"Grab, grab, step, slap, cross shoulders, slap, 5-6-7-8, grab..."
The five members of 'N Sync, each sporting a chevron of sweat on his chest, advance in a line toward an imaginary audience. This rehearsal of stage moves for the 52-date North American concert tour that kicked of May 9 in Biloxi, Miss., is running late and, in contrast to almost everything else in their now astonishingly successful career, not going especially well. As 19-year-old Justin Timberlake pirouettes toward stage rear in the see-ya strut central to boy-band choreography, the growled word "sucks!" bounces off the stage and onto the cement floors of this skating rink-cum-concert hall called Lakeland Center, 40 miles southwest of Orlando. "You gotta look at the slap," says determined if diffident choreographer Wade Robinson, a lanky, peroxided dance prodigy who's all of 17 years old and came off Britney Spears' stage to share terpsichorean chorus on this tour: "The straight line on the verse has got to be straighter."
JC Chasez, 23, is the first to reset himself at center stage (as cowriter and producer of "Space Cowboy," the song they're staging with cowpoke gesticulations, he has a vested interest). The other four lads in the legendarily hardworking group, who've been literally put through their paces for hours, line up for another run-through wearing carefully neutral expressions, as Robson adds, "It's only three minutes," Chris Kirkpatrick, owner of the highest voice and, at 28, the oldest but without a doubt most irrepressible 'N Sync-er, corrects him with mock exasperation: "Three and a half minutes."
The minuscule bubble of tension that briefly floated now pricked, the band goes back to the business of being the biggest pop-music juggernaut of the last...few months. In fact, over the last seven weeks they've rewritten the world records for speedy album sales, and now they're plowing toward the record for numbers sold in a year. Yes, they arrived as merely part of a pop-demographic landslide that sprouted with New Kids on the Block, flourished with Hanson and the Spice Girls, and more recently has steamrollered rock-rap acts like Limp Bizkit to take over the chart-topping positions hip-hop owned in the mid-'90s. But while at it, 'N Sync have leapt onto an entirely different plateau than their big-selling Jive Records label mates Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. True, these acts share the RIAA's new 10-million-albums-shipped "diamond" status with them, but from the moment 'N Sync's No Strings Attached hit the shops March 21, it's ka-chinged at a rate that makes the competition's sales seem a tad lethargic. The album's 1.13 million copies sold in the first day obliterated any previous going-like-hotcakes marks, as did its 2.4-million-units-sold opening week. "This thing sold about 5 million copies in its first weeks," notes Billboard charts director Geoff Mayfield, abandoning standard arithmetic chatter to add, "That's just nuts--it really is kind of scary." Mayfield acknowledges that third-week numbers were falling, "but then you got the fourth week and it actually had this handsome increase--the biggest Easter week we've ever seen."
At that stage, 'N Sync had almost doubled the Backstreet Boys' previous record of 1.4 million albums sold in a month. Mayfield sees little problem in their passing the diamond mark (the album has yet to be knocked off the top of Billboard's pop album chart) to head for numbers that don't even have names yet: "It's a safe bet that they get to 10, and then they could even start looking at something like 15 million." Surely such numbers will only be stoked by the band's two-part, six-month tour, which itself sold (an again unprecedented) 1 million tickets at an average $45 apiece during the first on-sale day, going clean in every venue but Nashville's Adelphia Coliseum (one of 14 stadiums on the tour, it sold out the next day). Billboard's tour savant Ray Waddell finds the quick sellout for the band that was on the road 300 days last year to also be somewhat scary: "The cardinal rule in touring has always been to let a market rest for a year or even two, and in rock it can be much longer. For these guys to keep going back and growing, that's unique to them. It will be without a doubt one of top-grossing tours of the summer--$40-plus million."
There are steady time pressures on the band; after touring through July, they hope to steal a few days' rest, and perhaps get a start on their first feature film--what's been bruited to be a Grease-style musical--before the second leg begins in October. Their concert bookers didn't even bother testing the waters by first putting just a few arena and "shed" dates on sale. "We thought we might have gotten in over our heads," says Chasez, "but the tour sold out. That was a relief, actually."
