Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo's Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008

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Spears’ vulnerability shines through as she describes her painful journey from vulnerable girl to empowered woman.

this year has been an age of reclamation. learning to openly love the things i used to get made fun of for loving. the parts kept neatly under wraps. no longer being ashamed about things i am so proud to love.Egan: We had gotten tipped off from the MTV people, like, “Hey, you may want to prepare a few words.” The category Chris was nominated in was fan-voted. So it didn’t matter that 99 percent of mainstream America didn’t know who he was.

Egan: Bill Carroll, Vagrant’s head of radio, and our publicist Brian Bumbery had really sold MTV on Dashboard. So they got all of MTV down to Irving Plaza to watch Chris. That was the tipping point. Full Book Name: Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo’s Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008Yeah, they’re not “Kill your girlfriend with a chainsaw” lyrics. Geoff, lyrically, was really influenced by DC hardcore bands – obviously Fugazi, also stuff like Q and Not U, a lot of bands that had like a deeper, more intelligent message. Also, I think Geoff came from a very bookish household. I’m pretty sure his parents named him after Geoffrey Chaucer. So that’s where he was coming from. Screaming Infidelities” is the biggest song from that era of Dashboard, when it was just Chris Carrabba and an acoustic guitar. And it was so organic – Fiddler Records, Amy Fiddler who ran the label, she just had local distribution for stores in Florida, so she didn’t have any national distribution to get the album in Chicago or Jersey or anything. And so much of why it got big is because kids shared it on Napster after seeing him live — or not even seeing him live –- as Napster was just gathering steam. This was one of the most exciting releases I waited for in a long time. I read a lot of music history, but there’s not much about our own recent past 00s but it’s coming! This is all about the formative age for many “elder emo” who have spent almost two decades with favorite bands included in this book. Just so happens to be my favorite bands too 😂 One of the scenes I love in the book – they’re the band that shows up with the bus at the big Jersey show, and shows everybody in the scene that this is possible. Just stepping on the bus is a big deal to all these bands, and it kinda shows you how modest the aspirations were at the time.

Their appeal is so cultish and specific that it’s hard to put into words. And for me, this song captures that the most. It’s so lyric-driven for so much of the song. The first two minutes or so, it’s just a very, very sparse song with just a little bit of guitar, barely any percussion… and this would be such a moment in a live show, of kids singing along and eating this s—t up. I feel like it must be so weird to decipher if you weren’t around it. Because it’s just like, “Is this dude real with this? Is he really saying, ‘I am heaven sent, don’t you dare forget’?” Rich Egan (co-founder, Vagrant Records; manager, Dashboard Confessional): When The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most came out in March 2001, we had no setup for it, just because we had to rush it out. We sold 2,500 records the first week. Most records in their second week drop off 70 percent. This went up. It got to about 2,550. And it just stayed there for a year. I remember it was right around a year later when the record hit the 100,000 mark. The kids loved Chris. It wasn’t a press-created thing. The press was reacting to the cultural shift. He was unlike anything before him in our scene. Carrabba: I was from a scene I was proud of. I didn’t want to get disowned by that scene for visiting another one. And that moment of being on the red carpet, I really felt like, Oh shit … Egan: The press didn’t know who Dashboard was. There’s all these pop stars around him, and I could hear people: “Who is it? Who is it? All right, pose for a picture!” Then Chris got interviewed by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. That was awesome. I think people of a certain age. I think maybe people who were seniors in high school in ’02. To them, stuff like My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy is maybe something else – it’s a little too pop – and they see emo as being more in touch with punk. Which, y’know, Dashboard is.

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Chris Carrabba) "They just said me. Wait, I think we won this." Avril was sitting right in front of me. I remember her turning around to clap when they announced my name, which I thought was nice. Egan: MTV needed to kind of justify why they were doing an Unplugged with this kid, so they started playing the “Screaming Infidelities” video a lot. Egan: I was thinking either the Hives or the Strokes were going to win it. Brittany Murphy and Anthony Kiedis announced the winner. Egan: They put out a call saying “first come, first serve,” and way too many kids showed up than that studio could handle. Not even a hundred kids could fit in there. Marsh: We went to Jimmy Iovine’s house [months later] to view MTV Unplugged in his massive theater room. I remember some of his comments: “You guys are gonna be the next big band. You guys are gonna be the next Nirvana!”