Fall Out Boy: Babies, Breakups, Bromances!

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It’s not every day you get to watch a rock star pee.

Fall Out Boy are in Philadelphia, the second stop on a back-to-basics club tour to promote their new album. They drove down from Boston this morning in a rented Dodge minivan and are currently lounging in the makeshift dressing room of a North Philly dive bar, across the street from Floyd & Diann’s Tire Service. A camera crew from Fuse is here, and a gaggle of pubescent girls awaits a meet-and-greet just outside the door. And over in the corner, Pete Wentz is unzipping his pants.

Armed with an empty 16-ounce Poland Spring bottle, Wentz—Fall Out Boy’s 29-year-old bassist and mouthpiece—turns to face the wall. While the rest of the room averts their eyes, he hunches his back and takes what is, by all appearances, a brief yet wholly satisfying piss.

“All right,” he says, zipping back up. “We ready?”

Pete Wentz has built his life around making the private public. In an age when all reality is televised and the most intimate of details are broadcast via Facebook Alert, Wentz is the king of the overshare—penning songs that flaunt their autobiographical provenance and blogging obsessively about everything from his 2005 suicide attempt to his favorite skate shoes. Unguarded and unashamed, he’s the quintessential 21st-century rock star—a penis-flashing Twitter stream come to life.

Wentz has been mocked mercilessly for his attention- mongering. He’s been branded an asshole, a sellout, a fucktard, a fame whore, a twat, a dick and a closeted gay douchebag—and those are just the comments on one Perez Hilton post. But as Wentz puts it in the single Fall Out Boy will encore with tonight: I don’t care what you think, as long as it’s about me.

“Being famous is like being in the WWF,” Wentz says. “When we first came out, I was Hulk Hogan. Kids loved me. Now I’m more like the Undertaker. The thing people don’t understand is, the boos are the same as the cheers to me. I just love to wrestle.”

“Aaaaand, action on the carousel!”

Two days later—sunny Los Angeles. Fall Out Boy are shooting a video for their new single “America’s Suitehearts” at a hangar-sized soundstage. The set resembles a ghoulish Hollywood carnival, complete with zombie starlets, a moat of toxic sludge and a giant red merry-go-round where the band will perform before a pack of bloodthirsty paparazzi.

The cameras roll, and the carousel begins to spin. As the fake photographers swarm, the members of Fall Out Boy circle one by one into view. First comes guitarist Joe Trohman—crazy-haired and slightly dazed-looking, in red suede boots and a matching fez. The photographers’ flashbulbs go pop. Next, Andy Hurley, the bearded, tattooed drummer, in a leprechaun-green tuxedo jacket and no shirt. Pop pop. Singer Patrick Stump, wearing a canary-yellow tailcoat and a feathered top hat, looking like a debonair chicken. Pop pop pop. And finally—in knee-high leather boots, gold lamé hot pants and a black lace headpiece so ghastly Cher could have worn it to the Oscars, and once did—comes Wentz, looking like some kind of gay glam gladiator, an evil-skeleton smile plastered on his face in black and white greasepaint. Poppoppoppop.

It’s not hard to find reasons to make fun of Wentz. His swooping bangs and disproportionately large head make him look disturbingly like a grown-up version of a Garbage Pail Kid. He wears girls’ jeans and toils in a genre known more for its interest in cosmetics than for its contributions to the pop-music canon. His lyrics are more self-indulgent than a luxury-spa retreat. Pictures of his penis have wound up on the Internet. He plays the bass—and not very well.

Yet this self-described “dirty, shitty boy” is also, improbably, the world’s biggest rock star under the age of 30. (Try naming one bigger.) He has his hand in a clothing line, an MTV show, a chain of bars and his own record label. Riding the cresting twin waves of emo and MySpace, Fall Out Boy transformed themselves from four Midwestern kids with funny names and bad haircuts to one of rock’s last reliable record-movers, selling a combined 4 million copies of their last two albums. And today, over in the band’s dressing room, curled up on a checkered sofa, sits another keystone of Wentz’s growing celebrity: a very pregnant Ashlee Simpson-Wentz. She and Wentz were married last May; they’re expecting their first child, a boy, literally any minute. “Hey, babe,” Wentz says during a break in shooting. He bends down and kisses her cheek. “Feeling OK?”