Larger Than Life by Maria Sherman

Author:Maria Sherman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2020-07-20T16:00:00+00:00

Pearlman purchased a home for the boys in Orlando, where they resided, dormitory style, and rehearsed. He was fully in control of their lives and worked them hard so they could debut within the year. Their first live showcase was on October 20, 1995, nineteen days after Lance joined the group, at the since-shuttered Pleasure Island in Downtown Disney. Prior to the set, JT’s mom compiled all of the return addresses from fan mail sent to Justin and JC in their Mickey Mouse Club days and invited those fans to check out their new group. Her tactic worked: a few hundred people showed up, and *NSYNC sold out the club before anyone actually knew anything about them.

The next year, with Pearlman’s aid, *NSYNC signed with Backstreet Boys manager Johnny Wright. Shortly after getting the gig, Wright shared a two-song demo with Jan Bolz, an executive at BMG Ariola Munich in Germany, which resulted in *NSYNC’s first record deal. Europe was infatuated with American boy bands at the time, and if building a fan base overseas before taking over the US worked for the Backstreet Boys, why wouldn’t Pearlman have the same luck twice? Bolz signed *NSYNC, but he had a few demands: he wanted Lance out of the band because the guy couldn’t manage to match his feet to the beat if his dreams depended on it. (They did.) Bolz also requested *NSYNC change their name. Neither happened.

In case the parallels between the two groups aren’t painfully obvious yet: Like the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC went to Sweden to record their first tracks. Their debut single, out in the fall of 1996, “I Want You Back,” did numbers in Germany, but it was their second single, “Tearin’ Up My Heart,” that launched the group into mega fame within continental Europe. Their self-titled debut LP hit number 1 on Germany’s Offizielle chart the second day it was released. Still, they were relatively unknown stateside.

That changed when Vincent DeGiorgio, an A&R rep at RCA Records in the US, a subsidiary of BMG, caught the quintet in Budapest, Hungary. He was blown away. DeGiorgio, unlike his counterparts at the other major labels who feared there could only be one best-selling boy band at a time, believed in *NSYNC enough to sign them. It also helped that by this point in the decade, Backstreet, Hanson, and the Spice Girls managed to become pop music juggernauts, indicating that radio was becoming bubblegum-friendly again and there really was a demand for sweet, safe, sparkly songs. Having perfected their trade overseas, with both Justin’s and Lance’s mothers chaperoning the underage boys, *NSYNC was ready to try to make it big back home. When their debut album came out stateside in March 1998, it had four tracks that were different from the European version in an attempt to captivate a sticky US market.

At first, the record didn’t make a splash. Then Disney got involved. That summer, the network prepped a live concert event to air on television with the

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