Boy Crazy!

A month or so ago, 26-year-old Pete Wentz — child of a posh Chicago suburb, bassist and lyricist for multiplatinum pop-emo sensation Fall Out Boy, unwitting Internet nude model — was finishing a typical Sunday night in Los Angeles. His band had just played a raucous surprise show at a tiny punk club in Anaheim — driving the hordes of rabid adolescents into an impressive, if by now familiar, frenzy — and, after devouring a late-night snack at a diner, Wentz was alone, walking back to his hotel on Sunset Boulevard, hooded sweatshirt pulled tight to protect his spiky black hair from the rain. It was well past three in the morning when the giant SUV with tinted windows pulled up alongside him.

“Hey,” said the large man in the driver’s seat. Wentz tried to ignore him but the man persisted. “Hey!” he shouted, louder now, “Where did you get your hoodie?”

Wentz froze, perhaps pondering the ironic perfection of a rock star getting jacked for a sweatshirt at three in the morning in West Hollywood — even if the sweatshirt in question was a bright pink, camouflage-speckled number from Bathing Ape that retailed for a couple of hundred dollars. Rattled, he stammered out the name of the boutique where he had made the purchase. Suddenly a growly, strangely familiar voice emanated from the back of the SUV. “Yo!” said the voice. “You’re that dude! I hate rock bands, yo, but I love yours! Get in the car!”

And that was how self-described “shitty, dirty boy” Pete Wentz got a four-block ride home from Ja Rule at three in the morning. (Ja offered to take him to an afterhours shindig in the Hills, but Pete passed, claiming that “Every time I walk into one of those hip-hop parties, it’s like the record skips and everyone stares.”)

Strange though it may sound, wee-hour carpools with rappers — or at least events of an equally head-scratching nature — have become the norm for Wentz and his three bandmates after a year that saw them go from Warped Tour headliners to arena-rocking pop stars. On the heels of their multiplatinum second album, From Under the Cork Tree, Fall Out Boy — Wentz, singer-guitarist Patrick Stump, guitarist Joe Trohman and drummer Andy Hurley — are the first of the much-hyped emo invasion acts to actually storm the Top 40, not just MySpace.com Top 8s. The reason isn’t rocket science: Radio hits “Sugar, We’re Goin Down” and “Dance, Dance” have choruses for days — and, despite the references to notches on bedposts and broken hearts, you don’t have to be a teenage girl to sing along.

No one has made more hay of their triumph than Wentz, the band’s unquestioned breakout star and de facto leader. In the past year, Wentz has become phone buddies with his label boss, Jay-Z, and received one-armed bro-hugs from hip-hop luminaries ranging from Kanye West to Fat Joe. He’s done a guest turn on teen soap One Tree Hill, watched his love life become the subject of near-constant Internet chatter and jumped headfirst into moguldom, launching a label (Decaydance, home to Las Vegas dancepunks Panic! At the Disco) and a clothing line (Clandestine Industries, purveyors of the finest in white belts since 2004). He’s even had a near-death experience — Wentz was treated in 2005 for an overdose of the anti-anxiety medication Ativan (he prefers not to label it a suicide attempt because that would call more attention to it, instead claiming he just “wanted to go to sleep”).

All this headline-grabbing and persona-pushing is fine if not normal for contemporary pop-punk, which models its behavior on the gleeful capitalism of hip-hop rather than the anti-corporate rage of a generation ago. But Pete Wentz isn’t the lead singer of Fall Out Boy — he doesn’t even write a note of the music. All those duties fall to 22-year-old, publicity-adverse Patrick Stump, a self-taught pop savant who worships at the altars of Prince and David Bowie and constructs the clever, heartbreak-soaked lyrics out of scraps of paper handed to him by Wentz.

In person, the soft-spoken, cherubic Stump seems to hail from an entirely different planet than Wentz. Stump has a dry, understated sense of humor, refuses to speak between songs at concerts and is happiest with his giant headphones clamped over his ears and Pro­Tools fired up on his laptop. “I get really annoyed with photo shoots and interviews and handshakes,” says Stump. “I’m a musician; God forbid I actually have time to make music.” As for the sweet and self-effacing Trohman and the quiet, politically minded Hurley, they seem content just to be along for the ride.

For any other band, this sort of public imbalance would spell doom. Somehow, though, Fall Out Boy thrive with one of the most complicated divisions of power since the Treaty of Versailles. “In all truly successful bands, everyone has a job to do,” says Fall Out Boy’s A&R man, Rob Stevenson. “Fall Out Boy is unique because they have two frontmen: Patrick, the guy who writes the music, and Pete, the guy who does the interviews. They can accomplish twice the work as a normal band, and I really think one couldn’t survive without the other.” In a pop landscape in which users clamor to “befriend” their heroes on social-networking sites and musicians are expected to log countless post-show hours counseling their sensitive young devotees, Wentz’s out-there lifestyle is just as important as Stump’s songwriting knack — and luckily both are 100% satisfied with their roles. “I don’t know if my contribution is recognized, and I don’t care,” says Stump, clearly exasperated by the question. “I know what I do and I’m busy doing it. I’m not one of these guys who sets out to take charge of things. That’s how Pete is: He’s a born leader.”



