#band of brothers 20th anniversary

[rossmccallsqueen]

Band of Brothers 20th Anniversary Symposium - From Toccoa to Europe: On the Ground with Easy Company (a brief summary)

no one wanted to write episode 6 apparently

“Put the clock on Ross” 😂

Shane always gravitated towards Roe throughout the audition process, but didn’t know if that’s who he would end up being

Shane said everyone really wanted to go to boot camp

Rick said most of his used source material was him talking to the actual people/George’s wife and people who knew George

“GET THIS GOD DAMN PLATOON ON THE MOVE” 😂

Rick said he just felt really supported by his fellow cast and the team making the show 🥺

“This isn’t about you this is about easy company.” - Ross about how the actors felt as a team doing the show

Matthew said he grew up watching war movies and his dad was a marine, so he grew up with the shows material

Matthew didn’t get to talk to Spiers but he said he “got to stare at his picture, and if you stare at it long enough something happens”

“We we’re all scared of you. We’re still scared of you” - everyone on stage @ Matthew bc of how mysterious spiers was 😂

“Ross is my handler” - Matthew “that’s the worst handler in the world!” 😂

The writers said they were all cocky after they got out of boot camp but it meant they had a show bc it showed how much they bonded

Ross said they all had to earn the right to wear their uniforms bc they wanted to make sure there was respect 🥺

RICK IMMITATED DONNIES NEW KIDS MOVES IM HAHAHAHA

Donnie whalberg took the marches very seriously bc Rick said “he has so much swagger”

ROSS CALLED THEM A BOYBAND “we were basically a boyband” 😂

Episode 6: all of the real life men said that Doc Roe was an “angel” 🥺

Episode 7: there was a moment where Buck was supposed to run out of the trees and be tackled by Luz who would save his life but they decided not to show that part to show respect

Ross said the scene in the church was just so serene for them bc of the impact it had

Episode 7 was one of the last episodes they shot

They shot them In this order: 1, 2, 3, 5, 4, 9, 10, 6, 7, and filmed 8 last

Dick Winters was one of the only people who would talk about the subject matter of episode 9. He kept saying “I was there I saw it you have to tell this story”

Writer wanted to make episode 9 about Nixon and dick was so excited

When winters goes into the widows house he’s so uncomfortable and he feels guilty really did happen to winters

Winters said it was okay thar the writer took his story and gave it to Nixon

When there are mistakes in the show, it was usually because of the real life guys remembering something wrong

[rebeccapearson]

Three-day supply of K rations, chocolate bars, Charms candy, powdered coffee, sugar, matches, compass, bayonet, ammunition, gas mask, musette bag with ammo, my webbing, my .45, canteen, two cartons of smokes, Hawkins mine, two grenades, smoke grenade, Gammon grenade, TNT, this bullshit, and a pair of nasty skivvies! What’s your point? This stuff weighs as much as I do. I still got my chute, my reserve chute, my Mae West and my M-1!

[pfenniged]

okay- I’m still not over the fact that Ross McCall confirmed at the Band of Brothers 20th Anniversary Symposium that some thirsty children walked up to him in the wild and had the audacity to be like I LOVED YOU IN BAND OF BROTHERS and bless this man Ross was oblivious enough to be like “IT’S A TRIBUTE TO THE ENDURING LEGACY OF THE MEN THAT PEOPLE AS YOUNG AS SEVENTEEN ARE INTERESTED IN THEIR LEGACY-” and I’m just here as a fully grown woman being like BLESS YOU ROSS BUT ALL THE CONTEXT CLUES YOU’RE GIVING TO THIS STORY LEAD ME TO BELIEVE THIRSTY TEENAGERS APPROACHED YOU EVEN TWENTY YEARS LATER AS MORE OF A TRIBUTE TO YOUR ENDURING HOTNESS-

[gluteus-canis-familiaris]

Easy Companyyyy, school circleee!!! Register now if you haven't yet! It's totally free and it's happening tomorrow 💖💖💖 the last time I was able to watch free content from the BoB cast was 10 years ago, no joke, so this is very special indeed!! Check out the program to see which of your faves are attending (*ahem ahem Liebgott simps, Ross is in nearly all the events agsjshnss*)

Registration here: http://support.nationalww2museum.org/site/Calendar/669547512?view=RSVP&id=128760

Event Program here: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/events-programs/events/128621-band-brothers-20th-anniversary-symposium?&_ga=2.108172160.329197387.1657039805-502667733.1645801003#program

[drinkwhiskeyandsmile]

I'm just gonna act like I didn't cry on the Band of Brothers 20th Anniversary Symposium video the Museum posted 🥲

I feel like my hearts gonna explode 🥺

The love these gents have for each other, and how strong friendships they got even 20 years later, is the most amazing thing ever. And they're so respectful and humble, I'm so happy I got to know this series, truly ❤️‍🔥

