High School Musical

"We weren't pessimistic," says Smith later, between fielding calls from his mom as he drives to the Orleans in his new Nissan 350z two-seater sports car. "But I wouldn't have been surprised if we were still in a van playing to a couple hundred kids right now. Fall Out Boy toured for three years in a van and trailer. That's what bands in this position usually do."

Even Wentz admits that he couldn't have predicted Panic! at the Disco would blow up so big they would threaten to eclipse his band. "They're a freak of nature," he says. "You can't explain it. They do absolutely the opposite of everything a label would recommend, and still thrive. Major labels could start telling bands, 'Put on paisley suits and make your show a circus' -- but it wouldn't work. There's something else there that's intangible. When you go to their show, you wonder, 'What makeup will Ryan be wearing and what are the dancers going to do?' It's like Kiss, but smarter and thirty years later."

In the age of MySpace, when you can construct an entire persona out of seemingly incongruous elements and change it as quickly as you can put up a new photo of yourself, guyliner bands like Panic appeal to the melodramatic, hyperimagized, Web-trolling youth, who depend on the Internet to find their next favorite artist. Panic! at the Disco's identity derives less from musical referents than from their cherry-picking of pop culture at large. Their lyrics cite Chuck Palahniuk novels; their song titles cop lines from the movie Closer; live covers like Queen's "Killer Queen" were learned from the game Guitar Hero. And their look is built from the visuals of their favorite movies -- Moulin Rouge!, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands -- which, like their songs, are full of the heartbreak and pathos that are never in short supply during high school.

Moreover, Panic are among a new breed of punk acts that includes My Chemical Romance and AFI, all of whom aim to bring the spectacle back to rock & roll by focusing as much attention on outfits, makeup and theatrical stagings as on the songs themselves. Most of their fans -- too young for the heyday of grunge (or even the teen pop that followed it) -- have never seen a rock show. Panic want to make their first concert nothing less than mind-blowing.

On Panic's fall tour, their production was so elaborate and expensive that their manager says the only money they made off the gigs came from T-shirt sales. The idea, says Ross, was to put on a show, not a concert. And though they don't always love playing the same eleven songs, they say they're obsessed with sitting around together and coming up with progressively more eccentric ideas for their performances.

"I remember Spencer saying, 'Mom, maybe we can get live animals and lions and have a carousel onstage,'" says the drummer's mother, Ginger, a medical secretary. Big cats never made it into the show, but the basic concepts stuck: Inspired by Cirque du Soleil and Moulin Rouge!, the band decided to make its stage set look like some kind of post-apocalyptic carnival or a Ringling Brothers fever dream. Ross, whose lyrics are so heavy on two-dollar words they could double as an SAT prep course, says the staging evolved from his fascination with Paris "and any true love story, whether it's Romeo and Juliet or Phantom of the Opera or Titanic. I don't know what it is, but something about the idea of a gentleman wearing a suit and being literate is fascinating to me."

During the show -- which features an intermission and finds the band attempting ambitious covers of both "Killer Queen" and the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" -- Panic perform dressed in tattered-looking Victorian duds, their faces covered with stark white, black or red makeup. And then there are the dancers, whose gymnastic contortions, never-ending costume changes (Ballerina! Cleopatra! Mental patient!) and bawdy interactions with the band give the show an element of the unexpected, even if it goes exactly the same way every night.

Urie's between-song patter is also premeditated, and the bit that gets the loudest screams comes about midway through the set, right before they play "Lying." "Have you ever dreamt you were in a sunflower field," Urie begins, and then with some minor variations describes running toward a lover for "the perfect kiss." As he does this, he approaches Ross and leans his face in close to the guitarist, who pulls his mouth away just in time, almost every time: In San Diego, on the final night of the tour, Urie moved in quick enough to plant one on Ross' cheek, which immediately flashed crimson with embarrassment. And then, as he pulls back and the room fills with an audible gasp, Urie always says something like "Well, this isn't that kind of dream. This is about sweaty, angry, crazy, monstrous fucking." A sea of girls barely out of training bras shriek with delight at the PG-13 ribaldry.

"There's plenty of stuff we do in the show to get a reaction," says Ross. "Like, fans are always saying that me and Brendon are dating. It's funny to me how people freak out about stuff like that. I think the show almost splits you and makes you choose: Will I like this band from this point on, or was the show too much? When we were writing these songs, we were expecting the audience for them to be our age or maybe a little older. I know that our CD wouldn't have been allowed in my house until I was sixteen. I guess parents are a little lenient these days. Then again, I've seen some angry parents in the crowd, that's for sure." [Excerpt From Issue 1019 — February 8, 2007]

>> Don't miss both of our exclusive, behind-the-scenes videos from the Panic! at the Disco cover shoot [ the posing, the clothes, the eyeliner! and an interview on the set]. Hate 'em, love 'em: Tell us what you think about Panic! here.