After the Glasgow show, hundreds linger near the tour bus, hoping for one last glimpse of MCR. Grant Morrison, Gerard’s comic-book hero, is outside their dressing room, praising their ability to bring light from darkness. “You gotta embrace that stuff, and absorb it,” he says. “Steal it back, make it life-affirming again.”
And that, according to Gerard, is the real message of The Black Parade. “It’s that you can survive,” he says. “Life is very, very short, and you can choose to live it how you want. You can choose to dumb yourself down and not express yourself just so you can fit in, just so people won’t dislike you.
’‘Or,” he concludes, voicing what might as well be his band’s motto, “you can f—in’ live.”
Bullet with Butterfly Wings, the Smashing Pumpkins
Before we shot the photos or even had the costumes we needed to choose a director for the first single ‘Welcome To The Black Parade.’ It needed to be the definitive video for the record, an immediate knockout punch to accompany the mini-epic that summed up the album. It would include every major character and would see us transformed into the band. The Black Parade.
I met Samuel Bayer when Bob and I presented an award at an annual music industry award ceremony, which was fun. Sam received an award for lifetime achievement and as they ran his reel, highlights of his work, I saw so many of the videos that had impacted me throughout my life.
One video in particular, ‘Bullet With Butterfly Wings’ by the Smashing Pumpkins, stirred a lot of emotion in me. It was one of my favorite videos of all time because before that video, the Pumpkins never looked so dangerous. Rock bands had started to look boring again and nothing was daring, everyone looked the same in ripped jeans and ‘I could give a fuck!’ flannels. The Smashing Pumpkins looked like they just landed from space to annihilate the Earth. They looked liked a new band.
Gerard Way, Black Parade Special Edition
Way also said that there were elements from My Chemical Romance’s concept album “The Black Parade” in his original pitch for The Umbrella Academy, but he took those out when he decided to use them in his music.
