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>> 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.
>>This is an excerpt from the new issue of Rolling Stone, on newsstands until February 8th.
Ryan Ross bought his C55 Mercedes three months ago, but it's
been parked in his Las Vegas garage ever since. When the Panic! at
the Disco guitarist climbs behind the wheel, cues up Tom Waits' new
Orphans collection and starts pushing buttons on the
navigation system, he's still not sure how it all works. Ross is
searching downtown Vegas for Panic's favorite local sandwich chain,
Port of Subs, to grab a quick bite before the second-to-last show
on the band's arena tour: a sold-out concert at the Orleans Hotel
& Casino for 7,500 fans, their families, friends and
three-quarters of Fall Out Boy, who flew in from Los Angeles to see
their proteges' biggest hometown gig yet. Later tonight, Ross, 20,
will face the crowd dressed as a gothed-out Oliver Twist, black
liner fanning from his right eye like a tangle of tree branches and
a newsboy cap covering his thick brunet quiff. But it won't be
Ross' first time onstage at the Orleans: Two and a half years ago,
he was here in a gown and mortarboard for his high school
graduation.
When Ross walks into a strip-mall Port of Subs with drummer
Spencer Smith and singer Brendon Urie, both 19, the shop is empty
except for two cold-cut slingers, neither of whom recognizes the
three local celebrities clamoring to upgrade to combo meals when
they hear that Rolling Stone is picking up the tab. A few
bites into his sandwich -- "the Pilgrim," with turkey, cranberry
sauce and stuffing -- Ross rubs his jaw and notes that his wisdom
teeth are coming in. After listening to Smith and Urie discuss how
generous a helping one ought to get when one requests "extra mayo
and mustard," Ross remarks that the Pilgrim is his second Port of
Subs sandwich since this morning. When Urie says he's only on his
first, Ross is befuddled: "What have you been doing all
day?"
"I had to pack my Dior case," Urie answers, as if it were the most
normal thing in the world for a teenager shoveling five-dollar fast
food into his mouth to have a $1,500 bag from a Parisian couture
designer. "And then I cleaned my room. Because it was starting to
smell."
In mid-December, when I traveled with the band through Vegas, San
Diego and Los Angeles, they were about to settle into their first
real vacation since signing to Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz's
Decaydance label in late 2004. Back then, Smith and Urie hadn't
even graduated from high school, the band had only three songs in
its arsenal and Panic had yet to play a single live show. But as
2006 wound to a close, the biggest new rock band in America had
album sales going on double platinum and was still scanning 20,000
copies a week of its debut, A Fever You Can't Sweat Out.
(The disc, which announced the arrival of a new breed of emo
augmented by synthesizers and computerized beats, was recorded for
a paltry $10,000.) Panic's single "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" --
three minutes of pizzicato strings, power chords and cabaret melody
-- has become an unlikely yet unstoppable Top Forty hit and earned
them MTV's award for Video of the Year. They've followed it with a
series of similarly over-the-top clips (the latest, for "Lying Is
the Most Fun a Girl Can Have With Her Clothes On," imagines a world
where people spend their lives with their heads encased in fish
tanks) that have flooded YouTube with fourteen-year-olds who missed
out on the campy Technicolor of MTV in the Eighties.
"We didn't expect this album to have any success," says Ross, the
group's introverted lyricist and main songwriter. "I don't really
think it's that good. It was more like our experiment for figuring
ourselves out. We just wanted to grow for a couple of years and
really show people what we can do on the next album. But we didn't
get to do that. For a while, we didn't even want it to be played on
the radio or MTV. I remember asking our manager, 'How can they play
our song if we don't want them to?' He said, 'Labels usually pay
radio stations to play bands. They're playing you for free, and you
want to stop it?' From that point, I was like, 'I'm gonna have to
look at this a little bit differently.'"
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"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.