WANTAGH, N.Y., June 5 — It was a breezy Tuesday night here at the Nikon at Jones Beach Theater, and the stands were filled with screaming teenagers and a few nonscreaming parents. Early on, Pete Wentz, the bassist and lead celebrity — but not lead singer — of Fall Out Boy, took a moment to reassure the nonscreamers.
Pete Wentz, Fall Out Boy’s bassist, at Jones Beach.
“It could be a lot worse,” he said. “We could be getting our heads shaved and going in and out of rehab.” He was kidding, but the parents probably agreed: these days a canny emo pinup boy like Mr. Wentz seems a lot less threatening than an unruly pop star like Britney Spears. Perhaps a few parents also noticed which scary alternative Mr. Wentz mentioned first. In his foppish world there are worse fates than rehab.
The occasion was the 2007 Honda Civic Tour, starring Fall Out Boy and a handful of fellow travelers: the pop-punk band +44 (containing two of the three former members of Blink-182), the glam-emo band The Academy Is ... , the white Houston rapper Paul Wall and the emo dance act Cobra Starship. All night long you could hear the high, trebly sound of teenage adulation, and if you went anywhere near the teeming merchandise tables, you could hear a different but not unrelated sound: cha-ching!
Mr. Wentz seems like the perfect rock star for our age, as self-conscious as he is shameless. In interviews, in blog entries and in his between-song comments, he pokes fun at his celebrity without pretending not to cherish it. That makes him both sensitive to criticism and, in a way, immune to it. At Tuesday’s concert fans could buy T-shirts emblazoned with the band’s unofficial nickname: Sell Out Boy.
Tuesday also happened to be Mr. Wentz’s birthday; just about everyone mentioned it, although they all seemed loath to mention precisely which birthday it was. (It was his 28th, which makes him more than a decade older than most of his fans.) This was his night, although every night on this tour is probably his night.
Paul Wall acknowledged him during a genial but rather dull set. He joined The Academy Is ... to sing backup for a song. And Mark Hoppus, from +44, gave him a birthday unpresent: he grabbed what he said was Mr. Wentz’s bass and threw it into the ocean.
Never mind: Mr. Wentz scarcely uses that thing. (His playing style is beyond unorthodox: instead of plucking out bass lines, he strums the strings, way up by the fret board.) That means that Patrick Stump, the band’s unassuming lead singer, has to work twice as hard: the rhythmic crunch of his guitar helps compensate for the erratic bass lines; he’s no heartthrob, but his precise, preening voice sounds the way Mr. Wentz looks.
During “The Carpal Tunnel of Love,” from the fitfully entertaining recent Fall Out Boy album, “Infinity on High” (Island), Mr. Stump led the crowd in a singalong — “Whoa oh, we’re so miserable and stunning/Whoa oh, love songs for the genuinely cunning” — while Mr. Wentz mugged and jumped and sometimes jabbed at his bass.
There were a few surprises: Travis McCoy, from the Wentz-endorsed emo-hip-hop band Gym Class Heroes, emerged (to many screams) to deliver a verse. And the evening’s M.C., known as Dirty, made an impressive leap into the ocean, chasing yet another jettisoned bass, this one tossed by Mr. Wentz.
Just as Madonna mastered the art of MTV celebrity, Mr. Wentz has mastered the art of MySpace celebrity, but like most musical empires, his runs on catchy, well-written pop songs, and Tuesday’s show offered plenty of them.
Near the end Mr. Stump reminded the crowd that it was Mr. Wentz’s birthday and noted that the members of Fall Out Boy liked to do “something cool” to celebrate birthdays. Then he said, tellingly, that there was a problem: “Pete usually thinks of the cool thing to do.”
Mr. Wentz replied that he didn’t need a birthday present from Mr. Stump: “Your voice is a gift from God.” And that’s precisely the trade-off that makes this band tick.
