Gerard Way’s problem isn’t stage presence or passion or the ability to sway an audience, at Webster Hall Thursday night he had all of the above, and it isn’t inattentiveness to craft, not even that he only played songs from his first solo album Hesitant Alien and a smatterring of covers, it is… well, the highlight of the show and by far was an encore of Sleater Kinney’s “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” and not because the actual performance was a significant improvement on the rest of the show but because the song was light years ahead of anything else he played.
The man has lost the gift for songwriting.
From 2004 to 2006, as the leader of My Chemical Romance, Way was not merelythe best in class, not simply better than entire genre, emo, he was the King of rock and roll, a towering modern David Bowie glam rock figure with some of the best songs of the 2000s under his belt. He could not merely fill arenas, he could play em. A less than sold out Webster Hall, part of the CMJ music marathon, which means your passes could get you in, should have been packed to the rafters and it wasn’t because 8 years between hits is too long and also, in 2014 everybody knows the setlist and the setlist was a drag… though better live than on record.
Gerard is an exciting performaer, he moves like a dream, he speaks well to the audience even if he namedrops too much and he attacks the stage with gusto directing his band, a nondescript lot, with a steady hand. When a barrier falls down he keeps the audience calm, takes the ten minute break in his stride, and doesn’t lose the set. With dyed red hair and a bright blue suit, Gerard looks the role and he plays the role, he believes in these songs and he sells them: essentially, he performs the album in order (a shake up here and there) and with absolute conviction. He opens with “The Bureau’ and ‘Action Cat”, same as on Hesitant Alien, but I preferred them on stage. But there is only so much you can do with all these stodgy only partially formed songs.
So many of them,, “Drugstore Perfume”, “Maya the Psychic” big time statement “Brother” fail to signify. Gerard shouts out Billy Corgan in the audience (Billy’s last good song was this week, but his last good song before that dates back 20 years) and tells us how he sent the demos to Billy who said “This is Glam rock. Have you listened to the Sweet?” Well, I’ve listened to Sweet (there is no the) and Way’s songwriting in no way compares to the glam bubblegum kings Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman. That is neither a compliment nor an insult. It is a fact. Gerard is playing pop rock with illusions of grandeur and a glam rock pedigree. And he is writing it worse and worse and worse.
It also begs an answer to this question: when your set is 60 minutes, why not make it 75 minutes and throw in some hits? Especially when you are pushing an iffy album which hasn’t helped you even sell out a 1500 SRO? Why not give people what they want to hear? You wrote the suckers, sing em.
All that is missing for Gerard to get back to the arenas is the songs. But that is a huge All That Is.
