You really have to hand it to Gerard Way. Only three years ago, the raccoon-mascaraed MC of Goth-punk powerhouse My Chemical Romance (MCR) was literally so partied out, the working title for his then-unrecorded third album was The Rise And Fall Of MCR. Witty, but most assuredly not amusing to the man himself. “I hit this point where I was like, ‘You know what? This has stopped being fun – I’m really unhealthy, I’m really on the edge, I’m really depressed and I’m really unpredictable,’” sighs Way, 30. “When you’re doing something that you love to do, but you have something that’s making it so you can’t enjoy it, it’s time to stop that and make a very simple decision. So it was a hard process, but a very simple choice – I’d hit rock bottom, but it wasn’t the kind of rock bottom where I jumped out a plate glass window or ran someone over with my car.”

The singer’s clean and sober rebound, then, appears near phoenixlike in context. MCR defied all expectations (not to mention critics, who passed them off as a flash-in-the-pan emo band) with that aforementioned third album, eventually released as The Black Parade – an ambitious, anthemic concept record revolving around Way’s artistic creation of a skeletal bandleader named Pepe. The band enhanced the idea onstage with matching marching-band uniforms, all in appropriately grim ebony.

That was just the warm-up. Way also launched his own comic-book series, The Umbrella Academy, featuring a reluctant team of awkward young superheroes, through the hip Dark Horse imprint. Currently, he’s been putting the finishing touches on The Black Parade Is Dead, a new concert CD/DVD taped live in Mexico City last October, but will make one last small-club sweep through the Bay Area before disappearing into a studio to reinvent himself once again. Only Way knows what ethereal form he’ll take next.

The Wave: What characters and plots are you conceiving for your Umbrella Academy?
Gerard Way: It’s very reminiscent of Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol. It’s just very bizarre-type superheroes, almost as if they got thrown into it from when they were kids and they didn’t really wanna do it. But the dad’s really crazy and kinda forces ’em into it. It’s one of those comics that’s not the easiest to explain because it is so weird, and sometimes they’re fighting things that are more like concepts, rather than supervillains. And I’m actually a fan of characters that don’t have a tremendous amount of powers, so one of the characters was the first boy in space, and he was really smart, an excellent pilot, a better pilot than any adult on the planet – he was the first person to actually complete a mission to Mars. But he got in an accident on the way back from Mars, and they had to switch his body with that of a Martian simian, a primate that was indigenous to that planet. So his head got attached to the body of a giant blue space ape. Another character is called the Rumor, and her power is that she can tell really small lies, and they all come true. So I tried to really think about the powers and make them useful, but not so useful that you’re dealing with a Superman character.

TW: Were you tormented as a kid for liking comics?
GW: Yeah, I guess so. There definitely weren’t a lot of kids I could hang out with and talk to about ’em. That was the thing – they were all trading baseball cards, and I tried that and I hated it. And I didn’t really watch sports, so I had no idea what I was talking about. But I knew a lot about the X-Men, and I knew about Spider-Man and Batman. But there were no other kids around that were really into that. Now I always carry a ton of art supplies with me on the road. I really like standard black ink – I like brush and ink, and blue pencil’s what I use to lay it all down. Then I ink over it, kind of an animation way of working. And I like watercolor a lot, too, I’ll use it sometimes when I actually have time. But doing comics is a lot of work – it goes from guy to guy to guy, and then months and months later, you have a comic.

TW: I don’t trust anyone who hasn’t gone to the edge and stared into the abyss. In music and art, you seem to have managed that quite well.
GW: Yes. I think you’re just playing around if you’re not doing that. And that doesn’t mean to say that you have to be gloomy or depressed or anything. But if you’ve never been to the edge and stared into it, you’re never gonna become a better human being, I don’t think. And it’s facing that stuff that makes you a good person to other people – it makes you good to yourself, it makes you smarter, it makes you faster, it makes you better. Out of all these tragedies, you’re born as something better, so I think that staring into the abyss is one of the things that the band does really well.

TW: What, exactly, have you seen there?
GW: Really, a lot of black. I stare into that sometimes when I have to tap into it and write lyrics, and I see my life going in ways I didn’t want it to go, I see... just this kind of darkness. Without sounding corny or clichéd, that’s really what it is, you’re staring into the black and you don’t know what’s there. And it’s really that you’re staring into what you don’t know and all your fears at the same time, and all your anxieties and all your depressions, plus all your hang-ups on yourself and all the bad sh*t you’ve done in your life, everything. You’re staring at it, and you’re either gonna switch it off, or you’re gonna dive on in.

TW: I saw a great bit of graffiti once: “The abyss stares also.”
GW: [Laughs] That’s amazing! I never even thought of that.

TW: So you’ve probably seen great dark flicks like Audition and Oldboy.
GW: Those are really big films for me. We based an entire video, shot for shot, on Audition, almost to the point where it felt like we weren’t being that creative. And I LOVE Oldboy. That scene where he eats the octopus is one of the most intense things I’ve ever seen. When I was at art school, one of the last classes I took was video art, just the history of it, as a requirement. And I found myself to be so interested in it, I was like “Wow! Some of these things, they’re not supposed to make sense, they don’t have a plot, they’re actually just visuals.” But they were so interesting to watch.

