In a night full of crazy moments – and emotional, funny and tragic ones, too – My Chemical Romance recreated its 2006 signature album “The Black Parade” at Dodger Stadium on Saturday, July 26,
How crazy? As flames licked the edges of the stage while My Chemical Romance reprised “The End.” singer Gerard Way, performing a big dramatic moment in which an actor playing the sad clown Pierrot appeared to stab him, crawled across the stage into closeup on the screens and sang like it was his last breath, “Save me.”
Bonkers, right? (And to be clear, it was all part of the act; he was fine.)
This shouldn’t be a surprise, of course. My Chemical Romance has long been a band of big ambitions and ideas. And the concept album “The Black Parade,” which follows the journey of a character known only as the Patient as he considers the disappointments and defeats of his life and approaching death, offers a canvas on which to paint.
Taking a swing this big, though, comes with risks: You might end up with something like Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge moment. But My Chemical Romance took its cut – and knocked it out of the ballpark on the first of two shows at the Los Angeles stadium this weekend.
The Long Live The Black Parade Tour is My Chemical Romance’s first-ever stadium tour, a remarkable feat on its own given the band broke up in 2013 after a dozen years, and only reformed for good in 2022 for a tour that played five nights at the Kia Forum, which in hindsight was a hint at how popular the band remained.
For the current tour, My Chemical Romance is playing “The Black Parade” as the Black Parade, the alter ego band it created for the album’s original tour. While the military marching band-like costumes remain the same, the concept has added layers of context to add to its Grand Guignol theatricality.
The show opened with the national anthem of Draag, a fictional dictatorship ruled by “the grand, immortal dictator,” as Way referred to the actor wearing a floor-length cape over formal military garb who sat in a throne-like chair, two soldiers at either side, to watch the performance.
“Tonight’s show has been brought to you by the Ministry of Complimentary Recondition,” he noted at one point, the explanation, perhaps, for why the tour announcement last fall said that the band’s work permit had been “ceremoniously reinstated.”
The slow martial rhythms of “The End.” opened the show as it does the album, and from the first note, the packed stadium roared, first with cheers, then with seemingly everyone within eyeshot singing loudly along. “Dead!” picked up the pace, and like nearly every song during “The Black Parade” half of the concert, fans stood and sang and sang some more.
The towering stage featured a backdrop that depicted a Brutalist concrete metropolis for much of the early part of the show, shifting later at times to vintage images of factory workers and peasants – two goose-stepping soldiers ceremonially delivered sheaves of wheat to the stage before its start – and later images of missile launches and a Soviet Bloc-style TV game show.
The band, in addition to Gerard Way, included his brother Mikey Way on bass, guitarists Frank Iero and Ray Toro, and touring musicians Jamie Muhoberac on keyboards and Jarrod Alexander on drums. Each wore a variation of the military band costume, some with brocades across the chest and cords over the shoulders, some with ornate red sashes.
After the furious pace of “The Sharpest Lives” ended, the slow, plaintive piano melody that opens “Welcome to the Black Parade” drew the loudest roar of the night so far. There’s a reason this one is one of My Chem’s most beloved songs: It makes a connection between band and audience that brings them into an embrace.
“When I was a young boy / My father took me into the city / To see a marching band,” Way sings in the song in the character of the Patient, remembering a long-gone happy moment. “He said, ‘Son, when you grow up / Would you be the savior of the broken / The beaten and the damned?”
My Chemical Romance has long rejected the label of emo for their music, and that’s fair. The band is a rock band that includes aspects of ’70s glam rock, furious punk tempos, and much more. But it also makes an undeniably emotional connection with fans, employing lyrics that address themes from death and mental struggles to resilience and triumph, and that’s a large part of what’s made them a stadium act more than two decades into their career.
“Cancer,” provided one of the most moving images of the night. As Way sang the softer song about the disease that will take the Patient’s life, fans held up cell phones, though this time thousands of them glowed red thanks to small slips of red paper, some of them shaped as hearts, that covered the flashlight beams.
The back half of the album picked up the pace and energy. “Mama” has a European folk song feel to its melody and vocals, a demented feel that included blasts of flame on stage that included a stuntman running across stage with his hoodie on fire. It ended with an opera singer on the remote stage singing the final verses.
“Teenagers” doesn’t seem to fully fit the narrative of the album, but it’s a terrific rock and roll number. It was followed by “Famous Last Words,” a roaring anthemic number.
Then the reprise of “The End.” arrived with flames flickering across the stage like footlights, then spreading into the area of the band, with what had looked like amps and other gear now on fire. Pierrot pulled a dagger from his white blouse, it flashed, blood spattered, and “The Black Parade” reached its end.
That’s a lot, right? If the show ended there after 14 songs and an hour and 15 minutes, you might not have complained, but for the ticket price you’d paid. But after a break during which cellist Clarise Jensen played a solo piece, My Chem returned to the remote stage for another 11 songs from across their catalog over the next hour.
Highlights of the hits and rarities set included the live debut of “War Beneath the Rain,” an unreleased song from the unreleased album “The Paper Kingdom,” which was scrapped when the band split in 2013. Fan favorites included “I’m Not OK (I Promise)” and “Thank You For the Venom.”
Way introduced “Vampires Will Never Kill You,” one of the band’s earliest songs, as his all-time favorite My Chem song. The second set and the show ended with “Helena,” a farewell song to the Ways’ grandmother, Helen. “So long and goodnight,” he sang as the crowd once more sang along. “So long, not goodnight.”