Eve 6

Southern California-based Eve 6 could fall into this category.

The band’s encounter with the David Letterman show almost foreshadows such a fate. Guitarist Jon Siebels explained to POLLSTAR, “Tonight on the show, they’re going to do this little thing where David’s like, ‘Tomorrow night, Eve 6. Who’s that? I’ve never heard of them before.’ And then a curtain is going to come up and we’re going to play like five seconds of the song.”

Then the curtain falls.

That short time is just a small taste of the limelight most pop bands experience but never endure; a few moments in the public eye then, like a magic trick without the cloud of smoke, they’re gone.

However, on the upside for Eve 6, the five-second performance was a teaser to promote the next night’s episode. The band returned to the stage and claimed the spotlight, performing its hit single “Inside Out” — in its entirety.

The group’s “Late Show” experience exemplifies what’s happening with Eve 6: The snowball effect is gaining momentum for the band of recent high school graduates and their self-titled debut album on RCA.

Even early in the group’s still-young career, Eve 6 was creating its tight punk, pop-rock sounds around Los Angeles before garnering attention from the right music industry people.

The band, taking its name from an episode of the popular sci-fi show “The X-Files,” formed during the summer before Siebels’ sophomore year in high school in La Crescenta, Calif.

“At that point, we weren’t really touring,” Siebels said. “We were just playing around our town a lot, the LA area and Hollywood, out to Orange County.”

As somewhat of a surprising move, Eve 6 chose to stay away from the area’s popular club scene. However, the choice reflects the young musicians’ mature sense of business.

“We kind of stayed away from doing the clubs a whole lot because a lot of the Hollywood clubs have the whole selling-tickets-to-play thing…. That’s just like the worst, to feel like you’re handing over money to play somewhere,” Siebels said. “We’d much rather just pack out a coffeehouse and have a great time than to have the high stress of selling tickets.”

So the occasional weekend party or coffee shop gig became the setting for Eve 6 to develop its sound. The band moved a step forward in its career after a performance on “Radio Asylum,” a college radio show. The program’s host, Jennifer Harold, “totally fell in love with the band and started managing.”

Harold had been working with then-RCA act One Thousand Mona Lisas and knew label A&R man Brian Malouf. She sent a live tape of Eve 6 to Malouf, who liked what he heard.

“We did a showcase for him [in LA] and he came back to New York, called us up and said the one band that he couldn’t stop thinking about was us,” Siebels said. “So, at the time, he signed us more for what he saw us developing into, not because he wanted us to put out a record and tour right away.”

Besides, the band hadn’t even entered its senior year of high school. “[Malouf] basically signed us and left us alone for two years to keep doing what we were doing, just playing.”

During a lax final year of high school, the band concentrated on making its debut album. After recording a demo of the song “Tongue Tied,” Eve 6 shopped around for management; Harold had parted ways with the band for a career in radio.

“[The demo] happened to fall on the desk of our managers, who are Arthur Spivak and Stu Sobol [of Spivak Entertainment],” Siebels said. “That was one of our best moves we’ve made because from there, they hooked us up with CAA — an amazing booking agency.”

With diplomas in hand and the release of their major-label debut this past spring, guitarist Siebels, bassist/vocalist Max Collins and drummer Tony Fagenson hit the road on a two-month-long club tour around the country. “We were headlining most of them and if we were lucky, we would get 30 people.” The band was able to play to some larger crowds, such as Atlanta’s Midtown Music Festival.

However, with the growing support of radio, the three piece was added to the Third Eye Blind/Our Lady Peace tour. “When we started the Third Eye Blind tour, it was like, ‘This is our third month straight of touring.’ And Our Lady Peace went, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve been touring 22 months straight,'” Siebels said. “So that was a little humbling.”

Eve 6 is on tour with Third Eye Blind for another two months, with MTV sponsoring the second leg of the tour.

But the band is readying itself for the future. “[We want to] just tour to get a huge fanbase to the point where, whether radio is embracing us or not at that particular moment, we’re always going to have a fanbase and be able to tour and sell records off of that.”