Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Flaunting their flaws at a live concert and on "Making the Band," boy group O-Town earn even more squealing fans.
Jul 11, 2001 | A giant, ghostly white "O" floated in the center of a stage moments before the made-on-ABC prefab boy band O-Town stormed the stage for the first show of their Liquid Dreams summer tour. The thousands of teen and preteen girls in the audience roared like a low-flying supersonic spacecraft and thrust their neon green O-Town glowsticks overhead like mini light sabers.
A glowing purple scrim behind the "O" vanished, revealing a backing band and five white sheets hanging vertically above a polished aluminum riser at the rear of the stage. The music reached a crescendo, the sheets dropped and the five members of O-Town -- Trevor, Jacob, Erik, Dan and Ashley -- burst forth. As they popped, locked and Frankenstein-danced their way onto the main stage they sang "All for Love." Dressed in five flavors of Fred Segal urban chic, they looked like male cheerleaders spun out on crystal meth. The group mmm-bopped and twirled. The crowd jumped up and screamed; they would remain on their feet for the duration of the show.
Oddly, though, it appeared that a few things were out of whack with the pop dream machine. The slick music -- contemporary pop with the thick sheen courtesy of some of the world's highest-paid producers and competent studio musicians -- was dead on. But the group's vocal harmonies seemed off. And there were only four spotlights directed at the stage, which left one member perpetually flailing in the dark.
More often than not that was Jacob, a latter-day Donnie "No More Games Sucka" Wahlberg, one of the original members of New Kids on the Block. Like the cane-clutching Wahlberg, Jacob fills the strictly codified boy-band role of the lovable but dangerous young man best avoided by good girls. On this night, Jacob's punkish array of dangerous accessories included a studded leather belt, a chain wallet, dreadlocks, Adidas Sambas, a black muscle-T emblazoned with a commie red star and a matching red headband.
Instead of grooving synchronistically with the other members, Jacob shuffled around in the dark, canted forward at the waist with near-geriatric posture. He shook his head enthusiastically to the beat, stomped a foot clumsily here or there and occasionally hopped in line with the other boyz. Mainly, though, he didn't dance.
When he stepped to the mike a few songs later, acoustic guitar in hand, Jacob explained that he'd broken bones in his back a month and half earlier.
The crowd roared and, like the rest of the flaws in the performance, Jacob was immediately forgiven and the show was swept along in the unremitting currents of euphoria and affirmation.
It was a moment emblematic of the special bond O-Town's fans feel with their heroes, an embrace that simultaneously encompasses the band's flawed humanness and pop star celebrity personae.
More human than human
Most of O-Town's followers first saw the current members of the group when they were normal guys battling for one of five slots in a boy band on ABC's "Making the Band" last fall. As the show progressed, viewers watched the applicants actually transform into a real band.
Like all reality TV stars, the men of O-Town encountered numerous emotional, familial and interpersonal crises during the course of the show. They broke up with girls. They experimented with their newfound celebrity superpowers. They took a trip to a tattoo parlor. They struggled with breaking voices and clumsy feet that couldn't follow animatronic cotton candy dance moves.
Being a member of a boy band, the television show made clear, was much more difficult than any aspiring Justin Timberlake might have thought. O-Town fans took notice, and it was these struggles that made them appreciate the finished product -- a boy band with an album on a major label -- perhaps to a greater degree than they would have minus the televised preamble.
"It's been interesting to follow these normal guys from the very beginning and to see all the pressures and challenges they've faced to get where they are," said a 47-year-old father and O-Town fan who was accompanying two sons and a daughter to the show.
This was a sentiment echoed by fan after fan at Friday's show, no matter their age. "We've watched them since Day 1 and bonded with them," said Yvonne Creason, 24, and founder of Kiss Me Trevor, aka KMT, an Internet fan club dedicated to O-Town member Trevor Penick that boasts 1,500 members. "Their whole life is out there for everyone to see on television."
Being dysfunctional reality TV stars with all of their warts intensified, and being exposed before they were pop stars, has paradoxically made the five members of O-Town and their decidedly abnormal vocation seem somehow more human than human to their fans.
Devotees of run-of-the-mill manager-created, money-driven boy bands like 'N Sync and the Backstreet Boys obsess over the details of their pinup heroes' lives. They might catch an occasional, fleeting glimpse of the behind-the-scenes lives of these bands in the pages of Teen People or Tiger Beat, on MTV's "Cribs" or "Diary" programs, or on any number of fan Web sites, but they'll never have the kind of simulated access to the minutiae of the band members' personal and professional lives that O-Town fans have had since the beginning. Granted, what O-Town fans saw on the television show was a glossy, edited version of the events leading to the band's formation that was crafted to emphasize TV drama, but it's still more access than most 'N Sync fans can ever dream of having.
The development of this special bond has led to a new kind of pop fandom that is oddly skewed toward fetishizing the normally invisible (and patently slimy) business side of the music business. Indeed, the televised creation of bands like O-Town and their female mirrors on NBC -- the band Eden's Crush from "Pop Stars" -- has spawned a new breed of superfan that's obsessed not just with the band but with everyone who appears on camera in association with the band -- including their families, band management and record execs.
It is fans of this sort, it became clear during the intermission before O'Town took the stage, that made up the core of the audience at Friday's performance.
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