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“Condolences to all of the people in the Nashville crowd idk how anyone’s surviving Gerard [Way] in a skirt moaning and screaming,” tweeted Twitter user and passionate My Chemical Romance fan @D0CSHARTENS, who documented the third stop on the band’s North American reunion tour on Tuesday (Aug. 23). The fan, aka Mak!, captured Way, 45, dressed in a green and white cheerleader’s outfit, a bright W emblazoned on the top of his costume. “Currently on death’s door, and it’s his fault,” she captioned a pair of photos (click to see) of Way’s look. “Gerard Way, you will ALWAYS be famous,” she wrote along with a video of Way pogo dancing, his hair and skirt bouncing to the beat.
“I do believe some of you have been waiting a very long time for this show,” Gerard addressed the crowd at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, according to The Tennessean. “We have, too. Thank you so much for waiting around.” Onstage, bandmembers Frank Iero and Ray Toro matched Mikey Way, as all three wore t-shirts with the words “Mikey F-cking Way” on the front (likely, as The Tennessean notes, a tribute to Mikey playing to his adoptive hometown since the New Jersey native now resides in Music City.)
The night’s setlist included some of the band’s most beloved hits, like “Boy Division,” “Teenagers,” “I’m Not Okay,” and “Welcome to The Black Parade.” The encore for the night was a three-song set that included “Vampire Money,” “Hang ‘Em High,” and “The Kids From Yesterday.” The band is scheduled to play Cincinnati tonight (Aug. 24) before hitting the road across North America. The tour concludes with a five-night stint at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles before the band hits up the When We Were Young festival in Vegas.
The reunion tour finally kicked off on Aug. 20 after three years of COVID-related postponements. It’s the band’s first tour since going their separate ways in 2013, and in the near-decade since that breakup, their legacy has grown – as has their fanbase. “I noticed that the crowd was people my age that grew up with the band, and maybe a little older,” Matt Galle, the band’s longtime agent, told Billboard about a comeback show in December 2019. “And then there were people that were my kids’ ages — in junior high, in high school, in college. It was multiple generations of people, that had all waited to see them.”
Early estimates suggest that the reunion tour will pull in $60 million in ticket sales. “It’s gotten so, so much bigger than anyone thought it could be,” Rick Franks, co-president of North American touring at Live Nation — one of the multiple promoters working on the Reunion Tour — told Billboard. “We knew it was big. We knew it was arena big. We just didn’t know the demand would blow these places out immediately.”
