Photo By Big Hassle Publicity

With only a few songs and not a single live show under its belt, now-exploding Panic! at the Disco was signed to Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz's label.

Before recording its debut album, A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, Panic! At The Disco had never played a live show.

Making a record with songs that added strings, horns and other instruments to the band's arsenal only made the prospect of playing live that much more unsettling, according to singer Brendon Urie.

"That was one of the most nerve-wracking things in the back of our minds when we were recording the album," Urie says. "We were thinking to ourselves, 'How the hell are we going to pull this off live?'

"I think for the first two weeks of that tour we were very nervous," he continues. "I think after that we kind of got used to it and got used to going up on stage and getting ready for that whole thing and we didn't really have any more nerves. Now, we just get excited to get up on stage."

Panic! At The Disco have certainly come a long way since those first tour dates last year. For one thing, Fever has become a breakout hit, with sales of more than 500,000 copies. That success has paved the way for the band to easily stage its elaborate live show on its first headlining tour, fronting a bill that also features the Dresden Dolls (a dynamic live act in itself) and The Hush Sound. Urie's description of the band's live show certainly doesn't sound like the work of a novice live act.

"We've been wanting to kind of put a big production on, like almost as if someone was going to go to a musical or a Broadway show," Urie says. "We've hired two players. One's a cello and keyboard player and one is a straight keyboardist/piano player. We hired them to kind of play the instruments from our album so we wouldn't have to sample anything through an iPod. So that's kind of one of the goals we accomplished.

"Also, we wanted to add some of the dancers from our first video," he adds. "They've been great so far. They do a bunch of improv and dances and I get up there and do a dance with them, a little choreography. Kids really seem to enjoy it. So it's a lot of fun. And we've got backdrops and props, a windmill and big lights and everything. It's just a huge production."

The fact that Panic! At The Disco was anything but a seasoned touring act when Fever arrived is a sign of the good fortune the group enjoyed in launching its career. Formed in Las Vegas by Urie, guitarist/keyboardist and chief songwriter Ryan Ross, drummer Spencer Smith and bassist Brent Wilson (recently replaced by Jon Walker) a couple of years ago, instead of playing local gigs to develop as a band, the group went straight into writing and demoing music.

That's where the fairytale part of the story begins. The group sent its first two songs to Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz through Wentz's online LiveJournal. The decision to approach Wentz was a true shot in the dark, taken well before the band had much of a catalog of songs to work with, according to Urie.

"We all kind of knew, especially Ryan and Spencer, (that) Pete was starting a label as a subsidiary of Fueled By Ramen. So that helped," Urie says. "We didn't really send demos to any other label. We pretty much put it all on Pete. We said, 'Here, listen to this.' If he doesn't, then whatever, but if he does, that's great. It just so happened that he listened to it and came to Vegas. At that time we only had three songs as a band, fully. We didn't even know how to play to an iPod with all the samples we had. So we had to play it acoustically."

The short set, though, was good enough to convince Wentz to sign Panic! At The Disco to his newly formed record company, Decaydance. When A Fever You Can't Sweat Out arrived in September, it sold 10,000 copies in its first week and sales have been mushrooming ever since, thanks to the popularity of the album's popular first single, "I Write Sins Not Tragedies."

The quick ascension to buzz band status and the press reports about the group's lack of dues-paying has generated plenty of sniping from other groups -- a sentiment Urie says he and his bandmates understand but now pretty much ignore.

"We never really had a chance to play live," he says. "We had three songs. We didn't have enough material to play live at the time. So when we got signed, it was pretty much a shot in the dark, a very lucky situation and (we're) very fortunate to have that opportunity. And, yeah, people will say we haven't paid our dues. But at the same, time if you asked those bands, 'Would you pay your dues if you (didn't have) to?' they would say no, because bands don't want to play to 20 drunk people in a bar every night just to get their sound out there."

The good fortune of Panic! At The Disco might be a more legitimate cause for derision if Fever was a dud of a debut. Instead, the album has been greeted with positive reviews to go along with the brisk sales. The music suggests that, despite the inexperience of the band members, Panic! At The Disco might be the real deal. Songs like "Time To Dance," "London Beckoned Songs About Money Written By Machines" and "Constantly Thank God For Esteban" might share a bit of the Dance Pop sound of another notable Las Vegas band, The Killers, but they are catchy and plenty inventive in their own right. And the second half of Fever shows a notable level of ambition, expanding the instrumentation on songs such as "But It's Better If You Do" and "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" to include cello, violin and horns, revealing a bit of Broadway musical influence to go with the group's obvious talent for rocking Pop.

The next test for Panic! At The Disco would appear to be surviving the change in bassists -- a move that generated considerable debate on-line among fans. The band members have been fairly vague about the circumstances that prompted Wilson's dismissal. Urie, however, offers a few clues about the move.

"The reason why he was relieved from the band was completely a musical decision (based on) where we wanted to go with the band," Urie says. "He wasn't willing to progress musically, we felt, in the direction we wanted to go with the band. He wasn't fully committed. So we had to find somebody who was, and we had to let him go. It was a very hard decision. I can tell you when we talked with him, we just sat there in silence for like 10 minutes and it was very, very weird, very sad. We're going to miss him and we hope he does great things, and I'm sure he will. It's up to him. Whatever he wants to do we fully support and we wish him the best in the future."