I can't believe they played war heroes in the series who had this incredible camaraderie, and now they have the same for life 😭❤️‍🩹❤

[shelyue99]

I came across BoB only last year (thanks Netflix the best thing you have done to me) hence 22 years late. I wish I had done it earlier (I definitely heard about the title, maybe in the 2000s, but I was too young at the time to take interests in it and I forgot about it), but because of it there are already a lot of resources and materials (and numerous fanfics) to dig into. I love research and meta and here are something I found interesting and relevant to BoB (with a focus on Winters and Nixon) :

Documentary:

Ron Livingston's Band of Brothers Video Diary

We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company

He Has Seen War

Book:

Band of Brothers, by Stephen E. Ambrose

Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoir of Major Dick Winters, by Dick Winters, Cole C. Kingseed

Biggest Brother: The Life of Major Dick Winters, The Man Who Led the Band of Brothers, by Larry Alexander

Conversation with Major Dick Winters: Life Lessons from the Commander of the Band of Brothers, by Cole C. Kingseed

Hang Tough: The WWII Letters and Artifacts of Major Dick Winters, by Erik Dorr, Jared Frederick

Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich, by David Kenyon Webster

Tinderbox: HBO's Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers, By James Andrew Miller

Podcast:

HBO's official Band of Brothers 20th Anniversary Podcast

The Ross Owen Show, this blog has all the BoB cast interview recordings.

Dead Eyes

Other Materials:

"Band of Brothers" 20th Anniversary Symposium, the video can be found here.

Re the symposium, I love some of the trivia stories the cast shared, like when some replacement guy (I remembered it's Rene Moreno who played Ramirez but my memory could be fuzzy) were having dinner with the OG Easy men at this posh restaurant after shooting. Someone asked Moreno what he did today and he said he cut his hair and got to shoot the gun something like that, and Neal McDonough (Compton) asked him to drop and gave him 20, Moreno looked at Ron Livingston for help, who he thought was the only normal person at the table, but Ron was like yeah you had to do it, and so he dropped and did 20 push-ups and startled the waitress and other customers.

The other interesting episode is that when they were shooting for the river crossing scene in Ep 8, a replacement guy (Ramirez or Hashey?) who wasn't in the bootcamp and wasn't that immersed, jokingly told Dexter Fletcher (Martin) to fuck off, everyone went quiet like how dare you say to that to the officer, and Ross McCall (Liebgott) asked, "Permission to throw him off the boat, sir," Fletcher said let him think about it. They didn't throw him off the boat but I find the comparison between those who went to the bootcamp vs. those didn't and thus didn't have a clue is so interesting. Oh, and Matthew Settle still scared the other cast and staff because Speirs is so scary lol.

[lonely-soul-02]

Oasis Reunion Speculation 2011 vs 2023

2011 was a busy year on the Oasis reunion rumours front although extracts from various articles show how wide the gulf was between the brothers. What's fascinating is how Noel's WTSMG anniversary ideas back then mirror Liam's Definitely Maybe anniversary ideas now. They missed the anniversary reunion boat in 2015 but they could catch the next one. Have lessons been learned?

Liam

"Going around playing someone else's [Oasis] songs?" says Gallagher. "That's not cool, is it?"

"Oasis is an entity that is to do with Liam and Noel," agrees Bell.

But an Oasis reunion, Gallagher insists, simply isn't going to happen.

"Never," he says firmly. "This [Beady Eye] is not a stopgap until me and Noel come to our senses and start Oasis again. That is well and truly done.” 

The Guardian Feb 2011

Noel 

“Well I regret when I was sat in the car and I kind of made a snap decision, really, if I had my time again I’d have thought about it a bit more and gone back, done the gig, done the next, there was only two gigs left on the tour,” he remarked.

“It was a hasty decision I’ve got to say, and we could maybe have all gone off and done other things for a few years. In my own head the 2015, 20-year anniversary of ‘…Morning Glory’ is looming and we could have maybe come back, made a new album and played that album in its entirety [WTSMG] and gone and been the greatest thing ever, but there you go.”

Absolute Radio August 2011

Noel

Is there any chance that Oasis will ever reunite?

“Liam has said that the idea makes him vomit and it would never happen, so I don’t need to add anything to that. I don’t need the fucking money, but I think it’s a shame that songs like “Champagne Supernova,” “Rock and Roll Star,” “The Importance of Being Idle” and “The Shock of the Lightning” will never be played again. In a stadium. That kind of fills me with sadness. The money is kind of irrelevant. There’s bands that say, ‘We don’t want to get back together. We’d have to make a new record.' Why? Fuck a new record. No one gives a shit about your new record. Play the fucking old ones. The Led Zeppelin guys are like, ‘There will have to be a new record.’ Really? Yeah, because that would be fucking great, wouldn’t it? Play fucking ‘Whole Lotta Love.’ Get over it.

