Ray Toro, guitar player for My Chemical Romance, is the one without the make-up.
“It’s not my thing,” he says from the road somewhere in Florida, a few days before his band plays the Tsongas Arena in Lowell.
When his Goth-looking band mates apply mascara and eyeliner before a show, Toro plugs into his iPod. Sounding as wholesome as an American Idol contestant, the 28-year-old kid from New Jersey is pretty psyched to be in this IT band right now. The only thing he misses is time.
“When you are constantly going, things go by really fast. You don’t get a concept, all of a sudden we are very, very popular.”
It dawned on him that he was a rock star when he was spotted at a Chuck E. Cheese in the middle of nowhere.
“Usually you’ll get spotted in a parking lot outside a venue before or after a show. This was random.”
Graduating from the second stage at the Vans Warped Tour this year to tour headliners and to an MTV Latin America nomination for best new international artist, their rise is anything but random. Toro chalks it up to “grinding away, returning to the same cities over and over.”
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Saturday night's Tsongas Arena lineup vacillated between two distinct musical idioms – call it metal-core, punk-pop or plain old whiner's delight, but never has rock 'n' roll this volatile sounded so tuneful.
Opener Reggie and the Full Effect played a short set of throttling hardcore (complete with uvula-scraping screams), blended with curiously radio-friendly riffs.
Alkaline Trio followed with a dexterous, authoritative performance.Alternating between two lead vocalists, the Chicago-based band played with a seasoned maturity that made for the gig's most pleasant surprise.
Plenty of body
A provocative drawing of blood-spattered lovers adorns the cover of "Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge," the hit album by My Chemical Romance. The songs are likewise dark, its subjects wounded and death-obsessed. The band rages through angst-filled, punk-pop blasts that bear such titles as "The Jetset Life Is Gonna Kill You" and "It's Not a Fashion Statement, It's a [Expletive] Deathwish."
The band members are not the most cheerful crew, but they've grabbed listeners viscerally as few other groups have recently. My Chemical Romance, which toured with Green Day this past spring, has become a bona fide MTV favorite -
The band performs at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Theater at Continental Arena, East Rutherford. Tickets are $19.99 and $25.
Ray Toro and his band mates miss New Jersey.
They miss the cramped New Brunswick basements where college students crammed to hear their band, My Chemical Romance, until there was barely space left to play. They miss packing Montclair's Bloomfield Avenue Café and Passaic Park's Loop Lounge with their friends. They miss rocking VFW halls.
"It was a crazy, crazy time," Toro said by telephone, as his band prepared to get back in the bus and travel to another city. "There
Egypt's vital tourist industry was dealt another blow after three young Islamist militants were killed in attacks in the heart of Cairo that left a number of foreign visitors injured.
One man blew himself up as he jumped off a bridge near the world famous Egyptian Museum on Saturday, and less than an hour later two women - the man's sister and his fiancee - died in an abortive attack on a tourist bus.
The attacks by what appears to be a new generation of young extremists without links to traditional Islamist groups followed a bombing in Cairo last month
Green Day win 7, My Chemical Romance get nothing
Green Day continued its charmed year by dominating the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards last night (Aug. 28) at Miami's American Airlines Arena. The group's video for "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" won six awards, including video of the year, best group video, best rock video and two trophies for direction and cinematography (for director Samuel Bayer). Another clip, "American Idiot," won the viewer's choice award.
The group's performance of "Boulevard" opened MTV's live broadcast of the VMAs, which were hosted by Diddy. "It's nice to know rock music still has a