Austin, Texas, 2010
During the hiatus, it’s like the band never existed. No one talks about them like they were real, and the band members themselves were briefly ghosts. My ex-girlfriend Marissa tells me that Pete never leaves his house in
L.A. and that his marriage to Ashlee Simpson is falling apart. It all seems so impossible. There was a collapse, and then everyone became something new and distant. My crew from the scene doesn’t really talk anymore since Tyler’s funeral. I saw a couple of them outside the Newport after a show a few months back, and we made small talk about all the new trash hardcore bands our other old pals were diving in and out of, but none of us talked about how we were feeling. It was like once we lost the band we decided was the mouthpiece for all of our most confessional moments, we decided we didn’t need those moments anymore and we didn’t need each other either.
I wear a patch on my jacket now. I found it underneath a pile of records in Tyler’s apartment when his mom came to try and clean everything out but instead cried with me in a circle of his old t-shirts. It’s a patch that says “DESTROY WHAT DESTROYS YOU” in bold and sharp white letters. He got it for free at some NOFX show that we hated in 2003 because we took the girl working the merch table to score weed a few hours before the show and I imagine it was the least she could do.
I’m wearing the patch on a jacket in Austin, Texas at South By Southwest, where I am because some startup music mag sent me here to cover the festival for the first time, even though I have no idea what I’m doing. In a bar called Dirty Dog Bar, a restless crowd of emo and punk kids are waiting in the dark. A surprise solo performance from Patrick Stump has been rumored all day, which seems both unlikely and exciting. No one had seen or heard much from Stump since the hiatus began, other than reports that he and Pete weren’t speaking, frustrated with each other, I imagine, about how much each of their legacies managed to be tied to the other.
When the drumming starts, it’s still pitch-black in the room. The crowd murmurs, some crane their necks. People begin taking flash photos with their cell phones to try and get a glimpse of this might-be Patrick. Then the drums begin looping, and a keyboard starts. The keyboard begins looping, some ’80s pop riff. And then, leaning out of the shadows to pick up a massive white guitar, is the face of Patrick Stump, several pounds lighter than when he was last seen in October of last year. Dressed in a dark blazer and with his blonde hair neatly shocked across his head, not obscured by a hat, as it had been for the past several years, it is almost impossible for people to process the fact that they are looking at Patrick. Until he gazes, briefly, up at the growing and silent audience, gives an uneasy laugh, and retreats back into his comfortable shadow. An audience member breaks the silence by yelling, “We love you, Patrick!” and, lit briefly by a camera phone, you can see a smile starting at the edges of his mouth.
Patrick once said, “I sang because Pete saw, in me, a singer,” and I think what he meant is that Pete saw, in him, a vehicle. This was the band’s great fascinating pull. That they were a bit of a mutation: a shy and otherwise silent frontman with a voice like a soul singer, belting out the confessional emo lyrics of a neurotic narcissist. Pete, who wanted the attention, but not enough to sing the words himself. I’m thinking about this again in a bar in Austin, Texas. Wearing a patch taken from my dead friend’s old bedroom, and considering the things we saw in each other that kept us whole for our brief window of time together. Tyler fought kids who fucked with us at punk shows because I saw, in him, a fighter. Until he stopped getting out of bed some mornings and I told myself that I saw, in him, a burden. Until the dirt was shoveled over the black casket and I saw, in him, nothing beyond a collection of memories.
Patrick is running around the stage, frantic. He has played a total of six instruments, looping all of them himself. The songs he’s playing are rooted in funk, jazz, and ’80s soul-pop. The audience, expecting to see Patrick maybe play solo versions of old Fall Out Boy songs, has thinned out. Those who remain cast strange looks at the stage, while Patrick barely makes eye contact or speaks between songs. It is a bit forced and obviously strategic, him trying to unwrap himself from the mythology of emo, which he had grown to be visibly uncomfortable with. He’s showing that he can be a Real Life Musician, outside of the machinery of Wentz. Destroy What Destroys You. Halfway through the showcase, it becomes clear that this exercise isn’t connecting with the audience, because it isn’t an exercise for the audience.
By the time the end comes, he sits down at a piano, out of breath. He gasps, “This song isn’t going to be on my record, because I didn’t write it. Bobby Womack wrote it.”