When Blender meets up with the “born leader” — and his willing charges — backstage at The Tonight Show in Burbank on a rainy Monday morning, Wentz’s hood is again pulled tight against his face and he seems subdued, perhaps still regretting his decision to bail on Ja Rule’s shindig the night before. “OK, I did call everybody,” he admits, “because you know, if the band went with me, I would definitely have gone. But the truth is, I probably shouldn’t roll by myself to a hip-hop afterparty in a pink hoodie.”

It’s no surprise that none of Wentz’s band members jumped at the chance to accompany him. Anyone entering the two dressing rooms would be hard-pressed to win a game of “spot the platinum pop stars”: Stump bolts himself to his laptop, listening to R&B (labelmate Ne-Yo is a new favorite) and eBaying sound equipment for the home studio he’s building. Trohman shows off a fresh tattoo, frets about his chances of being buried in a Jewish cemetery and texts his girlfriend back in Chicago. Hurley — with none of his beloved comic books in sight — settles for a thousand-yard stare. The only nods to their exploding bank accounts are flashy BAPE sneakers on several feet, an occasional gold grill (purchased at Paul Wall’s TV Jewelry during a stopover in Houston) and a pair of Dolce & Gabbana specs on Hurley. All members of Fall Out Boy are straight-edge (save for Trohman, the occasional pothead), so any backstage hijinks are left to the assorted crew and hangers-on: They’re the ones who prank each other with face graffiti during ill-advised naps.

The fact that such a prominent TV appearance engenders as much excitement in the band as yardwork speaks to the type of 2006 they’re having. After attending the Grammys (where they lost Best New Artist to John Legend), Fall Out Boy launched a massive arena tour (dubbed, in typical Wentzian fashion, Black Clouds and Underdogs) with fellow study-hall heartthrobs Hawthorne Heights and the All-American Rejects. The group have even started to swagger a bit, doing near­clichéd rock-star things like releasing a “deluxe” version of Cork Tree and filming a ludicrous, “Thriller”-esque video for “A Little Less Sixteen Candles, A Little More ‘Touch Me’” that features Wentz as a karate-chopping, backflipping, do-gooder vampire.

But despite the glitz, it’s been a rough few weeks for Wentz. During what should be the happiest, most gratifying time of his life, he’s compared his oft-discussed love life to “the Green Zone in Iraq” (i.e., full of warring factions and “mixed results”) and found himself dragged down into endless Internet beefs, including a particularly public spat with former friend Christopher Gutierrez (viewable at http://askheychris.livejournal.com). He’s become a polarizing figure to online yentas who seem to delight in alternating between building him up and tearing him down; celebrating him for his openness and then crying foul the minute he doesn’t stop to hug them after every show. “One person’s comment in their stupid, shitty LiveJournal will keep me up all night,” he fumes. “People don’t realize it, but I will read it and I will be affected by it.”

Nothing hit Wentz harder than the naked pictures that surfaced in March — an incident that all associated with the band seem desperate to move past. Yet in retrospect, it’s almost too perfect: What other fate could befall an emo sex symbol? The images — self-portraits of a solemn-looking Wentz standing in front of a (yikes!) Morrissey poster, penis in hand — were meant for a (now ex-) girlfriend, but when an enterprising soul hacked into Wentz’s Sidekick account (Wentz says someone figured out his security question — “What street did you grow up on?”), the images were quickly everywhere. Like, everywhere everywhere. Gossip sites. Gay porn sites. VH1.

“I was in Chicago and started getting texts from people saying I was naked on the Internet,” he explains, “and I got in a fender-bender because I was looking and freaked out.” Humiliated, Wentz retreated to his parents’ house, informed his manager the band was done and turned his phone off for two days. Eventually, though, he calmed down and learned to laugh about it. “The alternative-media guy at Island called me and said I was the second-most searched image on Yahoo, after the war in Iraq — which I guess says something good about the American people.”

While his bandmates decry the quality of the fruit roll-ups at NBC studios, Wentz attempts to put the penis incident in perspective: “It’s fuckin’ embarrassing, but it’s my fault. I definitely polarize people. People either love Fall Out Boy to death — they would die for us — or they absolutely hate us.” He sighs. “Honestly, I think it would be really hard to be in a band with me. There’s just this massive amount of turbulence, and you never know what the fuck’s going on.”

Stump — not surprisingly — doesn’t pay all that much attention to the maelstrom surrounding his bassist. As to whether it’s hard being in a band with Wentz now that he’s famous, the ever-affable Trohman is blunt: “First off, if anyone thinks that dude’s become an asshole, I’ve been friends with him forever and he’s always been an asshole.” He laughs and shakes his head. “He’s not cocky ’cause of the band. He’s cocky ’cause he’s Pete Wentz.”



