All my posts are gonna be TL;DR, so I'm gonna start doing summary posts. Eventually. When I have the time. Here, have a picture instead.
There are so many good things about this picture...
P.S. Leah just pointed out that no one actually knows what TL;DR actually stands for except me (and everyone else on the Internet, but w/e). It means Too Long; Don't Read.
Gerard has a stunning resemblance to Billy Corgan, the lead singer of The Smashing Pumpkins. At least, he looks like Mr. Corgan when he had hair. Something about the nose... and the mouth... or maybe just the fact that THEY ARE IDENTICAL TWINS.
Gerard once went to a Smashing Pumpkins concert with a shaved head (his then-girlfriend convinced him to cut it all off for some reason...) and he kept getting stopped by people because they thought he looked like Billy Corgan.
That is a sweet hat...
I can't heeeear yooou!
Just add hair!
Billy looks kinda adorable with hair...
Not so adorable now...
And then they met in real life!
Father and son...
Gerard also looks like Christina Ricci. Yeah, that girl he used to stalk.
Yup. Thank goodness he's never met her in person, that would be awkward.
Here, have a Pumpkins music video. In which Billy Corgan looks like Gerard if he drove an ice-cream truck.
Michael James Way was born on the 10th of September 1980 in Belleville, New Jersey. He is Gerard’s little brother, and the pair grew up very close. They would professional wrestle each other WWF style, have epic light saber battles (Gerard accidentally knocked out one of Mikey’s teeth once) and share music. He was very shy as a child, and lived in his head a lot. His teachers thought there must be something wrong with him because he wouldn’t talk to any of the other kids, but he was just “playing mind games with them”. When he was 9 he had to get glasses to correct his nearsightedness. Both Gerard and Mikey started drinking in middle school because there was nothing else to do and it was the only way to deal with boredom. His best memory of high school was the moment he left and didn’t have to go back again, as he didn’t connect to anyone there.
Mikey knew he wanted to be in a band from a very young age. He saw his first show at The Pipeline, the local music venue. He was in a few bands as a kid, including some with Gerard. In his teenage years he was really into The Smashing Pumpkins, and would buy tickets to all of their east coast shows. To fund this, he bootlegged rare Disney movies and sold them on eBay, until a private investigator caught him. His most memorable concert is seeing The Smashing Pumpkins at Madison Square Garden with Gerard, which was another step on the road to becoming a rock star. “Me and [Gerard] were both like ‘This is the band we want to be. We want to save lives’”.
After high school he interned for Eyeball Records, a small New Jersey-based label. He would carry equipment, put up fliers, and any other odd jobs that needed doing. He went to college, but only because he though college was “a place you went to find people to be in a band with”. He was a fixture on the Jersey scene, a hard-partying extrovert that knew everyone worth knowing. He met Ray through a mutual friend Gerard had met in art school – Ray’s first impression of him was that he was a weird skinny kid who wore his glasses on the end of his nose. Mikey was also friends with Geoff Rickly, the lead singer of legendary New Jersey band Thursday. Mikey introduced Geoff to Gerard, who at the time was known as “this weird artist kid who was Mikey’s older brother.” Gerard and Geoff quickly became friends, and Gerard did a few t-shirt designs for Thursday.
When Mikey heard the Attic Demos, he loved them so much he decided to join as the bass player even though he didn’t really know how to play bass properly. He learned MCR's set in a month. He also named the band. Gerard and him once worked at Barnes and Noble. Mikey was friends with the manager, and had to pull strings with him to get Gerard the job, because he was the kind of guy that couldn’t get a job anywhere normal. Mikey and the manager used to talk about British culture, especially music and books. One day the manager left out a stack of Irvine Welsh books (author of Trainspotting), and Mikey saw that one of the books was described as “Three Tales Of Chemical Romance”. He thought it would make a cool band name if there was a “My” in front of it to add a personal dimension to it. When people found out about the name they were heaps jealous.
At one of the Eyeball parties, Mikey played the demo to Alex Saavedra, owner of Eyeball Records. Saavedra loved it so much that he immediately added My Chemical Romance to Eyeball's roster.
Raymond Toro was born on the 15th of July 1977, in Kearny, New Jersey. He lived on a dead end street on the border of Kearny and Harrison in a dangerous neighborhood where drug-related crime was common and dead bodies would often be found in the local park. One of his childhood memories was watching a local drug addict called Bertine get taken away in an ambulance after OD’ing outside Ray’s house. He has a Puerto Rican and Portuguese background. When he was growing up, his father worked at the local post office in the international shipping department. His father also instilled a love of all things electronic into him and his two older brothers, taking them to computer shows and flea markets to pick up weird circuit boards and computer games. He grew up playing video games like Street Fighter 2 and first person shooters. His mother was very protective of Ray because of the dangerous neighborhood the family was living in, so he wasn’t really allowed out very much. He wasn’t very popular at school, describing himself as having been “pretty invisible”. When he was in junior high he once tried to impress a girl by sticking a piece of Runts candy up his nose, but it got stuck and he had to go to the nurse to get it pulled out. He went to the same high school as Gerard and Mikey Way, and was “loose friends” with the brothers, but only really became good friends with them after high school.