So, you’re saying there won’t ever be a reunion? Most groups say ‘never ever’ and then 10 years later, they do it.

"I’m saying that the singer has said “Never ever.” So we’ll leave it at that. 

Rolling Stone Magazine Oct 2011

Liam

"If we can put our shit aside, we can tour and play the album in its entirety for the 20th anniversary," Liam told Rolling Stone magazine. "I'd be up for that, if it's on our terms. There's got to be two-way respect. [Noel's] the one that keeps mentioning it," Liam said. "I want to put him out of his misery.

The Guardian Oct 2011

Fast forward to 2016...

Liam on Oasis splitting… I was more disappointed that Oasis split up. I wonder if he was. I’ve never heard him say he was disappointed about Oasis. No, he’s got what he wanted. Er, Liam seems you didn't follow his 2011 interviews!

Liam on reuniting with Noel…. Do you think I want to be in a band with that c*nt? He says, ‘Liam has to change.’ Get to f*ck. So I just tweet when he drops the ball because I will not let him get away with murder.

Q Magazine Aug 2016

What a role reversal. In Liam's case, it's all a far cry from the Oasis flag carrier he is today, whist Noel was the wistful and nostalgic one. What strikes me is how entrenched they both are in this cycle of baiting and punishing one another. As soon as one expresses interest, the other dismisses it, so that they are never in agreement, just as they are demonstrating in 2023.

[statickingofevil]

Xero (Edsel Dope) about Wayne´s family support.

Credits below.

Wayne’s family has expressed their support for this as well. What did they share with you about Wayne as you and the band set forth with plans to honor him?

Wayne's family made it very clear to us that they hoped for Wayne's spirit and for the music of Static-X to live on. They hoped for his unfinished works to be fully realized through the original line up of the band and for Ken [Jay], Tony, and Koichi [Fukada], to continue on with Static-X for as long as they wish.

It was very emotional seeing his family on tour. I really didn’t know what to expect at first, because this is such a unique situation. Wayne's sister Aimee came to meet me on the tour bus immediately after our show in Atlanta. She just wrapped her arms around me and we both just started to cry. I totally lost my shit, and I couldn’t get it together. I was just sobbing and I felt such a connection to her and I could feel the love that she had for her brother being projected onto me … It was so emotional, and I felt like I had just received the ultimate form of approval for what I was doing.

That was the moment that I realized how incredibly personal this all really was. I mean, from the start, I took this all very seriously and I was incredibly committed to respecting Wayne and making sure that people understood that my role was not to replace him, but to represent him on the 20th Anniversary tour. But it was his sister Aimee’s love that really brought it all home for me.

A few weeks later, Wayne's mom (Darlene), dad (Richard), brother (Jeff) and his other sister (Lisa) came out to the show in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and it was more of the same. Wayne's father actually pulled me aside, and he just looked me dead in the eyes and said, “Keep doing this.” He told me that I was making him proud and that I was doing a better job than he ever could have imagined. I didn’t know what to say to that. It choked me up. I just hugged him and thanked him for the support and tried to hold it together.

My experience with Wayne's mother was something that I’ll never forget. She put her arms around me and hugged me so tight that all I could do was imagine if the roles were reversed, and it was my mother hugging Wayne and thanking him for keeping my spirit alive. That’s some heavy shit. So much emotion, so very personal. I’ve been playing music and touring professionally for a long, long time. I’ve made lots of records and I’ve had lots of what I would define as incredible, memorable moments, but this is by far the deepest, most meaningful thing that I’ve ever taken part in.

⸺

"Wayne is currently on the minds and in the hearts of the metal community in a very unique and special way. His memory / legacy is more celebrated than it has ever been before.

I personally get to see the joy, the tears, and the incredible sense of healing that is occurring on the faces and in the hearts of Static-X fans, each and every night, around the world.

I’m not attempting to be a spokesperson for Static-X, but I will share that I have personally met Wayne’s parents and siblings, as they have attended a number of these shows.

I have personally seen their tears of joy and their expressions of gratitude and approval for the way that Tony, Ken, Koichi, & Xer0 are celebrating the music and memorializing the life and legacy of their son and sibling, Wayne Wells Static.

I’m including a candid photo that I snapped of Static-X drummer Ken Jay embracing Wayne’s father, while Tony Campos, Wayne’s mother, Wayne’s siblings and friends share some personal time together. Words cannot express the love and respect that I’ve experienced out here."

Credits: https://www.rockconfidential.com/edsel-dope-addresses-static-x-rumors/

Read More: Static-X's Xer0: Wayne's Family Has Made Tour Incredibly Personal | https://loudwire.com/static-x-xero-reunion-tour-interview/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral

[bandcampsnoop]

4/27/24.

