18-year-old's power pop quickens the pulse
By CHRIS HANSEN ORF
Get Out

He has released two brilliant EPs, played in front of several thousand people at last fall's Edgefest and been performing on Valley stages for half a decade.

And Adam Panic is just 18 years old.

“All I've ever wanted to do was be a musician,” says the fresh-faced singer/songwriter, who was raised in Paradise Valley. “We have videotapes of me when I was 2, playing a tennis racket like a guitar and singing ‘Over the Rainbow.’

‘‘Then, when I was 10, I went to this camp and they had this guitar thing, and I remember learning Tom Petty's ‘Free Fallin’.’ When I came home I was like, ‘I wanna play guitar.’”

At a time when most kids his age were into video games, Panic, born Adam Kootman, began immersing himself in music, taking guitar and piano lessons and almost immediately beginning to write songs. Three years later, the teen led his first musical projects into Valley clubs.

“My first band played a lot of Green Day songs — I worshipped (singer) Billie Joe (Armstrong) — and songs I wrote at the Mason Jar and Modified,” Panic remembers. “I was in metal bands and a punk band, too, before I
started doing this.”

“This” is Adam Panic, a stage name he adopted at 16 while still at Scottsdale's Chaparral High School, an educational experience that the musician is openly disdainful of. While many high school kids pick up a guitar to impress the opposite sex — making sure to play on campus at any opportunity — Panic kept his talents under wraps.

“I hated school,” Panic laughs. “I didn't have any school spirit. I always wanted to be a professional, and I thought that, if you play at school, you're just another ‘high school band.’ It's funny; after I played Edgefest, I got an e-mail from student government saying that they'd pay me to come back and play a show and I thought, ‘Wow, that's so great!’ and then I said no.”

For a young musician not interested in school, Panic took on a hefty task in August, enrolling at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, a challenge he undertook to help his own self-guided musical career and not to further his knowledge of dotted half-notes and 5/4 time signatures.

“I thought I'd go up there and meet some great musicians and put a live band together,” Panic smirks. “I go out there and everybody's just doing their own thing. They already have a path where they want to go. They are all like, ‘I want to be a music teacher.’ The guitar players are all into guys like (instrumental shredder) Steve Vai — it's hard to find musicians out there that are into what I am wanting to do.”

So while most of the Berklee students are locked up in practice rooms with their cellos, at least Panic is getting an education for his time spent there, right?

“I am so lost,” he laughs of his first real immersion in music theory. “I'm just now catching up. I took guitar lessons for five years and piano lessons for four years, but I didn't learn any theory — it was all by ear. I'd bring in a CD and my guitar teacher would just teach me what I wanted to play, and my piano teacher would just write in the notes. I've never really studied music before this.”

Panic, who flies back to the Valley for shows a couple of times a month, plans to move back for good in May and continue to create his own music, which is completely innate and something that cannot be taught in a classroom. His sprite, tightly crafted power-pop tunes — some of the best currently being written by an Arizona musician — are gorgeously layered with vocal harmonies and engaging melodies that are a testament to Panic's boundless creativity, and are not talents that even a Ph.D. in music can dish out in a school like Berklee.

So how does a kid exposed more to Marilyn Manson and Slipknot by high school classmates before suffering a music theory barrage at Berklee find solace in music made 25 years before he was born?

“I did my first Adam Panic record when I was 16,” Panic says.
“Subconsciously I just started writing, and when the chorus came around I wanted something really catchy. On that record I wanted to do everything I'd ever wanted to do, so it was kind of jumbled, more experimental. In those sessions (producer) Bob (Hoag) said, ‘You must love the Beatles,’ and I was like, ‘I've heard of them,’ but I had never really listened to them. He gives me all these Beatles CDs and sends me home and I just thought, ‘God, these are great!’ ”

Hoag's Beatles lesson took root, and the results are “We All Do,” a five-song EP that has garnered plenty of airplay on KEDJ (103.9 FM) with the title track, which led to Panic's high-profile gig at last year's Edgefest and his addition to the Edge's 15-song holiday benefit calendar and CD.
While his folks may not have a musical background, they certainly do not lack in support for their wünderkind son.

“My mom bought 15 calendars at Best Buy with me standing there,” Panic laughs. “She was telling the guy that she knew ‘somebody’ on the calendar and I was like, ‘Mom!’”

Adam Panic
With: Razorback, Dresden Dolls
When: 7 p.m. Tuesday
Where: The Sets, 93 E. Southern Ave., Tempe
How much: Free for Edge Insiders (log onto http://www.theedge1039.com to sign up) Information: