Source: Lexington Herald Leader
Posted on Sun, Jun. 12, 2005 By Jamie Gumbrecht (HERALD-LEADER CULTURE WRITER)
Boys re-appear, with just a little edge on their pop
There was a time when all Backstreet Boys fans were fanatical.
Even if they didn't memorize the band members' shoe sizes and favorite colors, they couldn't help but be caught up in the thrill.
"I heard Quit Playing Games With My Heart, and I was hooked," says Jesi Ramirez, a long-time fan from Lawrenceburg. "It's not just because they're good-looking and good singers. They're the nicest, the most down-to-earth celebrities you'll ever meet."
The band peaked back when pop music still tasted like bubble gum and five-part harmony guaranteed a fan base. The Backstreet Boys ruled MTV's Total Request Live countdowns. 'N Sync wasn't yet king of the boy bands, and hip-hop wasn't supreme ruler of all.
As if the Boys saw the end was near in 2001, they took a break but didn't break up. News of the band in recent years has consisted of marriages, babies, solo projects, charity causes and, occasionally, drug problems. With the "boys" now ranging in age from 25 to 33, being teen idols isn't really an option.
Which brings us back to 2005, when the band far beyond boyhood is releasing its fourth studio album on Tuesday.
The title: Never Gone. So they hope, anyway.
"It's very hard to know, 'til we actually get those first week's sales figures back, just how devoted that fan base has remained," says Melinda Newman, West Coast bureau chief for Billboard magazine, publisher of those coveted charts. "It's a tough row to hoe for anyone that's not a hip-hop act right now."
The band is relying on hype from its old fans: the casual listeners, the nostalgia lovers and the die-hards.
Lexingtonian Violet Calvert, 66, didn't know until last week that the group had a new album coming out. She used to hum the songs on the radio and enjoyed reading about Backstreet Boys Brian Littrell and Kevin Richardson, both Central Kentucky natives. She paid $125 for a BSB concert ticket at Rupp Arena in 1999.
"My kids couldn't believe it," Calvert says. "I stood up and sang with the rest of the kids."
The important part to the Boys' success: Although she doesn't follow the band religiously, she'd pay to see them again.
They want it that way
Women just like Emily Gallt, 18, could be a big part of the Boys' resurgence. She still belts out BSB songs with friends Taylor Ham and Paige Ishmael.
"It's kind of sad that we're 18 years old and still like them," says Gallt, who just graduated from Lafayette High School. "It is becoming less uncool. Now that we're moving on to college, you want to grasp onto something from long ago. It connects you to people."
Gallt denied her BSB fandom for years, telling herself she'd rather hear Smashmouth or Three Doors Down, alternative rock bands that quickly faded. But after seeing a BSB concert at Rupp in 1999, Gallt fell for them -- hard.
"At the time, I was very much into 'I'm going to be different,'" she says. "After the concert, I thought, 'OK, Emily, you really are a BSB fan. You can like things other people like and still be your own person.'"
She plans to hang a BSB poster in her dorm at Centre College in Danville this fall. She can easily recite I Want It That Way and still remembers what she wore to that fateful first show -- jeans, a white shirt and a fashion must-have in the late 1990s, her Old Navy fleece vest.
"With how music has changed since they were popular, I didn't think anybody would want them now," Gallt says. "But their music is so catchy, so easy to sing along to."
And meaningful, for some.
Ramirez's voice softens when she talks about the Boys. She knew they'd be back, she says.
"We fans have been waiting for this for years," says Ramirez, the Lawrenceburg fan and a recent graduate of Miami University in Ohio. "We can't believe it's finally happening. The people that remained the whole time, we knew they had a bond."
Ramirez, 21, is applying for high school teaching jobs, but her bedroom is covered, ceiling to floor, with BSB posters. She can list each concert she's seen -- 18, total -- and the number of times she's met one of the Boys -- 48 times. Her photo appears in a collage of 68 fans inside the new CD's jacket. She's the one with a cowboy hat, making a peace sign.
"They mean the world to me," Ramirez says. "There is no better group in the world."
Now, the Backstreet Men?
John West didn't realize the power of BSB fandom until he took his daughter to a Backstreet concert in Canada in 1996. Overwhelmed by the crowd's energy, the Canada resident promised to help create a Web site, which grew into Backstreet.net, thought to be the oldest and largest BSB fan site left.
"I was in Web development, and for every hit my sites got, my daughter's site was getting 500," says West, who says the site peaked in 2001 with 30 million hits a month. "It's fun to tell your buddies at work you got 10 million page views last month, but I was competing against 16-year-olds."
The site's traffic fell to about 3 million hits a month during the Boys' time off. West's daughter, like many fans, got over the them, he says. But interest in Backstreet.net perked up as the album's release came closer -- suggesting that fans might still be out there.
"This allows the truly obsessive types to really obsess," West says. "They used the oldest trick in the book: singing and dancing. And there will always be a new generation of young ladies wanting to watch cute guys sing and dance."
To wit: BSB's new single, Incomplete, plays about 100 times a week on WLKT-104.5 FM in Lexington -- that's once every 1.7 hours, on average.
"We jumped in with both feet, and it tested very well," says Barry Fox, operations manager for Clear Channel's Lexington stations, including 104.5 The Cat. "It played to the 8-year-olds, but 40-year-old women were going crazy over the sound, too."
Part of the craze, Fox says, might be the local ties. The Backstreet Boys are known as an Orlando, Fla., group, but cousins Littrell and Richardson still have friends and family in and around Central Kentucky. Tour dates, announced this week, will bring them as close as Riverbend Music Center in Cincinnati on Aug. 16.
The question now is whether the Boys can fill large venues. The club tour last year was a good way to renew the fan base, Billboard's Newman says, but it's not the '90s anymore.
"They have to make sure it's the Backstreet men, not the Backstreet boys," Newman says. "Some have had very public drama, very public adult problems. Substance abuse, broken relationships. ...
"The boy band tag is very hard to rise above."