On January 1st we posted about Audio Antihero's release from Nosferatu D2. While that band is no more, the Parker brothers are still making music as My Best Unbeaten Brother (Croydon, England).

At the time I mentioned how Nosferatu D2 reminded me of a cross between The Wedding Present and The Fall. My Best Unbeaten Brother immediately made me think of these comps, but this new band's music tends to be a bit more melodic.

"Slayer On a Sunny Day" is one of 15 tracks on the compilation "20 Years of Joy Vol. 2". This compilation celebrates the 20th anniversary of the blog/radio station Joyzine. While there isn't a traditional physical release, there is a card with a download card available. I've listened to this compilation and really enjoyed a lot - most notably My Best Unbeaten Brother and Sergeant Buzfuz.

Audio Antihero will be releasing "Pessimistic Pizza" in digital format at the end of June. Hopefully Jamie will find a way to make a physical release.

[lupoteodoro]

don’t miss this

[allnightlongzine]

The Eternal March of the Black Parade

Twenty years after their debut album and more than a decade after the critics dismissed them, My Chemical Romance stands as one of the greatest rock bands of the 21st century. How did we end up here?

Rob Harvilla | Jul 26, 2022 | theringer.com

Illustration by Brent Schoonover

My Chemical Romance is touring again, Paramore and Jimmy Eat World are headlining a major festival this fall, and there’s a skinny, tattooed white dude with a guitar dominating the charts. In case you haven’t heard, emo is back, baby! In honor of its return to prominence—plus the 20th anniversary of the first MCR album—The Ringer is following Emo Wendy’s lead and tapping into that nostalgia. Welcome to Emo Week, where we’ll explore the scene’s roots, its evolution to the modern-day Fifth Wave, and some of the ephemera around the genre. Grab your Telecasters and Manic Panic and join us in the Black Parade.

Our story starts in New York City on September 11, 2001. It just does. Suspend your disbelief; respect his audacity. But is it really so hard to believe, and is it really so audacious, that Gerard Way—then a 24-year-old New Jersey native, NYC art school graduate, and creatively stifled Cartoon Network intern—would choose that awful, vulnerable, crushingly human moment to reimagine himself as something immortal, someone superheroic? “That felt like the end of the world,” he told Newsweek in 2019. “It felt like the apocalypse. I was surrounded by hundreds of people on a dock on the Hudson River, and we watched the buildings go down, and there was this wave of human anguish that I’ve never felt before. Since then, I’ve continued to think about what we would do at the end of the world if we knew we only had a little time left.”

Standing on that dock, what Gerard decided he would do was channel his shock and grief and newfound sense of immediacy into the ultimate rock-star origin story. “Something just clicked in my head that morning,” he told Spin magazine in 2005. “I literally said to myself, ‘Fuck art. I’ve gotta get out of the basement. I’ve gotta see the world. I’ve gotta make a difference!’” So he hooked up with a drummer friend from high school named Matt Pelissier (the first of several drummers, alas) and wrote an anguished, furious, and yet startlingly tender pop-punk song called “Skylines and Turnstiles.” It starts like this.

You’re not in this alone Let me break this awkward silence Let me go, go on record Be the first to say I’m sorry Hear me out

Gerard sang and played guitar, though he struggled to do both at once. (It’s harder than it looks.) Slowly, he found other bandmates: Ray Toro and Frank Iero on guitars, plus his own younger brother Mikey Way on bass. Thanks to his gig working at Barnes & Noble, Mikey also contributed a band name: My Chemical Romance, an improvement on the title of an Irvine Welsh book. The band signed with a tiny label called Eyeball Records and released, on July 23, 2002, their debut album, called I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, produced by New Jersey punk deity and Thursday frontman Geoff Rickly, who’d already mastered the dark art of combining the rawest possible materials into something impossibly gargantuan.

This broken city sky Like butane on my skin Stolen from my eyes Hello angel, tell me Where are you? Tell me where we go from here

“Skylines and Turnstiles” is not, by a long shot, the highlight of MCR’s least-great album. The raw materials are there, of course: the scabrous and shimmering guitars, the breathless downhill-sprint propulsion, the throat-shredding screams to bolster the chorus and punctuate Gerard’s unguarded and brutal horror-flick lyricism. But your first song is never your best. Here, the one called “Honey, This Mirror Isn’t Big Enough for the Two of Us” is better. And the one called “Vampires Will Never Hurt You,” and the one called “Demolition Lovers,” and the one called “Drowning Lessons,” and even the one called “Cubicles.” But as an opening salvo, as the gritty first panel in a dense and ludicrously ambitious comic-book-punk saga, as an achingly sincere attempt to break the awkward silence and roll back the wave of human anguish, as a macabre but heartfelt attempt at genuine connection, Gerard Way’s first song got him where he needed to go, which was firmly on the road to leading everyone where they needed to go.

