The Backstreet Boys’ Year in Hell
There is fame, and there is teen-idol fame. The Backstreet Boys are well-acquainted with the latter, which transcends autograph seeking and enters a surreal realm where girls will offer up their own internal organs on the black market for, say, one of Kevin’s used Kleenex.
“They try to bribe us with money to get backstage,” says Q, the Boys’ longtime bodyguard and possibly the most beleaguered security man on earth. “They’ll say, ‘My dad can get you a deal on a car.'” He sighs. “Little girls will have a tape recorder, saying they’re from newspapers or Fox Kids.” In hotels, continues Q, “they come upstairs acting like housekeeping, or they call every single room in the hotel until they get the guys.”
The Backstreet Boys love their female fans, God knows they do. They say this repeatedly. It is those fans who are primarily responsible for the success of 1997’s 27 million-selling’, five-singles-spawnin’ album Backstreet Boys. When the girls spaz out, trembling and crying at autograph signings, it is the Boys who patiently, kindly talk them down. “I’ll say, ‘I’m human, it’s no big deal,'” says Brian Littrell.
One need not be Phi Beta Kappa to understand the group’s appeal. The Boys’ frothy pop and dreamy ballads tell the girls the very words they can’t extract from bepimpled boyfriends: “I’ll never break your heart, I’ll never make you cry.” However, what the Boys – Littrell, Howie Dorough, Kevin Richardson, A.J. McLean and Nick Carter – could really use is a few male fans. Gay men they’ve got. (“They’re cool,” clarifies Dorough. “They know we all, you know, date girls.”) There are also the reluctant dads and boyfriends in the audience. (“They try to act tough, but we see them bob their heads,” says Q.) But the Backstreet Boys want something more.
With the coming of its new album, Millennium, the Orlando band hopes, finally, to be taken seriously. “I wish people would realize that we have the goods and we’re legit,” says Richardson heatedly. He is presiding over a barbecue at his house. His band mates mill around nearby.”We’re talented, and we’re not some flash in the pan. We’ve been together for six years.” There is another, more insidious misconception that surrounds the Boys. Because the group has sold the aforementioned 27 million records and has toured the globe countless times, it would be natural to assume that each of the Backstreet Boys has himself a Mount Kilimanjaro-size pile of cash.
Not so. “The truth is that we haven’t got that much money,” Carter says evenly. Indeed. Last May, the group filed a lawsuit against its former manager, Lou Pearlman, and others in his company. Calling themselves “indentured servants,” the Boys accused Pearlman and Co. of keeping some $10 million in recording and touring revenues since 1993. The Boys, meanwhile, received $300,000. Total.
The ensuing court battle involved a squad of twenty lawyers, as well as judges in three different states. In the midst of it, Littrell endured open-heart surgery. “1998 was our most successful year,” says Richardson. He pauses. “It was also the hardest year of my life.”
Let’s unravel this by starting in 1993, when the Backstreet Boys formed under the tutelage of Pearlman, head of the Orlando-based Trans Continental, a collective of companies that includes charter planes, a travel agency and Chippendales dancers. In the early Nineties, Pearlman took notice of New Kids on the Block, the world’s most successful act, and heard the distant strains of – can you hear it? – Ka-ching.
He set out to recruit a boy band of his own – and in what better town than Orlando, which was crawling with young hopefuls auditioning like mad to sing and dance in the various theme parks? McLean, Carter and Dorough were the first to sign on. Richardson, a transplant from Lexington, Kentucky, followed; finally, Richardson’s cousin Littrell was called in from Kentucky to complete the lineup.
Their first gig: Sea World. School assemblies and family package tours followed, and then came opening slots for REO Speedwagon and the Village People. The Backstreet Boys’ first single, “We’ve Got It Goin’ On,” proved otherwise when it peaked at Number Sixty-nine on the charts and sank.
“At the time that we released our album,” says Carter, adjusting his Fubu hat, “Snoop was big, Nirvana was really big, so we were at the wrong end of the cycle.”
Undaunted, Pearlman recruited former New Kids manager Johnny Wright and dispatched the band to Europe, where teen pop springs eternal. The Boys promptly became huge in Germany, and the rest of Europe soon followed. For two years, they toured nonstop.
America was still unmoved. “We’d leave Europe,” says Littrell, digging into some corn bread, “where there were, like, 2,000 people at the airport, to…” He makes cricket noises.
During the Boys’ lean years, Pearlman claims, he poured some $3 million into their career, just in time for the musical pendulum in the States to swing back to pop, thanks to the Spice Girls and Hanson. After three years in the field, the Boys were pumped. They swooped down on America with “Quit Playing Games (With My Heart).” The sweetly infectious tune (and its pec-static video) soon hit Number One.
