Pared Down “I Want It That Way” Boy Band Headlines SF Pride Main Stage

When the Backstreet Boys first climbed to global consciousness in 1995, success came easily in Europe, but the United States resisted…except in the LGBT community, says group member A.J. McLean. Before radio embraced the Orlando-based boy band, he says, gays did — and that started the ball rolling at home.

Soon Howie Dorough, Brian Littrell, Nick Carter, Kevin Richardson and McLean were riding a wave of pop music success that led to sales of more than 130 million records worldwide, nearly half of which were in the U.S. Soon Backstreet racked up a string of inescapable hits at radio, sold all 750,000 tickets to their 1999 Millennium Tour in under an hour and became one the most successful acts in music history.
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For all you doubters: Backstreet’s back, alright? Next week the
Boys are heading west to perform at San Francisco Pride and the Warfield Theater. If you asked the guys, though, they’d tell you they were “Never Gone” and “Unbreakable.” (Yes, we’re reading straight from some of their recent album titles, which do seem to have a running theme.) You’ve got to hand it to them, though — 17 years later, and about a decade since the boy-band thing started to dissipate, the Backstreet Boys are the only example of that cultural phenomenon still on tour.

Those years have seen many changes, however. The group just left its label, Jive records — a split that member A.J. McLean told us will open new doors for the Backstreet Boys. Now, the four members can be “who they are” — part of which means emulating long-lasting bands like The Rolling Stones and The Eagles — and hone a sound for “the next 17 years.” Soon the group will be hitting the high seas on a Backstreet Boys cruise, with fans who are now older, saucier, and way more intoxicated. Where do we sign up?
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Brian Littrell wants to tell you something about his group, the Backstreet Boys: Backstreet’s back, all right — and they’re back to stay.

“The thing I want people to focus on is this: There is a future for the Backstreet Boys,” Littrell said from his Atlanta home a few weeks ago. “A lot of people get focused on what was — the catalog, the late ’90s, the boy-band explosion. And the Backstreet Boys got lost in the mix of how many bands there were just like us.

“But for us there is a future. And I’d like to compare the Backstreet Boys to the Eagles someday, looking at our history and catalog.”
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Having performed back-to-back nights on the East Coast, the Backstreet Boys’ Nick Carter yawns his way through an interview with The Flint Journal. But he perks up and laughs when he hears a mention of Detroit, a city to which he feels close now.

“I’m on a bus right now — and isn’t Kid Rock from Detroit?” he asked rhetorically. “I have Kid Rock’s bus. There’s a big D everywhere on my bus. It’s for Detroit.”

The bus pulls into DTE Energy Music Theatre on Friday, when Backstreet Boys, which also includes A.J. McLean, Howie Dorough and Brian Littrell, perform there.
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Indy: Your previous album, Unbreakable, didn’t do well for you guys. What went wrong?

McLean: Honestly the reason why it didn’t do so well is because the songs weren’t that good. That’s why we decided to team up with big producers and writers [T-Pain, Claude Kelly, RedOne] on this album [This Is Us]. We want hot music. We want music that we can perform and be proud to perform.

Indy: You went through a much-publicized rehab in 2000. You seem healthy and happy these days, and recently got engaged to Rochelle Deanna Karidis. How are you doing?

McLean: It’s always a daily sort of — not a daily struggle — but you’ve always got to keep it in the back of your mind. You’ve just got to make sure that you have a balance in your life and not let anything catch up to you. So I think that’s what I’m doing. And playing has been a priority to me. I like to go out and have a good time with friends on special occasions, but to me my priorities have changed, and they’re all about my physical appearance, the way I look, the way I feel inside and my brain, what I can do from a creative side of things.
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