And after seeing what we saw Can we still reclaim our innocence? And if the world needs something better Let’s give them one more reason, now

It’s the rousing, heartbreaking vocal harmony on the words the world needs something better that shows you what Gerard and his vampiric cohort is really about. Look beyond the eyeliner, the hair dye, the ghostly pallor, the extra-macabre marching band outfits, the wholesale mall-goth hijacking of this band’s whole look, its whole ethos. Don’t flinch at the lyrics no matter how gnarly and nihilistic they seem to get; don’t get too wrapped up in the surreal sensationalism of their flames-and-chaos music videos. Buy the album tie-in comic book or don’t. Just never forget that the closer we get to the end of the world, the tighter Gerard Way means to hold us, to make however much time we have left just that much more bearable.

I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love just celebrated its 20th birthday, and inspired some very excellent anniversary pieces despite being, well, MCR’s least-great album. Their next record was a gleaming and snarling major-label-debut colossus that crowned the fellas as Warped Tour royalty; the record after that was a hilariously overblown rock-opera funeral march and consensus masterpiece that now stands among the greatest emo albums ever born, any era, any wave; the record after that is my personal favorite. Then MCR broke up in 2013, to appropriately operatic dismay, going out as close to On Top as a youngish rock band possibly can.

There was no explicit tabloid-roiling catalyst, no real drama, except no drama is not exactly this band’s vibe. Gerard’s farewell letter, posted to Twitter three days after the news broke and titled A Vigil, On Birds and Glass, is my personal favorite Rock Band Breakup Explanation Letter, any subgenre, any era, precisely because it captures this band’s precise and fantastic combination of galactically overwrought and unabashedly intimate.

We were spectacular. Every show I knew this, every show I felt it with or without external confirmation. There were some clunkers, sometimes our secondhand gear broke, sometimes I had no voice- we were still great. It is this belief that made us who we were, but also many other things, all of them vital- And all of the things that made us great were the very things that were going to end us- Fiction. Friction. Creation. Destruction. Opposition. Aggression. Ambition. Heart. Hate. Courage. Spite. Beauty. Desperation. LOVE. Fear. Glamour. Weakness. Hope. Fatalism.

And then he expands on the fatalism part as a way of explaining why, exactly, this band broke up after only 11 years and four albums.

That last one is very important. My Chemical Romance had, built within its core, a fail-safe. A doomsday device, should certain events occur or cease occurring, would detonate. I shared knowledge of this “flaw” within weeks of its inception. Personally, I embraced it because, again, it made us perfect. A perfect machine, beautiful, yet self aware of its system. Under directive to terminate before it becomes compromised. To protect the idea- at all costs. This probably sounds like something ripped from the pages of a four-color comic book, and that’s the point. No compromise. No surrender. No fucking shit. To me that’s rock and roll. And I believe in rock and roll.

He goes on at great length. It’s wild, it’s lovely, it’s absurd, it’s genuinely moving. The fellas found stuff to keep them busy post-breakup, and Gerard most prominently, of course: the solo album, the ongoing and relentlessly off-kilter Netflix series based on his comic book. And then, inevitably, MCR reunited—tentatively in late 2019, and full-throatedly here in 2022, headlining giant festivals and packing arenas as what certainly feels like the first rock-band reunion that anybody’s actually given a shit about in years. Put it this way: If you are a remotely young person who, like Way himself, still believes in rock and roll, My Chemical Romance is very likely why, and it’s worth ruminating on how, exactly, this profoundly strange and desperately necessary band has inspired such belief. Anybody who listened to I Brought You My Bullets in 2002 couldn’t have predicted any of this. But the guys who made it did.

Emo is back, baby! In honor of its return to prominence—plus the 20th anniversary of the first MCR album—we’re diving deep into all things emo.

Grab your Telecasters and Manic Panic and join us for Emo Week.

The most striking song on I Brought You My Bullets—the most Gerard song, the most MCR song, The Most in general—is called “Early Sunsets Over Monroeville.” It begins as a woozy but deceptively gentle waltz but darkens by ominous degrees, and soon Gerard is wailing the line “If I had the guts / To put this to your head,” and maybe you worry for a second that this is the 200,000th uncouth and unnervingly violent post-breakup emo song. And then you find out that Monroeville is in Pennsylvania, and parts of George Romero’s 1978 zombie-flick classic Dawn of the Dead were shot there, and oh, wow, suddenly you realize this is actually a very grim, very romantic song about an inconsolable man realizing he has to kill his no-longer-human wife:

And there’s no room in this hell There’s no room in the next And our memories defeat us And I’ll end this duress

Not the best song, but the most. My Chemical Romance would get truly dangerous, and truly great, when their best and their most intertwined. They signed to a major label; all the coolest kids do. Deal with it. Deal with this, while you’re at it.

