IT'S A JONAS BROTHERS THING
'You wouldn't understand, Dad ...' | july22.2024
The Jonas Brothers are in the house. | Rupp Arena, Lexington KY | september 26, 2023 | thestoryisthething.com photo
By Douglas John Imbrogno | july21.2024 | FREE SUBSCRIBE: thestoryisthething.substack.com
My daughter sort of likes the Jonas Brothers. This is an extravagant understatement. Grace loves the Jonas Brothers, the trio of bros — Kevin, Joe, and Nick — who since their formation in 2005 have transformed from teen heartthrobs into gazillion-selling Grammy-nominated pop music icons for a devout, not insignificant subset of pop music culture. If they are not yet, collectively, worth a billion dollars like Taylor Swift, they must at least be in the ballpark or on their way there.
It’s more than just a passion for their accomplished tuneage, their smart, clever, earworm songs, that inspire true-blue JoBro Jonatics, or so this father has witnessed in his daughter’s 30 years of life. For that is the all-grown-up birthday she marked earlier this month. You can’t call yourself a youngster anymore at 30 , but you don’t yet have all the mojo, incessant responsibilities or full-on neuroses of full-blown adulthood just yet. It is also when you look back on what got you to this important hinge point in life.
And so I lean on Kevin, Joe, and Nick for this daughterly disquisition. (Nick, by the way, is the cutest and best songwriter of the trio; Joe is the most handsome, in classic Italian stallion fashion; while Kevin seems the most down-home and domestic of the lot. I would that she’d have married stable Kevin, if it ever came down to a JoBro romance.)
‘I’m a sucker for you …’. | Rupp Arena, Lexington KY | september 26, 2023 | thestoryisthething.com photo
‘Oh, Dad!’ Alert
First, however, I offer a blanket apology to my daughter and other members of the Jonas Brothers sisterhood. (I suppose there may be a brotherhood, but it can’t be anywhere near as large as the sisterhood). Doubtless, I am about to make some un-cool, uninformed and embarrassing ‘Oh, Dad!’ remarks in this homage to my daughter and her band. I don’t think anyone uses the phrase ‘Jonatics’ anymore, for example, if they ever did. But her long-since un-hip father did come upon the phrase on a Google search mission. Also, please note: I have offered her a pre-publication, ‘Embarrassment-Reduction Edit‘ on this article and the right to interject commentary via brackets into the text. As in: [GRACE NOTE: … ]
For you see, as I ponder my daughter’s continued ardor for the Jonas Brothers for more than half of the three decades she has (sorry, can’t resist) ‘graced’ this world, my writerly self is intrigued by such a long fraternization with three guys from New Jersey, who share Grace’s own (one-fourth) Italian heritage. [GRACE NOTE: ‘Joe is my Jonas of choice (though I love them all) …’]
The Jonas Brothers have been part of the very warp and weave of most of her conscious life, and still are. They have been the soundtrack and backing vocals to her existence. They are possibly her longest tribal fellowship outside the family unit. True-blue fans like her monitor the trio’s every twist and turn — the band splitting and reuniting; their love affairs and betrothals; their TV, movie and theatrical side gigs; their latest tours and tunes — in the internet watering holes, endless message threads, and 24/7 gossiptorium in the sprawling kingdom of Jonasbrotherstan.
It took her two texts to recall just how many Jonas Brothers concerts she has attended [GRACE NOTE: FIRST TEXT: ‘9 concerts. 2 meet and greets.’ SECOND TEXT (minutes later): ‘12 concerts. Final answer.’ ] Below is is one of the photos from when she got the — pretty darned expensive — tickets that included a meet-and-greet with the JoBros. In the picture, she fairly glows from the momentous encounter, with two Jonases to her left and another to her right. The swarthy Latin bombshell in the black tank-top is H.F.J. himself (Her Favorite Jonas).
The Jonas Brothers briefly add a new member to the band. | February 2010
The stressfulness of it all
So for such an auspicious birthday, please spot this father some slack in his efforts to recall evocative details of a dear daughter’s upbringing. Pre-Jonas, I recall the weight of her when she was tiny enough to hoist onto my shoulders. After which we would stride off together to investigate the wonders of, say, the carnival come to town in a local field, with all its strobing, incandescent lights, zoomy rides, and cotton candy flavors.
From her early-girlish days, I recall her curled up in the passenger seat on some journey, her eight-year-old form now long enough to rest her bare feet upon the dashboard. The next morning, starting up the car’s engine to head to my newspaper job in West Virginia’s capital, I look over and note the girlish footprints smudged across the passenger side windshield. Where they remain for days until I finally break out the Windex.
Years later, after the radar of her adoration locked upon the Jonas Brothers, I recall her sitting in front of two fired-up laptop computers on the dining room table — hers and mine. A clock ticked off the minutes until 9 a.m., when Ticketmaster sales began for the latest JoBro tour-stops within roadtrip-distance of our house. She was ready to smash the keys of two keyboards, alternatively. If one of the orders came up empty or technical snafus snarled that order, she would get tickets on the other computer, by gawd.
Running her hands through her long auburn locks as the golden hour approached, she was freaked out she might miss getting the best seats.
“Dad! You don’t know how stressful this is!”
A Tribe Called Jonas
Rupp Arena, Lexington KY | september 26, 2023 | thestoryisthething.com photo
As I do sometimes for perspective — and to seek maybe better words I might not at first think to use — I looked up synonyms for the word ‘love’ on my go-to Oxford English Dictionary app. Some of them get at the flavor of what this Dad has observed stirs the heart of his longtime JoBronian kid (I am now coining my own words for the band’s fans):
Deep affection; fondness; tenderness; warmth; intimacy; attachment; endearment; devotion; adoration; doting; idolization; worship; passion, ardour; desire; lust; yearning; infatuation, adulation; besottedness.
OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY Synonyns for 'love'
I would hardly be the first to observe that for many a pre-pubescent or teenage girl ‘boy bands’ are sort of fantasy, tryout boyfriends-from-afar. The band members are a way to play-act and to role-play some of the words above in a safe setting, once removed.
Attachment. Endearment. Passion. Infatuation …
I feel obliged to note, though, that ‘boy band’ is often a slur for pretty-boy bands with not much musical skill. The Jonas Brothers, on the other hand, are an accomplished, sometimes kick-ass outfit, with numerous fun, accomplished and even classic original tunes, from the loopy pleasures of “Love Bug,” to the trio’s hard-to-resist hit “Sucker.”
“Sucker” by the Jonas Brothers | Click to play video
Love Bugging
There was doubtless a lot of cute-boy idolization which led my daughter to plaster all of her bedroom walls with Jonas Brother posters and photographs when she was a teenybopper. (And I hereby apologize to her entire generation for deploying such an old-fashioned phrase as ‘teenybopper …’) Did I mention she covered the ceiling with posters, too? Or that at age 30, and all growed up, she refuses to let her parents dispose of any of those 50-odd posters stored safely in plastic bins downstairs? Meanwhile, she also demands that a few remain up in her old bedroom — now a guest bedroom — in a shrine-like callback to her youth.
Speaking of ‘besotted’ — being the besotted Dad of a darling daughter — I brought my modest singer-songwriter skills to the Jonas Brothers plate years ago, in honor of her devotion. I might need a few days to rehearse it, but I can strap on one of my guitars, plug in, and crank out a decent version of “Love Bug,” although not with the full-on rocking tempo of the JoBros. The song was on the playlist of my old band, The BrotherSisters, and I think Grace smiled when I played it the time she came to one of our shows. She didn’t flee the room, at least.
‘JONAS BROTHERS ART INSTALLATION’: My daughter’s bedroom, circa February 2009. Fortunately, Tabitha the Cat (of blessed memory) seen napping on he bed, escaped getting postered.
