Written by Patrick Stump was in full panic mode. The sign in black marker on the front door said ‘SOLD OUT’, and he had found himself in the middle of a mosh. Surrounded by bodies, tumbling, screaming and pushing in every direction, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t breathe… and he had a camera pointed at his face.
A gig at Knights Of Colombus, a venue in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, where Stump’s band Fall Out Boy were filming the video for their very first single, Dead On Arrival, had got completely out of hand. Three songs into the set, the police turned up and shut the show down. “I thought I was going to die,” the vocalist and guitarist later told Chicago music TV show, JBTV.
Viewed today, Dead On Arrival’s video captures the furore that was building around the band at the time. Formed by bassist Pete Wentz and guitarist Joe Trohman in 2001, the duo recruited Stump and later, drummer Andy Hurley, who was renowned on the Chicago punk scene, and signed to independent Florida label, Fueled By Ramen, who released their debut album, Take This To Your Grave in 2003.
Fall Out Boy’s blend of irresistible melodies and razor sharp hardcore, later dubbed ‘softcore’ by Wentz, was fizzy and energetic, and they had a killer singer in Stump, whose elastic, honeyed voice had been honed by years of consuming everything from jazz to Christina Aguilera, Prince to Elvis Costello and Earth, Wind & Fire. The band’s leader though was Wentz, a good-looking, business-minded local legend in the local Chicago hardcore scene. His angsty, poetic lyrics were whip smart, barbed and romantic. They tackled topics such as relationships and depression, and immediately won Fall Out Boy a fervent audience.
Take This To Your Grave was rush-recorded over just two weeks in Madison, Wisconsin. When it was released in May 2003, initial reviews of the album were lukewarm – in particular, Rolling Stone branded it “run-of-the-mill” – but nevertheless, it still gained the band an enthusiastic following. The following summer, along with My Chemical Romance who had released their own debut album, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love in 2002, Fall Out Boy were booked onto US travelling pop-punk festival Warped Tour.
“We get asked, ‘How does it feel to be an overnight success?’ But I swear to God we played so many shows to one person it’s insane.”
Pete Wentz
“The audiences weren’t huge at this point, but they were so engaged,” said Kevin Lyman, Warped founder and producer, speaking to Billboard in 2018.
By the time the band had started work on their second album, From Under The Cork Tree, hype around the band had increased to the point that Fueled By Ramen’s major label parent, Island Records, had waded in and signed them up.
“The moment that the band progressed to Island Records was a paradigm shift like no other,” Trohman noted in his memoir, None Of This Rocks. The band decamped to California, where they recorded the album at LA’s Burbank Studios. “Everything went into hyperdrive once we started production on what would become our breakthrough album, From Under The Cork Tree.”
To an outsider, it seemed everything was falling into place, but Wentz’s long-time depression and anxiety was bubbling back to the surface. In February 2005, mid-way through recording sessions, he took an overdose of anti-anxiety medication, Ativan, while sitting in his car in a Chicago Best Buy carpark and was hospitalised for a week.
“I feel confidence in myself, but at the same time there’s these cracks in the facade and those little things underneath that are unstable,” he told Rolling Stone in 2006.
From Under The Cork Tree track, 7 Minutes in Heaven (Atavan Halen) is based on the experience. ‘I’m sleeping my way out of this one… I just need a stronger dose…’ sings Stump, giving voice to his bandmate’s experiences.
Wentz has since been frank about the incident to press and fans. “I just wanted to have my head shut up. I didn’t really think about whether I slept or died,” he told The Independent. “It is particularly overwhelming when you are on the cusp of doing something very big and thinking that it will be a big flop. I was racked with self-doubt.”
From Under The Cork Tree did not flop. The album was spearheaded by the single Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down, one of the year’s biggest songs, which Stump wrote in 10 minutes.
“I was trying to do a straight punk song for fun,” he told Rolling Stone. “But there was something about the rhythm of it, where I was like, ‘Hmm, that actually might be too good for just a shitty punk song.’”
“There was something about the rhythm of it, where I was like, ‘Hmm, that actually might be too good for just a shitty punk song.’”
Patrick Stump
The band knew straight away they’d created a corker. Drummer Hurley remembers Stump turning to him after recording the vocals. “He was like, ‘Yeah, I just got your kid’s college tuition paid for.’”
When the album was released in May 2005, it sold 500,000 copies in its first three months. By September, it was certified platinum. More polished than its predecessor, the new material smoothed out the band’s hardcore edges, but ramped up the lyrical angst. Wentz’s brutally honest lyrics, hanging out his very public relationship melodrama and battles with depression, provided fans with a life-line, a community where they felt validated and represented. In their thousands, they flocked to Myspace and online forums to dissect every line.
