed into a semi-coherent Trump-era satire of political authoritarianism: My Chemical Romance, in this telling a band from the fictional nation of Draag, was performing for the delectation of the country\u2019s vain and ruthless dictator, who sat stony-faced on a throne near the pitcher\u2019s mound flanked by a pair of soldiers.<\/p>\n

The theater of it all was fun \u2014 important (if a bit crude), you could even say, given how young much of the band\u2019s audience is and how carefully so many modern pop stars avoid taking political stands that could threaten to alienate some number of their fans. After \u201cWelcome to the Black Parade,\u201d a bearded guy playing a government apparatchik handed out Dodger Dogs to the band and to the dictator; Way waited to find out whether the dictator approved of the hot dog before he decided he liked it too.<\/p>\n

\"Fans <\/p>\n

Fans react as My Chemical Romance performs.<\/p>\n

(Etienne Laurent \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n

Yet what really mattered was how great the songs still are: the deranged rockabilly stomp of \u201cTeenagers,\u201d the Eastern European oom-pah of \u201cMama,\u201d the eruption of \u201cWelcome to the Black Parade\u201d from fist-pumping glam-rock processional to breakneck thrash-punk tantrum.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the better part of Saturday\u2019s show came after the complete \u201cBlack Parade\u201d performance when My Chem \u2014 the Way brothers along with guitarists Frank Iero and Ray Toro, drummer Jarrod Alexander and keyboardist Jamie Muhoberac \u2014 reappeared sans costumes on a smaller secondary stage to \u201cplay some jams,\u201d as Gerard Way put it, from elsewhere in the band\u2019s catalog. (Its most recent studio album came out in 2010, though it\u2019s since issued a smattering of archived material.)<\/p>\n

\"Gerard <\/p>\n

Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance performs.<\/p>\n

(Etienne Laurent \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m Not Okay (I Promise)\u201d was blistering atomic pop, while \u201cSummertime\u201d thrummed with nervy energy; \u201cNa Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)\u201d was as delightfully snotty as its title suggests. The band reached back for what Way called his favorite My Chem song \u2014 \u201cVampires Will Never Hurt You,\u201d from the group\u2019s 2002 debut \u2014 and performed, evidently for the first time, a chugging power ballad called \u201cWar Beneath the Rain,\u201d which Way recalled cutting in a North Hollywood studio \u201cbefore the band broke up\u201d as My Chem tried to make a record that never came out.<\/p>\n

The group closed, as it often does, with its old hit \u201cHelena,\u201d a bleak yet turbo-charged meditation on what the living owe the dead, and as he belted the chorus, Way dropped to his knees in an apparent mix of exhaustion, despair, gratitude \u2014 maybe a bit of befuddlement too. He was leaving no feeling unfelt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Twelve years after a breakup that didn\u2019t stick \u2014 and one year shy of the 20th anniversary of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":98195,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[40226,26949,64244,1582,276,64243,64245,5494,35302,5169,16636,2961,224,5337,4000,64246,5395,4370,25467,1628],"class_list":{"0":"post-98194","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-audience","9":"tag-band","10":"tag-black-parade","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-california","13":"tag-chem","14":"tag-chemical-romance","15":"tag-dodger-stadium","16":"tag-gerard-way","17":"tag-group","18":"tag-inglewood","19":"tag-la","20":"tag-los-angeles","21":"tag-losangeles","22":"tag-pop","23":"tag-ruthless-dictator","24":"tag-saturday","25":"tag-show","26":"tag-thousand","27":"tag-year"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114928386321462251","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98194\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}