My Chemical Romance’s Philly date came with guillotine, cheesesteak, and the Phanatic
And Alice Cooper, who emerged through a newspaper front page declaring him ‘Banned in Pennsylvania!’
For their first-ever stadium tour this summer, My Chemical Romance invited a unique A-list guest to open each show — many of them influences on or favorites of the band (the roster includes Violent Femmes, Devo, Pixies, and 100 gecs).
At first glance, septuagenarian shock rocker Alice Cooper may seem an unlikely choice, but watching them side by side Friday night at Citizens Bank Park, the pairing made perfect sense.
The grand guignol theatrics that Cooper pioneered helped pave the way for the operatic ambition of My Chemical Romance’s “Long Live the Black Parade” tour, while the defiant teenage angst of “I’m Eighteen” offered a blueprint for MCR’s attitude.
Both Cooper’s hour-long opening set and the 90-minute portion of MCR’s show playing The Black Parade in full ended with the assassination of their respective front men.
Cooper, as usual, was beheaded on the guillotine (overseen by an eye-patched Marie Antoinette portrayed by his wife, Sheryl), while MCR singer Gerard Way got stabbed by a Pagliacci figure in a suicide bomber’s vest.
But that’s skipping ahead.
For those unfamiliar (which can’t be many judging by the fact that the ballpark sing-alongs threatened at times to drown out Way’s vocals), The Black Parade was My Chemical Romance’s 2006 third album, scaling up the band’s heart-on-sleeve pop-punk by telling the story of a man dying from cancer and his grandiose delirium.
The ensuing tour saw MCR donning marching band uniforms in the guise of alter egos the Black Parade, supposedly killed off at the end of the tour but resurrected this summer to pack baseball stadiums.
That pseudo-band’s mythos has expanded as MCR revisits The Black Parade for the first time since 2007. They now appear as the state-sponsored band of a fictional dictatorship known as Draag, the concert put on for the benefit of its “Great Immoral Dictator,” who watched stone-faced on Friday from a midfield throne.
Video screens displayed a series of Orwellian diktats — in English and an invented, Cyrillic-style language — prior to the show, which began with the singing of the Draag national anthem.
Between songs, which Way sang in part from behind a lectern, the singer was handed orders by a clipboard-toting functionary representing the “Ministry of Complimentary Reconditioning.”
A visit by the Phillie Phanatic led to Way declaring the band the “official spokesband of the cheesesteak” (Jersey natives should be able to come up with less predictable Philly-pandering material). Somehow, it all led to a mid-show firing squad execution (with the audience implicated in a “yea or nay” vote) and eventually the stage engulfed in flame, band members whisked offstage under hoods by jackbooted thugs.
The timing of this elaborate totalitarian cosplay can hardly be coincidental as the military is deployed in U.S. cities, but MCR’s satire is a broad swipe — more Terry Gilliam than Costa-Gavras. The design is a fantasy world blend of Soviet and Weimar eras, with Way speaking in the Teutonic accent of a ’40s B-movie villain, only fitting for an album that veers often into emo cabaret.
The packed stadium ate it up, waving flashlights in the air for the confessional “Disenchanted” or raging en masse to the snotty “Teenagers.” After 90 minutes of such overwrought trappings, it couldn’t help but come as a relief — to crowd and band alike — when they reemerged as My Chemical Romance again, playing an additional hour of songs from their other three albums, in T-shirts and jeans on an intimate second stage.
Their virtual mission statement, “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” and the on-the-nose goth anthem “Bury Me In Black” were countered, as Way joked, by the more hopeful “Give ’Em Hell, Kid.”
Cooper’s set was a distilled version of his usual show, which he planned to bring to Bethlehem on Saturday night. At 77, he still stalks the stage like no one else, even if his trademark snarl cracks more often. Emerging through a mock newspaper front page declaring him “Banned in Pennsylvania!” (the masthead font looked familiar, but read “The Pennsylvania Times”), the eye-painted singer launched into the defiant “Lock Me Up” from 1987’s Raise Your Fist and Yell, followed by the recent single “Welcome to the Show.”
The remainder of the set stuck to the tried and true, largely culling from albums by the original Alice Cooper group, which reunited for the first time in 50 years for the new album The Revenge of Alice Cooper. Cooper’s usual touring band was on hand for this show, tearing through classics like “No More Mr. Nice Guy” and “Go To Hell.”
A 10-foot Frankenstein’s monster and a machete-wielding Jason Voorhees made appearances and Cooper was strapped into a straitjacket for “Ballad of Dwight Fry” before losing his head once again.