Old Kids and Backstreet Men

New Kids on the Block and The Backstreet Boys are on tour together, playing the Mohegan Sun Arena June 2. When the bands were first big, they were too young to gamble, though their Svengali promoter Lou Pearlman certainly wasn’t.

It’s hard to argue them as has-beens. They’re playing one of the largest indoor concert arenas in the state, tickets cost $75-$90, and a second show had to be added when the first (May 30) sold out. Granted, it took the lure of both acts to do it, and there’s the added benefit of two or three of the groups’ members having had relatively successful solo (singing or acting) in the past 15 or 20 years. But even Entertainment Weekly had this pegged as a major mainstream tour, not a nostalgia exercise.

I saw The Backstreet Boys at their height, in 1998 at New Haven Coliseum. I still have the useless “Backstage Pass” sticker from that show stuck to a hat somewhere.

The Coliseum was in its waning years, and so, unbeknownst to them, were The Backstreet Boys, who could have gotten a clue from the fact that they were beginning to stretch the definition of “boys.” Kevin was married and in his late 20s while the most boyish of the quintet, Nick Carter, was being upstaged in the cuteness category on this tour by his opening-act little brother Aaron.

I remember the opening acts at that show at least as well as I remember BB (as they were known, usually with the second B turned backwards). Besides Aaron, who entered by jumping through a hoop, then tripping and falling flat on his cherubic little face, there was the female duo S.O.A.P. (this was the era of Spice Girls) and the impressive retro pop of Jimmy Ray, who had his own rockabilly/ techno theme song and a cool stage manner that I thought would carry him far, instead of straight to the undeserved obscurity addressed in hits title song:

“Are you Jimmy ray? Who wants to know?”

I remember watching scores of parents grabbing their kids and fleeing the auditorium after the main Backstreet Boys set so as to beat the traffic out of New Haven back to the suburbs. (It wasn’t even a school night—it was a Saturday in July.) Those folks missed the encore, when the group did the intricate folding chair routine for which they were justly renowned, accompanied by a screening of the Thriller-esque video in which the boys all turn into movie monsters. (I know thus song has a name and a tube and lyrics, but rise were all unavoidable and meaningless, while the video images and chair trick endure.) Those unfortunate tots who were dragged away from the coliseum prematurely probably never forgave their longsuffering parents for this cardinal concertgoing sin. Those scarred youths can now be healed by seeing the Backstreet Men creak through the same routines, and pony up the hundred bucks for tickets themselves.

As for the New Kids, I grew up in the Boston area, so to me they were the white version of New Edition—both groups were brought into being by the canny producer Maurice Starr. I had friends who bragged that they’d actually grown up “on the block” with the New Kids (a well-known neighborhood, since it’s where the Boston Children’s Museum used to be). In the last throes of their remarkably long initial time as a group (a full decade between their formation and the 1994 break-up), they severed ties with Starr, changed their name to NKOTB (which has exactly the same number of syllables as New Kids on the Block), tried new musical directions (particularly rap) for the album Face the Music and played a tour which eschewed stadiums and theaters for large clubs. In New Haven, they played Toad’s Place. The New Haven Advocate sponsored the show (when presented with a list of shows the paper could sponsor, the published picked New Kids because it was the only act on the list she had heard of) and I was assigned to write the cover story. I was able to arrange a phone interview Joey McIntyre—who’d been 12 when he joined the group, and was considerably less cute and cuddly at the age of 22. Mostly we chatted about Boston. Then I asked him what was the most embarrassing piece of merchandise his face had ever been emblazoned on. “Marbles,” he said. I glanced down at my desk, where a colleague had left a container of New Kids on the Block marbles to psych me for the interview, and felt a moment of spiritual transference.