The Clean Teen Machine

The story of the Jonas Brothers begins in suburban New Jersey, in a town called Wyckoff, not far from the George Washington Bridge to Manhattan. Kevin Sr. and Denise, who had met at the Christ for the Nations Bible college in Dallas (Kevin Sr. was the hot musician on campus), moved their young family to New Jersey from Texas in 1996 when Kevin took a job as a pastor at the local Assembly of God Church. The family lived in a nearby split-level red-brick house. The Jonas family truckster was a '92 Toyota Camry. A big family night was a rented movie — About a Boy was a favorite — and sweet-potato casserole.

On Sundays, the family would watch Kevin Sr. deliver his weekly sermon and play songs, some of which he had written, on his guitar. The kids would sing as well. "We grew up in church, playing with our father onstage," Kevin says. (If you go to YouTube — or GodTube — you can find a clip of a tiny Kevin and Joe singing "I Am Amazed" with their father back in Dallas.)

But Papa Jonas also had a fixation with pop music. Kevin Sr. raised his boys on the melodies of James Taylor and Carole King, and even followed the careers of power-pop producers. "We'd have friends over, and we'd be listening to the new Backstreet Boys CD, and he'd talk about how amazing Max Martin was," Nick says, referring to the reclusive Swedish boy-band producer. Says Kevin, "Dad's always taken the Billboard chart and dissected it."

Back when he was little, Nick would accompany his mother to the hair salon, where he would walk among the mirrors singing Backstreet and show tunes for candy money. One day, a woman was there whose son had been in the Broadway cast of Les Misérables. "She said, 'Do you have a manager?'" Kevin Sr. recalls. "She said, 'He needs a manager, because my son did this, and he can do this.'" It sounds like a Frank Capra plot, but Nick soon landed roles in shows like A Christmas Carol, Annie Get Your Gun, Beauty and the Beast and, later, Les Miz. Kevin Sr. would shuttle his son back and forth from the city, analyzing the harmonies and bridges of greats like Stevie Wonder. "All the way home and back, we'd write songs," says Kevin Sr.

Nick kept a full school workload, skipping Wednesdays for matinees. Meanwhile, Joe had carved out his own stage career (he played the Artful Dodger in Oliver!), and Kevin ventured into commercials. Denise Jonas, a pretty former sign-language teacher who blessed her boys with their fantastic curly brown hair (and who confesses her own teenage crush was Star Wars' Mark Hamill), recalls taking them to auditions while she was "full and pregnant" with her fourth son, Frankie (who is now seven and known as the "Bonus Jonas").

"I really observed the other parents," Denise, 42, says. "I thought, 'I'm a novice, and I don't want to make any mistakes that could be detrimental to us as a family or their careers down the road.' We weighed everything. Sometimes they'd throw a script at us that was full of language not suitable for a seven-year-old."

"People always used to imply, 'Are you concerned about having your kids in this business?'" Kevin Sr. recalls. "But they're doing Les Miz, La Bohème — beautiful works of art."

In 2004, Columbia Records signed Nick to a deal, and soon afterward he released Nicholas Jonas, an album of mostly spiritual songs (a lyric from "Dear God": "Dear God, people take your words and try to twist them around/I know you can't be happy with what's going down"). But Columbia saw potential for a Jonas trio. A record was made (It's About Time), and a grind of weird gigs (opening up on the Cheetah Girls' Cheetah-licious Christmas Tour) began. The Jonases all started taking long stretches away from their school, Eastern Christian, to perform.

"The kids thought our family was in the mob," Nick says.

But around the same time, a Jonas crisis occurred. Joe and Nick had gone off to a retreat when Joe noticed his younger brother had lost an alarming amount of weight. "We went swimming, and he took his shirt off, and I freaked," Joe recalls. "He looked like a skeleton."

Nick was taken to a hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with diabetes. "I didn't know if we'd be able to continue as a band," Nick says. Denise slept by Nick's side in the hospital. "The feelings you go through are so vast," she says. "There's grief, because he's lost his health. There's guilt — 'What did I do to my child?' You're uneducated about what it is. Once I understood, I could release that."

"After about the second day in the hospital, I realized that it'd be all right," Nick says. "It would just take time and understanding to manage it."