New Kids on the Block's Hangin’ Tough 9781628929737, 9781501305245, 9781628929744

Citation preview

HANGIN’ TOUGH

Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration—The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough—Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice A brilliant series … each one a work of real love—NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK) We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books—Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/ musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

Forthcoming in the series: The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts Dig Me Out by Jovana Babović Psychocandy by Paula Mejia Donny Hathaway Live by Emily Lordi The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly and many more …

Hangin’ Tough

Rebecca Wallwork

Bloomsbury Academic An Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Rebecca Wallwork, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wallwork, Rebecca, author. Title: Hangin’ tough / Rebecca Wallwork. Other titles: Hanging tough Description: New York, NY, USA : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Series: 33 1/3  | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015037171 | ISBN 9781628929737 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: New Kids on the Block. | New Kids on the Block. Hangin’  tough. | Rock music--History and criticism. | Rock musicians-United  States. Classification: LCC ML421.N5 W35 2016 | DDC 782.42166092/2--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc. gov/2015037171 ISBN: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978-1-6289-2973-7 978-1-6289-2974-4 978-1-6289-2975-1

Series: 33 13 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Track Listing

  1.   2.   3.   4.   5.   6.   7.   8.   9. 10.

“You Got It (The Right Stuff)” (4:09) “Please Don’t Go Girl” (4:30) “I’ll Be Loving You (Forever)” (4:22) “Cover Girl” (4:02) “I Need You” (3:36) “Hangin’ Tough” (4:16) “I Remember When” (4:09) “What’Cha Gonna Do (About It)” (3:54) “My Favorite Girl” (5:28) “Hold On” (3:36)

Contents

Introduction 1 Do You Remember? It Starts With a Whisper Rise ’N’ Grind Listen Up, Everybody Space Cowboy Click, Click, Click Let’s Get This Put You in a Trance BH Love Eternal

8 16 27 39 51 72 83 93 101

Pose for Me (photos) 111 Notes 115 Works Cited 122 Acknowledgments 126 Also Available in the Series 129

 vii •

•

Introduction

A suburban community center is not where you expect to see a group of five young guys poised for pop stardom, not at three p.m. on a Sunday in front of a crowd of mostly lower-middle-class moms and dads from the neighboring area. Hard workers. Churchgoers. Families with modest goals—to get their kids into college, to save for a nice summer vacation, maybe a road trip this year. But there is someone in the room with far loftier goals. Someone with a clear vision. A dream. A plan. Despite his large frame and height—six foot three—few of the three hundred or so folks in the function room seem to recognize him. He stands along a wall on the side of the room, right by the doors that lead in from the foyer. His eyes flit about, scanning for people he knows, young talents he is yet to discover, perhaps, or contacts in the small corner of the entertainment industry in which he operates. No. Make that hustles in. They call him the General, this songwriter and record producer, a musician who can play multiple instruments, a one-time recording artist himself. But he has given up the spotlight to instead stand behind young performers he has plucked from his own blue-collar neighborhood.  1 •

•

HANGIN’ TOUGH

Some say he molds himself in the shape of Motown’s Berry Gordy—a hit-maker, a star creator. It was the General’s name all over the posters promoting this show, but it’s his brother Soni who is on the mic, emceeing what has been billed as an anti-bullying “rally,” but is also a showcase for local performers, foremost among them the General’s new singing group. The acts so far have included a couple of bands fronted by young African American girls with big voices way more soulful than the music they’re singing to, a female dance troupe, a gospel group, and a rapper we’re told is a former gang member. Each act gets to do just one song each and in between Soni makes lame jokes and plays the role of hype man for his brother and the headliners, the only group here whose photos rotate on a projector placed behind the featured performers at the front of the room. Around four p.m., a promoter named Joe Young shares the General’s battle secrets with the crowd: “There’s a saying that he lives by. If you run after success, success runs away. But if you run after excellence, success runs toward you.” Wait now, not so fast, he warns the starry-eyed kids and stage parents in the audience: “This is show business. You can have all the talent in the world. But it’s twentyfive per cent talent, and seventy-five per cent hustle. No matter how much talent, no matter how hard you work, you’ve gotta have that favor up above.” And with that, Mr. Young invites the room to give it up for Maurice “the General” Starr. Despite the last name that he bestowed upon himself, Starr is soft-spoken and seems uncomfortable being  2 •