Chasez speaks without blinking. He and his fellow band members seem ever poised to investigate, if not quite deprecate, their own astounding ascension. (They happily spoofed themselves as 7 Degrees Celsius on Saturday Night Live, but Lance Bass, who just turned 21, finds the Backstreet Boys' recent criticism of 'N Sync as derivative to be "kind of tacky, really--stupid.") Their detractors in the harder-bitten hip-hop audience (along with the boomers wistful for the folkier pop of the tube-amp era) might envision the band as greedy teen pretenders, and a report of egomaniacal getting and spending would no doubt fit in well here. But the truth is that these newly hatched millionaires comport themselves with a brand of neighborly goodwill that's charming in its sheer ordinariness.
The high-cheekboned Chasez, who splits lead vocals with Timberlake, appears for his interview with his gangly frame perched spiderlike on a half-piper's trick bicycle, and turns out to be thoughtful and soft-spoken--a Latino pop deity by way of suburban Bowie, Md. Bass (recruited last for his basement-deep Mississippi voice) may have led the well-publicized battle to shed their original label and management, but he still possesses the gentle manners of the Baptist choirboy he once was. Joey Fatone, 23, who fills the tricky vocal slot above Bass and below the two leads, seems destined to play the slightly raunchy linebacker when they make their inevitable high school flick (perhaps the future film they've discussed with Tom Hanks), but is about as amiable as his home turf of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, makes them. The buzzy Kirkpatrick, out of near poverty in Pittsburgh, has filled many a recorder's tape recorder with a mixture of heartfelt declarations and jocular chaff, and is the sort of guy who's clearly upset when his complex makeup job won't let him hug an old pal who turned up for a video shoot ("I'll get you next time"). And Timberlake, who chirps out peppy, Michael Jackson-style serrated leads and takes turns with JC making the girls whimper and shake on the lachrymose ballads, seems like the supercilious one you won't like--until he finally sits down, looks you unwaveringly in the eye, and doesn't try to be anything other than a still-learning, chronically overworked, 19-year-old Memphis man-child. "You only have to spend 10 minutes around Justin to see he's straight-up soulful," says the touring band's musical director, Kevin Antunes. Nonetheless, always lurking beneath Timberlake's winning presence is a palpable cautiousness. "I have issues with meeting new people," says the guy who gets to emote on an album cut ("Digital Get Down") about cybersex, "because you wonder why they want to meet you. Or you feel, You don't know me at all, yet you're totally acting a certain way around me like you do know me. And you wonder, is there something behind that mask?"
While there's no shortage of teenage girls ready to scream for them (and yet come up just shy of the sobbing, incipiently sexual hysteria of Beatlemania or Elvis worship), the band's endured some derogation for being mutts alongside the more glamorous, testosterone-rich Backstreet Boys. What they've got instead is an unmanufactured distinctiveness. Without broaching any musical comparisons of vocal quintet to rock quartet (producer-on-loan She'kspere played "all instruments" on the current album's "It Makes Me Ill"), the group can claim an iconography modeled on that of John, George, Paul, and Ringo.
'N Sync's clear accessibility, says MTV Networks chairman/CEO Tom Freston, means that they've been featured not just in heavy video rotation and mini-biographies but backstage, at the Super Bowl, and in looser studio settings like Total Request Live. "Anything we can do to allow them to connct with fans in a non-video environment," he says. "It's a passionate fan base, it's the classic avid girl fans circa 1964 with the Beatles or earlier with Frank Sinatra or Elvis, so anytime we can get a band like that and give the audience a kind of all-access connection; it works for us, and I'd say it's worked for them." The heavy research MTV typically does hasn't been necessary with 'N Sync, he notes: "For a group that big, response just pulsates through the system--e-mail, phone calls, ratings--so we know there's a huge audience out there. If you look at kids under 17 today, they've grown up in nothing but good economic times; the music they first became aware of has been largely in these perfectly handcrafted pop bands, and it kind of resonates with their life. It's not like they're walking around saying 'Boy, I wish there were more singer-songwriters.' I think that day will come, but right now what they're interested in is a kind of soundtrack for their life."
"We don't need all these prophecies
Tellin' us what's a sign, what's a sign
'Cause paranoia ain't the way to live your life
from day to day
So leave your doubts and your fears behind..."
--"Space Cowboy"
The saga of 'N Sync's forming has reached near-biblical status among the faithful, as the band members happily repeat it often to remind us they were self-assembled. True enough, the essentials came together in a few days of antic energy applied by Kirkpatrick in 1995, but the genesis came thanks to a word from Louis Pearlman of the Orlando-based Trans Continental management company, the Svengali (his somewhat autobiographical pseudo-documentary Making the Band recently tanked on ABC) who has since parted company with the group. "Lou had put the Backstreet Boys together," recalls Kirkpatrick, who'd been scuffing in Orlando--ground zero for every kid with a one-octave range and a dream. "He went to a friend of mine and said, 'If you can bring me a group , I will sign them.' I said, 'I've got so many friends who are talented, I can handle this.'" No rube, he found Timberlake through an agent. Just 14 then, Timberlake had worked on the Disney Channel's Mickey Mouse Club (and was working on some songs with Chasez, another former Clubber two years his senior, then waiting tables) and had been preparing to try his luck in Hollywood during pilot season. The three of them ran into Fatone (he'd worked with Kirkpatrick in a revue at Universal Studios Florida) in an Orlando club and signed him on. In deference to the a cappella boy-band ethic, they needed a true bass. They found Bass (sounds like the fish) through their old vocal coach at Mouse Club. With a name coined by Timberlake's mother, Lynn, they signed the deal with Pearlman and, after a spell of dance and vocal coaching, began the climb up via what Bass wearily calls "a four-year tour." Recalls Kirkpatrick: "When we first got together as friends, not only did we all enjoy what we did, but we all had a hunger. And even to this day, even though working as hard as we for five years takes a lot out of you, you can sit every one of the guys down and look in their eyes and see the hunger." Chasez, whose dad had been en route to the major leagues as a baseball player before the Vietnam War intervened (he's now a computer maven). puts it this way: 'To me, everybody who is sucessful is a dreamer and a believer. If you can't think of it, it's never going to happen, but if you can dream it, you can make it happen."
Signing to the RCA label in late 1997, they followed the Backstreet Boys route by working Germany (home to RCA's sprawling parent company, the Bertelsmann Music Group) and becoming overseas stars, diligently making inroads back home. By spring of '98, their self-titled debut went platinum, carried by two Top 40 hits ("I Want You Back" and "Tearin' Up My Heart") and repeat airings of a Disney Channel special. Yet they weren't getting rich quick, as Kirkpatrick disgustedly found out when he asked management for some cash to upgrade his lifestyle: "Suddenly you come back and they're like, 'Well, Chris, you could move into a nicer apartment, but you already owe us so much money.' And I'm saying 'We've sold half a million records in Europe, all the merchandise we've sold there, and now we're breaking in the States, and we owe money?"
It took Bass, raised in a down-South hamlet, to blow the whistle that would result in a July 1998 insurrection. He had "suspicions about the contract" and encouraged Chasez to let his lawyer uncle have a look. "What makes our group so tight is that everybody has their individual strengths, and JC and I tend to worry about the business side of it," says Bass. Pearlman, who'd gotten into the music business as an outgrowth of a charter plane service that ferried New Kids and others around the world, had contractually granted himself some king-size cuts (according to papers filed by the 'N Sync attorneys, 65 percent of all merchandising, 62 percent of all record royalties, plus control of the band's publishing and name). In September of last year, the five band mates told Pearlman they wanted out of the deal. Suit met countersuit. When Pearlman tried to enjoin the band from using their own name, federal district court judge Anne Conway (thanked in the No Strings Attached credits) told both parties to go settle, which, after some high-powered lawyerly wrangling, they did in December. The band moved to another BMG affiliate, Jive Records (RCA had to swallow the loss in the name of corporate peace), and Pearlman was out, though he kept a piece of the band's future profits.
