Vegas pop punk favorites to play first shows in over a decade

Twenty years ago, Alex DeLeon was a kid among many changing the face of the music industry in Las Vegas and beyond, one raucous, sweaty all-ages show at a time.

His band The Cab would earn a major-label record deal while he was still in high school writing songs in chemistry class, and go from playing local coffee shops to L.A’s Staples Center in what seemed like the blink of an eye.

And it can all be traced back to Panic’s debut show at long-shuttered music store/teen-friendly venue The Alley in August 2005, when the band began a rocket ride to superstardom — and soon brought The Cab along with them.

“I mean, the only reason we got signed to a record deal was because I was at the show and I sang the last chorus to ‘Time to Dance,’” DeLeon recalls in a recent video call with his keyboardist bandmate Alex Marshall. “These Vegas fans would just support the hell out of every band, and the bands would support the hell out of each other. I don’t even think we understood how special that time was.”

Two decades later, the era continues to stand out as one of the most fertile and exciting periods in Vegas music history. Back then, the city was far from a musical hotbed, with hard rockers Slaughter and an ascendant The Killers the only bands to earn major-label success up to that point.

But then came the pop punk and emo boom: In addition to Panic and The Cab getting signed, groups such as Escape the Fate, The Higher and You In Series all landed record deals, while other popular bands in the scene such as Fletch, Lydia Vance and Red Light School District packed all-ages venues such as Rock N’ Java, Jillian’s, the University Theater and The Alley.

This weekend, those halcyon days get revisited when Panic reunites to headline emo and pop punk mega-gathering When We Were Young, performing their multiplatinum 2005 debut, “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out,” in its entirety on Saturday and Sunday at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds.

The Cab is also getting back together to play their first concerts in over a decade at the festival and a WWWY sideshow on Friday at Brooklyn Bowl.

It’s a full-circle moment for both bands who helped lead one of Vegas’ most commercially successful scenes.

“Talk about a family reunion,” DeLeon says. “Like, how lucky we are that this festival happens to be where we grew up, where we built the band brick by brick, played these tiny shows and worked our way up?”

‘Thrown into the fire’

“One day you’re in high school, and the next day you’re waking up on (Fall Out Boy bassist) Pete Wentz’s couch, and you’re at Pete’s wedding with John Mayer, and you’re like, ‘What the hell is going on right now?’” DeLeon recalls. “You don’t have time to react — and so we just did it. You figure it out as you go, because you don’t really know what you’re doing. We just got thrown into the fire.”

And they enjoyed the burn back then.

After signing with Wentz’s Decaydance label, the group dropped their 2008 debut “Whisper War,” an album of R&B-inflected, love-drunk pop rock with ringing, U2-esque guitars set against DeLeon’s doe-eyed, ever-earnest delivery that sold over 100,000 copies.

For sophomore record “Symphony Soldier” in 2011, the band wrote with big names such as Bruno Mars, Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine and Wentz, among others. But touring for 11 months out of the year in support of those albums took its toll.

“We had been touring extensively, and when you start touring so young — Alex and I were kids — you make decisions as a kid,” Marshall explains. “And I think for both of us, we had been road dogs for so long that we were burned out.

“You just don’t have the maturity to understand, ‘Dude, we’re blessed to be able to do this,’” he continues. “That was the initial like, ‘We need to take a pause on this for a bit.’”

In 2015, The Cab went on hiatus, getting back together for a writing session in Bali around the time of the pandemic and continuing to pen new material off and on but remaining absent from the stage.

Then one of the biggest emo and pop punk fests dropped them a line.

“When We Were Young called and they were like, ‘Do you guys want to do this?’” DeLeon remembers. “I called Alex, called our manager, and I was like, ‘I think this is it. This is our hometown. Panic is playing, the band who signed us. It just feels too perfect.’”

‘An ocean of emotions’

When 100,000 or so black-clad emo/pop punk diehards flock to a festival in Vegas, it begs the question: What made that scene from the early to mid-2000s so special to so many? And why does that bond endure?

“It was a really cool era of rock music, because people were allowed to be vulnerable,” DeLeon explains. “That was a genre of music that just allowed people to express themselves, and they could say whatever they wanted. It was really important that fans could hear music where they go like, ‘Oh, I feel that way, too.’”

The time frame is key: This was before Spotify made practically every album from every artist available at one’s fingertips, when social media was just taking its first baby steps toward omnipresence.

And so the process of finding a new favorite band back then could foster a very personal sense of discovery that had the power to make listeners feel like they were part of something.

“We had our band on MySpace, like pre-dating all the social media, and there was this feeling of, ‘I found this new band,’ and it’s almost like, ‘It’s my band that I found,’” Marshall says. “That was before all these social platforms made everybody so accessible.

“I think that following remembers that,” he adds, “and that just created a family out of that whole era. I mean, we still feel it, the fans that were there from the early 2000s when we were starting to play, those fans are still with us. They still have that same feeling of, like, ownership and ‘This is mine.’”

The numbers underscore Marshall’s point: Even with an 11-year gap between the release of new music, The Cab logged nearly 2 million monthly listeners on Spotify, with their song “Angel With a Shotgun” going platinum just last year and having earned over 237 million streams.

About that new music gap: It just ended with the release of The Cab’s new four-song EP “Road to Reign: A Prelude.” It’s meant to be a taste of what’s to come — they have new two album’s worth of material written — and it’s a promising one, moving the band’s sound into fresh terrain (the R&B-meets-electro surge of the dance floor-ready “Pain”) while also revisiting the well-heeled pop punk they became known for (the stirring, sentimental “… Stay This Way Forever”).

Next up: playing live again.

To knock the rust off, The Cab got back together for their first jam sessions in ages last month, their lineup rounded out by bassist Joey Thunder, drummer Dave Briggs and touring guitarist Chantry Johnson.

“I think for both of us, the initial worry was, ‘What’s it going to be like when we go into a rehearsal space and all play together? Does the machine still work? Does the vehicle move?’” Marshall acknowledges. “We did a week in the beginning of September, and I remember Alex looked over when we were playing, and everybody just started smiling. It was just this overwhelming feeling of like, ‘Whoa. This feels so good.’ When we did that, it was like, ‘Wow, this is it, dude.’”

If that chemistry between bandmates remains unchanged over the years, the same can’t be said of their personal lives: Both DeLeon and Marshall are married with kids.

And so when The Cab takes the stage in their hometown once again it really will be a family affair.

“Dude, I’ve been with my wife for 11 years, and she’s never seen me perform,” DeLeon says. “My daughter will be there. She’s 2 — she’s gonna have the little headphones on.

“We have friends from 10-plus countries flying in,” he continues. “I told my wife, ‘If I go on stage and people are singing the songs loud, I might cry.’ It’s gonna be an ocean of emotions, for sure.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram.