With their album 'The Black Parade' and subsequent tours, My Chemical Romance have emerged as one of the most theatrical and visually compelling bands in rock, hearkening back to a time when concerts were feats for the eyes as well as the ears. Backstage at Projekt Revolution, where the quintet continues to display its grand artistic style with pyrotechnics and an elaborate stage setup, frontman Gerard Way offered some insight into where the band might have gotten its ideas by listing his favorite visual rock acts.

1. The Smashing Pumpkins: Not only did each of their members embody a completely different feeling, but with each record they evolved and grew the hell up and really pushed it and tapped into things like Fritz Lang and 'Voyage to The Moon' and things like that. That's ballsy stuff, and it becomes art rock at that point. I really feel no matter what anybody says about what we do, we're doing art rock. It's on a grand scale, but it's art rock.

2. Queen: Another band that evolved -- you have Freddie [Mercury] as a harlequin, a greaser, wearing a parade jacket, and everybody in that band evolving with him in their own unique way.

3. Pink Floyd: Visually, everything about 'The Wall' right there -- it's not even to me about the light shows, it's about everything else. It's about the intensity, and I find that visually interesting.

4. Tom Waits: I've felt that it's almost all visual. The lyrics are visual. And I think that's so important; the two go hand in hand. The character "Tom Waits" that Tom Waits has created, you don't know what's fiction and what's not. I think that's the beauty of it.

5. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds/Afghan Whigs (tie): I've always kind of tied [Nick Cave] with the Afghan Whigs, because everything about it was sleazy and sexy, and that to me was manly, that kind of what's expected out of you to be a man --especially from the Afghan Whigs. It's almost like it's ingrained in you, you're supposed to have a lot of sex, and that's what exuded off of them and it didn't necessarily seem like something that suited them or they were necessarily comfortable with. But it comes up a lot in their music.