The boys-turning-to-men came away with an edge of bitterness they struggle to subdue, and an extraordinary esprit de corps. "If I saw [Pearlman] today?" says Kirkpatrick in response to a question. "I'd ask him why he stepped over a dollar to grab a dime. 'Cause he would still be in our lives otherwise." In the bigger picture, "when we were all buddy-buddy with everybody in the music business, we all five were like, 'Oh, yeah, come on into our group, yeah, come on into the clan, come on into our party, join us, we love everybody, everything is great.' Then, suddenly to have a knife in your back--that's when we all turned around and linked arms, then went back-to-back, and said, 'You know, it's the five of us against the world.' This was a bond that was bigger than family. We felt we were closer than blood."
During the period in legal limbo, the band kept plugging, assembling the songs for the album whose title would carry a message about the ties they'd cut with Pearlman and RCA. Jive came in for the late innings, providing links to two credibility-enhancing producers--Teddy Riley, who'd remake Johnny Kemp's 1988 "Just Got Paid" with them, and She'kspere, who cooked up "It Makes Me Ill." Add in a couple cuts from hitmeister Max Martin and the Swedish song factory Cheiron Productions (notably the inescapable first single "Bye Bye Bye," which topped the hugely influential Total Request Live polling for two months), sugary ballads from Richard Marx and Diane Warren, and Timberlake and Chasez's own coproductions, and they had a 12-song album almost diabolically attuned to wide market penetration. Radio and video-TV marketers discovered that the pubescent girls' moms quite like boy-band harmonies, and as it became apparent that the nation's youngest Web surfers were hitting the band's site almost as often as the Nickelodeon, Pokémon, and Lego sites, 'N Sync were featured last month on Nick's Kids' Choice Awards. Just last week, HBO announced that it will beam the boys live from New York's Madison Square Garden on July 27. Face it, with this kind of commercial kudzu crawling over the airwaves, and the major tour sweep, we're heading for an 'N Sync summer.
It's highly unlikely that any band could sustain the kind of numbers 'N Sync now stand in shoulder-deep. But these five workaholics are perhaps the most efficient, user-friendly pop machine ever to ride in on teenage screams that spike up to 135 decibels. They talk freely about how it could all go away; and JC Chasez has, characteristically, done his homework on that eventuality: "I'll tell you the best person that I spoke to as far as that's concerned; we spoke briefly. but it's embedded in my head--Jordan Knight, man, from New Kids. This guy went from being one of the biggest pop stars in the world to everybody just absolutely hating [them], where the entire world turns their back on you. You're like torn up; you're still a kid. And he's had to grow up, and he's had to put it behind them. He said, 'You've just got to believe in yourself, to know what you're made of, and you have to be willing to lay it out there. If people don't like it, as long as you're satisfied and proud of what you did, nobody can take that away.'"
As often happens around this group, the appearance of production aides with crackling handheld radio signals that Chasez, who's been on break from rehearsals, is being called back to work. "If it all fell apart tomorrow," he says, "I can know that I gave 100 percent and I had my time in the sun. And so many people would give anything just to have that minute in the sun. So I'm not going to take it for granted."
He gives it a shrug. Chasez is clearly prepared to ride out such annoyances as his favorite rapper Eminem's recent mockery of 'N Sync ("I don't care if he likes me or not, he's a talented guy"), by recalling the days of scrambling for whatever gig they could get ("We practiced 'The Star-Spangled Banner' just hoping to sing the anthem at a basketball game in Orlando--we thought we were so cool"). And he'll have to live with the badly bruised knee he's suffered after running his bike into an equipment case. "You know, when your back is sore, when your knees are hurting, when you're walking around with a sprained ankle, there's always that minute backstage before the show. You hug your best friend, saying 'Let's go do it.' Because we all hug before every show. It may sound corny, but we're a family, and so whatever argument we've had that day is all squashed right there. And there's an understanding that says, 'Okay, now it's time to do what we do best.'"