Backstreet Mom: A Mother's Tale of Backstreet Boy AJ McLean's Rise to Fame, Struggle With Addiction, and Ultimate Triumph (17 page)

We had a great time walking along the Farmer's Market. As we walked,
Howie took videos of everything. It had become his trademark. In fact,
you had to be careful when someone knocked on your door at night.
There was a good chance you would open it to a video camera with
Howie behind it.

IN AUGUST 1994, the boys sang their first nationally televised anthem
during a Predators football game in Tampa. The anthem had been added to an already hectic schedule at the last minute, which meant that we
had to travel by private jet. The boys made it onto the field just in time
and the crowd loved them.

I think the excitement of the football game, coupled with the nonstop rush of the day, infused their voices with electricity. The boys' stamina never ceased to amaze me. I was worn out and did not want to stay
to watch the game, but I was outvoted. As it turned out, their performance never aired on television because the game was blacked out.

As the school year approached, Jive decided to put the boys on another cross-country tour of middle and high schools. The tour was backed
by Macy's, which meant that when they weren't performing the boys
were expected to go to malls to sing and then hold autograph sessions
at Macy's stores.

The tour got off to a rather bad start. The touring company didn't
have a clue what the boys needed in the way of equipment. I don't know
if the budget was again too small or what, but the first few shows were
disasters because of the sound. To top things off, Donna had run-ins
with the touring company. Things went from bad to worse.

It took a least a week for everything to get organized. Finally, the
shows began to go well. The boys went out there and did the best that
they could with what they had to work with, but it wasn't easy, given
that they never knew what to expect from the equipment. Suddenly, in
the middle of a song, the sound might just stop. When that happened,
they stopped dancing, huddled together to find the note, and then continued on a cappella. The young girls in the audience didn't care whether they were singing or not. They screamed anyway.

The shows often began on a tepid note, since most of the students
had never heard of the Backstreet Boys. Once they proved to the audience that they could sing and dance, the excitement levels increased,
especially among the girls. Fueled by this enthusiasm, the boys showed
off. Sometimes they went into the audience to sing to a particular girl.
Other times they pulled up their shirts just enough to flash them a bit of
skin. Alex and Howie did that the most. Nick, Brian and Kevin were a
bit shy with their movements on stage, but eventually they got the idea.

Typically, they gave two shows at the schools. By the time the second
show began, word had gotten out about the boys. The second shows usually began with the girls already frenzied. It was a phenomenon that I did
not understand. The only thing that I could relate it to in my youth was
when I watched the Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan Show. The audience's reaction in the studio, and my reaction in my own living room,
were the same: uncontrollable screaming during every performance.

In school after school, the reaction was the same. Sometimes the girls
ran outside after the boys and followed the bus out of the parking lot,
yelling each boy's name. Once, as we left the parking lot, the boys stuck their heads out the windows and waved at the girls. When the girls saw
that some of the boys had water bottles in their hands, they begged
them to toss the bottles to them. The girls cried and hugged the bottles
as if they were gold. After that, we sometimes marked the tops of empty
bottles with the boys' initials and threw them out the windows as we
left the schools.

SUSAN HORTON SENT A NEW TUTOR out on the road with us, a young
woman named Kim Anaszewski. Alex really liked her because she tried
to make his lessons more fun. She took him on field trips and had him
write reports, instead of making him sit every day for three hours with
his nose in a book.

By that time, the school had realized the amount of work that Alex
was doing on the road. Susan helped work out a method by which he
could get academic credit for his stage performances. She made the school
understand how his life experience was worth a lot in terms of things
like public speaking. They also came up with a special credit for dancing. Over time, Alex and Kim were able to find enough free time to go
on outings and still manage to keep up with the academic program.

The boys at a pep-rally show in Indiana

A couple of times during this period, when we were alone at night in
our hotel room, I asked Alex if he was still having fun. Quite emphatically, he would answer yes. He loved what he was doing and didn't seem
to care whether there were two kids or two hundred watching.

