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.
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 indoor 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.