Backstreet Boys
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Get closer to:
Kevin - Howie
- AJ - Brian
- Nick |
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| The
B-Boys gelled in 1993, in Orlando, where high school students
A.J. McLean and Howie Dorough, and junior high student Nick
Carter frequently ran into each other at acting auditions. They
began hanging out, started singing, and eventually brought in
two additional members, Kevin Richardson and his Kentucky
cousin, Brian Littrell. The band's initial local gigs ranged
from high school gymnasium |
| dances
to Grad Night at Sea World. But eventually, with the inclusion
of smooth R&B-pop numbers like "Tell Me That I'm
Dreaming" in their act, the Backstreet Boys heated up the
local teens sufficiently enough that a cell-phone call placed to |
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a Jive Records executive during one of its pandemonium-inciting
gigs resulted in the group scoring a recording deal.AJ
and Howie were auditioning for local plays in Orlando, Florida.
They kept bumping into Nick and eventually they formed a trio.
Lou Pearlman discovered their singing and decided the trio
needed to add a couple more voices to make the harmony richer.
Lou had a friend who knew Kevin (who was working at Disneyworld
at the time). Then he called his cousin Brian who was in
Lexington, Kentucky. Brian was in class when he got the call
from Kevin. Without thinking, Brian took a flight to Orlando the
next day. Brian auditioned for the group and of course became a
Backstreet Boys! There was a market called "The Backstreet
Market" in Orlando, Florida. It was a local teen hangout so
the boys took Backstreet from it, added boys, BACKSTREET BOYS!!!
Though
their eponymous debut album has by now sold more than 10 million
copies in the U.S., the group was anything but an overnight
success on its home shores. The quintet's 1995 single,
"We've Got It Goin' On," fizzled after climbing to No.
69 on Billboard's Hot 100. It hit hard in Germany,
however, and the band soon found itself in the middle of a
European Boysapalooza, along with other teen-scream bands like
Take That and Boyzone that were then dominating the notoriously
fickle Continental market. "Over there, they had a bunch of
what's called 'boy groups,' so we had a ready-made market,"
explains Littrell, apparently fully aware of the musical
implications of supply-side economics. "But since we were
Americans, we were a fresh new sound for Europe. We had more of
an edge, and unlike a lot |
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of
those other boy groups, we were more than just a bunch of pretty
guys. We could sing." Whatever the source of their appeal,
the Boys' record sales were real, as they succeeded in ringing
up more than five million in unit sales outside the U.S. They
also nabbed |
| the
viewers' choice award at the MTV Europe Awards in 1997, and
caused a panic in the streets of Madrid during a staged
meet-and-greet affair that eventually had to be canceled. All in
a day's work, it turns out. "In Europe, there's no walking
anywhere without a bodyguard," Dorough told
Teen People in March of 1998. Security head Lonnie Jones
added, "When teenage girls all push in a group, you can't
stop them." Predictably, there have been several
Beatlemania-like breaches of security. According to Seventeen
magazine, two fans once hid in the storage hold of the group's
tour bus; and one European admirer scaled a barbed-wire fence to
get into their dressing room. Topping the list, though, was a
particularly gaga young woman who gave McLean two diamond rings
they turned out to be her parents' wedding bands. But of
course, it's always lonely at the top,
and dating has sometimes been a problem for the Boys.
"People say, 'Who cares?, You're loved by thousands of
screaming girls,'" Littrell recently lamented to Teen
People. "But it's not like there's somebody I can call
anytime and say, 'This is how I feel.'" But that changed on
Sept. 2, 2000, when Littrell, 25, became the second Backstreet
Boy after Richardson married his longtime girlfriend, dancer
Kristin Willits, on June 17, 2000 to take a bride. Littrell
and his fiancιe, actress Lieghanne Reena Wallace, 30, walked
down the aisle in a candlelight ceremony attended by all four of
his musical cohorts. And though some of the Boys have complained
that nobody really knows them, a wealth of fun facts can be
gleaned from a rip through the myriad of fan-maintained
Backstreet Boys Web sites: When Nick goes shopping, relates one,
he loves to buy sneakers and gold jewelry; Brian's favorite food
is macaroni and cheese, and his favorite cologne is Safari by
Ralph Lauren; A.J. likes girls with nice eyes and long hair;
Howie is most likely to "invite you for a moonlight walk
along the beach"; and Kevin "spent eight years of his
life living in a log cabin, and he's also a qualified
ballroom-dancer instructor!" Don't ever let it be said that
they'll never make Monkees out of these guys. |
| The
group's redoubled efforts in America have begun to pay off
their debut album, Backstreet Boys, was released domestically in
August of 1997, and spawned a number of hit singles, including
"Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)," "As Long as
You Love Me," and |
| "Everybody
(Backstreet's Back)," all of which have done well across
several radio demographics. So, in addition to being young,
good-looking, rich, and successful, the Backstreet Boys have
established what looks to be some staying power. Still, there's
that little bit of lingering doubt: "When you think of a
teen sensation, you think of the past and how this is just
another one to come along," |
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| Carter admitted to Billboard
in 1997. "We realize that people are talking about that,
but we take everything with a grain of salt. We know it's going
to take a lot of proving." Proof came in May of 1999, when
the band released the highly anticipated Millennium. Its
first week out of the gate, the disc amassed 1,133,505 in sales,
making it the most albums sold in a week ever since
SoundScan began recording sales figures, handily trouncing the
record set by Garth Brooks the previous December. In August
1999, the band announced a massive North American tour backing
its Millennium CD that sold out every one of its 53 dates
in a single day. "Being that the album is titled Millennium,
we're going to make the show a futuristic trip," Backstreet
Boy Kevin Richardson told Wall of Sound
upon the album's release. The two-hour show was presented in the
round, and included almost 20 songs. |
| As
the year came to a close, the Boys were declared the top sellers
of 1999, and they started the new year by announcing an |
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extensive
marketing campaign with Burger King. Over the summer of 2000
they appeared on VH1's Divas Men Strike Back and
will end the millennium with the much-anticipated release of
their third album, Black & Blue, on Nov. 21.
Expectations are running high for the |
| new
disc, specifically whether or not it can beat the single-week
sales record set by labelmate 'N Sync earlier this year. But in
an interview with Wall of
Sound, Howie Dorough imparted that he and his comrades
aren't as concerned as you might think. "The whole big
thing is who's breaking whose record, especially since we had
the record ourselves last year," says Dorough. "But
records are made to be broken, and to us, it's not so much about
that. It's just about making good music, and if the fans love it
and we're happy with it, everyone else will come along with
it." Come 2001, the Boys will undertake a massive tour in
support of Black
and Blue, which will kick off Jan. 23 in Fort Lauderdale,
Fla. The group's first U.S. leg will take it through March, at
which time the band will head overseas, hitting Southeast Asia,
Australia, Europe, and South America, before returning for another
set of U.S. dates. |
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