Occasionally, record company representatives joined us out on the
road, primarily to see if the stories they were hearing about the boys
were true. They soon discovered they were. That made them even more
determined to put them back into the studio to finish their album. It
was time to get the Backstreet Boys out into the marketplace.

Once we returned to Orlando, I worked in the office ordering more
merchandise and entering names into the database that I had created for
the boys. To gather names, I handed out postcards for the fans to fill out
during the autograph sessions. Some of them filled them out right there
and others mailed them back to us.

By then, Donna had hired an assistant to help with the mounting
office duties. Nicole Peltz was a spunky young college graduate who
had recently moved to Florida from New York. She was very organized
and eager to learn the business.

When we got home, Nicole, who had been manning the front office,
had boxes of postcards everywhere. Along with the postcards came the
fan mail. Mostly, it was girls writing to their favorite Backstreet Boy,
telling him how much they loved him and asking when they would see
them again. Always they asked when their album would be released. It
was a question we often asked ourselves.

THE BACKSTREET Boys had their coming-out party in, of all places, Kua-
la Lumpur, Malaysia. That was because jive's distributor, Bertelsmann
Music Group (BMG), had a conference there for its worldwide network
of sales reps and buyers. BMG, a much larger company than Jive, owned
several record labels, including RCA Records. With our wardrobe cases,
makeup and hair supplies and our best finery, we flew from Orlando to
New York (two and a half hours), New York to Singapore (sixteen hours)
and Singapore to Malaysia (lhour). With plane changes, layovers and
delays, it took us over twenty-two hours to reach our final destination.

When we arrived in Malaysia, none of us had the faintest notion what
time of the day it really was. After going through so many time zones,
we were completely turned around and jet-lagged to the max. The humidity and heat hit us like a wall when we walked off the plane. We
were met by two transportation vehicles, neither of which had air-conditioning. The ride from the airport to the hotel seemed endless.

Nick and I sat in the back of the mini bus, sweating terribly. We seemed
to be more affected by the heat than anyone else. Suddenly, I felt sick to
my stomach. I knew I would not make it to the top of the mountain
road we were on without throwing up. The twists, turns and bumps did
not help my already nauseous stomach. Finally, I could stand it no longer and yelled for the driver to stop.

"Mom, what's wrong?" Alex asked.

I was so sick I couldn't even answer him. I scrambled out of the van
and onto the street, where I lost whatever I had eaten that day. Right
behind me was little Nick, in the same condition. He went to the other
side of the van. The boys kept oo-ing and ah-ing and saying things like,
"Oh boy!"

Alex jumped out of the van and grabbed a hold of me. I must have
looked like I was going to drop. He helped me back into the van and
insisted I sit up front with him. My problem turned out to be motion
sickness. I should have realized that possibility when I got into the van,
but the long hours of travel had affected my thinking.

Nick and I breathed a sigh of relief when we finally reached our destination and our air-conditioned rooms. It was all I could do to drop to
the bed and crash. Alex was exhausted as well. Later, a ringing phone
awakened us. It was time to hit the showers and get ready for the day.

When it was time for the boys to dress, they came to my room. That
left me little privacy, which meant that I had to make sure that I was
showered, dressed and ready to go before they arrived. They dressed
and primped and fooled around until it was time to leave. It reminded
me of five women who were dressing for a date. It followed a pattern
that ended with the hair spray and questions of "How do I look?"

That evening, their performance took place during the dinner hour
in the main ballroom. The stage was very small, but the boys had worked
out their choreography to accommodate a smaller space. Before they
took the stage, jive showed a short video of the boys that was comprised
of scenes from the school shows. Then came the boys' turn to show the
audience what they could do. The performance was full of energy and
sounded terrific. When they finished, they were given a standing ovation. It was a magnificent start for the boys.