Rise to fame

Orlando's Fab Five have made it to the top of the charts. But it was a long, hard climb for the group.

The Oxford American Dictionary says that a rebel is "one who fights against, resists or refuses allegiance to established authority."

According to that definition, the Backstreet Boys are true rebels. For when the Boys started their singing careers, they resisted the popular sound in the music industry, choosing instead to go their own way. As a resulym the group was dismissed early on by record execs and other insiders who said they'd never make it onto the charts.

The band's roots were planted in Orlando, Florida, in 1993, where teenagers Nick Carter, AJ McLean and Howie Dorough were hustling to score acting gigs when they weren't in school. "AJ and I met at a talent contest," Howie told Hello magazine. "And we ran into Nick at various auditions."

Their success as actors had been limited. Howie landed a few substantial roles in feature films, while Nick had a rold on low-profil cable TV show. AJ, meanwhile, had just auditioned for Disney's the New Mickey Mouse Club series, nut unlike soon-to-be stars Justin Timberlake and Keri Russell, he didn't make the cut.

So Howie, Nick and AJ decided to join forces and start a singing act. At first, lke their acting efforts, they didn't get much attention. After all, they were hopelessly behind the times - at least that's what the music industry thought. The soon-to-be Backstreet Boys were unabashed pop singers, which was decidedly uncool in the early 1990s. Alternative music was the thing - grunge rock groups like Nirvana were hot, while cheerful popsters like New Kids on the Block were being dropped by their labels.

In an interview for the Chicago Tribune, Vincent DeGiorgio, A&R director at RCA Records, offered: "Let's face it, if you turned on MTV [at that time], you were seeing a lot of hip-hop artists and the latest alternative superstars."

Who you weren't seeing were pop songers like Howie, Nick and AJ. But the trio didn't care about what was "in" at the moment. They loved soulful pp music, and they were determined to bring it back into style. So the three teens continued plugging away, rehearsing at their homes and performing occasionally at local street fairs and any other venue that would have them. After a fw months, they attracted the attention of airline magnate Louis J. Pearlman, who recognized that these young boys wanted to get a foothold in the music industry, knew talent when he saw it, and he also believed that with the teten ranks growing, pop music was primed to make a comeback. Hooking up with former New Kids road managers Johnny and Donna Wright, he began holding auditions for a singing group.

The Return of Pop
"We heaerd of a man named Lou Pearlman who was starting a label called Trans Continental Records," Howie has said of how the guys hooked up with their first manager. "And he was looking for talent. We were harmonizing, so we went in and auditioned for him. He suggested that we extended the group to five members."

This suggestion resulted in Kevin Richardson, an employee at Orlando's Disney World (he played Aladdin!), auditioning for the group. Kevin, in turn, brought his cousin from Kentucky, Brian Littrell. With the group now complete, they chose a name: Backstreet Boys, which was derived from a local hangout. "Actually, it ws called the Backstreet Market," Kevin told the press. "It was just a local hangout. It was a flea market, but when there was no flea market [going on], it was a big parking lot. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out in their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got 'Backstreet'. We put 'Boys' on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll feel we'll always be boys."

What they weren't, however was an instant success. In fact, Dona Wright admitted to Billboard magazine that she initially had misgivings about signing the group. "I wasn't sure if we wanted to get involved [with them]," she said. "The New Kids had just finished up two years prior and pop seemed to be over. But hearing them sing just gave me chills running down from my back of my heels to the top of my head. I really felt like we had something there."

So Donna Wright swallowed her concers and took a gamble on her physical response to the group. After she and husband Johny - as well as Lou Pearlman - signed them to exclusive contracts, they set their sights on getting the Boys a recording contract, which was no easy task. Explained Howie, "We'd go to local labels and sing a capella in their foyers. We'd sing anywhere, for anybody."

And it didn't do much good. What Pearlman and the Wrights discovered was that the best way to secure a record contract wsa to gain visibility for the group, to build a fan base so that record companies would feel secure that someone out there would buy the album. They set about achieving this goal by booking the guys for live performances anywhere they could, ranging from private parties to high school pep rallies. (This forced AJ, and Nick, the last remaining BSBers in high school, to give up attending classes in favor of private tutors.)

"Those [early performances] were the hardest," admitted Kevin. "You could tell the [kids] were thinking, 'What is this, the second coming of the New Kids on the Block?' But once we started showing them we could really sing, we won them over every time."