•

I ntroduction

the center of attention. He deflects the crowd’s focus to others, soliciting a few pint-size volunteers from the front rows to sing lines of whatever song they like, parsing out some cursory praise when they are done. The headliners are about to come on and the front of the room magically fills with teenage girls. Most are sporting red team t-shirts from a local middle school and they seem to have been wrangled for this very purpose by a teacher or event organizer. Just moments earlier they were milling about in orderly groups and lines at the back of the room before one or two of the adults in their midst cued them to begin their “rush” to the stage. When whispers indicate that the group is ready to make its debut, Starr drops his voice and raises the microphone close to his lips. “Are you ready for show time?” The middle school girls scream. This time he speaks louder: “Are you ready for the five hardest-working kids in show business?” A recording of a siren begins to play and the girls scream louder. “Let me hear ya say yeah!” “Yeahhhhh!” the rent-a-fan mass obliges. “Give it up,” announces Starr with relish—“… for N-K …” — Let me pause here for a minute. Fans of the album on this book’s cover will be familiar with the scene I’ve just described. Even if they weren’t in this particular community center audience, or one like it, they know  3 •

•

HANGIN’ TOUGH

the stories of such shows well, and they sure as hell know that line—“Are you ready for the five hardest-working kids in show business?” What they don’t know is that I am not talking about a scene that took place in 1985, or 1989, but one that occurred in March 2015. This isn’t the Joseph Lee School or a community center in Dorchester, Massachusetts, the hardscrabble suburb of Boston. The scene above took place in the Sanborn Activity and Event Center in DeLand, Florida, a modest college town north of Orlando. But yes, that’s Maurice Starr, the famous producer and boy band Svengali, if you believe his press, the same Maurice Starr who trained another group of young, green guys in front of neighborhood crowds, a group who earned that “hardest-working kids in show business” intro. That group—New Kids on the Block— did their first show thirty years ago in Dorchester. NK5—yes, NK5—the kids Starr is promoting today, have only just begun their lives on stage. — A month before the DeLand show, 1,042 miles north in New York City, another small show is about to begin. It’s one of the coldest nights of 2015 in a winter of many a snowpocalypse and snowmageddon and polar vortex. When the women first begin to line up outside the Gramercy Theatre on 23rd Street, it is hovering around twenty degrees, but that doesn’t deter fans for bundling up for a wait of, in some cases, nine hours. They have tickets, but this is a general admission show, so it’s first in, first to snag those spots up front.  4 •

•

I ntroduction

And when it comes to New Kids on the Block, it’s all about face time. What’s a little wind chill when you know you’re going to be in the front row? If you might get a hug from Donnie or Jon? Besides, even the supposedly sensible fans, the ones who arrived when the doors were set to open, had to wait in cold that would soon hit four degrees Fahrenheit. The line, a parade of women in their twenties, thirties, and forties, all jeans, tall boots, and heavy-duty parka hoods pulled in tight, snakes around on to Lexington Avenue. Some ladies huddle together like puppies, many jump up and down or stomp their feet in place, moving their limbs so they’ll be able to feel them when they finally get inside. There are complaints and expressions of shock that the band would allow their fans to suffer such an injustice, but it’s not enough to dampen the more dominant mood of communal excitement. It’s rare for New Kids to do a show this small—Gramercy holds 500—and tickets are coveted and hard to come by. The exclusive fan club-only show was announced just a week earlier, on a Monday morning, with tickets going on sale that night and selling out within minutes. What was a reasonable forty-dollar ticket showed up on eBay for a few thousand hours later. Never mind that most New Kids fans already had tickets for the band’s summer 2015 tour, The Main Event: Those shows would be in arenas; this was a small theater. This show was billed by NKOTB.com as an “exclusive … intimate members-only show,” a unique night the guys were doing because they just couldn’t wait until the summer to see their fans. It was a Cottonelle toilet paper marketing stunt. It wasn’t until the day before the show that the truth began to emerge. A press release from Cottonelle was  5 •