Ray when he was 9
Ray shared a tiny room with his two older brothers, and grew up listening to classic rock music with them. His oldest brother, Louis, loved music and had a guitar that he would practice on at all hours of the night. When Ray was in junior high he became interested in metal bands like Metallica, Pantera and Anthrax. He expressed this interest to his brother, and Louis lent him his many guitar magazines and taught Ray how to play. The next Christmas Louis bought Ray a guitar of his own. Since Ray didn’t have many friends, he would go straight home after school to practice guitar, later saying “Thank God I didn’t have any girlfriends or friends, ‘cos I would suck now!” His two biggest influences were Randy Rhoades (played with Ozzy Osbourne) and Brian May (Queen). While in high school he joined a band called The Rodneys, with which he played a few shows at the popular local venue The Pipeline.
After school he went to the William Patterson University to study film. He still loved playing music, and was in several bands, including a pop-punk band called Nancy Drew, which Gerard was also in. However, his main aspiration was to become a film editor. While at college he made several short films, including one about a guy obsessed with eating eggs (at the end an egg came back to life and killed the man). He fell out of contact with Mikey and Gerard, although they remained casual friends. In 2001 he wasn’t really doing anything with himself, just playing drums in a little band with a few friends. When Gerard found out about this he was “bummed out”, because Ray was the best guitarist he knew. When the band was starting, Gerard called him and said “No strings attached; you don’t have to say yes or no. Just come, check it out, and bring your guitar.” Together, Gerard, Ray and Matt wrote Our Lady Of Sorrows (originally Bring More Knives), Cubicles and Skylines and Turnstiles (originally just Turnstiles). They recorded demos of these songs in Otter’s attic, and released them on an EP called Dreams About Stabbing And/Or Being Stabbed (aka The Attic Demos). This disc was reputed to have also featured and early version of Vampires Will Never Hurt You called Stabbing, but this song appears to have been lost to the seas of time.
Before they could start playing live shows, though, the band needed a bassist and a name. Gerard played the demos to his little brother Mikey, who loved it so much he provided both.
On the morning of 9/11 Gerard was on the ferry, on his way to work, when he saw the Towers go down. “I was in Hoboken, which is right across the Hudson River. There was 400 people and me, and I was at the railing. Right in front of us, it just went down. It was the biggest neutron bomb of mental anguish you’ve ever felt.” This catastrophic event made him wake-up and think about his life, whether he was happy and fulfilled. When he found that he was not, he began to regard commercial art as a load of crap. Gerard went home and wrote the band’s first song on his old blue guitar in his parent’s basement. It was called Skylines and Turnstiles, and was his reaction to 9/11.
Soon after, he ran into his old friend Matt “Otter” Pelissier at The Loop Lounge and recruited him to play the drums. They had a few practice sessions in Otter’s attic, but the pair quickly discovered that Gerard couldn’t sing and play guitar at the same time, so he called up his old friend Ray Toro…
When Gerard was young he got his tonsils taken out and his grandmother bought him a stack of Captain America comics for him to read in hospital, kick-starting a love of comics. He started buying comics for himself (the first comic he bought with his own money was an issue of X-Men that had Wolverine being crucified on the cover), and quickly decided that he wanted to make a career out of comics. When he was in middle school his mother would drive him to the Newark library so that he could look at art books. He got a job at the local comic book shop when he was 15 (he got held up while working there; the robbers put a gun to his head execution style). As a teenager he discovered comics like Watchmen, Dark Knight, Doom Patrol and Krom. After finishing high school he went to the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, where he majored in Illustration and Cartooning. He showed up in drag one day because he’s a cool guy like that. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
Gerard's SVA yearbook photo.
After leaving college Gerard interned a lot, also working in toy design for a company called Funhaus. He interned at DC for Joe Boyle, working mostly as a photocopy boy. While there he met Jim Krueger (celebrated comic book writer), who paid him out of pocket to do stuff for him on freelance projects. After a while Joe Boyle got a new job at Curious Pictures helping with Sheep In The Big City, and brought Gerard with him as his intern. While there, he met Stu Horvath, with whom he started a project called The Amazing Goffo Brothers, Piano Movers Extraordinaire, which was about a pair of Italian brothers who had surreal adventures in a dark, creepy city. One of the minor characters was a little monkey that slapped people in the face with a spatula if they disrespected breakfast. Unfortunately, Gerard and Stu had a falling out, and split the characters between them. Joe’s only request was that he was allowed to do something with the monkey.
