The press was reacting to the cultural shift. I remember it was right around a year later when the record hit the 100,000 mark. Most records in their second week drop off 70 percent. Rich Egan (co-founder, Vagrant Records manager, Dashboard Confessional): When The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most came out in March 2001, we had no setup for it, just because we had to rush it out.
When people started to have a real sense of community. Ian Cohen (music journalist): If you didn’t know all the words to the songs, you were gonna feel out of place.Ĭhris Carrabba (front person, Dashboard Confessional): This is when things really started to snowball for Dashboard. It became like a church thing, where you’re trying to get the people to sing the word of God back to you. He would step off the mic, step to the front of the stage, and sing with them. Mike Marsh (drummer, Dashboard Confessional): Chris really went out of his way to condone it. Chris was up there singing songs that had felt kind of mono on record, but they were exploding into this outrageously intense stereo because the audience was singing along, singing everything back to him. That night, the clientele was almost entirely suburban high schoolers wearing, like, pleated khakis and Gamecocks hats. I went to the show a little skeptical, having listened to Chris Carrabba’s records and not personally connecting with them. I was given the opportunity to write about Dashboard Confessional at CBGB. The editor Tracey Pepper would often, generously, give me opportunities to cover bands other people weren’t interested in or she herself didn’t fully understand or appreciate.
The following chapter, an insider’s pass into Radio City Music Hall and Studio 8H, falls at the pivot point when emo subculture went mainstream - and somehow emerged as the defining rock music of the 21st century.Īndy Greenwald (music journalist, former Spin contributing writer): The front of Spin magazine was a section called “Noise” where they covered up-and-coming bands and things. If one moment captures the unlikely success of emo’s many heroes, it may be Dashboard fans voting the Strokes home early from the MTV Video Music Awards. Emo didn’t end up saving the business, but Best Buy behemoths like Paramore’s Riot! and My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade provided overcast teens with a thrilling soundtrack as it careened into the unknown. Over the next five years, bands like My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Paramore, and Panic! at the Disco pushed emo so far into the mainstream that it’s now impossible to imagine social media or millennial emotional awareness (or lack thereof) without it. Shocking as this was to the punks who frequented the Wayne, it was just the beginning. Then Dashboard’s Unplugged went platinum and Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle” became one of 2002’s biggest pop songs. They never planned on being music-industry saviors. At home between tours, Dashboard’s Chris Carrabba worked in a South Florida elementary school and Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins at an art-supply store in Arizona. Less than two years before Dashboard Confessional did MTV Unplugged and Jimmy Eat World graced SNL, they were playing venues like the Wayne Firehouse, a rec hall in northern New Jersey where tickets went for $8. I always knew their fame was unexpected, but interviewing both bands for my book, Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo’s Mainstream Explosion 1999–2008, illuminated just how novel it all felt. Dashboard Confessional and Jimmy Eat World were just happy to be there. Or at least that’s what music execs like Jimmy Iovine and Luke Wood were hoping for. As the search for the next Nirvana neared its 11th hour, lightning struck in the form of a yearning punk-rock subgenre called emo. Of all genres, rock seemed most under siege. CD sales hit an all-time peak in 1999, but the rise of file-sharing platforms like Napster had sparked a sharp drop. Screaming infidelities: Dashboard Confessional introducing emo to the world on MTV Unplugged.
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