“You like D&D, Audrey Hepburn, Fangoria, Harry Houdini, and croquet,” Ray Toro informs Gerard Way at the onset of “I’m Not Okay (I Promise),” one of several monster singles from their 2004 Reprise Records debut, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. “You can’t swim, you can’t dance, and you don’t know karate. Face it: You’re never gonna make it.” Cue the high-school-outcast histrionics, the cuddly arena-punk viciousness, Gerard’s destabilizing magnetism as he practically screams in your face, the vintage airbrushed-van metalhead radness of Ray’s guitar solo, and, before the final bone-crushing chorus, a truly bonkers Gerard buildup/breakdown for the ages:

But you really need to listen to me Because I’m telling you the truth I mean this I’m okay (Trust me)

And, boom. There are days when this is the best song ever written. And there are other days when it’s not even the best song on Three Cheers: “Helena” has a majestic Mötley Crüe meets the Misfits chorus, the power chords ascending a stairway to hell, an infinite legion of demons pumping their fists along to every word: So long and good night / So long and good night. Or maybe the power-ballad pyrotechnics of “The Ghost of You” do it for you, the classic quiet-verse-loud-chorus dynamics, Gerard’s unapologetic controlled-screaming melodrama (“At the top of my lungs in my arms / SHE DIES”), the extra-luxe video that recreates D-Day down to the puking soldiers landing on the beach. Tell me these guys aren’t spectacular, and not driven by friction, ambition, LOVE, glamour, and fatalism.

By 2005 MCR are headlining the good ol’ Warped Tour alongside Fall Out Boy, and early-2000s third-wave emo—undaunted in its embrace of pop-punk, of the mall, of teenagers both actual and perpetual—has its very own Queen, and/or Led Zeppelin, and/or Pink Floyd. Suspend your disbelief; respect their audacity. “The main thing that we’ve always wanted to do was to save people’s lives,” Gerard informed the magazine Alternative Press in 2004. “That sounds Mother Teresa–ish and outlandish, but it really does happen. It does make a huge difference. We’ve seen it in action.”

Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, by the way, is a semi-derailed concept album involving two lovers, a man and a woman, who both seemingly die in a gunfight: The man goes to hell, is informed by the Devil that the woman is still alive, and agrees to kill 1,000 evil men in exchange for the chance to reunite with her. I say semi-derailed because during the writing process Gerard and Mikey’s beloved grandmother died—“Helena” is about her—and Gerard considered scrapping the whole thing. “When that happened, I was like, ‘Fuck. Oh, God. How am I going to deal with this story? Does it even matter anymore? Is it just fucking pretentious? Is it bullshit?’” he told Alternative Press. “And then I came to grips with it and said, ‘Fuck it. I’m going to write the songs that I want.’” Even the song called “You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in Prison” has a certain funereal poignancy to it.

Even for a band already operating at this scale in terms of both ungodly rock-star bombast and naked emotional intimacy—Gerard has gotten increasingly forthright in interviews about his struggles with mental health and substance misuse in this era—My Chemical Romance’s third and biggest and most extravagantly beloved album, 2006’s The Black Parade, struck like a thunderbolt from a clear blue sky. There is an awful lot to absorb here; the marching-band outfits are as good a place to start as any.

The Black Parade is a classic leveling-up record, the fairly conventional tale of a young, ferocious rock band hitting its commercial peak (the album debuted at no. 2 on the Billboard album chart, behind a Hannah Montana soundtrack) with the help of some new big-shot collaborators. It was produced by Rob Cavallo, who probably also produced your favorite Green Day album; the screaming-and-fire video for “Famous Last Words” was directed by Samuel Bayer, who also directed your favorite Nirvana video. (I’m just assuming your favorite Nirvana video is “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”) Several members of the band got severely injured while shooting this, by the way, and somehow you can just tell.

The Black Parade is also an unprecedented and not-at-all-conventional narrative flex credibly described by The New York Times as “a stricken tour de force about coming of age in the post-9/11 era.” It’s a not-at-all-derailed concept album about a man (“The Patient”) dying of cancer while wracked by fear and regret; Gerard decided to add to the verisimilitude by cutting his hair short and dying it a stark silver. (“I wanted to appear white and deathlike and gaunt and sick-looking,” he cheerfully told the NYT.) Liza Minnelli (“I love those guys”) drops by to portray a grieving mother; musically, the klezmer parts somehow hit harder than the heavy metal parts. Influences range from David Bowie to KISS to the Beatles; there is also, as the marching-band uniforms might suggest, a marching band. The scale of this, in every sense, is nearly overwhelming, so if you’re new to it all maybe start out by just putting the caustically hilarious goth-blues anthem “Teenagers” on repeat for six hours.

