The last time I saw Joe Trohman in person was at the Fireside Bowl at a THROWDOWN / BLEEDING THROUGH / NO WARNING show in December 2001 when he gave me the CDR of the new band he was doing with Pete Wentz. He said they made the name three words so Matt Groening wouldn’t sue them. In the two or three years prior to that, we spent a lot of time hanging out at shows, listening to music, and playing video games. He was one of only a few friends at my school who were straight edge and actively involved in a scene beyond our suburbs. We had bonded so much that my mom felt the need to intervene with a passive aggressive note.
[image removed to save myself from embarrassment.]
I wish I had other mementoes from our friendship. Given that cameras were yet to become ubiquitous, so we don’t have random candid photos, and that we lived in the same area, so we didn’t exchange letters, there’s not much else to show from our time together. Even his signature in my yearbook was of the nickname some of the older Chicago dudes gave him instead of his given name.
[image removed to preserve some mystique.]
We were only one grade level apart, but he was chronologically more than a year younger than me. This age gap makes no difference these days, but reading his account of his pre-FALL OUT BOY days in this book makes me scratch my head at times. Was he really only 15 when he scabbed for ARMA ANGELUS? He would have been 15 until September 2000, so the story of Pete Wentz convincing Joe’s mom to let him go on that tour would have happened in March of 2000. This was a time when we were hanging out pretty frequently and I don’t remember him ever talking about it, so I don’t know what to think about the credibility of this anecdote. It seems a little more likely that he would have scabbed for them in the summer of 2001 on the tour with 7 ANGELS 7 PLAGUES, when he would have been 16 and starting his senior year in the fall. In the end, the accuracy of this detail has zero impact on his subsequent musical success and on my life in general, but engaging in the performance of being correct after the fact in this review sure made me feel good for about five minutes.
I selfishly read the book for the possibility that my name or a vague recollection of an older, taller friend would grace the page. It was not to be. I supposed that makes me one of the vapid and faceless moonlighters from high school who were not long for the scene, as he tells it. He does recall the kids who were a grade above me treating him with kindness before brutally telling him that not one of them actually liked him as a friend. Which one of these guys do you think best matches his description of being the “portly, pig-nosed, Buzz McCallister look-alike” who delivered that line?
[images removed for privacy and the presumption of innocence.]
It was hard to read that part, given that I remember how he looked up to those guys and how they seemed to welcome him just the same. That ease with making friends seemed to have served him well with connecting with the scene elders in the city as he was putting together the idea for FALL OUT BOY. He was the one who introduced himself to me at the RACE TRAITOR / BURN IT DOWN / GOOD CLEAN FUN / BROTHER’S KEEPER / The JUDAS FACTOR show on March 6, 1999 at the Fireside. (Let me know if you have the flyer for this show.)
Later that year, he was doing an online zine called A Helping Hand and he interviewed CLUBBER LANG and FIGURE FOUR over email. I was supposed to help with the zine in some way by doing show reviews but I never did. I think he gave me the nickname of the Angry Green Giant and used a picture of Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z as my avatar. He also put his own spin on Adele Collins’ mainstay question from I Stand Alone by asking both bands “When was the last time you made someone cry?” If you’re not familiar, all of the interviews in ISA featured the questions “When was the last time you cried?” and “Pick a scar and tell a story about it.” Steve Wiltse memorably used them in his interview with The A-TEAM in Town of Hardcore #6. In light of the way he was so clearly driven to do more than fuck around in the suburbs and go off to college, it makes sense that he wouldn’t include these experiences in his memoir. They probably don’t register because they were just part of him finding his way.
As for the content related to the band that made him famous, the book is informative without being boring. Some of the writing probably sounds better in an audiobook or stand-up performance because the jokes don’t quite land in print. The reference to a bat mitzvah being a good deed involving purchasing his father one of Hank Aaron’s bats is indeed hilarious (i.e., it's a mitzvah related to a bat, not a bat mitzvah in the sense of a Jewish girl reaching religious maturity). The fact that his mom later gave the bat to a contractor who was admiring it while working on their house tells you a lot about how she navigated the world and caused problems for their family.
Rock memoirs aren’t a genre I read extensively, but it is really interesting to hear him explain how dissatisfied he was with the band’s last two albums because they featured so little in the way of guitars. That and his candid discussion of struggles with chemical dependency are honest without being gratuitously depraved. As he says in the title, none of this experience rocks. He has not always enjoyed the road to fame but it seems like he has at least found some kind of comfort in it.
(This is a lightly edited version of a review that originally appeared in issue #2 of the zine Anxiety’s False Promise, published February 2023.)
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