By the time he gets into the chorus of “If You Think You’re Lonely Now,” Patrick has arched his back with his eyes closed, leaning away from the microphone, yelling the same lyrics over and over: “If you think you’re lonely now / if you think you’re lonely now / if you think you’re lonely now / just wait”
This part. This is the part that’s for the audience.
LaGrange, Illinois, 2002
The heckling starts slow, first in the back, and then making its way to the front. The band on stage is, decidedly, not hardcore enough. And this is, after all, a hardcore show. Some of the faces are familiar enough from the Chicago hardcore scene: there is Pete Wentz, Chicago scene celebrity, who most recently screamed in Arma Angelus and thrashed around in Racetraitor. And Joe Trohman, the scrawny guitarist from Arma Angelus. The drummer is Mike Pareskuwicz, from Subsist. The problem, the crowd has decided, is the kid fronting the band, with his clean vocals and craving for melody. “This is a fucking hardcore show,” someone yells in a silent moment. “I didn’t come here to listen to this wannabe Marvin Gaye.”
I’m here because a few months earlier, I came alone to Illinois to see The Killing Tree, former Arma Angelus frontman Tim McIlrath’s newest band. In what seemed like a solid, he let his old bandmate Pete Wentz open the show with his new project, a band that had been soliciting advice on a name from their friends, according to a group of people smoking outside. When Wentz finally took the stage that night, he mumbled into the microphone, uncertainly.
“Hi… we’re uhhh… well, our name is, uhhh… we’re…” Someone from the side of the stage cut him off.
“Fuck it, you’re Fall Out Boy.”
And then, someone else.
“Fuck yeah, dude. Fall Out Boy Forever!”
The small crowd laughed at the nervous new band.
That night, during The Killing Tree’s set, I got knocked down in the pit, which happened often due to being short, less aggressive, and sometimes invisible, as the only black kid there. It is hard to describe what this is like, to be on the ground with no room to get up, waiting for the feet to grow less restless and violent, so that you can get a small escape. Right when I began to cover my head, assuming I’d be kicked, a massive shadow pushed through the pit and pulled me up nearly effortlessly. I yelled thanks, and the tall kid nodded before bouncing off, throwing elbows behind him as he went.
At the end of that show, the kid who saved me from the pit found me leaning on my car. Checking out my license plate, he leaned in. “Ohio? Can you drop me near Columbus?” Most of the Midwest scene kids all found their way to Chicago for these shows, often without a means to return to wherever they came from. It wasn’t uncommon for us to pile in whatever car was headed back to the state that we came from. Skeptical but indebted, I told him sure. “But you can’t smoke that in my car,” I told him, gesturing to the cigarette he was preparing to light. “You fuckin’ straight edge punks,” he laughed, lighting the cigarette and jumping in the passenger seat. “I’m Tyler, by the way.”
When Tyler heard that Fall Out Boy was playing a show in LaGrange tonight, he called me, insisting on a road trip. I was on the fence, arguing that they weren’t that good the first time we saw them, but Tyler persisted, claiming that they had to have gotten better. He liked the singer, and I thought the lyrics had promise.
So, in an indoo
r skate park in LaGrange, Illinois, the band known as Fall Out Boy is getting heckled while standing at the bottom of a skate ramp and playing through fast, sloppy songs. Everyone in the room is standing mostly still in a traditional unmoved hardcore pose: arms crossed, nodding slowly but unimpressed. Someone from the front of the stage yells, “What the fuck? Play something to get the pit going!”
Pete looks at Patrick, smirks at the audience, and confidently says, “All right. This is a new song. It’s called ‘Dead On Arrival.’”
Thirty seconds into the song, arms begin unfolding. Someone starts pogoing toward the front and bodies begin a collision, first gentle, and then rougher. When the pit reaches its peak, Pete moves to the front of the skate ramp made stage, visibly considering a leap into the crowd. At the last moment, he pulls back. An issue of trust, I suppose. Don’t throw yourself to those who would heckle you until you bow to them.
When the show is over, outside of the venue, someone drunk and barely standing yells, “FALL OUT BOY SUCKS” before throwing up into a sewer.
