Any Question Answered: Frank Iero

From New Jersey’s punk scene to worldwide stardom and his experiences of recovering from life-changing trauma, Frank goes in-depth on his unique and truly remarkable journey.

- Rob Sayce

What were your first experiences with music?

“It was my earliest memory. I remember being three years old, and my dad would have teaching sessions where we lived. Downstairs there were two drum kits set up, and then the walls were covered in carpet samples in an attempt to deaden the sound… but it didn’t ever really work. One time my dad was teaching some kid, one of the hardest hitters, and I crawled down, was playing around or whatever, and they couldn’t find me. So my dad was like, ‘Wait, stop for a second,’ and they found me asleep with my head against the bass drum! Ever since I remember, that was it: I wanted to be in a band. I wanted to write songs. I wanted to tour. I saw my dad with this date book - my grandfather had one too - with rubber bands wrapped around it. Nobody had computers or anything, so there were all these notes of where to be on which date, who they were playing with, what the job paid. It just seemed like this really cool secret society that they were a part of, and that no one else knew. My dad was like, ‘Alright, if you want to do that… I hope you don’t want to do that, but you have to have something else to fall back on’. Because my dad and my grandfather, they had three or four day jobs, just to be able to support this habit of playing.”

Was there ever a kind of Plan B on the backburner?