Nick and Kevin Jonas perform at a sold out show for the Jonas Brothers at the Ford Amphitheatre.
Below: Kevin shakes hands with fans before the show.

[KERI WIGINTON | Times]
View more photos

TAMPA – Nadine Albadawi has something to say. Well, scream actually. After all, it’s extremely important that she get her point across. Plus she’s also speaking for her pal Samoura Slim, 12, who's still recovering from an epic bout of tweenage sobbing.

“The Jonas Brothers are real!” says the 13-year-old Tampa girl, as her fave band in the whole wide world –-  the ONLY band in the whole wide world as far as she’s concerned -- finishes a pre-show sound-check for 100 lucky fans at Ford Amphitheatre Thursday. “That’s all that matters! They’re real!”

They are not the Beatles. They’re not Elvis, either. But the Jonas Brothers are the biggest story in pop music. Heck, pop culture. The Disney-owned scamps with those fabu ’dos have three albums in the top 10, including the new "A Little Bit Longer." They have a No. 1 cable movie (Disney Channel's "Camp Rock") and a merchandising deal with Target that costs me $30 every time I take my 4-year-old daughter to that godforsaken place.

The Jonas Brothers are also the LOUDEST story in music. Nick, Joe and Kevin Jonas – 15, 19 and 20 respectively, God-fearing good boys from the tony burg of Wyckoff, N.J. -– played their undeniably catchy power-pop for a sold-out crowd of 20,000 at the Tampa venue, reportedly raising the noise meter to somke 120 decibels.

It’s the kind of noise that makes you cry with life-affirming joy…well, for the first five minutes at least. After that, it just sounds like a terrorist tactic.      

Everywhere you look, the Jonas boys are being stalked by young girls. And they love it. Perhaps even more important, they’re also being stalked by a rabid press, including yours truly, who was invited to spend the whole day with the band. They didn't seem to mind that, either.

So while this accessibility makes them look “real,” it also makes them look like cutie-pie rock stars who can’t get a lick of quiet, of privacy, of anything resembling a normal life. It's a brilliantly controlled mob scene featuring three boys taking it all in stride.

Just like the Beatles.

Just like the King.

****

The Jonas Brothers have fairly large, floppy bare feet. Nick, the Cute One, guzzles Diet Dr. Pepper. Kevin, the Nice One, likes to trumpet the joys of Red Bull. Joe, the Funny One (but also kinda cute), is genuinely sweet. He even gave me a fist bump. Right back at ya, buddy.

The Jonas Brothers, boys and girls, are as nice as you (and your parents) hope they are.

I learned these things not from the Q&A session, but by hanging with the guys at the Saddlebrook Resort in Wesley Chapel before their show. When the brothers were faced with yet another formal press conference, they were downright waxen, poised and posed, smoothly issuing the same slick answers they've been giving out for the last couple of years. Not rude, but not exactly a ball of laughs, either.

Joe: "The best part about touring is getting onstage and seeing the fans."

Nick: "We love Tampa. Any chance we get to come here is amazing."

Someone asks Joe about his rumored romance with country star Taylor Swift, and with neither a pause nor a smirk, he answers: "She's a wonderful girl. Anybody would be lucky to meet her." The press chuckles; the Jonas Brothers do not.

Someone asks Kevin, who's turning 21 this year, if he'll celebrate with an adult beverage on his big day. "Um, I'm not there yet," he says. Somewhere, those infamous "purity rings" were gleaming heavenly.

The brothers are famous for never acting like brothers. Never sniping, digging, punching each other in the head. They travel with their mother, father and younger brother, aka "the Bonus Jonas," one big polite happy family.

But keep watching and maybe you'll get something. Saddlebrook officials cooked up a team-building exercise for the guys. Each brother had to build a boat out of cardboard then race it across the pool. It was obviously meant as a zany photo op. "Oh no," whispered PR rep Carolyn Weyforth. "Not when it's about competition. You watch."

And indeed, with the theme from "Gilligan's Island" gamboling from a loudspeaker, Nick, Joe and Kevin went at it with an earnest fever. Nick made a teepee ("Paradise Pyramid"), Kevin a canoe ("Titanic 2"), Joe a shanty hovel ("Pool Master 5000"). When they finally launched, Nick sank, but Joe and Kevin remained afloat. Two feet from winning, Kevin took on water, and Joe, cruising to victory, immediately ripped into his sibling with a closed-door ferocity: "You're out! You're out!"

Not exactly a punch in the head. But as for trash talk, I'll take it.

****

It's easy to get cynical about pop culture these days, especially with such vapid tartlets as Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears doing their best to be dumb. And the Jonas Brothers certainly garner their share of snipes from people who don't believe they write their own songs or play their own instruments. (I was at sound-check and the show; the boys can play, trust me.)

How real can a band be if they're run by the Mouse House, the same place that made Miley "Hannah Montana" Cyrus a prefab star? Disney, after all, is make-believe.

And yet, when the Jonas Brothers finally took the stage at 9:00, descending on a hydraulic lift and kicking into theme song "That's Just the Way We Roll," you couldn't help but get a little misty-eyed.

"The last time I went to a show like this was Andy Gibb," said Mia Alvis, a Sarasota mom with two kids in tow. "It's nice. I hope that purity ring stuff sticks. I like that."

Maybe the Jonas Brothers will only get as big as Andy Gibb. Or Hanson. Or New Kids on the Block. But on this night, on this tour, the Jonas Brothers felt like the biggest act of the 21st century, the coolest role models in the universe. The fans felt it. The oft-jaded press felt it.

As my pal Nadine would say, it was definitely, deafeningly real.