•

HANGIN’ TOUGH

discovered and shared online: “Cottonelle and New Kids on the Block Encourage Americans to Go Commando.” The toilet paper brand and the New Kids had teamed up, apparently, to convince Americans to use Cottonelle with CleanRipple texture and ultimately “Go Cottonelle, Go Commando.” It was easy to think that this “brand activation” cooked up in a corporate boardroom was all a joke (go commando on the coldest night of the year?), albeit weeks too soon for an April Fools’. It was no joke. Soon, band members were tweeting about Cottonelle; the brand’s signage was all over the Gramercy. A production truck was parked outside and barely noticeable signs stuck up on the wall inside declared entry into the venue as consent to be photographed, filmed, videotaped, and audio recorded and for the footage to be published without review or compensation—thank you very much, love the Kimberly-Clark Corporation. Snarky comments had already flooded NKOTB fan social media channels, but a show is a show, and, if you had gotten this far, you took your free drink ticket, pushed past the mommy bloggers invited to cover the event (I mean, mommy bloggers, an ’80s band, and toilet paper, amirite?), and got yourself close to the stage. Even if some fans felt a little dirty about this brand integration, their obvious excitement betrayed the truth: Who cares? We’re about to see the New Kids! Screams erupted when the lights went dark and glimpses of five microphone stands could be seen in the flashes of five hundred smartphones. When it’s show time, nothing else matters—nothing—but the five guys on stage. There was no more Cottonelle talk (for now). There was no Maurice Starr, no hype man, and no introduction for the  6 •

•

I ntroduction

five hardest-working kids—or men—in show business, just the screams and the lights coming on to reveal Jon Knight, Jordan Knight, Joe McIntyre, Donnie Wahlberg, and Danny Wood standing at their mics, each flashing a thumbs-up sign as they sang “These are the days of the times of our lives / And we’re gonna crash into it tonight,” the first few lines of “Crash,” a song from their 2013 album 10. It was a characteristically energetic opener with a few synchronized hand gestures but an otherwise loose performance full of fist pumps, pelvic thrusts, pogoing, and general over-the-top dancing in each band member’s individual style. Cottonelle forgotten, the fans folded themselves into the vigor displayed on stage. Another special New Kids on the Block show, one that would be talked about for days and weeks to come, was underway, thirty years after the band first performed for a community crowd in Dorchester.

 7 •

•

Do You Remember?

Quick. Imagine you are fourteen again. You’re in your bedroom or you’re at school hanging out with friends, or you’re on summer vacation with endless days stretching before you. What are you listening to? Recently, I asked my husband this, and he answered without skipping a beat: “Punk rock. And a bit of metal.” “Do you still like that music today?” I asked. “Yeah. And when I hear something from that time, it feels …” He trailed off, but I knew what he meant. There was an emotional connection between that time a couple of decades ago and now. The music, and his reaction to it, was special. There is something indelible about what we grow up on, something inescapable. I feel it, too, only my answer isn’t half as cool as my husband’s. When I was fourteen, I was immersed utterly and completely in New Kids on the Block. I was one of those New Kids fans, so crazy about them that I could wallpaper my bedroom with their posters three times over. Okay, okay—scratch the past tense. I can still recite interviews they did in 1990 word for word. I stood in the rain for hours to see them reunite on The Today Show in  8 •

•

D o Y ou R emember ?

2008. And, yes, I was one of the Blockheads who snagged a ticket to the Cottonelle show at the Gramercy Theatre, one of the thousands of grown-up, accomplished women around the world who still goes out to see a group she fell in love with as a teenager. In 2008, eighteen years after the peak of their phenomenal pop success, fourteen since they’d last performed together, the New Kids reunited with a new album and a tour that would bleed into the following eight years and counting—that’s longer than they were together the first time around, as Joe McIntyre is fond of saying. The Kids were back, and so were their fans. While they do have a sprinkling of male followers, the overwhelming majority of their audience is female. Ladies in their twenties, thirties, and forties, many with kids, husbands, and solid professional lives—these women spend hundreds of dollars to go to not one or two New Kids concerts, but a string of them. Thousands also splurge on a ticket to their annual cruise to the Bahamas or Bermuda. I’ve been in arenas as these women squeal and scream and sing along and pump their fists and wave their hands in the air. I’m propelled by a similar surge of nostalgia and living, breathing, unbridled joy as I watch these five men over forty sing and dance onstage. I’m not entirely sure why. Are they cute, even now? Sure. My favorite, Joe McIntyre, has TV-heartthrob good looks. Is it the dancing? It often makes me laugh, but yes, that’s a big part of the live show fun. A lot of it is seeing the guys—people I feel like I know, as if they were neighbors I’d grown up with, as absurd as that sounds—interact with each other on stage, and with the audience. They flirt, they make fun of each  9 •