Four singles and the majority of $200 million in revenue later, the Boys began to chafe under their agreement with Pearlman. “I swear, in one year we had to have done five tours,” says Carter. “The contracts weren’t fair,” says Richardson. “And we were kept on the road, and before you know it, two or three years and millions of dollars go by.”
Feeling hosed, the band began to falter a bit in performance, while the competition in the pop market heated up. The Boys’ five jaws dropped when, in a surreal turn of events, they discovered that’N Sync, their main competition (at 6 million records and counting), were managed by none other than… Lou Pearlman. “That hurt our feelings,” says Richardson. “Because for a while it was like, ‘We’re a family.’ Then all of a sudden, ‘It’s business, guys, sorry.’ We have nothing against… that group, personally. It was [Pearlman’s] not being honest.”
Now you know the drama; Let’s meet the players.
Brian Littrell “I’ve been through a lot at a young age,” says Littrell, 23, lining up a shot at a beloved Orlando driving range. Indeed he has, and it all began with a phone call from his cousin Kevin Richardson six years ago. Littrell was a nice churchgoing boy from Lexington who worked after school at the local Long John Silver’s. Littrell also sang in the choir and at the occasional funeral (“a song called ‘Heaven,’ mostly”) and planned to attend Cincinnati Bible College. Then he got the call.
“I guess the guys liked me, because two weeks later. I’m performing in front of 5,000 people,” he recalls in that rolling Kentucky accent: Ah guess the gahz… Littrell, who is courtly and charmingly low-key, has the smooth voice that you hear taking a lot of the band’s leads.
While the grinding teen-pop lifestyle has turned many a young talent into a broken. Leif Garrett-esque nightmare, that was the least of Littrell’s worries last May, when he had open-heart surgery to correct a heart defect he had had since birth.
“After six years of a schedule that was pretty much horrendous,” says his mother, Jackie, “he went for his annual checkup and the doctors noticed that his heart was getting quite large, like one for a 300-pound linebacker.”
“I delayed surgery twice because of the tours,” says Littrell, smiling ruefully. “I mean, the saddest thing is that I scheduled open-heart surgery around my work schedule. It was like nobody really cared or felt that it was important, because the career was moving on.”
He stares out over the range. “It’s not worth all that to me,” he says quietly. “To be a star and not have my health? Sorry, but it’s not worth it.” He strides over and pulls up his shirt to reveal a thick, red, five-inch scar with two still-healing puncture marks near the bottom where breathing tubes went into his lungs. “Now I have a manly scar down the middle of my chest,” he says.
Littrell doesn’t remember anything that occurred right before the surgery – not when the nurses shaved him, nor when his family gathered around him. “My mom and my girlfriend said I was real cheerful, and then they wheeled in a transfer bed and said, ‘Are you ready to go?’ And then – I just busted out bawling.”
He hits another ball, which sails off into the hazy Florida sun. “Eight weeks to the day of my surgery, I was onstage performing,” he says. Physically, he had healed, but emotionally, he wasn’t ready. “I was sixty-five percent, really. My mind-set wasn’t there. But the show must go on.” And so it did, with oxygen tanks at the ready backstage, which Littrell relied on for the first week or so.
It was around this time that he had an epiphany about what is important in his life. “Music is my love, but it’s my job,” he says. “There’s things that used to be taken for granted that aren’t now: time with your family, time to enjoy the fruits of your labor.”
Which he is doing with relish – new Beemer, new house. Littrell heads to his home, in a nearby gated community. He is currently spiffing the place up, with the help of his girlfriend, a pretty blond actress named Leigh Anne. As he nears the place, she calls him to say that fans have been taking his mail out of the mailbox. Ladies! This is a federal offense!
“This isn’t the first time,” he sighs. He walks into his house as his Chihuahua, Lil’ Tyke, pingpongs joyfully around the hallway. Littrell’s house is airy and comfortable, backed by a tranquil pool surrounded by flowers. He proudly gives a tour, including his dark-blue office, stuffed with gold records, and the bedroom. (Attention, fan Web sites: It has light blue walls, a white bedspread and a Jacuzzi encircled by candles in the bathroom.)
“I’m trying to figure out ways to hang my hat at the end of the day,” he says. “One day I hope to have a pop-gospel hour. Maybe I don’t want to have a solo career one day, maybe I do. I’ve had a lot of people say they want to work with me when I’m finished with the group. And I look them in the face and say, ‘I can’t tell you if I’ll ever be ready.’ ” He smiles. ” ‘But if I am, I’ll call you.'”
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