Where Are Your Boys Tonight?

Exultant.

The first time I cried reading a non-fiction.

I first discovered emo in 2006 when I was in the 6th grade (10 years old) with MCRs Teenagers and Good Charlottes The River. It irreparably altered my brain chemistry in 2007 when I first saw pictures of Panic! in either AP or Rock Sound or Kerrang. In 2008 I had the roughest year of my early teens and these bands were all I had (along with the Percy Jackson series.)

Now I'm 27 and this all feels like a lifetime ago. With age comes perspective, with age these idols become people. This book let me get a glimpse of my heroes growing up in a way their albums and performances only alluded to. I'm grateful.

That being said, if Ryan Ross ever releases new music I will cry scream throw up and maybe even pass away.

Loved it. Here's everything I highlighted, mostly fob and panic related:

Where Are Your Boys Tonight? - Chris Payne (Highlight: 46)

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◆ Introduction

▪ In 2017, Brand New's Jesse Lacey was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, who described similar accounts of a twenty-something Lacey preying on them throughout the 2000s when they were as young as fifteen. Brand New subsequently canceled touring plans and Lacey issued an apology statement, though it did not address specifics of the of sexual misconduct accusations. In Where Are Your Boys Tonight?, I attempted to depict where and how Brand New drove the narrative of the 2000s emo boom, without glorifying Lacey himself. I realize that, at times, this bestriding may seem difficult, if not impossible: Brand New was arguably the most innovative and critically acclaimed band of their scene. Their appeal was so cultish and specific, it's hard to put into words. I truly hope I captured it in a way that feels accurate to the era, and brings no further pain to those Lacey hurt.

▪ While the emo boom is inextricable from the internet, it's tied to physical space and a time I don't think could ever exist again

▪ when the internet was accessible enough to spread word of new demos and DIY shows, but pre-MySpace platforms like message boards and LiveJournal were still too analog and isolated to make anyone famous.

◆ Part 1: Close to Home, 1999–2000

▪ PETE WENTZ: bassist, Fall Out Boy (and previously, bassist, Racetraitor; front person, Arma Angelus); founder, Decaydance Records, Clandestine Industries

◆ Chapter 1: Jersey Basements & the Manhattan Skyline

▪ Everything we were into was tailored to somebody who didn't like to go outside, anyway.

▪ If you had friends at high school who were like, “I'm going to a concert,” they're not in the scene. If you're in the scene, you go to shows.

▪ nobody likes being misunderstood. I'd rather be ignored than misunderstood.

▪ One thing I remember clearly was talking about how it's okay to cry.

◆ Chapter 2: The First Fancy Tour Bus to Pull Up at the Manville Elks Lodge

▪ Isn't that lineup insane? For ten dollars!

◆ Chapter 3: Long Island & the Last Silent Majority Show

▪ There's this sibling rivalry between New Jersey and Long Island, that they kind of seem to hate each other, but are kind of exactly the same. Like Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly in Step Brothers.

◆ Chapter 4: “If Pete Wasn't Playing for Us, He Was Moshing for Us”

▪ I grew up in a very white neighborhood, but was super disconnected from that. I think my parents tried to have us be . . . you know, we'd eat at Ethiopian restaurants but you're just the weird family and I'm like, “I just want to eat my fucking McDonald's,” you know what I mean?

▪ JIM GRIMES: Pete didn't really know how to play bass too well. It was more of an entertainment thing with him, where he had good stage presence.

▪ Pete had cultivated this image for a little while . . . I wouldn't say being thuggy, but being a dude that was a little bit of like . . . how do I put this . . . a dude who's willing to fight.

▪ Pete always had a hustle going on. He was always a hustler. I'll say that till the day I die about that guy. He always had some kind of scam going on, whether for good or bad.

▪ Pete always wanted his own thing to catch on, where he could say, “This is my thing that I built.”

◆ Chapter 6: And Out to the Great Wide Open

▪ I was still young enough that, something bad happens, you call your mom.

◆ Chapter 9: “At the Time, They Were Geoff from Thursday's Weird Friends”

▪ My Chem was the first band I knew that would get ready to go onstage every night. We were dirtball kids; those guys put fucking makeup on.

◆ Chapter 10: The Long Island Lyric Pool

▪ Brand New put out a shirt that said “Mics Are for Singing Not Swinging” and then Taking Back Sunday's response was to put out a shirt that said “Proudly Swinging Since 1999.

◆ Chapter 11: “If Half the People Hate You, the Other Half Are Going to Defend You to the Death”

▪ PETE WENTZ: Everybody's got a dream or whatever. Nobody gives a fuck until you execute it.

▪ Fall Out Boy had just started gaining momentum. They had rabid fans . . . but there were only about thirty of them.

▪ The band Spitalfield wrote this song called “Fairweather Friend,” which was rumored to be about Pete.

