Fall Out Boy is on the rise

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By Sean Moeller | Thursday, May 10, 2007 1:13 AM CDT | () comments

For Fall Out Boy, no introductions are necessary at this point.

They’re beyond the sort of ambiguous existence that this band and that band share, splitting time between being forgotten and having never been known.

In two years, the Chicago pop-punkers have become that meteorite blazing through the sky, up the charts and into the greater pop consciousness.

They’re in every magazine you pick up, and their music is uploaded onto every tight pants-wearing, 13-to 25-year-old’s mp3-playing device — guaranteed.

The new fame, ballooning faster than imaginable, has led to some dicey moments and, suddenly, friends are harder to spot.

“The thing that’s the weirdest for us is that we’ve gone from being this band where people think, ‘I don’t care about this band that I’ve never heard of’ to being a band where people are saying, ‘Ooo. Hey! Can we be friends?’ ” Fall Out Boy guitarist Joe Trohman said. “I don’t feel like there’s anything that’s changed in us. I’ll tell you what it’s been like. People I went to high school with that I never knew and really crummy family members want to be your friend. I feel like every one of those people is coming out of the woodwork. And the more that happens, the more I keep people at arm’s length. I realize they’re there for something else.

“We put ourselves out there. People feel like they know us real well. The line comes close to being crossed a lot. For instance, Pete (Wentz, the band’s bassist) got sent a bunch of bloody razor blades. That’s like creepy. That crossed the line.”

Two years ago, they were a band with promise, a band that was making its major label debut and maybe biting off more than it could chew in the form of expectations. The album, “From Under the Cork Tree,” went double-platinum and earned them a Grammy nomination as best new artist.

Songs from that disc were easily the catchiest songs the genre had heard in quite some time. When you think catchy and likeable pop-punk, you immediately think of Blink-182. And then, if you want to think about serious pop-punk that’s not as pandering to the lowest common denominator, such as that from Good Charlotte and Simple Plan, there was Fall Out Boy.

Just when the style of music had been beaten to death by cheekiness, elementary lyrics and a look, there was Fall Out Boy. They brought a new level of intelligence back to a style that was desperately needing a face lift and a tummy tuck.

“Infinity on High,” the band’s fourth full-length album, was released in February to much fanfare. The first voice you hear, leading into “Thriller” is hip-hop mogul Jay-Z spouting about overcoming naysayers: “Yeah, what you critics said would never happen. We dedicate this album to anybody people said couldn’t make it — to the fans who held us down till everybody else came around. Welcome. It’s here.”

The critics and the fans have made this a new world for a band that, no more than four years ago, was playing the VFW Hall in Rock Island and the venue formerly known as Gabe’s in Iowa City, humping it to make their name stick.

“I can’t remember the names of the places we played, but we played there a lot,” Trohman said about the Quad-Cities in an interview two weeks ago. “We saw a lot of hard-core shows there, too. We used to come and see hard-core shows there because there was such a hard-core scene. We still have a lot of friends back home in the hard-core circle, and they always tell us they’ve got a show in the Quad-Cities. We’re like, ‘Surprise, surprise.’ ”

The new album went straight to No. 1 in the Billboard 200 charts, selling 260,000 copies its first week out. The first single, “This Ain’t A Scene, It’s An Arms Race,” was No. 1 on the United Kingdom singles chart and the U.S. pop singles chart.

The group’s first massive tour behind the new album begins Friday in Denver and includes a lineup that’s very who’s who and slightly off-kilter in the same instance, with +44 (Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker of Blink-182’s new group), Cobra Starship, The Academy Is… and the wild card, rapper Paul Wall.

With all of the attention being paid to the band and its music, a collection of optimism made for cynics — aka those who’ve had a difficult time with ladies — Trohman senses that difficulty that comes from getting bigger and needing to be more things to more people. The vultures and the sharks circle.

“There’s always another baby step ahead of you. That’s how I look at these things,” he said. “I think that the weird thing is that now that we’ve kind of gotten to this point, I feel in the air people waiting for the tear-down. It comes with the territory — all those doom-impenders.”

One of those doomsayers is not Jay-Z, the current president and CEO of Roc-A-Fella Records and Def Jam, who, earlier this week, was falsely reported dead in a light aircraft crash in North Carolina.

“When we’re in the same area, we’ll usually do dinner together,” Trohman said of Jay-Z. “He’ll come to see us play whenever he can. It’s so hard not to geek out around that dude. He emits this coolness.”

Sean Moeller can be contacted at

(563) 383-2288 or smoeller@qctimes.com.

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