•

HANGIN’ TOUGH

other, they mess up occasionally, and they know when to be real and when to take the camp factor sky high. Their personalities, which I got to “know” so well by watching hours and hours of videotape of their every move when I was fourteen and fifteen, are so familiar to me, and even after all those years they haven’t really changed. Tall, dark, and handsome Jon is still shy, with a wicked wit. Donnie looks like your suburban Massachusetts friend’s goodlooking husband who has cut back on the burgers and booze and hit the gym. He’s still the extrovert, over-thetop tease, but super-sensitive beneath the bravado. Jordan is as dreamy as ever, both in temperament and his pin-up boy-band good looks, and he can still hit those high notes. Danny, the tanned, tattooed, muscular gym rat, blends right in with the locals in his adopted hometown of Miami, has retained his laid-back, dry sense of humor, and can still breakdance. Joe is still a showman and a bit of a smart-ass. His curls are gone and his cherubic face has grown into TV-star manhood, but the baby blues and cheeky smile endure. They may all be middle-aged, yet somehow Joe still looks like the youngest. But above all, the best part of their shows is the music. The new music is fun, but it’s the old songs that bring the house down, night after night. Along with “Step by Step” and “Tonight” (off their third album Step by Step), it is the six songs from Hangin’ Tough, the New Kids’ highest-selling, eight-times-platinum album from 1988, that make these grown women go crazy. If you’re not a fan, you probably know at least one of the four bona-fide hits from the album, thanks to their late 1980s ubiquity: “Please Don’t Go Girl,” “You Got It (The Right Stuff),” “I’ll Be Loving You (Forever),” and “Hangin’ Tough.” •

 10 •

D o Y ou R emember ?

These are the songs that still make my skin prickle if I unexpectedly hear them come on the radio when strolling down a grocery store aisle. It’s like they run through my veins and are a part of me, like they are mine. And I have no clue whether or not they’re even very good. Let me explain. The teen years, says author, musician, and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, represent a turning point for musical preferences. In his wonderful, nerdy book This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, Levitin uses science to show what most of us probably already know—that “as adults, the music we tend to be nostalgic for, the music that feels like it is ‘our’ music” is the music we heard during our comingof-age years. He points to a study of elderly patients with Alzheimer’s. Many could not remember who they were or the people they loved. Yet many of these old-timers can still remember how to sing the songs they heard when they were fourteen. Why fourteen? Part of the reason we remember songs from our teenage years is because those years were times of self-discovery, and as a consequence, they were emotionally charged; in general, we tend to remember things that have an emotional component because our amygdala and neurotransmitters act in concert to “tag” the memories as something important. Part of the reason also has to do with neural maturation and pruning; it is around fourteen that the wiring of our musical brains is approaching adult-like levels of completion.1

I was thirteen when I heard New Kids for the first time. By fourteen, I was in the thick of a full-blown teen •

 11 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

obsession. Looking around at the audiences of their concerts today, it’s easy to see that a huge slice of their fan base would also have been in the throes of New Kids mania at the same age. Detractors and armchair psychologists (probably some real ones, too) might posit that this had little to do with the music and more to do with the budding hormones of teenage girls. As Levitin writes, even Charles Darwin believed that music might play a role in sexual selection. (And, as the lightning-fast self-assignment of being a “Joe girl,” “a Donnie girl,” or “a Jordan girl” attests, some kind of selection was going on.) Darwin wrote: I conclude that musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex. Thus musical tones became firmly associated with some of the strongest passions an animal is capable of feeling, and are consequently used instinctively.2