▪ Pete developed this thing that was like, “Infamy is bigger than fame.” If half the people hate you, the other half are going to defend you to the death.

◆ Chapter 14: “It Didn't Matter That 99% of Mainstream America Didn't Know Who He Was”

▪ We treated the word “emo” like a dog you're training not to jump up on you. The best way to train that dog is just to ignore the dog.

◆ Chapter 15: Private Jets & Magazine Covers

▪ Like, “What the fuck? People are referencing this shit on SportsCenter?” That's when I knew shit got weird.

▪ Alt Press was the MTV of our scene. The holy grail was the fucking Alt Press cover story.

◆ Chapter 16: “I Remember Playing Hollister. It Was a Riot at the Mall, Basically”

▪ By the time we got signed, Pete was like, “I got the steering wheel now.” And I was fine with that. I just wanted to write music. It takes me longer to write words, anyway.

▪ Towards the end, I think during “Saturday,” the stage couldn't handle the weight of all the people and just kind of collapsed. They had to stop and try to figure out what to do. I remember that night feeling like, “Okay, this is a different thing. This band is gonna be a different thing.”

◆ Chapter 17: “If You Don't Sign This Band, You're Gonna Regret It for the Rest of Your Life”

▪ I never thought they were gonna be the next humongous band in the world; they were a vampire biker band to me. I loved it.

◆ Chapter 18: “Love in the Face of the Apocalypse”

▪ Bunch of Generation X confused-ass old people who were mad that a bunch of young people came along and got bigger than them.

◆ Chapter 19: New Friend Request

▪ I think there's a whole generation of damn good developers today that started because they were social people who liked music and wanted to customize their MySpace pages.

▪ “Is that Patrick Stump on vocals? What is this?”

◆ Chapter 21: Going Down Swinging

▪ To me, I hate going too deep with anything like this because I feel like there's the possibility that you romanticize it. And there's nothing really romantic about it.

◆ Chapter 22: The Eye of the Storm

▪ The My Chem superfan wanted to like, be in the band; they wanted to be close to it and share those feelings. The Fall Out Boy superfans, to me, wanted to sleep with someone in the band.

◆ Chapter 23: “Panic! at the Disco Was Like Pouring Gasoline on the Fire”

▪ Ryan Ross and Brendon Urie were like Lennon and McCartney. Ryan wasn't the most proficient player, but he's a writer. If he got an idea he really believed in, he beat the fuck out of it, looked at every angle, until he was like, “Okay, I've got this one idea. I can't even play it, but this one idea will be huge.” And Brendon is the kind of dude who can play anything. An oboe, a violin—put an instrument in this dude's hand and he'll just get it. He could interpret Ryan like that.

◆ Chapter 25: “Bigger Than Emo”

▪ I don't know how anyone got away with ranking friends, without some kind of World War III erupting across the social stratosphere. It was a different time . . .

◆ Chapter 27: “As Much Mischief As We Could”

▪ Hey, listen, there's this movie called Snakes on a Plane. It's just Samuel L. Jackson cussing the whole time and killing a bunch of snakes and it's gonna be the biggest thing in the world.

▪ This far into their record cycle, they're rock stars. They're wearing mismatched designer shoes, like $1,000 on each foot. Ryan was getting a very intricate tree painted on his face every single night by makeup artists.

◆ Chapter 28: Bridge & Tunnel

▪ Around 2006, there was a big clash between the early 2000s emo and everything that was gonna come after.

◆ Chapter 32: Takeover

▪ GABE SAPORTA: [Who was the best kisser?] Definitely Pete. Maybe tied with William Beckett.

◆ Chapter 35: “They Took the Exclamation Point Off Their Name”

▪ I will say I never liked Panic!; I liked Ryan Ross.

◆ Chapter 36: “When Your Fans Start Dressing Like You, You Gotta Find the Next Thing”

▪ You could tell there was some sort of dissention in the group, so that was the first time it was really only Patrick speaking on behalf of the band, taking me through the songs. I think Folie showed his influence more than Pete's. I think Pete was a little checked out at that point, so for better or worse, Folie is more of a Patrick Stump record.

▪ The front half of the song is just me being miserable, and putting that into song. And the back half of the song became a celebration of the band, and what we had been, up to that point.

◆ Chapter 38: We'll Carry On

▪ Hayley is the iconic alt-rock flower that continues to bloom a different color every season.

▪ Dude, Ryan Ross. What a visionary

▪ PATRICK STUMP: The response to my solo record was even worse than Folie.

▪ I've come to terms that, similar to the term “punk,” emo is in the eye of the beholder. So is emo Rites of Spring and Sunny Day Real Estate, or is emo My Chem and Fall Out Boy? And the answer is “yes.” It is whatever it is to you.