"If you videotape the first minute and a half of our set and submitted it to the Sundance Film Festival, it would probably win top prize," drummer Kyle Burns cracks.
Adds Cook: "You're gonna leave wondering why Broadway has moved to Dallas-Fort Worth."
Allison V. Smith
Allison V. Smith
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But pardon their bravado. Because, go figure, when the crowd sees the display, it goes predictably bonkers—just as it will for the rest of the band's 30-minute high-energy set, which was filled with more clichéd rock posturing than you can possibly imagine. But it's what the fans want. It's what they've come to expect.
It's the product they yearn for, unapologetically. Because, well, they don't know any better, and for the time being, this is all just too much fun to not enjoy.
But it rarely lasts very long. Each of the bands and players involved in the scene is keenly aware of the demographics for which it performs.
"Oh, a hundred percent," Ziemer says. "Just in the image of our company. We want to appeal as an alcohol-free, drug-free, smoke-free environment."
As such, Ziemer, for one, has seen friends of his stop showing up to his shows once they hit a certain age.
"We notice that a lot of people stop coming to shows when they're 18 or 19," he concedes. "It's life. You're cool in the scene here, but then you want to test out the club scenes."
Just like the band members themselves. After their House of Blues show, after innocently marveling at the crowd's reaction to their performance ("Golly, that was fun; I wish we could stay out there all night," Burns exhales once in the comfort of the backstage green room), and after, once again, dutifully interacting with the fans who are again gathered outside their parked tour bus, FTSK's members scatter about the city to various ultra-lounges: Burns was guest-DJing at one club; Cook was off to meet his friend Paris Hilton, who just happened to be in town that same night, at another.
And when the band returns to town to headline Ziemer's final Plano Centre show on July 12, they'll do it all over again.
The question, though, is how long the honeymoon will last. Quon, for one, having seen his last big pop artist, Vanilla Ice, re-establish himself as a public figure after a lengthy period in the gutter, isn't too concerned.
"The kids are gonna get older and be 20-plus 10 years from now," he says. "The scene will grow with them."
And if it doesn't? Does it matter? With its amount of success and with everyone involved in the scene having such a good time, no one's really worried about the long term. At least not yet.
"Yeah, music goes in cycles," FTSK's Cook acknowledges. "But right now? Things are not good, not great, not awesome, but incredible. I hear people from here all the time saying that the Dallas music scene died. No, the music scene hasn't died. It just found a new place to thrive."
And for better or worse, it isn't going anywhere. Not anytime soon, at least. This, Cook assures, will always be his band's home.
"Some of us might move way out west," he says, a coy smile forming on his face, the same smile that keeps his teenage fans up late at night, "all the way to Fort Worth."