I’m not in a position to argue with Darwin, or a scientist as accomplished as Levitin, but I have to doubt that this deep-seated passion is the sole reason for the New Kids’ massive worldwide success. (Why this band over others? Why this style of music? Why these five guys?) What I wonder is, could there be something else, whether in the music itself or in the story of the New Kids, to explain this global phenomenon? Critics far and wide analyze the music of everyone from the Beatles to Rihanna, searching for meaning and breaking down the •

 12 •

D o Y ou R emember ?

genius, the inspiration, and the mechanics of some of the world’s best pop songs. However, people don’t talk about the music when they talk about the New Kids on the Block. And by people, I don’t mean fans, but the rest of the world. Much has been written and broadcast about the New Kids over the years, but it’s usually about the crazy fans, being a boy-band prototype, the idea that Maurice Starr did it all, or the embarrassment of riches and insults that was the New Kids merchandise (marbles, sleeping bags, pillow cases, lunch boxes, dolls both plush and Barbie-like! Much to my teenage chagrin, most of this merch didn’t make its way to Australia, but I do still have the action figure dolls stashed in a box at the back of my grandmother’s hall closet). Thinking about why I still love this band twentyfive years after I first heard them made me realize that I wanted to dig deeper, to understand my own love for this album. To start with, why not look more closely at the music, and at the musical preferences of the five New Kids themselves? After all, music is what they’ll leave behind. What clues are in the ten scant tracks of Hangin’ Tough—or at least its hit singles—that can explain the fierce connection fans still have with the group? This is the band that changed the face of pop music, by ushering in what everyone today understands as a boy band. So how did they do it? What role did the actual music play in this sea change? Whether the explanation is scientific, emotional, or musical, why are these songs burrowed so deep inside so many girls’ and women’s psyches? First of all, what makes me qualified to embark on such an examination? I’m no rock critic or musical •

 13 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

historian, true. And I have the musical version of beer goggles when it comes to the New Kids. This music is so intrinsically bound up in my formative years that it forms knots I don’t even know how to untangle. I have been to twenty-three New Kids concerts and just as many solo performances by Joe and Jordan. I’ve met them, individually or together, around twenty times. For the past twenty-five years, their voices have been the voices in my head. I’m biased, obviously. But if you can show me a music critic who can robotically switch off personal musical preferences and prejudices as he or she comes to the page, I’ll applaud you for introducing me to the first robot to get a job in music journalism. When you think about it, being such a passionate fan of something is its own fascinating psychology state to plumb. Which is why I decided to put myself—or, more specifically, the collective New Kids fan—on the couch, musically speaking. I purposefully decided to bring fandom into my exploration. Most coverage of New Kids fans has been of the “Can you believe the shit these girls do?” genre. Instead, I’m going to get closer to what’s really going on here. I’m going to get inside fans’ brains. In the New York Times, scientists Robert J. Zatorre and Valorie N. Salimpoor wrote about their 2013 research on music and emotions and likened one’s favorite music to a chosen drug, on account of how the pleasure of hearing music releases the neurotransmitter dopamine. We found that listening to what might be called “peak emotional moments” in music—that moment when you feel a “chill” of pleasure to a musical passage—causes the •

 14 •

D o Y ou R emember ?

release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, an essential signaling molecule in the brain … When pleasurable music is heard, dopamine is released in the striatum—an ancient part of the brain—which is known to respond to naturally rewarding stimuli like food and sex and which is artificially targeted by drugs like cocaine and amphetamine.3

Intriguing stuff, especially for any New Kids fans who have wondered when purchasing tickets for yet another concert and meet-and-greet why they just can’t quit them. Naturally, with research like that, music cognition experts like Valorie Salimpoor became people I wanted to reach out to, along with producers and recording engineers and music executives who worked with the New Kids, in a quest to find out what they could tell me about these songs in musical and scientific terms. In other words, I wanted to turn the artifact that is this record over and look at it from as many angles as possible, all in service of answering questions like How and why does Hangin’ Tough have such a lasting emotional impact on hundreds of thousands of fans? Scientists say that musicians knowingly manipulate our feelings as they compose. What strings was Maurice “the General” Starr pulling as he wrote these songs destined for platinum status? What did the New Kids add to the formula that made them superstars? What I really want to know, I realize, as I ponder my own fandom standing on 23rd Street waiting to escape the sub-zero temperatures and see a New Kids show for the twenty-first time, is this: Is the music of Hangin’ Tough actually any good? And if it isn’t, then why am I standing here? •