Soon after, Joe and Gerard started working on a new project called The Breakfast Monkey, about a Scandinavian flying imp that talked like Bjork and could harness “Breakfast Magic”. The idea came from a stuffed toy monkey Gerard used to have. Whenever his girlfriend at the time was sick, Gerard would put on a squeaky voice and make the monkey talk about how wonderful pancakes were to cheer her up. Gerard did the penciling, Joe did the inking, and they both came up with the storyline. The animatic available on YouTube features the song “Crusin’ For Crazy”, which was the first ever song written by Gerard and his friend Ray Toro. There was some interest in the show from Cartoon Network, but Gerard quickly realized that he had very little control over what would happen to the project. Eventually, Cartoon Network dropped The Breakfast Monkey because they had just signed Aqua Teen Hunger Force and didn’t want another food show. Their loss.
This is the animatic Joe and Gerard made. Joe did the voice of the wrestler, Gerard did the Breakfast Monkey, and they split the other characters between them.
And this is the Breakfast Monkey Documentary. It was filmed by one of their friends who was studying film as a school project. It features Gerard with a bowl cut and Joe in a coat lined with black fur.
Gerard Arthur Way was born on the 9th of April 1977 in Belleville, New Jersey. He is half Italian, half Scottish - his father (“Handsome Don”) was a mechanic and his mother, Donna, was a hairdresser. Donna was a large influence on his interest in horror and the occult, renting horror movies and making Gerard and his little brother Mikey watch them with her. Gerard was also extremely close to his grandmother Elena, who recognized his creative potential at an early age and taught him how to draw, paint and sing. His family lived in a very dangerous area with a lot of mafia and drug-related crimes, so Gerard and Mikey couldn’t really play outside very much, instead having to create their own worlds inside their heads to live in. To pass the time, Gerard would draw and tell stories for his little brother. When he was in 4th grade, he and his brother moved schools, and Gerard decided that he would use this fresh start to become more involved in things. He played snare in marching band (which he hated – at band camp they made him wake up at 2 in the morning). Gerard also auditioned for the school play and got the part of Peter Pan. His grandma made him a costume with green tights. He quickly got sick of being known as ‘the singer kid’, and when he started middle school he turned his back on performing.
Throughout his teenager years Gerard was regarded by his peers as the weird loner fat kid. On his first day of high school at Belleville High he was the guy in the army jacket and horror movie t-shirt eating his lunch alone. He mostly kept to himself during high school, drawing, drinking, and listening to music. He liked Britpop bands like Pulp and Blur because it was social commentary as well as good music. He played games like Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer. At a Dungeons and Dragons party and older friend introduced him to Iron Maiden, and from there he discovered other rock and punk bands like Black Flag, Morrissey and the Smiths, and The Misfits. When Gerard was 15 he bought a blue guitar that looked like Billie Joe Armstrong’s guitar. He tried to play guitar in a band, but when he couldn’t play Sweet Home Alabama (by Lynyrd Skynyrd) he got kicked out. He tried starting a few other bands (including Raygun Jones, in which his brother Mikey played the bass), but nothing worked out.
Gerard was into a lot of weird things. When he was young he realized that everyone he knew was going to die, which eventually influenced him in a lot of ways. Having been raised Catholic had given him a fear of death and damnation. When Gerard was 17 he found out that he lived near Christina Ricci, and bought a bike for the sole purpose of stalking her, helping him lose weight. When his girlfriend dumped him (so that she could have fun in Greece) he tried on his mom’s lipstick. Gerard had a friend called Dennis that had an uncle named TT who was into voodoo and could supposedly see into the future. When Gerard asked what he was gonna be when he grew up, TT said that he could see Gerard on the stage. However, his first love was art and comic books.
day of high school at Belleville High he was the guy in the army jacket and horror movie t-shirt eating his lunch alone. He mostly kept to himself during high school, drawing, drinking, and listening to music. He liked Britpop bands like Pulp and Blur because it was social commentary as well as good music. He played games like Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer. At a Dungeons and Dragons party and older friend introduced him to Iron Maiden, and from there he discovered other rock and punk bands like Black Flag, Morrissey and the Smiths, and The Misfits. When Gerard was 15 he bought a blue guitar that looked like Billie Joe Armstrong’s guitar. He tried to play guitar in a band, but when he couldn’t play Sweet Home Alabama (by Lynyrd Skynyrd) he got kicked out. He tried starting a few other bands (including Raygun Jones, in which his brother Mikey played the bass), but nothing worked out.