They said, “All teenagers scare the livin’ shit out of me” They could care less as long as someone’ll bleed So darken your clothes, or strike a violent pose Maybe they’ll leave you alone, but not me

Even five years ago, this record was an easy fan favorite but not necessarily an agreed-upon, era-defining masterwork. “The Black Parade, though well-reviewed at the time, hasn’t accrued the same reputation as other classic albums,” the critic Jeremy Gordon wrote in 2016 in a 10th-anniversary piece for Spin. “It was almost entirely ignored in lists of the best albums of the ’00s run by tastemakers and canon-formers like Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Stereogum, Billboard, Paste, Complex, NME, and, yes, Spin.” By this record’s 20th anniversary, however, it might be universally hailed as the pop-punk Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: In 2020, when Rolling Stone unveiled its updated list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, there was The Black Parade at no. 361, not quite as good as Funkadelic’s One Nation Under a Groove, but just a little better than Luther Vandross’s Never Too Much.

You could argue that rock critics ruin everything. You could regard The Black Parade’s steady ascent on lists like this as proof that something essential—a life-affirming secret shared only between MCR and their Day One fans—is being lost. As a Late Pass–holder myself, out of respect/trepidation, I have decided not to argue that the band’s fourth and last album, 2010’s Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, is actually their best album, even though I love it profoundly for both the reliable audacity of its concept (now MCR are Mad Max–esque rebels battling an evil corporation in postapocalyptic California, with the Gerard-penned comic book to prove it) and the chaotic scope of the songs themselves. Get acclimated by putting the song “Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)” on repeat this time.

Danger Days probably includes one too many songs that blatantly reach for Coldplay-style arena-rock uplifting grandeur, but what I will say is that this record’s final attempt at volcanic sentimentality, “The Kids From Yesterday,” totally works, and the album ends with an extra-caustic and extra-hilarious trashing punk tirade called “Vampire Money,” in which Gerard politely declines to contribute a song to the soundtrack of a Twilight movie.

(Come on!) When you wanna be a movie star (Come on!) Play the game and take the band real far (Come on!) Play it right and drive a Volvo car Pick a fight at an airport bar The kids don’t care if you’re alright, honey Pills don’t help, but it sure is funny Give me give me some of that vampire money, come on!

“Originally, what we did was take goth and put it with punk and turn it into something dangerous and sexy,” Gerard explained to the NME. “Back then nobody in the normal punk world was wearing black clothes and eyeliner. We did it because we had one mission: to polarize, to irritate, to contaminate. But then that image gets romanticized and then it gets commoditized.”

This is all delightfully but decidedly rude: There’s an excellent argument that the Twilight universe is every bit as vital and inclusive and life-affirming as any of the rock bands it attempted to romanticize and/or commoditize. But I will laugh at the line Pick a fight at an airport bar forever.

As for MCR’s breakup, and the failsafe doomsday device that triggered it, within a few years Gerard was opening up about it: In 2014 he told the NME that he’d relapsed into alcoholism after Danger Days, and worried that his daughter would grow up without a father; the choice, he concluded, was “Break the band or break me.”

The band first reunited for a single show in 2019 in Los Angeles: “That was definitely the most fun I’ve ever had playing on stage with My Chemical Romance, for sure,” Gerard told the NME, adding that “to me, the new version of My Chemical Romance and the way I want to go about it is exercising less control.” (The NME loves this guy.) The band’s festival-headliner status now is in part a reflection of pop-punk’s bizarrely ascending reputation in the past five years as both a commercial and critical proposition, from Olivia Rodrigo to Machine Gun Kelly to Juice WRLD. But however many sonic and stylistic precedents there might be, there has never been a rock band quite this courageous, spiteful, beautiful, desperate, glamorous, hopeful.

I believe Gerard when he says that this band’s original mission was “to polarize, to irritate, to contaminate,” but that was never their only mission. MCR was born in an apocalypse, and designed to help us all survive it. Us meaning actual teenagers, not critics, but we caught on eventually. We are all bandwagoners on the Black Parade now. Meanwhile, the apocalypse is closer than ever, but at least we can all huddle together in the glow. 

[rossmccallsqueen]

Ross McCall talking during the From Toccoa to Europe: On the Ground with Easy Company panel - National World War II Museum Band of Brothers 20th Anniversary Symposium

[z-h-i-e]

Bunniverse: Twenty Years of Nibbles

This Sunday (9-24-2023) is the 20th anniversary of the writing of the story which would be the glue that bound together several dozen stand alone stories into a cohesive universe, which would continue to grow for the next two decades. While the initial seeds were sown December 19th, 2001, and stories would be developed and written for almost two years, on a Wednesday evening, while chatting through the Yahoo! Groups board for the Haldir Lovers group, the idea manifested of Haldir having PTSD and getting through some of his anxiety with the help of a plush purple rabbit named Nibbles which was made for him by Elladan and Elrohir.