Knights Of Columbus, Chicago, Halloween 2003
(We got kicked out cuz everyone was packed to the ceiling and I mean the ACTUAL ceiling and Joe had his face painted like a skeleton and Patrick was sweating everywhere and I do mean EVERYWHERE at the end of “Saturday” Pete jumped into the crowd with the mic and he nearly got buried by everyone trying to grab his head and sing into the mic because it was the only song of theirs we knew all of the words to and he was climbing over everyone trying to make it out of all the arms grabbing at him and he put the mic in Tyler’s face for a moment and Tyler sang the part about never really living and then the whole entire stage collapsed and I mean REALLY collapsed so the band had to stop playing altogether and it’s probably for the best because the room was over capacity by at least 25 people and when the door guy saw the river of us pushing our way out into the streets he said goddamn, you kids are gonna get the city burned down)
Subterranean, Chicago, 2013
Pete is in the crowd already, mere seconds into the band’s reunion show. He’s jumped from the stage into the front row, and the brief moment he was in the air felt like an eternity. There is a part of me that thought they wouldn’t show up, even as the opening notes of “Thriller” poured out of the loudspeakers. But then there they were, for the first time in four years, together. On a stage that could barely fit the four of them, like the old days. But they’re adults now, Pete’s hair trimmed to a shorter and more reasonable length. Patrick in a slick leather jacket, with glasses. Joe, more restrained than his usual whirlwind of activity. Before they started playing, they huddled briefly, slapping each other’s hands. It felt, more than anything, an acknowledging of no hard feelings. Or, an acknowledgement of that which we all spend a lifetime searching for: the permission to come home again, after forgetting that there are still people who will show up to love you, no matter how long you’ve been away. No matter how obsessed you’ve been with your own vanishing, there will always be someone who still wants you whole. Pete, for all of his songs about racing toward an abyss, returned to us with two kids. Patrick and Joe returned married. No one wanted out anymore, at least not that night.
Cleanliness is next to Godliness, sure, but you can be both God-like and unclean. Pete Wentz is no longer afraid to dive from a stage because he knows he will be caught, no matter what sins or regrets make the trip with him. That is the true ending of Fall Out Boy’s story, no matter what comes after tonight. The Boy With The Thorn In His Side, finally made good. And all it took was dragging an entire band through the fire of his own making, and managing to come out clean.
There’s a thing Pete and Patrick have always done on stage during every show since the beginning, even during their bad nights. The full line in the second verse of “Saturday” that echoes into the ending goes “Read about the afterlife / but I’ve never really lived / more than an hour / more than an hour.”
When the second rotation of “more than an hour” hits, Patrick and Pete turn toward each other, no matter where they are on stage, and they sing the line at each other, sometimes giving each other a slight bow before returning to their microphones. They do it tonight, and touch hands on their way back to their corners of the stage. I think it’s a way to remind each other that they’ve made it, for one more day. There is something about setting eyes on the people who hold you up instead of simply imagining them.
Tyler’s patch had fallen off my jacket a year or so ago, after the adhesive wore off when the jacket sat in the closet for too long. I hadn’t worn it since I got back from Austin, Texas in 2010. I carried the patch with me to the show tonight. At the end, when the band is playing the final notes of “Saturday,” I toss it into the pit, and let it fall into the forest of writhing bodies.
No one decides when the people we love are actually gone. May we all be buried on our own terms.
You can put a murderer in a suit, and he’s still a murderer.
Allen Iverson
IV.
By the time Marvin gets to “…bombs bursting in air…,” you can see his hands finally stop shaking. A rhythmic clap begins to grow from the audience.
I watch fireworks in July 2013. Two weeks later, George Zimmerman walks free, and Trayvon Martin is still dead.
(Marvin Gaye sings If you wanna love, you got to save the babies, and a black mother pulls her son close.)
I watch fireworks in July 2014. Later that month, the world turns to the internet and sees Eric Garner choked to death by police officer Daniel Pantaleo.
(Marvin Gaye sings Trigger happy policing / Panic is spreading / God knows where we’re heading, and thousands of people march from New York to Washington.)
I will watch the fireworks in 2015 and black churches are burning in the south. I will watch the fireworks in 2015 and no one marched for Renisha McBride.