 15 •

It Starts With a Whisper

My sons, they know Afrika Bambaataa—I play that stuff for them. They can go all the way back. I think if you’re a fan of something you can’t be ignorant of how it started.1 —Danny Wood

If you listen to New Kids on the Block’s most vocal detractors over the years (rock critics and plenty of average music fans who hate pop), one of the loudest arguments for not taking them seriously deemed the five guys in the group to be puppets, generic youngsters standing on stage who had nothing to do with the music they performed. While it is true that Maurice Starr wrote almost all of the New Kids songs and is credited with playing all the instruments on Hangin’ Tough, Starr was not on stage singing and dancing, and stopped having any creative input into what New Kids did well before their 1994 album Face the Music was released. Considering that New Kids reunited in 2008, and have released two albums and performed live shows every year since then, which include the hits from Hangin’ Tough, I refuse to accept that the five members of the group are not an integral part of the music itself. •

 16 •

I t S tarts W ith a W hisper

They sing the songs, and it’s their voices on the record that sold more than seventeen million copies. They also come to the microphone, and even more so to the stage, with their own skills, talents, and musical backgrounds. There is no way that some of that—that a piece of each of these five guys—has not contributed to the finished product, or to the legacy of these songs and this album. I became intrigued by the field of music cognition when reading Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music, and in particular his description of the teenage years as a critical time in the formation of our musical tastes. I wanted to know more about how this worked in order to shed light on the New Kids’ musical tastes—to know more about what knowledge and influences they bring to their performances. I began by speaking to Susan Rogers, an associate professor of music production and engineering at Berklee College of Music and the director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory. Rogers has both real-world experience in the studio—for five years she was the staff engineer for Prince, and she has also produced, mixed, and engineered for artists including David Byrne and Barenaked Ladies—and serious academic chops, with a bachelor’s degree in science and a doctorate in psychology from McGill University, where she studied music cognition and psychoacoustics under Levitin and fellow researcher Stephen McAdams. To set the stage for our discussion, Rogers first explained that music cognition is a branch of a larger branch of psychology: cognitive psychology, which “is concerned with the nature of mental processes—how they work. Where do they resonate—what areas of the •

 17 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

brain?” Many music fans would be able to tell you how music makes them feel, but how many of us know exactly what mechanics are at play in our brain as that emotional response is taking place? “Cognitive psychology concerns how we think, how we memorize, how we pay attention to things, how we learn, how we categorize and make decisions … how we record an incoming stimulus—whether it is an ice cream cone or a piece of music,” says Rogers. “Music cognition is concerned with all of those things but looking at it from the perspective of music as a stimulus.” The teenage years’ significance in this equation has a lot to do with—surprise!—hormones. “The reason we bond to music is part physiological,” Rogers explains. “And [at that age] we’ve got this hormone factory that is working at full steam and is cranking out a lot of new stuff, so we are dealing with new feelings, new emotions [as well as] dealing with new physical changes. There is a lot that is brand new, and that makes us sensitive—and vulnerable.” Lyrics, says Rogers, can help supply the words that won’t come when we’re talking to “that guy” or “that girl.” Music lets us try on new personalities. But it’s not just the stereotypical teen crush scenario where music has a role. “It also helps with the coordination of our motor system—learning to dance and things like that. It helps us grow and get stronger.” Researcher Valorie Salimpoor, who has a PhD in psychology and behavioral neuroscience from McGill University and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Roman Research Institute, also helped me understand this crucial time. “During •

