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The Heartbreaking End of Panic! at the Disco‘s 2006 Summer Tour (Masterpost)
In summer of 2006, Panic! at the Disco was on top of the world. Their debut album was an unexpected hit, despite initially being hated by music critics, and their avant-garde tour circuit across America established them as both an artistic and financial success. Even better, they had racked up an impressive four nominations for the MTV Video Music Awards.
The last performance of their tour was scheduled to be on the first day of the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago, IL, on Friday, August 4, 2006: the perfect, triumphant end to the perfect tour.
Unfortunately, fate had another plan.
Ryan Ross’s father, George Hammond Ross Jr., was an alcoholic who had been in and out of the hospital for some time. He and his son had a notoriously difficult and strained relationship, mostly due to problems associated with alcoholism, and Ryan had written two songs about it: “Camisado” and “Nails for Breakfast, Tacks for Snacks”.
An article from Kerrang in 2006 interviewed Ryan about his family troubles:
Ross, meanwhile, found growing up a more tricky prospect. As fragile as a porcelain doll - as if a strong gust of wind or the wrong words would crush him to dust - he writes the clever lyrics that frontman Brendon Urie sings. He was outgoing as a small child, but somewhere along the line he became cripplingly shy. Keen to give his son a good start in life, his father, an ex-marine, worked to send him to a private Catholic school - although Ross is an atheist - hoping to provide the education he never got. Ross found he had little in common with his wealthy classmates.
Meanwhile, his home life was falling apart. His parents split up when he was young; he hardly ever speaks to his mother and rarely sees his two half-brothers. Which meant he was left alone to deal with his father’s growing problem with alcohol - as beautifully portrayed in the song ‘Nails for Breakfast, Tacks for Snacks.’ Ross’ fights with his father were exacerbated by Ross’ decision to concentrate on the band rather than going to college.
“He was pretty much dead set on me going to college and I got a scholarship,” he says quietly. “He thought I was stupid for throwing that away. His problems with alcohol magnified and skewed things even further. I was not staying at home for weeks at a time. I was staying with my girlfriend, staying with the other guys in the band. There were times when I almost had to sleep at our rehearsal space, ‘cause I didn’t have anywhere to go. Obviously I loved him and I cared about him, but when you’re getting kind of abused by that person, at the same time it’s really hard to try to help them.”
At the end of July 2006, during a televised interview in Vancouver, Ryan received news that his father was in the hospital again and that it wasn’t looking good. Understandably, this made him check his phone repeatedly and have a barely-repressed anxiety attack, which resulted in the interviewer actually taking away his cell phone and teasing him about it on-air.
This is horrifyingly immortalized in the fandom (albeit out-of-context) because Brendon showed support for his grieving friend with a comforting hand squeeze. (Jon also flips off the interviewer behind his back.)
George Ross Jr. passed away on July 28, 2006, with memorial services scheduled for August 3.
Ryan heard about his father’s passing while on the band’s tour bus, which he discussed a few months later in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine:
Last July, [Ryan’s] father died in his sleep at the age of sixty. Panic were en route from Vancouver to Seattle on their bus when Ross heard the news. “I could almost feel that it was going to happen, because of the way he would treat himself,” he says. “I got a phone call, and I knew right away what the police officer was going to tell me. I just knew.”
Ryan also talked about his father’s funeral in the same Rolling Stone interview:
“The day of his funeral, it was raining and… it was strange to be raining that time of year. After the service, I went back and put my hand on the casket and kind of said goodbye. Right then, it stopped raining. The clouds blew away, and the sun came out, and it got warm. I spoke at the funeral and said that I think the one thing my dad cared about since I was born was that he wanted to raise me. I think he felt like he was done with that and had nothing else to do, so he just let go and stopped living. It’s almost like it’s better this way because it’s what he wanted. I miss him, but I feel like everything’s all right now. It was sad, but I got back out on tour and only missed three shows.”
The next day was the Lollapalooza show, and Ryan was determined to play it despite the circumstances.
The results are, as you could imagine, horribly sad in context. Ryan and Brendon’s vocals are both strained for the duration of the show, and the entire band looks on the brink of tears for most of their time onstage. “Camisado” and “Nails for Breakfast, Tacks for Snacks” are particularly gut-wrenching.
The performance was also besieged with logistical errors, including microphone trouble, poor stage management, and a sound delay that gets progressively worse over the course of the show. The boys tried their hardest anyway, but the performance is not one of their best. Making matters even stranger, portions of the concert are lost forever.
Noticeably, Ryan also chose to do his hair and makeup in a way that covers most of his face. He has admitted to using his elaborate makeup designs as a mask and confidence-booster, so it is unsurprising that he did one of his most intricate looks on such an emotionally difficult day.
You may recognize this look, in fact, from a popular gif taken from the tail end of their performance of “Lying is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off.”
The next time you see this floating around the fandom, remember the context.
~Mods C, M, and B
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