This story never really had a point. It’s just a lull—a skip in the record. We are addresses in ghost towns. We are old wishes that never came true. We are hand grenades. We are all gods, we are all monsters.
Pete Wentz
III.
He wore a dark suit and oversized sunglasses to cover his eyes. His voice trembled when singing the first line.
Though an album of little solutions, What’s Going On is, at its most literal and perhaps most difficult to process, an album that presents a small series of inquiries that weave into a much larger and rhetorical narrative: what are we doing to each other, and what will the world look like if we don’t change?
To be black and still alive in America is to know urgency. What Marvin Gaye knew, even as a man of God, was that Heaven might not be open for him, or for any of us. He knew then what so many of us know now: we have to dance, and fight, and make love, and fight, and live, and fight, all with the same ferocity. There are no half measures to be had. It is true, yes, that joy in a violent world can be rebellion. Sex can be rebellion. Turning off the news and watching two hours of a mindless action film can be rebellion. But without being coupled with any actual HARD rebellion, without reaching our hands into revolutionary action, all you’ve done is had a pretty fun day of joy, sex, and a movie. There is no moment in America when I do not feel like I am fighting. When I do not feel like I’m pushing back against a machine that asks me to prove that I belong here. It is almost a second language, and one that I take pride in, though I wish I did not need to be so fluent in it. I know what it is to feel that urge to build a small heaven, or many small heavens. Ones that you cannot take with you, but ones that cannot be taken from you. A place where you still have a name. I believe, at one point, that Marvin Gaye looked at a country on fire, and wanted that for us all.
Fall Out Boy Forever
Chicago, 2008
“Thanks to the city for letting us play here… I feel like last time there were pyrotechnics in here, it nearly burned the city down.”
Fall out boy bassist pete wentz, on stage at the Chicago Theatre, is pushing his dark bangs out of his eyes while the band’s lead singer, Patrick Stump, re-tunes his guitar. The fire that Pete is talking about is one that happened in 1903, and he’s technically wrong. The fire didn’t happen at this theater, but at what was once the Iroquois Theater, a bit down the road from here. The fire was in December, the same month of this concert, with people packed to the walls, testing the limits of the modern fire code. The fire in 1903 was caused by a spark from an arc light falling onto a muslin curtain, starting a blaze that spilled onto the highly flammable flats that held scenery paintings. The theater had no sprinklers, alarms, or telephones. The Chicago Fire Department insisted that it delay its performances until it was fire-ready. The theater charged on, imagining that there were no dangers that could not be survived. When the fire started to spread, there was no way to contact the fire department quickly. A stagehand had to run from the theater and find the nearest fire house. By that time, the fire had spilled into the seats, wiping out nearly half of the building. 575 people were killed, their bodies piled ten high around the doors and windows. People, in an attempt to escape, tried crawling over the already dead bodies to reach the windows, before falling victim to the gas themselves, making a wall of dead who were once almost free.
Pete Wentz and Patrick Stump are having a bad night. If you’ve seen enough Fall Out Boy shows, you can tell by how little they play off of each other during a set, or how often Patrick tries to rush Pete through an in-between song monologue. During the song “This Ain’t A Scene, It’s An Arms Race,” Pete attempts to scream into the microphone that Patrick is singing in, not unusual for their on-stage partnership. Tonight, Patrick leans away from Pete, cutting a sideways glare at him from underneath his low hat. By this time in the band’s evolution, Pete is an attention vacuum, racking up weekly tabloid covers and paragraphs of speculation on internet blogs. As Pete goes, so goes the band. And as he’s become more hated, so has the band. It’s wearing on them, and you can see it tonight, in all of them. Even at home, they look like they would rather be anywhere else.
Fall Out Boy’s newest album, Folie à Deux, is set to be released in two weeks. That is the reason we’ve all gathered here, skipping a few meals and trips to the movies along the way in order to afford the tickets. I can hear my friend Tyler’s voice as I sink into a spot in the crowd and shake my head. “In fucking Chicago, of all places,” he’d say. And then, likely, “We used to be able to see these guys here for two bucks and some cash for gas.” He’d be right, of course. And I’d punch his shoulder and tell him to quit complaining. That tonight was important. I almost turn to say this to him, as if I’ve imagined him here with me, to my right, as he always was. But there’s only a short kid with purple hair there, and I’m snapped back to reality.
Folie à Deux is French for “a madness shared by two,” which feels prophetic for a band that has operated as a translating service as much as anything, Patrick giving a life and entire body to Pete’s words for the better part of a decade. It has drained them both by this point, Pete weary of fame and addicted to pills. And Patrick, weary of the way Pete’s fame had moved into a world where he imagined himself less in the spotlight. No one tonight knows that ten months from now, Fall Out Boy will be broken up, on a four-year hiatus. That this is their last big show in their hometown, where they played in basements and dives and pool halls and broke their instruments against brick walls in houses with 30 punk kids packed to the walls.
During “Saturday,” the band’s traditional final song, Pete always abandons his bass and strips off a layer of clothing to bring home the song’s closing moments by screaming close into the mic while Patrick sings the lyrics “I read about the afterlife / but I’ve never really lived.” It’s a nod to Pete’s hardcore roots, even though they are, by now, flimsy at best. Tonight, perhaps because it was in Chicago, or perhaps because a mood of finality was in the air, the crowd takes on a heightened excitement when Pete tosses his sweatshirt to the masses. It falls somewhere just behind me and the memory of Tyler, and I can feel the people crawling over each other for it. Jumping on each other’s backs while a pile collapses around us, searching for a small piece of fabric. A lifeline out of some imagined fire.
Los Angeles California, 2005
On the VH1 “Big In ’05” special, Pete Wentz takes off his bass guitar and launches it into the drumset behind him. It narrowly misses the head of Andy Hurley. The band had just gotten done playing the song that made them a household name this year, “Sugar, We’re Going Down.” In the audience, celebrities like Paris Hilton sing along to every word. The band isn’t in Midwest basements playing to kids who scraped together gas money anymore—they’re actually famous now, bordering on pop stardom. Pete is beginning his great moral conflict: the desire for fame pushing back against the desire to be famous. While his bass guitar crashes into the drumset, sending a cymbal up in the air and knocking off Andy’s glasses, he storms off stage defiant, while the crowd cheers. To them, it seems like they are witnessing a true rock star moment and not an artist struggling with his disdain for the process. Fall Out Boy was never supposed to be this famous, after all. Not playing to stars and socialites on national television, at the end of a year where they covered major music magazines. It has been said before, for decades prior to this one, that no band can live this fast for this long. While the drumset collapses, Joe Trohman slings his guitar across the stage floor. Patrick, while walking off the stage, gently places his guitar on the drum riser, Pete’s bass spearing a snare drum on the edge of falling.
Columbus, Ohio, 2007
When it’s a funeral for a suicide, the air feels different. It’s heavier, for one thing. It sits on your shoulders differently, makes it harder to move. It’s something you don’t notice until maybe your second or third one. This time, it was pills. Last year, it was a jump from a building. We buried Tyler in his old leather jacket
, covered in patches from all of our favorite bands that we would cross state lines to see in a shitty Ford Taurus. There was the Fall Out Boy patch, largest on the back of the jacket. We got it at the show in ’04, where Pete threw his bass guitar into Andy’s drum set and then put his foot through a speaker but couldn’t pull his sneaker out of it, so he just left it in there and walked off stage with one bare foot. Tyler was almost a foot taller than me, and at that show, he grabbed some suburban scene trash by the collar after the kid tried to make some crack about me being the only black kid at the show. And look, I know that memories don’t actually bring a person you love back to life. Real life, I mean. It doesn’t make them touchable in the way we most need them to be.
