The Clean Teen Machine

"I get it," Joe says. "When I was young, I wanted to know what my favorite bands were up to all the time. And it's funny when there's a rumor. It's funny when you find out there are other celebrities with crushes on you, like when I read that Lauren Conrad from The Hills liked me."

Nick agrees. "The Kim Kardashian rumor [about me] was hilarious," he says. "I was honored, but I was like, 'Reggie Bush would kill me!'"

Of course, Nick's always being dogged by the speculation about his relationship with one particular girl: Miley Cyrus, a.k.a. Hannah Montana, the blue-eyed Disney dynamo who helped break the Jonas Brothers when she brought them onboard her hit TV show and Best of Both Worlds Tour.

"There was a point in our lives when we were very close," Nick says softly of the Miley rumors. "We were neighbors when we were on tour together. It was good. Just really close. But it would crack me up — I would read these stories online, people saying things that were completely untrue."

Reading the Nick and Miley gossip, you get the feeling that America is in a rush to anoint a Magic Kingdom Charles and Di. After all, the primary engine behind the Jonas Brothers phenomenon — besides the brothers themselves — is the Walt Disney Company, which has made hundreds of millions of dollars blanketing the American tweenscape with a sun shower of G-rated musical entertainment. With its various subsidiaries — including Disney Channel, Radio Disney and a record company, Hollywood Records, not to mention theme parks and merchandising arms — Disney has built powerhouse 21st-century franchises like High School Musical and Hannah Montana. In an era when music companies have struggled to connect with record buyers, Disney prospered by cultivating a demographic that had been largely ignored. "People don't think they have much buying power, but they do," says Disney president Robert Iger. "We decided they should be our core demo."

The Jonas Brothers, of course, are grateful for the support of Mickey's white glove. Disney, after all, fished the boys out of the pop-rock abyss and inserted them into the Hannah-verse, exposing them to millions of love-struck consumers (opening for Miley Cyrus in '07 was kind of like batting in front of Babe Ruth in 1927). But today on their jet, the Jonases want everyone to know that they weren't cooked up in a Disney laboratory by Mouse-hat-wearing demographers, that they play their own instruments, write their own songs, and that, yes, they are, in fact, brothers.

"People seriously ask us all the time," Kevin says. "'Are you guys really brothers?'"

Joe laughs. "It's like, no, we named our band Jonas Brothers just for fun."