Vote For Gerard! - My Chemical Romance Goes Full Theater Kid in San Antonio
I genuinely don't think I've ever been this overstimulated at a concert before.
My Chemical Romance put on one of the most insane shows I've ever seen, and I mean that in the best possible way. It started with a marching band-looking drummer coming out onstage, followed by an opera singer singing the national anthem of Draag while the president of Draag watched over the floor on the jumbotron. There was a dictator. There was the severed head of a Dictator. There was an election. Gerard drank a chalice of blood in celebration of his victory. The aide to the dictator spent part of the show trying to put his head back on with bandaids. Somehow it actually worked??
And all of that was before we even got into the depths of the show.
The Draag storyline was so much fun and entertaining to watch, but I also really loved what MCR was doing with it. Music as a form of political protest is so beautiful, and it felt so powerful seeing thousands of people with their fists in the air during "Welcome to the Black Parade." There's something really special about watching a band take something that could just be a huge theatrical production and actually use it to say something.
Gerard also made the most evil face ever when "Welcome to the Black Parade" ended and that was definitely foreshadowing into what the rest of this show was going to become.
One of my favorite parts of the show was how much the setlist changed. They had said during the show that we were going to get some of the songs they don't play very often on this tour, and they really delivered. We got "AMBULANCE," "Boy Division," "Summertime," "To the End," "Hang 'Em High," and "Surrender the Night," which hadn't been played in a really long time. They've been changing the setlist pretty quickly from show to show, so I had no idea what we were going to get, which made the whole thing way more exciting.
The B-stage was also such a fun element. There was constantly something happening there even when the band themselves were on the main stage. They did Quizzo (a Dragg game show) and pulled a guy named Austin out of the crowd... I do mean literally yanked him out... and had him help decide whether guys with bags over their heads were going to live or die by playing Quizzo. When they died, they exploded and streamers went everywhere. I really don't think Austin was expecting to be making life or death decisions at a My Chemical Romance show, but there he was.
And then there was all of the other stuff happening onstage.
The band did a really great job with their show design, it definitely felt like the visual equivalent of ear candy in a song. The strobes were a nice element, especially when everyone had their phones up and all of the screens suddenly went white at the same time. There was SO much pyro. They lit a creepy doll on fire. Gerard came back after "Cancer" absolutely drenched. He got knighted with a giant sword. He was reading from a paper with the little doll's face on the cover. He somehow kept ending up with blood on his face.
Then during "Famous Last Words," the entire stage suddenly went up in flames and there were fireworks going over the crowd, shooting across the entire arena.
At some point I literally stopped taking notes because I was too overstimulated to process everything that was happening.
But underneath all of that, the actual music was incredible. "Cancer" had a beautiful violin arrangement, "Mama" had Lucy Joy Altus and King Diamond, and the band sounded so good throughout the entire night. There were so many little changes to songs and arrangements that made hearing them live feel different from just listening to the records.
And then, at the end of all of this, they announced they're making a fifth album.
Which is kind of insane to have witnessed. This show definitely did its rounds on Twitter and it was such an honor to say I had experienced it too.
I've been listening to My Chemical Romance for a long time, so getting to finally see them live was already a huge deal for me. I just didn't expect the night to involve a fictional dictator, a severed head, an election, a burning doll, a giant sword, a cello intermission, crowdsurfing, approximately a million explosions, and the announcement of a new album.
I left completely exhausted and very happy that I got to be there.
I still have no idea what happened in Draag, though.
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