Meanwhile, Fall Out Boy were being played on near constant rotation on MTV’s flagship show, Total Request Live. That summer, they returned to Warped Tour, this time, playing the main stage alongside My Chemical Romance, who were soaring off the back of their own 2004 breakthrough, Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, while a little known Paramore played lower down the lineup. It was Warped’s biggest year; 700,000 kids turned out over 48 shows, more than double the year before and the atmosphere was feverish.
“It was the first time bands had security guards,” Senses Fail vocalist Buddy Neilson, recalled to Billboard. “Pete Wentz and Gerard Way couldn’t get around without them.”
“A lot of people are like, ‘You went from twenty kids in the room, to thousands,’” Wentz said later that year, during an interview for the band’s 2005 DVD, Bastards Of Young. “We get [asked] in interviews; how does it feel to be an overnight success? But last year, we toured for 285 days out of the year, and I swear to God we played so many shows to one person it’s insane. It built exponentially, for us it wasn’t an overnight success.”
By 2006, emo had erupted into the mainstream and scene leaders, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Panic! At The Disco and Paramore had become superstars. In May, having already completed a sold-out UK tour in January, the band returned to Britain for another tour, this time playing venues that were, in some cases, double the size than on the previous tour, including two dates at London’s iconic, 4500-capacity Brixton Academy. Later that year, the band received their first Grammy nomination, for Best New Artist (they would lose out to R&B singer John Legend).
Much like grunge and nu metal before it, emo had a recognisable uniform: studded belts, skinny jeans wristbands and fingerless gloves, all topped with violently side parted hair and a sweeping fringe. Pete Wentz jokingly admitted that he travelled with his own hair straightener that required a “thirty-pound industrial converter to work overseas”.
The bassist had relocated to LA, was dating popstar and MTV darling Ashley Simpson, and had achieved a level of celebrity that saw him hounded by paparazzi on a daily basis. A few years later a picture of him strutting down the street while a starstruck-looking Bruno Mars started after him would become a viral meme.
While he had never shied away from discussing his private life in public through his lyrics, later that year a boundary was crossed. In one of the earliest cases of its kind, a nude selfie of Wentz was leaked online, an experience the band later poked fun at in the video for their single, This Ain’t A Scene, It’s An Arms Race, but which he would eventually describe as violating.
“I feel confidence in myself, but there’s these cracks in the facade and those little things underneath that are unstable”
Pete Wentz
“There was a point where I thought, if these are the terms that we do this band on, I don’t want to do this band,” he later said in an interview with The Guardian. “I felt like my privacy had been invaded.”
Alternative music has always had an uncomfortable relationship with the concept of ‘selling out’ and emo was no different. But, in direct contradiction to the scene’s insular tendencies, Wentz had his eye on the bigger picture. By 2006, he had turned himself into a kind of emo mogul, plugging his clothing brand, Clandestine Industries, and talking up Fall Out Boy “the brand” in interviews, an entrepreneurship spirit that was more hip-hop than rock. “You’re going to eat, sleep and breathe it,” he told Rolling Stone. “I want it to be a way you think about the world.”
In 2005, he and Patrick had founded their own record label, Decaydance Records, signing an emerging Panic! At The Disco and putting out the Las Vegas band’s debut record, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out – a move that was as savvy as it was cynical. “People are going to be piggybacking bands off of us,” he said. “Somebody’s going to be pulling those strings, why would it not be me?”
By the time Fall Out Boy released their third album, 2007’s career highlight, Infinity On High, they had transcended emo altogether. Not only did the album introduce a shift away from punk to pop-rock, Jay-Z put in a guest rap on the album’s opening track, Thriller. When Kanye West offered to remix single, This Ain’t A Scene…, Wentz went over to his house where they ate tacos and played board games. On its release, Infinity On High landed at No.1 on the Billboard chart, selling over 260,000 copies in its first week. It’s the band’s best album to date, a bona fide, no-skip album of wall-to-wall bangers.
Fall Out Boy were so successful, they could go in any direction they liked, which is exactly what they did – 2008’s ambitious, jazz and funk-indebted Folie Á Deux mostly side-stepped emo completely, baffled their fan base and was largely panned by critics. Ahead of its time, it’s taken longer for that album to have the reappraisal it deserves, but there’s no doubting the immediate and impact Fall Out Boy’s earlier material has had on the alternative scene.
The immense influence of their first three albums can be heard today in the work of new artists, from Pink Shift to Olivia Rodrigo, Yungblud and Lil Uzi Vert. More than two decades since they emerged from the broiling underground, one of the last rock bands to truly conquer the world have once again captured the zeitgeist.
“We were a really weird punk band that came out of hardcore, randomly ended up on TRL and were shot into this vortex of [the mainstream],” Wentz told the NME in 2023. “I’m just so happy we made it out as the same four guys. I’m most proud we exist 20 years in and we’re talking about music we made this year. That’s pretty cool.”
Originally published in The Story Of Emo bookazine. Order a physical copy online and have it delivered straight to your door.