Named "The First Homely House, or, Attack of the Purple Plot Bunny", it was readers who would begin to refer to this story and subsequent related tales happening in Elrond's Valinor residence where he lived with Celebrian, her parents and brothers, their spouses and children, later adding Erestor and Glorfindel when they reached the shores of Alqualonde, and the youngest of Arwen and Aragorn's daughters, a marchwarden named Elodien who chooses the path of an Elf instead of the race of Men not as the titles the stories were given, but as the 'Purple Bunnies', a name that would later stick as The Purple Plot Bunnies for the series of fifty fics set in the Fourth Age, from September 119 to June 121. The series is PG13, with a handful of 'half-steps' written at higher ratings for in-between stories between consenting adult characters.

While it was actively being posted, many sites and groups at the time listed any sort of slash (m/m or f/f pairings) as forbidden or considered to merit a mature rating even if the content was below a teen level. Therefore, there are two different versions of about 1/3 of the stories in the series -- in the versions posted at gen and het sites and groups, Glorfindel and Erestor were only referenced as having traveled to Valinor at the same time, did not kiss or hold hands, and no mentions were made of their wedding bands or marriage. In versions posted to slash sites, relationships between Elrond and Celebrian as well as Galadriel and Celeborn were downplayed, and the above content with Glorfindel and Erestor was included. Most of the het/gen variations no longer exist; the slash variations were edited to include some of the content from the het/gen versions and additional content between 2007 and 2008, when they were all printed in what is considered the merged v.2 of all of the tales.

It was around that time that the universe became known as Bunniverse; prior to this, it was listed as The Purple Plot Bunny Universe, or, PPB-AU for short. The name Bunniverse was suggested by Smaug, since PPB-AU required explanation for new readers. Bunniverse has its own layer of confusion, with some potential readers believing that the name implies characters are all rabbits in the universe. A series of drawings by Smaug on this theme were done, which really only lead to more confusion, but fellowship buns were too adorable for anyone to be mad about it.

Three companion 'bunny' series are also part of the universe of what now numbers over 400 stories -- the Orange Plot Bunnies (also referred to as Erestory, where Erestor became the character of focus), the Pale Pink Plot Bunnies (concentrating on Glorfindel and Erestor adopting a child in Valinor, and featuring Fingon and Caranthir in prominent roles), and the Baby Blue Plot Bunnies (also known as Fluff'n'Stuff, taking place in early Third Age Rivendell, heavily focused on Glorfindel, and containing some of the heaviest religious and faith-based themes in Bunniverse). Of the three offshoots, only the Blue Bunnies have been completed at this time.

If you managed to read through all of this, you might be interested in the party time weekend I'm hosting on the Bunniverse discord server. Come on over; I totally asked your parents and they said it's okay. Okay, actually, I'm not asking your parents, but you should come over anyhow. Come celebrate Nibbles' birthday with me. :-3

[pfenniged]

Robin Laing’s final speech at the Band of Brothers’ 20th Anniversary Symposium <3

[gluteus-canis-familiaris]

this show and this cast will always be something else ❤ currahee and hang tough!

[x--daughters-of-darkness--x]

HALESTORM's LZZY HALE: 'We're Very Lucky That We Still Like Each Other'

In a new interview with Graspop Metal Meeting, HALESTORM frontwoman Lzzy Hale was asked if she has "any idea how special" it is that she and her bandmates have managed to keep the same lineup for nearly 20 years. She replied (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "It's very special. In fact, tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the day that Joe [Hottinger], our guitar player, auditioned to be in the band. So, yeah, it's very special. It's crazy to think about it, because we don't always think about it until we meet other bands that constantly have a new lineup or they hate each other. So we're very lucky that we still like each other and we still hang out."

Lzzy and her brother Arejay (drums) formed HALESTORM in 1998 while in middle school. Hottinger joined the group in 2003, followed by bassist Josh Smith in 2004.

During a June 2022 appearance on SiriusXM's "Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk", Lzzy talked about the fact that HALESTORM has had the same lineup for nearly two decades – a rarity among rock acts. "I feel like that's probably one of our biggest accomplishments," she said. "We actually still like each other. We've been on tours — we still go out on tours with bands that don't even speak [to each other] until they're on stage. And I'm, like, 'That must be horrible.' We've always supported and loved each other. And we've been through a lot of ups and downs; we've been through this whole roller-coaster ride together. And nobody really knows us the way we all know us. So it really is like a marriage, which is weird, because it's like I'm married to three guys and one of them is my brother. I should probably just say 'family' and not 'marriage' because Blabbermouth will get a hold of that… It's great. I love the boys. And I couldn't imagine doing it with anybody else. Because there is something about the way that we all meet in the middle. What I can do is something that the three boys cannot. But I can't do the same thing that Joe does; I can't do the same thing that Josh does; nobody can do anything that Arejay can do. And it's one of those things that, like I said, with our forces combined, with all four of us together making these decisions and moving forward and the way that we play together, it just wouldn't be HALESTORM without the four of us."