Fall Out Boy: Babies, Breakups, Bromances!

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Talking with Hurley, you get the impression that he’s completely content to play the drums and go home to his Boca Burgers and Alan Moore comics. Joe Trohman, on the other hand, wants to do more. “I do feel left out a lot,” the guitarist says. At 24, he’s the youngest of the Fall Out boys, and he plays the role of kid brother well—splurging on old Nintendo games and $500 Storm Trooper figurines, finding funny YouTube videos for the guys to watch (latest favorite: “Chimpanzee Riding a Segway”). If Fall Out Boy were the Ninja Turtles, Wentz would be Leonardo, Stump would be Donatello, Hurley would be Raphael, and Trohman, all agree, would be Michelangelo—the “party dude.” “Joe is a free spirit,” Stump says. “He’s kind of just off in Joe Land, which is an awesome place to be.”

To hear Trohman tell it, though, Joe Land isn’t always so awesome. “It does get frustrating, not being able to contribute,” Trohman says. “I mean, to be labeled a background guy, someone who’s just along for the ride—it’s hard. I started Fall Out Boy, you know?” He wrote a few songs for the new album, but they were all cut at the last minute. “It’s kind of a bummer, to work so hard and have it come to nothing. I don’t want to sound like I’m bashing anyone, or I’m ungrateful,” he stresses. “Because I’m very happy to be a part of all this. I’m afraid the guys are gonna read this and wish I’d talked to them first—which maybe I should have. But sometimes it doesn’t feel like I’m even in the band.”

Pete Wentz doesn’t Google himself anymore. He used to do it once a day, sometimes more. But recently he had to quit: “I was letting the blogs get to me. It’s semi-frustrating when your name actually becomes a synonym for douchebag.”

Wentz is at a corner table in a quiet Italian restaurant in Studio City. The paparazzi followed him here, too, descending as soon as he handed his keys to the valet. “Eh, those guys weren’t so bad,” he later shrugs. “We have a five-man security team for the hospital. I heard the tabloids sneak in pregnant women.”

Wentz talks of wanting to join “the club”—revered, long-lived groups like Green Day and U2—but he knows Fall Out Boy aren’t at the top of anyone’s list. “We’ve definitely made it into, like, the Big in ’05 VH1 special,” he says. “But I don’t think we’re in the hall of fame.” He also realizes that his colorful personal life—the photos, the tabloids, the pop-tart wife—might be why they aren’t taken very seriously. “I know for a fact that some of the stuff I’ve done has hurt my band. I know it’s selfish, and I know it’s self-destructive. But it’s like when you put your foot in the hot tub and go, ‘Fuck, that’s hot as shit’—even though there’s a sign right there saying CAUTION: 1,000 DEGREES. I have to dip my toe in.”

“I can’t imagine he doesn’t get hurt by things,” Mayer says. “But Pete is really brave in that he refuses to put his sensitivity away. You know how in Good Will Hunting Matt Damon’s dad would make him choose between getting beat with a belt, a stick or a wrench, and he’d pick the wrench, ’cause fuck him, that’s why? Pete always picks the wrench.”

Not long ago, during a tour for their last album, Patrick Stump quit Fall Out Boy. They were at an airport in Australia when Stump found out that Wentz had made a decision without consulting the band. “Pete isn’t a control freak, but he is very controlling,” Stump says. “It was just some stupid business thing, but I was fed up. I’d had enough.” He’d been writing songs on his own, stockpiling material for a solo album in case “Pete ever pissed me off,” and he decided it was time. “I said, ‘We’ll finish this tour, and then I’m fucking gone.’”