He just kept telling the audience, “Go steal it on Napster … I’d rather you have fun when you come see me play.”Ĭarrabba: Kids at those shows were used to singing loud and not being heard. Maybe they did what everybody did back then: put it on a cassette or burn a CD-R or something like that. I’ve seen this happen more often since, but at least I hadn’t seen it beforehand, and it all just felt very punk rock and hardcore, the scene I was from.īonebrake: I have no idea how they learned the words, though, because there’s no way they could have had copies of those songs. I think it’s become more common for people to sing en masse. I was astounded by how loud everyone was singing.Ĭhris Carrabba (vocals/guitar): I can’t overstate this. We sold 50 CDs, and I decided that we needed to stop selling them because it was the first night, and we had two and a half months of this. I was helping him set up, do merch, drive the van, everything except for playing. That’s what we were taking on the two-and-a-half-month tour. Even back then, crowds seemed to know every single word to all of their songs.ĭan Bonebrake (bass): When we showed up at Tallahassee, he had 150 CDs with him. In 1999, Carrabba and Dashboard embarked on a tour that kicked off in his home state of Florida. “But anybody that had understood what an important piece of the puzzle the audience was-and is.” Part 1: “I Have No Idea How They Learned the Words.” “Maybe you hadn’t heard Dashboard at that point,” Carrabba says. Without them, the recording would feel incomplete. Their ever-present voices, as overwhelming as they often are, make the Dashboard Unplugged unique. Loudly, emotionally, and occasionally off-key. Carrabba and his teenage chorus are entwined when he drops off, they come in. Shot on April 24, 2002, in New York City, MTV Unplugged 2.0 captures the band at its interactive best. “I think I phrased it like, ‘Well, we’re not really taking pieces away and replacing them with an acoustic guitar.’” But Coletti eased his nerves: “His feeling was like, ‘No, what we’re going to do is we’re going to add the pieces that aren’t on the record, which is the audience.’”Ī Dashboard Confessional show wasn’t a passive experience. “That was my first question,” Carrabba says. But he also worried that his already-stripped-down music was a little too well-engineered for an intimate setting. And their frontman, who was reared on classic Unplugged sets, was excited to follow in his idols’ footsteps. “Screaming Infidelities,” the first single off their second record The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most-on indie label Vagrant Records-was slowly climbing the rock radio charts. Three years, two albums, hundreds of concerts, countless tracks illegally shared on Napster, and several new bandmates later, the emo act had built a cult following. And I want to be part of this.’”Ĭoletti soon met with Chris Carrabba, who started Dashboard as a solo project in 1999 while still with Further Seems Forever. “All the things that I’m known for-the sarcasm, the cynicism-it was missing. “Something about the music, the singing along, the earnestness these were well-written songs,” says Coletti, then the head of programming and production at MTV2, the new home of Unplugged. He’d just discovered Dashboard, but he knew right away that they were made for the show. After all, Coletti had steered many of the most memorable episodes of the acoustic series, including Eric Clapton, Nirvana, and Alice in Chains. On Monday morning, he explained the noisy voicemail to his boss and pitched an idea: a Dashboard Confessional Unplugged. “It was like the Chuck Berry, Back to the Future moment,” Coletti says. The veteran MTV producer was so gobsmacked-and admittedly tipsy-that he called station president Van Toffler’s office number, held his phone up into the air to record the sound of the Saturday night crowd of teens at Irving Plaza 20 years ago, and said, “Listen to this.” “How does everyone here know all these words?” he recalls saying to himself. The first time Alex Coletti went to a Dashboard Confessional show, he felt like he was the only person in the audience not belting out the songs. Grab your Telecasters and Manic Panic and join us in the Black Parade. Welcome to Emo Week, where we’ll explore the scene’s roots, its evolution to the modern-day Fifth Wave, and some of the ephemera around the genre. In case you haven’t heard, emo is back, baby! In honor of its return to prominence-plus the 20th anniversary of the first MCR album-The Ringer is following Emo Wendy’s lead and tapping into that nostalgia. My Chemical Romance is touring again, Paramore and Jimmy Eat World are headlining a major festival this fall, and there’s a skinny, tattooed white dude with a guitar dominating the charts.
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