In 2005, Pete downed a bottle of pills in a Best Buy parking lot while listening to Jeff Buckley, who drowned in the Wolf River Harbor at age 30 and who was the son of Tim Buckley, who overdosed on heroin at age 28. And so what I’m saying is that our heroes spill from their heroes and their heroes before them, and at some point, everyone wants out. Pete lived because his mother came and dragged him out of his car and sat next to him in a hospital room, talking him awake. And on the night Tyler died, I was driving through the darkness to make it to Chicago by morning so that I could surprise a girl who I wouldn’t remember in a year. And there was only a missed call on my cell phone when I looked down at it around 5:30 in the morning, when the sun was just beginning to bend itself around Chicago’s sprawl. So I’m not saying that I would have been able to talk him away from that which was beckoning him. I’m not saying that I would have been able to hold his face to mine on the concrete and tell some story that would have kept him alive until the ambulance lights flooded our little corner of Ohio.
I think I am trying to say that I like to imagine Tyler was calling to say goodbye, and couldn’t bring himself to do it to a machine. But what I am mostly trying to say is that the air at a funeral feels different when someone finds their own way to the grave, but we scene kids all decided to still wear black leather to bury Tyler today, even with summer bearing down on our backs. Sometimes, it is truly about the aesthetics. It helps, in the moment of the casket’s lowering, to think about suicide not as a desire for death, but a need to escape whatever suffering life has dealt.
Once I hit a certain age, I never imagined a life where I didn’t lose friends. I dated someone during this year who told me she’d never been to a funeral. She was 22 years old. I couldn’t decide if I thought something was wrong with her, or if something was wrong to me—the way I learned to cling to my relationship with death as if loving it hard enough would make it into a full person. A person who looked, at least a little, like everyone I had loved and lost.
Infinity on High dropped three months before the funeral and we listened to it in Tyler’s van, where he said it was the album that Fall Out Boy finally sold out on so I didn’t tell him that I thought it was brilliant. Jay Z was on the intro for the album’s first song and they called the song “Thriller” because I guess Pete decided that if you’re going to be famous anyway you might as well fucking go for it. In the second verse, Pete wrote “the only thing I haven’t done yet is die / and it’s me and my plus-one at the afterlife” and me and Tyler played that line back at least ten times.
Columbus, Ohio, 2005
In some Rolling Stone interview, Pete says there are the songs you actually love, and then there are the songs you pretend to love when people are watching. It has been one of those endless summers again, and “Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down” is always on the radio, coming out of the rolled down windows of cars in almost every neighborhood. Me and my pals tell all these new fans that we were there from the beginning of it all, presenting it as currency in a world where you start to feel something you love slipping away from you. When Tyler’s parents got divorced and he was crashing on my couch, we’d play From Under The Cork Tree all night long behind a closed door, but then tell the dudes at the record store that we only liked Fall Out Boy’s old stuff, talking about their B-sides as a way to regain some of the credibility we felt we’d lost during our nighttime listening parties.
The album is about the aftermath of Pete’s relationship falling apart, and my post-college girlfriend moved to California in April and stopped calling in May. I scrawled lyrics in pencil on the wall of my apartment that I pushed my bed up against so that no one knew they were there. It was the summer of all our scene pals getting hooked on some drug or the other and sleeping on top of each other all day while me and Tyler played video games on their couches and spun the first Fall Out Boy split 7” until we got back to his van, where we’d play the chorus of “Sugar, We’re Goin Down” and sing all of the words.
It’s easy to convince people that you are really okay if they don’t have to actually hear what rattles you in the private silence of your own making. I sometimes imagine that this is what Pete was trying to say the whole time. Public performance as a way to hold yourself together until you could fall into what actually kept you alive in your secluded moments. By the time this summer was finally done with us, it all felt plastic. Like we were all playing the roles of someone else.
They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us Page 9