TW: Is it true you’re going to write some horror books for Scholastic?
GW: It was a really amazing opportunity that came up. I’m actually really interested in young adult stuff, because I find that to be a pretty crazy playground right now. You find a lot of authors like Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker going to that form, so in a weird way its limitations give you more freedom, because if you’re writing for young adults, you can push the boundaries more. But it also keeps you from doing the things you would normally do in an adult book. And I think that’s what’s great about young adult – the stuff that crosses over.

TW: And one thing you’ve got to admit – all the stimulants and depressants in the world can’t equal the wonder of real life.
GW: Yeah. And not only is [real life] ugly and beautiful at the same time – because anything needs to be both ugly and beautiful – but it’s just so amazing, and there are so many opportunities there to do so many crazy things if you’re just not f**ked up. And the point the band’s at now, creatively, especially on Black Parade? We pushed it so far with that record that we can do all kinds of crazy things now. And that’s what’s really exciting.

My Chemical Romance play the San Jose Civic Auditorium, Apr. 2, and San Francisco’s The Fillmore, Apr. 3-4

CD REVIEWS By Tom Lanham

	R.E.M. Accelerate Warner Brothers By now, the jury on these old Athens upstarts is split pretty evenly into two camps: Fans who long for the early Murmur/Chronic Town years, when Peter Buck fired off sparkling guitar filigrees as unpredictable as bottle rockets, while Michael Stipe mumbled his way through hummable non sequiturs; and those who’ve glommed onto the group in its later slow-dance phase, and repeatedly requested “Everybody Hurts” at their senior prom. R.E.M. closes the case with Accelerate, a scruffy, scrappy riff-fest that does its damnedest to bring back those halcyon fireworks, often quite successfully. The now-requisite ballads are here – “Hollow Man,” and the English-folky “Until The Day Is Done” – but the show essentially belongs to Buck, who sustains a fierce retro-punk energy across rockers like “Mr. Richards,” “Horse To Water” and the Kinks-addictive powerchord single, “Supernatural Superserious.” While Stipe spits out venomous vitriol in the opening track, “Living Well’s The Best Revenge,” he doesn’t linger too long in serious territory this time around, at one point posing the rhetorical question “Where is the cartoon escape hatch for me?” Right here, in this righteous little trip down memory lane.
	THE KILLS Midnight Boom Domino Inspiration, it seems, is in the playground where you find it. Or so say The Kills – Yankee vocalist Alison Mosshart and her UK guitarist sidekick Jamie Hince – who were so struck by the jump rope songs they heard in the ‘60s documentary Pizza Pizza Daddio, they composed a few of their own. Seriously. So the schematic for this third outing is disarmingly simple – kickoff single “U.R.A. Fever” is a childish, chanted duet tacked to a bass/handclap rhythm that’s decidedly schoolyard. Following rope-skippy suit are “Sour Cherry,” “Alphabet Pony,” “Black Balloon” and “Cheap and Cheerful” (when The Kills find a nail, they keep hammering it long after more play-it-safe musicians would’ve stopped). And Hince has ratcheted down his garage-retro guitar squall accordingly, until it serves as mere punctuation on several tracks. This puts Mosshart front and center, and she rises bravely to the occasion. A bold career experiment for a duo, but it works.
	THE DUKE SPIRIT Neptune Shangri-La British barnstormers The Duke Spirit were all set to conquer America a couple of years ago with their goth-punk-psychedelic debut Cuts Across The Land. But a key tour opening was canceled, and the match never touched their fame-ready fuse. That should change with this sophomore stunner, produced in the California desert by Queens of the Stone Age alum Chris Goss. The kaleidoscopic confusion of Cuts is long gone, replaced by a steady, thumping rock ’n’ roll pulse and a clarity of sound that points twin guitarists Luke Ford and Dan Higgins in the same Spectoresque direction. Riding herd on their sweeping textures is blonde bombshell Liela Moss, her Janis Joplin-schooled voice often cracking with charismatic strain. Every cut is a keeper, from the ethereal confessional “My Sunken Treasure” to the Marvin Gaye-echoing “The Step And The Walk.” Everything – from the vocals, riffs, and rhythm to the gothic sense of grandeur – fits together like a jigsaw. And one light shines through: Moss is a total star in the making.
	VAN MORRISON Keep It Simple New West Anyone who’s ever seen the man perform can testify to this: Tottering out onstage, possibly nursing a hangover from the night before, Van Morrison doesn’t resemble some soulful song stylist so much as Yoda in a vest. You can’t help but think “Jeez – this guy’s gonna entertain me?” Then he opens his mouth to sing. And jaws drop. Eyes gape. The Celtic crooner has won over another crowd, simply by purveying some of the most friendly, flexible pipes in modern music. And by now he knows all too well his own strengths, ergo the title – and the basic blues, country content – of this latest effort “Soul is a feeling, a feeling deep within/Soul is not the color of your skin,” he opines in one number, then spends the rest of the album proving it, in straightforward stunners like “That’s Entrainment” and “End of the Land.” Nothing that really sets your speakers on fire, but that was never what Morrison was about.

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