Pete Wentz on the Art of Rocking in Underwear, Fall Out Boy’s Plans
When Fall Out Boy‘s Pete Wentz met up with two of his musical heroes, Weezer‘s Rivers Cuomo and Blink-182‘s Travis Barker, to rock out in a commercial for Band Hero, he realized the shoot wasn’t going to be an epic jam session. For starters, they were each holding miniature plastic instruments. Also, they were performing in their underwear. Wentz, Cuomo, Barker and Taylor Swift are the latest artists to emulate Tom Cruise in a Risky Business-inspired commercial for Band Hero, the pop-oriented and family-minded spin-off of the Guitar Hero franchise that hits stores today.
“The slide was pretty bizarre. I gotta admire Tom Cruise, because you have to slide so your slide lands on the beat, and you have to slide at just the right place so the next person can slide at just the right place,” Wentz says the harder-than-expected shoot. “And they would Lysol it. And sometimes it’d be way slippery. There was a time when I slid offstage.” Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar, We’re Going Down” is among the 60-plus playable songs on Band Hero, and while Wentz hasn’t had the opportunity to “play” the song yet, he predicts he wouldn’t do too well. “Joe [Trohman], our guitarist, is pretty good at it, so when we play [music video games], he always has to save us, or save me,” Wentz said.
Both Weezer and Fall Out Boy served as opening acts for Blink-182 this past summer, and Wentz reveals he often marveled at Barker’s drumming skills during the tour. As for Weezer, “They’re a band that inspired us in many ways. It’s strange that Rivers, like, knows something about Fall Out Boy,” Wentz says. “For someone who’s been doing it for so long, he’s so aware. That’s what kind of blew my mind. He knew about bands on my label, and I talked to him about Cobra Starship and stuff like that.” (Little did he know, the pair could have pow-wowed about Miley Cyrus and Adam Lambert, too.)
With their tour finished and a greatest-hits comp, Believers Never Die, due out November 17th, Fall Out Boy recently revealed they’d be taking some time off. Wentz is quick to tell Rolling Stone that this isn’t a dreaded — gasp — “hiatus.” “I think that I, and we, have made it confusing for people,” Wentz tells RS. “I think that when bands force themselves to kind of be creative, it comes across as forced. We’ve been seven years straight of just driving albums and tour, tour, tour. Everybody just needs to decompress, and the problem is that people want to know the amount of time that’s gonna take, or what’s going to have to happen for it to come back.” Wentz reiterated that the band is not breaking up. “It’s kind of like in the Midwest, when you start having snow days. The snow will melt one day. It will melt sooner rather than later.”
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