The Jetset Life Is Gonna Kill You

Before the record release, My Chemical Romance went on tour with bands like Story of the Year, Avenged Sevenfold, and Moments in Grace. After the record release they toured with Taking Back Sunday, then went on Vans Warped Tour. It was during this period that Gerard’s drinking, that had already been a problem, started to get out of control. This was partly due to the atmosphere of Warped, which was like a summer camp where everyone was old enough to get wasted. Gerard would try to be drunk by the time they got on stage, which was sometimes at midday. He would then drink until 4 in the morning, and use pills to get to sleep. Gerard would sometimes spend $150 a month on illegal pills, most of which were Xanax, and he would go through a bottle of vodka every day to day-and-a-half. Eventually he started dabbling in things like cocaine, until he was standing right on the edge of life and death. The rest of the band was doing similar things, but to a far lesser extent. They could see it was a problem, but they didn’t realise how bad it was. They felt it would be hypocritical to tell him to stop, as they (especially Mikey) had been as bad as Gerard at some points.

Another part of the problem was that Gerard was struggling with the band’s sudden rise to fame. He felt that to be the crazy performer he was onstage he had to drink and do drugs because that was the character people wanted him to play. However, he soon lost all separation between himself and that character. He started wearing the clothes he wore onstage all the time. While he did succeed in being the drunken crazy frontman, Gerard’s singing suffered as a result of his consistent drunkenness. Also, he was terrible at kickball, and he lost his pants on stage. Fun times. After a while it started to feel like the band was touring because they had to. Everyone was unhappy and overwhelmed.

On July 20, 2004, Gerard went out to see The Killers in Kansas while My Chemical Romance were on tour with Senses Fail and The Bled. To celebrate, he got hold of an 8-ball of cocaine (3.5 grams) and did so much of it that he was throwing up in the street. When he woke up the next day he felt more suicidal than he ever had in his life. He called Brian who talked him down, then went for a walk with the Warped tour manager until he fell asleep when the drugs were finally out of his system.

Four days later, on July 24, My Chemical Romance played a show in Louisville Kentucky. Gerard was wasted (as usual) and he was given a wireless mic to sing with. He hadn’t ever done a concert with a wireless microphone before, and he treated the show like a joke, just running around all over the place and barely singing. He ended up under the stage with Daryl Palumbo (Head Automatica) and Geoff Rickly (Thursday). This experience taught Gerard to take every show seriously.

After the trainwreck that was Warped ’04, My Chemical Romance regrouped in New Jersey before heading out the Japan for Summersonic. During this break, Gerard drank, sweated, and loaded up on pills and alcohol. Japan was one of the places he had always wanted to go, but now that he was in this situation he wasn’t sure whether he would come back home. He packed the bare minimum of clothes for the trip because he honestly thought he wouldn’t make it. Gerard popped a bar of Xanax for the plane trip and woke up hours later in Japan. Before the shows in Osaka and Tokyo he drank shitloads of sake and ended up playing two of the band’s biggest shows completely wasted. He wanted to make them as memorable as possible, but did so in the worst possible way. As soon as MCR got off stage, Gerard went and sat on a couch in a corner and threw up for 45 minutes into a garbage can. As the rest of the band stood around him trying to figure out what to do, Gerard thought, “This has to be the end… I have to stop drinking. I don’t know how, but this has to be the end”.

When My Chemical Romance got off the plane back in America, Gerard was really upset because he knew what was going to happen to Otter, but at the same time he didn’t even know whether he’d be alive the next day. He went straight to his therapist and checked into Alcoholics Anonymous. He decided against going to rehab and instead went cold turkey by himself. Gerard’s official sobriety day is August 11.