#aug05

Las Vegas Weekly wrote in October 2007 that The Alley would be “best remembered as the answer to the trivia question ‘Where did Panic! At the Disco play its first show?’” The Alley was in Summerlin (where the Panic guys were from) in this Family Music Center:

The store was pretty big and had a small venue in the back... here are some screenshots I just grabbed from google maps lol:

The show was announced towards the end of July after the band had finished recording AFYCSO. The venue sold out, so they let in more people than they technically should have. Ryan usually said there were 300-400 people there. Brent said there were 500 kids. And most journalists gave numbers anywhere between 200-600. Alex Deleon was also at this show. Doors were at 8pm. The opening bands were initially supposed to be The Collection and What About Apollo, but then The Collection dropped out and Fletch replaced them. Those were all local bands who'd played small shows before.

Here's Panic's set list. And here's a video (I forget where it originated but it's 100% for sure their first show. Ralph Fountain was a photographer who took some shots of this show from a very similar angle as this video… so maybe this came from a Vegas news outlet? idk I wasn't quite a total fan yet whoops).

I was debating whether or not to even upload this because the quality isn't as nice as the previous video but whatever:

P!ATD was legitimately popular online by August... I just want to emphasize that there was SO much hype at this point (like I couldn't avoid it). Several people at this show said the crowd was singing so loudly that they drowned out Brendon at times. Ryan told Rolling Stone in early 2006 that “people were singing along to every word. It was a shock; it was flattering.” 

Ryan later told Rolling Stone that the band only had 3 demos online at their first show. However, the final version of The Only Difference was definitely posted online several days before the band’s first show as part of the marketing campaign (more info here). Fans were also passing around the four demos, even though only some of those were still listed online.

This show was probably scheduled in order to give the baby band some experience playing their finished songs live before they joined a national tour in a few weeks. A couple people at this show said that it took the band forever to set up their gear. Panic's merch for that fall had already been designed, so they had legit professional-quality shirts at their first show too. Brendon said in a late 2006 interview:

“When we first started off, we made our record and then we played our first show. There was a bit of an expectation, you know, ‘Fall Out Boy signed them. They never played a show. They better be, like, real good.’ In the beginning, we sucked, too. We were horrible.”

Panic! at the Disco never had a normal "first show" experience. They launched into touring shortly after this show, so Vegas basically became another tour stop in their lives. Alternative Press asked Spencer in December 2008 if he missed the opportunity to build a local fanbase and he replied:

Yeah. I think more than that, we just wish that there was a little more camaraderie among the other local bands in Vegas. It's been a long time since we've been home for a long enough period to kind of figure out what's going on in the local music scene there. At least when we were kind of coming up and starting to play a few shows, it just seemed like every band was kind of out for themselves. [There was] this weird jealousy of everybody else [being] too substantial. It was just a little weird so I think that's why we didn't really have any local following or anything and why Vegas just seems like another show on the tour. But it's fine. Whatever. Can't go back now, I guess. 

this is Nina. we love Nina.

she gave the fandom some great content, including these videos from P!ATD's second show ever:

The Only Difference was not P!ATD's first single (despite whatever Wikipedia currently says). It was just the first full song that was posted on the band’s purevolume during the marketing campaign in August – September 2005 leading up to the release of AFYCSO (more info in this post).

So the band finished recording in late July and then played their first show on August 12th. In the meantime, the album’s cover art and tracklist were revealed around the start of August. Then on August 8th fans were spreading the word that there would be a new song on P!ATD's purevolume at midnight, which was The Only Difference. That was the very first full song we got... up until that point there were only the 4 demos.

PETE'S CONTRIBUTION TO THE LYRICS:

Fans already knew that Pete Wentz helped with lyrics on AFYCSO. On August 16th Pete answered a question on FOB's Q&A that asked if "I aim to be, your eyes, trophy boys, trophy wives" was a line he wrote in the new P!ATD song, and Pete replied "that would be indeed."

THIS SONG WAS NOT A SINGLE:

The Only Difference was used in several places that promoted P!ATD this fall, like these samplers. Here's an example e-card too:

Some fans heard this song on their local radio in August. But some radio stations had resorted to playing demos like It's Time To Dance earlier that summer too... the band was just popular and there wasn't much to use yet.

So this song still wasn't a single even though John Janick used it for promotional purposes. Here’s a moment in 2008 where Ryan explains how John Janick had wanted The Only Difference to be a single (“he wanted this song to be a single, and I always said no... and it never was”).

so I'm confused why Wikipedia currently says this:

Rolling Stone did put The Only Difference as #84 on their list of 100 best songs of 2006. And some international magazines had it on a list of best singles. But I don’t remember that song being treated like an actual single.

The band made it very clear in January 2006 that IWSNT was their first single. That was the media hype around it too! Here’s part of a Big Cheese interview from that month where Ryan talked about why IWSNT was chosen:

Big Cheese:I Write Sins Not Tragedies isn’t an obvious choice for a debut single in terms of immediacy. Why this and not, say, ‘Time to Dance’? Ryan:“The label wanted to choose the first single on the record, but that seemed like too safe a thing and we didn’t want to go that way. We wanted to take a chance. We’ve talked about bands like Pink Floyd, that band wrote the records they wanted to write and they were huge. That’s where we want to be. We don’t want to have to craft the perfect single. We don’t want to have to compromise.”

these look like one of the earlier shows in August 2005 because of the red tie with that shirt, but I’m not 100% positive which show... like August 16th is my first guess but idk.

and this first one looks like the Alley on the 12th and the second one could possibly be August 16th but again... not sure: