Twenty years late and on time

In Amsterdam on Saturday night, a fan at the rail shouted "Viva Palestina." Harry Styles, two songs into his first show since 2023, leaned into the mic and said one word. Styles' one-word answer, "Correct," hit 1.6 million views on Pop Base inside twenty-four hours. A stadium-pop artist who has spent his career declining to take sides has now taken one in the shortest possible answer. The room can't agree whether that's the bravest restraint of the spring or the laziest applause line.

On Saturday at Sonic Temple in Columbus, Gerard Way came onstage in the Black Parade marching jacket and counted in "The End." My Chemical Romance played the album front to back for the first time in twenty years. The pit knew every word. The drummer did not look like a man who had been waiting a decade to play these songs.

Reunion tours are good, actually. The sneer that calls every reunion a cash grab gets the arithmetic wrong. A band that has spent twenty years thinking about those songs is often better at playing them than the band that wrote them.

Mellon Collie sold ten million copies in 1995. The Pumpkins were twenty-six and fighting each other in the studio. Jimmy Chamberlin would not survive the original tour. The record was a masterpiece. The tour was not.

Louder Sound called My Chemical Romance the most important rock band since Nirvana or Oasis after Saturday's Sonic Temple set. The album is twenty. The musicians are forty. They were not forty in 2006.

Ten years ago tonight, Diddy brought Jay-Z out at Barclays Center for what would have been Notorious B.I.G.'s forty-fourth birthday. Mary J. Blige did "You're All I Need." The 1997 album was grief. The 2016 reunion was grief that had learned how to play.

This is the version that knows what the songs were always about.

The honest counter is that all of this is for the money. The Pumpkins want a paycheck. So do MCR. So did Bad Boy in 2016. True. Musicians being paid to do their job is not a scandal. The actual cash grab is the festival nostalgia headliner playing the same seventy-five-minute set twelve weekends a year to people too drunk to notice the fill in "Hotel California." The reunion tour is the band playing the record. Different thing.

Anthony Green announced his solo tour the same morning Corgan announced Mellon Collie thirty. Same day, same idea. Old songs, finally played right.

Twenty years late and on time.

Concert Law #1: The reunion tour is when the band finally plays the record right.

Pumpkins announce Mellon Collie 30 tour. The Smashing Pumpkins will play Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness in full on a fall run called "Rats In A Cage," opening September 30 at the Schottenstein Center in Columbus. Presale ran Tuesday. The general on-sale lands Thursday at 10 a.m. local.

MCR plays The Black Parade in full. My Chemical Romance played the album front to back at Sonic Temple on Saturday, the first real anniversary play-through since the band's surprise return. Welcome to Rockville and Louder Than Life are still on the cycle.

Phoebe Bridgers' pop-up run hits eight cities. What started as three cities in five days is now eight in twelve, Macon at the 650-cap Capitol Theatre on Friday, Savannah on Sunday. Fans are following the tour bus city to city, every room phone-free, every wristband sold at the box office. The May 14 issue called it a stunt. Not anymore.

KATSEYE go straight to arenas. The HYBE x Geffen global girl group announced a 28-date "WILDWORLD TOUR," Sept 1 Dublin opener through Nov 27 Mexico City close, with Kaseya Center Miami, Crypto.com Arena LA, and UBS Arena on the routing. General on-sale Thursday at 3 p.m., the same morning as the Pumpkins on-sale. The open question is whether KATSEYE sells.

The Jazz Estate, the East Side Milwaukee club that booked Pat Metheny, Maceo Parker, and Joshua Redman across 49 years, closes June 27. Twin Talk plays the final show, with a grand farewell party the next night. Owner John Dye announced the closing last Friday and said it plainly: "The math has caught up with us." Operating costs at the room have more than doubled. A 49-year-old club with national bookings cannot survive that. The Acrisure Amphitheater opened in Grand Rapids last week. Sub-200-cap rooms are not getting built.

75: Bruce Springsteen's age in 2024, the year he averaged 28 songs per setlist on the Land of Hope and Dreams tour. The man is still going.

Twenty years ago tomorrow, Madonna opened the Confessions Tour at the Forum in Inglewood, a 60-date run that grossed over $194.7 million, the highest-grossing tour by a female artist to that point. She was forty-seven.

Every Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Olivia Rodrigo arena tour since has descended in some form from that opener. The mid-career pop-legend tour is now a category, and it started in Inglewood.

Two object-throwing incidents in five days. Oli Sykes of Bring Me the Horizon took a phone to the face in St. Louis on May 11; Eric Clapton took a vinyl record to the chest in Madrid on May 7. Pollstar is now pairing them as a pattern, and a witness in St. Louis claims the phone in question wasn't thrown by its actual owner. One side says venues should body-search every entry. The other says the room is already policing itself, and making everyone else feel surveilled is the worse answer. When the room names the bad actor, does the venue still need to body-search the rest of us?

The Hagens Berman class action against Ticketmaster and Live Nation was certified on May 14. Every U.S. Ticketmaster customer since 2010 is now part of the class. The argument is straightforward: Ticketmaster charges a fee when a ticket is sold, then charges a second fee when the same ticket is resold through its platform, and the suit says that double-dip was never properly disclosed.

The first time I saw them, the bass player kept turning around to ask the drummer what tempo they were at. The second time, twelve years later, he didn't have to look.

Iron Maiden, Somewhere on Tour, late 1986: a stage lamp burned through the giant inflatable Eddie's hand and the whole thing deflated mid-set. The crew patched it overnight and tied the fingers down so that at the next show, Eddie's repaired hand emerged with only the middle finger fully inflated. They toured it that way for months.

Somewhere in Columbus a guy is refreshing a Ticketmaster page for songs he first heard at fifteen, and on Thursday he'll click.

What'd you think of this week's Still Ringing? Hit reply.

See you at the show.