Tag: grant morrison

Posted 55 years ago by

I met Gerard Way in Glasgow at the end of 2006 not long after the release of The Black Parade by his band, My Chemical Romance.

The video for the single “Welcome To the Black Parade” had seemed to me a perfect articulation of a kind of, let’s call it “necrodelic,” current I was hoping might show up in popular culture, so I was eager to catch up with him. Those punk, post-apocalyptic echoes of Sgt. Pepper, the elegiac chiming guitars and doomed young soldiers, the Freddie Mercury bravado that compressed the polar extremes of emo and military macho together into a perfect synthesis: the blend was thrilling and showed a pop group with ambition, a vision, and a reach that immediately attracted my attention.

The Black Parade played relentlessly while I was writing psychotic Joker prose for the 663rd issue of the Batman comic, and on all through the endless, cold, dark nights and cigarette-burn days of the miserable Scottish winter.

So by the time Gerard and I sat down together it was already a mutual admiration party. He had the iconic silver crop then but the dye was making his scalp crawl and he’d started to talk about ditching the look. We got on like old pals and spent the afternoon before the band’s sound check talking about comics, travel, rock ‘n’ roll, life, death, Malcolm McDowell, and all that.

Grant Morrison, Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite foreword.
Posted 55 years ago by

When asked if Way and Morrison had thought about collaborating on something, Way said they almost made a My Chemical Romance video together, for the song “Mama” off of “The Black Parade.” Morrison was going to play the devil. Some of their ideas for the video had the band being chased by wolves at one point, Liza Minnelli playing the Virgin Mary and Morrison as the devil yelling in Way’s face.

Unfortunately, the video was never made.

Newsarama
Posted 55 years ago by

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.”

Entertainment Weekly