Fans of Backstreet Boys will get more than music at the sold-out concert Friday at Pechanga Resort & Casino in Temecula.

Band member Brian Littrell said fans get to see a new side of the four-member vocal group in concert —- two-minute films that spoof the movies and the singers themselves —- while they are backstage changing costumes for their next number.

Howie Dorough spoofs “The Fast and the Furious,” AJ McLean does “Fight Club,” Nick Carter does “The Matrix” and Littrell spoofs “Enchanted.”
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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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A.J. McLean sounds fully prepared for the demands of touring this year with his bandmates in the Backstreet Boys.

“I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in, so I can actually perform it and look good, too,” McLean said in a recent phone interview.

He had better be in shape. According to McLean, the tour requires more dancing from the Backstreet Boys than when the show the group took on the road following the 2007 album “Unbreakable.”
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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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