The Paramour

The Black Parade started being written while My Chemical Romance was still on tour. When they did Warped ’05, they customised their tour bus by ripping out the back half and building a makeshift recording studio in it. They used Pro Tools, a drum kit hooked up to an Mbox, and guitars connected to Line 6 Pods to write several demos, including basic versions of the songs that would go on to become Disenchanted, I Don’t Love You and This Is How I Disappear. This studio kept Gerard away from the alcohol fuelled parties of Warped and gave them a head start in recording their 3^rd studio album.

Rob Cavallo

This record was produced by Rob Cavallo, who had previously worked on several Green Day albums, including the critically acclaimed American Idiot. Cavallo helped My Chemical Romance bring their theatrics and epic guitar solos to the forefront. He encouraged them to do whatever they wanted, and gave them the tools to do so (e.g. getting Liza Minelli to provide a cameo on Mama). Cavallo also had a huge selection of vintage guitars, enabling the band to find the right sound for the album. One of the guitars used for Disenchanted and Sleep was the same guitar used by Billie Joe Armstrong to record Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life).

The Paramour - not a house of love

On March the 6^th, 2006, My Chemical Romance headed out to The Paramour, a haunted mansion in Silverlake, Los Angeles. The multi-million dollar manor/studio was built for the star of 1920’s silent film The Creature From The Black Lagoon. It reportedly looks like an Asian palace, with views of the city, a huge garden and an outdoor swimming pool. Unfortunately, the actor’s wife died in a car accident, and her body was buried on the property, leading many to believe that The Paramour is haunted. The ghost opens and closes doors and turns taps on. While for many bands, writing and recording in a haunted mansion would add a “cool” factor, for My Chemical Romance the experience nearly killed them.

Revenge Mikey

The band’s time spent in The Paramour was emotionally the darkest point in the band’s career. The atmosphere was very intense and edgy, and the band put a lot of pressure on themselves. While there, Mikey had a breakdown. He had been having problems with severe anxiety ever since the band’s last victory lap of America, which eventually developed into full-blown depression. Mikey started to withdraw from things, limiting his world to playing shows and staying on the bus between concerts. Some of the biggest shows of his career passed straight by him. Mikey became angry at himself, and started to doubt his musical ability and role in the band. He would stay silent and deflect attention away from himself, which sometimes came off as shyness or even arrogance.

By the time the band started work at The Paramour, Mikey was at an emotional low. He started to feel as though he only had two options – to leave the band or to kill himself. He tried drinking and taking pills, but this did not help. His condition was only worsened by the fact that The Paramour had no phone reception, no TV, and no heating. Also, Mikey had ended up sleeping in a creepy room with only one blue light. After suffering through a month of nervous breakdowns and hyperventilating attacks, Mikey left the mansion to stay with Stacey Fass, the band’s attorney. He started getting therapy, and was diagnosed as having a condition “very close to bipolar”. When he wasn’t seeing a therapist, he returned to The Paramour to help the rest of the band write. However, he did not stay the night again.

After Mikey left, the rest of My Chemical Romance became creatively paralysed. Gerard went through a “pre-mid-life crisis” in which he searched for meaning in what he was doing. He stopped showering and changing his clothes, and started having trouble sleeping. He started having waking dreams and night terrors not being able to breathe and things burning. He started keeping notes of these nightmares. One of things he wrote was “We are all just a black parade”, which helped the band shape the direction of the record. Gerard also described his nightmares into a portable tape recorder, and soundbites from these were later used on Sleep.

To help deal with all of these emotional issues, the band decided to designate one room in The Paramour to go and thrash out their feelings and be brutally honest with each other. This place became known as The Heavy Room. They drained their souls in this room, as they kept finding things they didn’t like about themselves. However, they knew that they had to push themselves to the edge to make a really great record, and ultimately the time spent talking over their feelings in this room strengthened the bonds between them. They realised that they had to put aside their personal problems to help each other, and so emerged closer than ever before.

However, My Chemical Romance was still in creative stasis. A breakthrough finally came when Gerard heard Ray playing songs off Ozzy Osbourne’s Bark At The Moon. “It upset the shit out of me. He wants to play our songs, but he’s playing Ozzy. He was playing the songs a lot faster. They sounded angrier and I knew it was coming solely out of frustration”. Gerard went over to him, and the pair started working on a song scrap entitled “The Saddest Music in the World”. Gerard poured all of his anxieties about Mikey and recording into it, and the song became Famous Last Words. The next day, when Mikey came in they played him the song, and he loved it. This revitalized everyone’s spirits, and the band decided to leave The Paramour a few weeks earlier than they had previously planned. They moved into the Oakwood apartments located close to the studio, and kept working.