I realize this isn't the forum to trash celebrities who treat you bad.  But I'm going to do it anyway.  This is supposed to be a place where you come and report on your close encounter of a celebrity kind.  In this story I use the words celebrity very loosely.

Let's start from the beginning.

If I passed Panic At The Disco in a Walmart, I wouldn't recognize one of them.  With that being said I did my research and afterall, our radio station was playing their music in a semi heavy rotation.  This was around the time their last single "9 In The Afternoon" was popular.

They came to do an acoustic set for us at the radio station.  They had excited fans in attendance.  And no matter what my or their agenda, the goal here is to focus on what comes out of the speakers and create the best on air experience.  Afterall, we are in the business of mass appeal and listener experience.

Before their arrival, I came across this video on Ibeatyou.com essentially it's a video site setup with the goal of completing a task better than anyone else and challenging the world...thru video to beat you.  I found this ultra timely video of Jessica Alba doing what's called a lip dub.  A lip dub is a video lip synched by it's participants...in this case a bunch of Jessica's friends and colleagues each singing a verse of the song and it's all shot in one continuous take.  If you've never seen or tried it, it is pretty tough to pull off.  I know because we tried it.

I came up with the idea that since Panic At The Disco were coming to perform, if a few minutes before they went on, they shot a piece of the video with us.  The concept was simple.  Our radio station staff would film all the lead in parts and the final chorus would be done by Panic At The Disco and at the end yelling to the camera, "I Beat You" encouraging other web participants to challenge your video and have other users vote on it.

For this task I enrolled our friend Chris Kirkpatrick.  Yes, I know the NSYNC guy.  He came by to offer some nostalgic star power to our video. 

What was the point of all this?  Make a fun video, including the artists and get some cool publicity out of it.

We followed all the proper channels to get approval for Panic to be in the video, ran it up the flag pole and it was green lit. 

I was stoked because I was super involved int he project from directing and being the vision of the project.  So after rehearsing all day the morning of Panic's performance we rolled tape on 2 takes (both without Panic.)  We were ready to film with them, remember, no editing...one singular take.

In the middle of take 2, we got word.  Panic will not be participating.  This all while we have Chris come down special just to film this with us.  It was A) embaressing B) annoying for all those who gave their time to this project and C) weak...are you too big for a webvideo?  If anything it further promotes your single.

If that wasn't enough to annoy me, I had to interview them in 5 minutes.

To be fair, I have to remind myself the goal of this interview, it's not about me...it's about the people in the audience and more importantly the folks listening in the car or at home.  So I have to put my personal feelings aside about them choosing not to do our video (which they simply didn't feel like doing) and still put on a great interview.  That would've been easy.  In radio, there are days we don't feel well or broke up with a g/f...but still the show must go on.  So yes, I was faking it through this entire interview...put on my happy face and tried to deal with these guys.

Only problem, not only were they not accomidating.  But they were rude.  The first thing I asked was for them to introduce each member of the band.  They all used each others name not introducing themselves as the person they were.  It was their way of trying to be funny.  In reality it just confused the room. From then on, short one word answers and overall a sucky interview and performance.

Most artists, I will take a photo with afterwards.  I didn't bother this time.  As you can imagine, I was the most excited person when word came of their breakup last year. 

This is just one person's experience.  But they definetly didn't win any fans that day either.