About a Boy

Chicago's North Shore hardly seems the crucible for edgy punk-pop. But with a new CD that's already gone gold, and jam-packed concert crowds, Fall Out Boy has burst out of the suburbs (even though most of the band members still live with their parents).

(page 2 of 4)

"So many people want to reach out to them," says John Janick, the president and a cofounder of Fueled by Ramen records, the independent Florida label that released Fall Out Boy's first CD, Take This to Your Grave, in 2003. In early May, Island Records released From Under the Cork Tree, Fall Out Boy's sophomore CD and major label début. Fans bought more than 60,000 copies in the following week, enough to land the record in the number nine slot on the sales chart compiled by Billboard, the music industry's leading trade magazine. The CDs sales reached the gold record mark-half a million copies-in late July, and by the end of August was approaching platinum status, with almost one million CDs sold.

Fall Out Boy spent most of the summer on the Warped Tour-a multiple-act, multiple-stage summer punk rock festival that has helped raise bands such as No Doubt and Blink 182 to superstardom-playing 48 shows in less than two months, including a hometown concert at the Tweeter Center in Tinley Park in late July.

Standing on the side of the stage before that show, Richard Trohman, a cardiologist at Rush University Medical Center, looks out at the sea of teenagers who are waiting for his son's band to perform. "I find it hard to believe," he says of the band's success. "It's exciting, and I'm very proud, but it's surreal. You never dream it'll really come true. You don't dare."

Growing up in the affluent suburbs, the sons of professionals, isn't your typical pedigree for punk rock musicians, but for Fall Out Boy's members, music was a refuge from the conventionality and cliquishness of their environment. "We were the kind of nerds who get ignored in high school," says Stump. "While everyone else was going to parties, we were doing bands."

Wentz attended North Shore Country Day School (where his mom, Dale, works as an administrator) and New Trier High School. He and Hurley played in a hard-core band called Arma Angelus while they were in college-Wentz came within a semester of earning a political science degree from DePaul, and Hurley was a dean's list double major in anthropology and history at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. They formed Fall Out Boy in 2001 with Trohman-a New Trier junior who'd known Wentz since they were kids-and Stump, a Glenbrook South High School student that Trohman met at a bookstore.

Taking their name from a Simpsons character at the suggestion of a kid at their first show-a decision they now regret-Fall Out Boy began to build a music scene around the band, playing house parties and booking gigs in any place that would have them. They played a south suburban coffee shop and a dive country bar in Schaumburg, and started selling out a Knights of Columbus Hall in Arlington Heights. "There were so many random places," Stump remembers. "Every weekend we'd play some other suburb to the same amount of different people in some totally unlikely place."

"They took the grassroots punk rock steps. If there's an unwritten manual, they followed it pretty closely, and good things happened for them," observes Joe Shanahan, the owner of Metro, the Chicago rock club, where Fall Out Boy gradually rose from the opening act on a four-band Sunday night bill to headlining a sold-out year-end concert last December.

This article appears in the October 2005 issue of Chicago Magazine.

Did you like what you read here? Subscribe to Chicago Magazine »