A Dad’s night out
So, given this history, I could hardly say no when she invited me to go with her to a Jonas Brothers concert at Rupp Arena in Lexington in September 2023. A friend had to cancel and she didn’t want the ticket to go to waste. Plus, I have apparently raised her well enough and have not yet descended into utter un-coolness that she is willing to be seen publicly with me at a Jonas Brother Revival. That is to say, the gathering of thousands of their fans, screaming in adoration in a sort of communal ecstasy that more than a few mainline religious traditions might wish their adherents displayed.
I will let the photos and video speak for themselves. I will note (see the video below from the show for proof) that, for all intents and purposes, the JoBros could simply hop around the stage, avoiding their microphones entirely, while allowing their fans to handle the vocals as the thousands of them belt every word of the band’s greatest hits. The lyrics appear to be entwined in the DNA strands of the very fiber of their beings.
Sing-a-long. | Rupp Arena, Lexington KY | september 26, 2023 | thestoryisthething.com photo
As for me, I dropped into my professional documentarian/journalist self, intrigued by this mass phenomenon of united ardor. I will say I felt a little bad for the JoBros, at one point. Their fans have such a set of expectations for what a concert should deliver that the tour’s set-list is announced in advance. This seems constricting — what if the emotional moment demanded they veer into an entirely different direction on stage? Calling an audible because it just felt better to take the set in this direction, at this moment. You can hardly do that when the show is scripted in advance, every set piece and encore locked into place.
But, hey, I am just an interloper Dad with an overactive brain. The JoBros — to quote one of my own formative bands, The Clash — proceeded to ‘rock the casbah’ there in Rupp Arena. Beside me, in the darkness now speckled with thousands of lozenges of lights from cellphone screens held up to record the band’s familiar musical testimony or waving in illuminated rhythm to the beat, my daughter had already fused with the choir.
And they were having their usual blast.
A JONAS BROTHERS SAMPLER from the show | Click to View
Making tracks
On the road home, Grace snoozed. It had been a while since we had been out on the road together or headed to the Nag’s Head or Kill Devil Hills beaches for one of our regular family vacations — her mother, her brother, Gracie and I. Yet it felt as familiar as an old, cozy blanket, driving through the American night, your kid asleep in the car with you.
The next day she slept in after coming from her apartment to stay the night at our place for the concert. I had to drive to Charleston for a meeting. I fired up my car’s engine. I looked to the right. And there, for the first time in a very long time, I saw daughter footprints smudging the passenger side windshield.
I’d like to thank Nick, Joe, and Kevin for that.
Plus, they were a little bit bigger this time.
P.S.
After I let my wife read this piece pre-publication, she took issue with one aspect of it. Why no mention of the 2013 Jonas Brother’s tune “Pom Poms”? Below is how our group text thread ran. After viewing the official video, I’m not sure how totally ‘wholesome‘ ‘Pom Poms’ shakes out — quite literally — to be. But it is very fun and is full of the JoBro’s signature snap, crackle, and pop:
MOM: Shouldn’t the piece include a reference to the song ‘Pom Poms’?!?
GRACE: Mom will never give up on ‘Pom Poms.’
MOM: It’s one of their best songs ever!
DAD: Am I gonna have to add ‘Pom Poms” to the story as a PS … ?
GRACE: Yes, for dear mother. Even though ‘Pom Poms’ reminds me of the time right before they announced their breakup. The trauma!
MOM: No, it’s a joke. Though I do think it’s a catchy tune.
GRACE: Yes, but part of my core of being a Jonas brothers fan is my mother’s obsession with one of their least popular songs.
MOM: It’s very wholesome.
“Pom Pom” by the Jonas Brothers | Click to play video
Thanks to Jeff Seager for his editing assistance on this piece.
You have one lucky daughter. Grace has one lucky dad.