Fall Out Boy formed in 2001 in Glenview, not far from Wentz’s hometown of Wilmette, an idyllic, prosperous community on the tony North Shore of Chicago. The North Shore served as the setting for many of John Hughes’s most obsessed-over ’80s teen comedies, but for Wentz — the oldest child of a corporate lawyer turned law professor and a private school admissions dean — it was “fucking mundane.” Wentz, a former high-school soccer star who traded cleats for the cult of Morrissey, was a notorious scenester in the world of suburban hardcore, infamous for the numerous groups he would create and disband in the course of a month and for his outsized ideas. Bored and disillusioned by the reactionary nature of the scene, he hooked up with the much younger Trohman, a Jew-fro’d shredder, and Trohman’s friend Stump, a self-described “geek” and “punk tourist.” Stump’s father works in association management but harbored musical dreams that he passed on to his son; growing up, Stump assumed all of the songs his father played on the acoustic guitar were originals, leading to embarrassing situations when Stump heard Eagles songs played on the radio and credited them to his dad. Hurley a shy, tattooed drummer from outside Milwaukee who knew Wentz from years of basement shows, joined later.

The goal was to have fun, maybe find a way to deny adulthood for a few years. The shows, then as now, were sloppy, more about enthusiasm than precision. The name, a comic book character from The Simpsons, was a joke, shouted by a fan at an early gig. But their pop hooks, emo lyrics and punk touring ethic quickly pushed them past indie label Fueled By Ramen (home of 2003’s gold Take This to Your Grave) and onto Island, where things exploded. “All of a sudden you go into this room and there’s a bunch of dudes dressed like your dad,” Wentz says, “and you’re like, wow, these are the guys in charge of my life.” Trohman agrees. “Things went from a nice size to retarded,” he says.

While the three other members of the band have adjusted to fame — they’ve bought houses in Chicago and Milwaukee and are either seriously involved with a girlfriend (Stump, Trohman) or seriously not (Hurley) — Wentz still lives in his parents’ sprawling house, with Transformers littering the floor and Cure posters lining the walls. He claims he’s planning to move out soon (“regular human beings live on their own when they’re 27 years old”) and that despite all the drama, his always shaky mental state has actually improved. “I feel OK going to sleep knowing who I am these days,” he says. “And it’s been good seeing a psychiatrist. But part of the psychosis is that I want to stay this way because it’s the only way people know me.” He laughs. “Sometimes it feels wrong to feel OK.” Before things get too Dr. Phil, Wentz flashes his smile as well as his remarkable business savvy: “Any band that creates a cult-like following requires the kids to empathize with somebody talking about their flaws,” he says. “When people come up to me and say ‘Fall Out Boy saved my life,’ my only response is that Fall Out Boy saved my life, too.”



The day after watching Fall Out Boy perform and compare neck tattoos with Rosie O’Donnell on Leno, Blender rejoins the band at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, where talk turns toward the future. Wentz and Stump have 15 “soulful” demos ready to go and plan to record them this summer with Cork Tree producer Neil Avron and (wait for it) smooth R&B balladeer Babyface, a nod to Stump’s true musical leanings. “Patrick is the real deal,” says Babyface. “He’s an all-the-way, full-service musician and writer.” The decision to release a new album only a year removed from their breakthrough is another sign that FOB know their audience well. “If you go away for too long, people are bound to forget about you,” says Trohman fervently. “When I was between 14 and 16, I’d be into one band this week, another band that week. I was fickle as fuck.”

Luckily for anyone with a financial stake in the band, quietly disappearing doesn’t seem to be in Pete Wentz’s genetic makeup. As he bolts from the dressing room to schmooze a few more Hollywood types and squeeze in a radio interview or two before showtime, it becomes clear that it just might be his constant hoovering up of attention that allows the rest of his band to flourish in peace. Pete being Pete can be entertaining for some and ridiculous to others, but it’s essential to Fall Out Boy’s career. And for the man himself? Does he ever get tired of being Pete Wentz?

“My biggest dream is to move to Nebraska and marry somebody super regular and disappear,” he says earnestly after playing to 16,000 screaming fans who hang on to his every word from the stage like gospel.

Blender tries to not to bust out laughing: Give up the cameras, the girls … Jay-Z’s phone number?

“OK,” he grins. “It’s a fantasy. I could never give up my life.” He chuckles. “Even if my life includes going to the movies and having some guy yell ‘“Sugar, We’re Goin Down” is the shittiest song I’ve ever heard!’ and I’m like, ‘Yo, let’s hear your fuckin’ single, douchebag!’” He shakes his head in wonder at it all and gestures to himself. “I mean, sometimes a dude just wants to see a movie!”