I will watch the fireworks in 2015 and people I love can be legally married on Saturday, and then legally fired from their jobs on Monday.
(Marvin Gaye sings In the morning, I’ll be alright, my friend, and a group of black children watch the sky light up, seeing darkness turned inside out for the first time.)
Ric Flair, Best Rapper Alive
Once you realize that it’s all performance, the medicine goes down easier. The boy on the playground who doesn’t really want to fight dances around and talks his shit at a volume that shakes the birds from the trees. There was a point where most feared rappers are the ones who could best convince you that they have killed someone before, even if they hadn’t. Perhaps if they had only held a gun and dreamed of the history it could unwrite. Before the internet, it was even more possible to believe in anything a performer presented. It took more work to track their histories, their more unprepared moments. I feared N.W.A. most when they wore all black and looked like they might not run from any manner of violence that arrived at their doorsteps.
Look, all I know is that Ali started this shit, bouncing around his opponents and daring them to lay some small violence on him. What a gift, to be both invisible and as bright as the sun itself. All I’m saying is that no one knows where Richard Morgan Fliehr came from and that ain’t even his birth name but no one knows that either, not even him. The Tennessee Children’s Home Society spent the ’40s and ’50s illegally removing children from their birth mothers and stripped them of their histories before putting them up for questionable adoptions with desperate parents, and that’s how Richard Fliehr ended up in the world, so it’s hard to trace exactly when and how the fire started.
(But it did start in Memphis, where Three 6 Mafia once played at a nightclub on Lt. George W. Lee Ave. after they won an Academy Award for a song about the difficulties associated with being a pimp, and Juicy J had the academy award on stage and the light hit it just right and reflected back into the crowd and Juicy J said, “This right here is for Memphis, Tennessee,” and everyone was blinded by its immense presence, and then he threw a handful of dollar bills in the crowd that arch
ed and then collapsed in the middle of the club floor and this was in 2006 in the South when everyone was just trying to survive and so a fight broke out right there in the middle of the club while Three 6 Mafia played their song “Stay Fly” which samples the Willie Hutch song “Tell Me Why Has Our Love Turned Cold” which is one of those samples that you can’t unravel from your memory once you hear it nested deep in the song and so while watching a man straddling another man on the ground preparing to throw a punch, all I could hear was Willie Hutch singing “tell me / tell me / tell me” so what I’m mostly saying is that Memphis is a wild place to fight your way into and then fight your way out of.)
And speaking of staying fly, Richard Morgan Fliehr was going by Ric Flair in 1975, when the twin-engine Cessna 310 he was in ran out of gas in North Carolina and fell from the sky, hitting the ground at 100 miles per hour. In the picture of the plane after the crash, the entire front window is gone, the plane’s front smashed. The pilot, Joseph Farkas, eventually died from the crash. The crash also paralyzed wrestler Johnny Valentine, one of the biggest wrestlers of the era. When the plane went down all of the seats were jarred loose, pushing the weight of all the wrestlers onto Valentine at impact. Before the flight began, Ric Flair switched seats with Valentine, after being nervous about sitting up front near the pilot. Ric Flair walked away from the flight with a broken back, and returned to the ring in six months. Doctors told him that his bones were healed but there was no telling how they’d hold up under the stress of the ring. Valentine never walked again. Ric Flair never talks about this.
But he sure could talk, sometimes about flying, sometimes in jets while wearing $8,000 sequined robes in the 1980s. There is almost dying and then there is truly almost dying. The thing about that is you get a grasp of all that which you cannot take with you and then you sometimes wear it on your body at all times. Ali had the mouth, but was always too humble for the gold. Ric Flair walked from the wreckage and became The Nature Boy. All of the best showmen hid behind their names and their gold. The people didn’t scream for Antonio Hardy like they did for Big Daddy Kane. The women weren’t always running for James Todd Smith, but for LL Cool J, sure. It is more than just the name. At the start of rap, it was about stepping into a phone booth and coming out as something greater than you were. It was easier to sell a personality than it is now, with every nuance of a person’s life splayed in front of us. Rappers can go by their real names now, with no persona attached, and still be legends. Ric Flair, already an invention, walked from a plane crash reinvented.
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