Panic on the Rock Band

Disco drummer on sponsorship and musical direction

PROFILE. Spencer Smith is a better drummer in real life than in videogames.

Smith plays drums with Panic at the Disco, who are currently on a tour sponsored by the game Rock Band, which he says grossly under represents his skills. The Panic song “9 in the Afternoon,” from this year’s “Pretty. Odd” album is one of the easiest levels of the game.
“It makes us look like we can’t play our instruments at all,” he complains with a slight laugh in his voice. “We’re not that good, but we’re better than that makes us look.”

Smith says the tour - which also features Dashboard Confessional, Plain White T’s and The Cab - has been “like some weird summer camp for guys in their 20s,” since all of the bands are good friends anyway. However, they didn’t initially embrace the idea of sponsorship.

“We’re always leery of any sponsorship, especially this being a video game,” says Smith. “But the new Rock Band has songs of The Who, Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, and a lot of these artists that maybe these kids wouldn’t listen to themselves or wouldn’t have heard any other way, so being influenced by that stuff, it just actually seemed like kind of a cool thing and a thing that’s getting a lot of kids back into rock music, and in the past 10 years, rock music hasn’t been the thing that’s the biggest thing out there. And so we thought, ‘Wow, this is a lot cooler than being sponsored by a deodorant body spray.”

What’s also different about this tour for Panic is that they’ve been working on songs while on tour. So is the new album going to be another 180-degree change of direction, the way “Pretty. Odd” was from their 2005 debut?

“Maybe like a 720 something,” jokes Smith, before addressing the question more seriously. I think that the difference from the first to the second record just came from us being on tour for a year-and-a-half after the first record and not really writing very much, but getting into new artists and finding out about bands that we liked and getting out of some of the stuff that we may have liked when we were younger. I think that with this record we didn’t want to do that, so as soon as we were done recording and went on tour we just always had acoustic guitars around and still continued to work on songs. So it’s not going to be as big of a gap in between.”
Just as long as Smith doesn’t try to only play complicated beats just to impress Rock Band players.

Panic; (at the Disco)?

Another big change from Panic’s first to second album, was the way the band wrote their name. Their debut, “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out” had them listed as Panic! At The Disco, where “Pretty. Odd” limited the weird punctuation to the album title. “We didn’t really mean to ever put it in there,” says Smith of the exclamation point. So what happened?

When Ryan [Ross, guitarist] was making our MySpace four-and-a-half years ago, I don’t know how many friends we had, and he put it in there, and it was just like, “Oh, that’s cool, put it in there.” And we never write it like that, but then all of a sudden a lot more people started finding out about our band, so it just stuck, and then when we were doing the second album artwork we were like, “Well, we never really meant for it to be in there,” so we just took it out. … We just tell people that the next album we’re going to add in a semi colon or parentheses, or brackets or something.

Rock Band Live
Featuring Dashboard Confessional
Panic at the Disco
Plain White T's
The Cab
Tonight, 7
Tsongas Arena
300 MLK Jr., Way, Lowell
$25-$35, 617-931-2000
www.ticketmaster.com