Title: 'Aaron Fever' proves a screamer
Topic: Winter 2001 Concert Review
Source: The Boston Herald
Source: SECTION A Pg. 1
Author: Gary R. Dennis
Date: February 23, 2001
By the decibel levels leaking into the city streets surrounding McAllaster Auditorium last night, you'd think the Beatles were in town.
But it wasn't the Fab Four; it wasn't even the current teenybopper heartthrobs Backstreet Boys. It was just a little blonde-haired sensation named Aaron Carter -- and that was close enough.
Carter is the 13-year-old pop music singer wowing teens and pre-teens all over the country. He's also the brother of Nick Carter, singer in the wildly-popular Backstreet Boys vocal harmony group that helped kick off the boy-toy music scene. And Carter, as anyone within a two-mile radius of the Central High School campus could tell you, was in town last night. "I just kept counting down the time today," said Shannon Feeny. "I'd be, like, five more hours -- just five more hours."
Shannon's aunt, Sharon McBride of Manchester, was in tow.
"They've been very, very, very excited," McBride said of her niece and a son who attended last night's concert.
Carter is the latest craze for girls anywhere between six and 16 years old. He's cute, they say. He's talented. He's got an internationally-famous brother -- what else is there?
How about compassion? He's got that, too. Before the show, he met with 10-year-old Becky Landry, a wheelchair-bound Manchester girl with inoperable brain cancer. Her meeting with him was quiet -- she was really too shocked to speak.
"I like your nails," he said to her. She grinned -- she'd had them done for the show.
Then he wrote "Becky" on his palm and said, "I might even mention your name on stage."
And when it was time for the thin, towheaded superstar to go, he told her, "You better enjoy the show."
"I will," she said back. He "adiosed" and ran toward his backstage area.
Becky's mother, Kristina Landry, said her daughter acted like any other teenage girl this morning.
"She couldn't wait to start getting ready," she said. "She knows every word on his CD these days."
The show opened with a rapping, hip-hop group called Code Five.
The second act, Tik'n'Tak, brought Finnish teenage girls in with their brand of dance-Top 40 mix. Applause was light in the early on -- there weren't many who knew the band -- but the foot stomping tunes soon brought Manchester's youth to a fever pitch.
The foreign girls mixed it up well with ballads like "Why Girls Cry" and then sped it up with screamers like "Upside Down."
But while both opening acts could get the glowsticks waving and feet stomping up and down, it was the small blonde kid -- he looked no different than the kid buying candy from the local convenience store -- who tested even the strongest tonsils in the crowd.
He danced, he sang, he pointed to screamers in the crowd. His five-man band and four dancers offered up a visual and audio smorgasbord. It was enough to get your mind off the high-pitched screams of Manchester's youth at least for a little while. Whatever he said or did brought the screeching of more than 1,200 show attendees.
Before the show, a line of kids and parents -- mainly kids, mainly girls -- looped through the Central High courtyard and around the nearby parking lot. Some waited in line from 3 to 7 p.m. as the mercury dipped into the teens.
But the cold was no match for Aaron Fever. The Quimby sisters of Manchester -- Krissy, 15 and Sam, 11 -- were stuck together in a huge white T-shirt. On it, they pasted pictures of the teen idol and wrote "We Love You" and other such endearments.
They didn't have many layers on underneath -- they shivered.
"We've been fans since, well, since forever," Krissy said. At least since Aaron was nine, she said.
Mary Garon, 11, was celebrating her birthday. She and friends Erin Leary, 11, Stefanie Wozmak, 11 and Kariel Parian, 11, had one unison answer for why they were at McAllaster Auditorium last night.
"He's so cute," they said.
And while the kids cheered and the music blared, parents looked at each other and just shook their heads. This was a night out for the kids. The sore throats, spent glowsticks and newly-bought posters would be all they'd have left in the morning.
Carter, reached backstage, seems to have a good grasp on his early stardom.
"I'm so young," he said. "I had no idea how good this would be for my future," he said of the decision to tour.
And how does he handle the fact that he could very well be a role model for so many pre-teens and teens across the country?
"I just try not to be someone I'm not," he said.