But it was slow going. Gigs were hard to come by, and most of them were at very small venues. One record label signed them up in 1994, but soon dropped them without ever bringing them into the recording studio. After nearly two years together, performing at malls and staying at cheap motels, the Boys were beginning to wonder if they were ever going to get their big break.

The break did come, of course, but from an unexpected source. In 1994, the Boys were hired to perform at events across the country for the Students Against Drunk Driving (SADD) awareness campaign. As Kevin told the pres, "Being on the SADD tour before we even had a record deal really helped get our confidence up."

It also got them that elusive record deal. It was during one of their SADD performances that they caught the attemtion of Jive Records' Dave McPherson and Jeffrey Fenster. "The first time I saw them was at a SADD function in Columbus, Ohio, at the convention center in front of a pretty big group of junior high and high school students who had never seen them before," Fenster says. "They performed great, did some original material, sang some a capella. They were a very polished unit when we signed them. Even though they were not completely self-contained artists in terms of writing and producing their own material, they were very much a unit that worked extremely well together."

McPhjerson and Fenster auditioned the group and, impressed by their vocal abilities and attractive personalties, decided to give them a shot. Shortly after signing with ive in 1995, the Boys recorded the single "We've Got it Goin' On," which was released simultaneously in America and England. The single didn't do much business, but the overseas tour that followed did. Kids in Europe reacted enthusiastically to the boys, causing a re-release of the single to climb to number three in Britain. By the end of the year, they were clearly on their way, with the U.K.'s Smash Hits magazine Hits magazine honoring the group as "New-comers of the Year."

The Big Time
Their popularity in Europe quickly spread. "Over there," Brian told the press, "they had a bunch of what's called 'boy groups,' so we had a ready-made market. But since we were Americans, we were a fresh new sound for Europe. We had more of an edge, and unlike a lot of other boy groups, we were more than just a bunch of pretty guys. We could sing."

Howie added, "It just blew up over there. America wasn't ready for a group like us. And over in Europe, they were just more accepting. We came over with a very fresh, Americanized [sound]. They just embraced us with open arms. I think it was because we had a really fresh sound. We came across over there doing a lot of a capella music in the beginning, which was something kind of new for them."

Soon enough, the Backstreet craze was well underway. Said Howie in US magazine, "we had some crazy things start to happen in Europe, like fans stowing away on the bus, girls climbing over barbed-wire fences and showing up in our dressing rooms with their skirts cut up." In Teen magazine, he added: "We used to talk to fans in the hotel lobby, but we can't be as personable with [them anymore] because the hype is so big over there."

With their success on a sharp upswing, the Boys released a second single, "I'll Never Break Your Heart," which quickly surpassed its predecessor. The song went gold in Germany and hit number one in Austria. As 2995 folded into 1996, the group wsa voted the "number on international group" by German TV viewers. By February, the BSB had entered the radio and video rotation in Canada, and the momentum was unstoppable. Country after country fell to the Backstreet Boys, fueled by their non-stop touring, a thired single - "Get Down (You're the One for Me)" - and the release of their self-titled international debut album. By the fall of '96, they'd taken over charts in Asia and Australia and were met by screaming fans everywhere they went.

Coming Home
Despite this phenomenal success,America still seemed like a distant dream.

"A lot of people are still skeptical about us," Nick told Teen. "We want to show our country what we can do." American debut album. This time, America was ready for the Backstreet Boys. An American tour settled the matter once and for all: The guys found themselves headlining sold-out concerts across the country.

After a year of living their American dream, the Boys suddenly faced with competition. Their success helped usher grunge and electronica into the dustbin of music history and triggered a wave of BSB-like groups, from Hanson to 'N Sync. The guys, however, just felt good that the hard work had paid off.

"Two years of practice six days a week, small tours of schools around the States and then, after we signed with Jive, there was three years of touring," Howie has said of the group's long trek to fame. "People have this misconception that we do a show, go to a party, sleep-in the nect day, go shopping, lie by the pool and go do the next show. But we haven't [lived that life] yet. Mostly, when everyone else is at the [after-concert] party, we're on our way to next gig, getting there with barely enough time to shower and rehearse before going on."

In spite of their amazing success, the guys seem to have remained down-to-earth. In Hello magazine, Howie said that the group's ability to deal with their success has much to do with their families. "We all come from middle-class backgrounds, hard-working, whold-some people. We've all worked very hard to get where we are today and we appreciate very much what we have. We never take anything for granted."