 18 •

I t S tarts W ith a W hisper

adolescence, music is an integral part of a teenager’s life,” she says. “Some studies have found that [teenagers] generally place more importance on music than on many other things in their life—things like sports, TV, or video games and books.” Happening parallel to this is another critical milestone—identity development. “If teenagers are trying to figure out who they are and conveying that to the world, then music provides a vehicle that they can use for self-expression and also self-discovery.” What’s so important about music helping to shape our identity as a teenager, says Salimpoor, is that “any piece of information that contributes to that process will stay with us for a really long time.” This doesn’t automatically mean we’re stuck liking the exact same songs for the rest of our lives. It’s more nuanced than that, says Rogers. “Our likes and dislikes can change, but what will remain relatively stable are the links between your personality and certain aspects of music.” In fact, there is an entire subset of music cognition studies devoted to the relationship between personality traits and the musical genres we prefer. There are detailed layers of this research that differentiate between age and gender but, generally speaking, people who are fans of pop music or country-and-western music tend to be extroverted more than introverted, agreeable, and outgoing. In contrast, those who “tend to be adventurous risk-takers or thrill-seekers, [who are a] bit more introverted than extroverted will tend to like music that is also complex and introspective,” says Rogers. Music that would fit into these categories includes classical music, jazz, folk music that is complex lyrically, and heavy metal. •

 19 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

The other part of this delicate dance of science, personality, and preference is the social component. “It feels really great to be in a room with people who are all enjoying the same thing as you,” Rogers says. “Like people who get together at midnight to go and see The Rocky Horror Picture Show or people who go to Burning Man every year. It’s ‘your’ people, ‘my’ people, all enjoying the same thing—that social communal aspect is comforting. It comforted proto-humans fifty thousand years ago when we all got together and sang the same song or danced to the same music that helped us thrive as a species. We’re still driven to do that today.” — With this science in my back pocket, I turned to the New Kids’ childhood and teen years for insight into what was percolating in their musical minds before they ever entered Maurice Starr’s studio. I began with a look at the Billboard charts, to get a sense of the pop terrain when each of the guys was fourteen. Here are some of the top songs that would have been ubiquitous during those years. Jon Knight was fourteen in late 1982, when “Truly” (Lionel Richie) and “Mickey” (Toni Basil) ruled the airwaves. Danny Wood was fourteen in the spring of 1983, the era of “Beat It” (Michael Jackson) and “Flashdance … What a Feeling” (Irene Cara). Donnie Wahlberg wasn’t far behind Danny, turning fourteen in the summer of 1983. “Every Breath You Take” (The Police), “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (Bonnie Tyler), and “All Night Long” (Lionel Richie) were top of the •

 20 •

I t S tarts W ith a W hisper

pops. Jordan Knight was fourteen in the spring of 1984, which gave us more Lionel, this time “Hello,” along with “When Doves Cry” (Prince and The Revolution) and a song dear to my childhood heart, “Let’s Hear it For the Boy” (Deniece Williams). And, finally, Joe McIntyre was fourteen at the beginning of 1987, when the hits of the day were “Walk Like an Egyptian” (Bangles) and “Livin’ on a Prayer” (Bon Jovi). Remember, the 1980s was a time when the all-powerful record companies controlled what we heard if we were watching television or listening to the radio—which we all were back then. There was no Pandora or Spotify, no file-sharing services, iTunes, YouTube, or any of the other modern ways for individuals to find music specifically geared toward their own tastes. Sharing and exploration still happened, but it was a more social, interpersonal experience—making mix tapes for friends and crushes, listening to foreign radio taped by kind pen pals, or hanging out in record stores all day so you could hear something new. You had to seek out the different and the weird and the things that caught your ear and got you jazzed. This explorative side of musical enjoyment lived alongside the ubiquity of radio play and the rise of music videos on MTV, which seemed to have just as much influence on us as each track we discovered alone. So, how were New Kids discovering music when they really were kids? “On my thirteenth birthday, I went to buy my first album,” Donnie said on a VH1 Behind the Music Special Event in 2008.2 Like the Knights and Danny, he was living in Dorchester and was being bussed to a predominately black school in Roxbury. He took his ten bucks, jumped •

 21 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

on the subway, and headed for Strawberries Records in Downtown Crossing. “I ended up being torn between two albums—New Edition and Jonzun Crew. So I was trying to decide, and I was starting to read through the liner notes … I noticed this Maurice Starr’s name was on both albums.” Then he found Starr’s solo albums. Long before he became the General, Starr had put out two solo records and a few others with his brothers, Michael and Soni, as the Jonzun Crew. It was one of those albums, Lost in Space, that Donnie bought that day, having no clue that he’d meet that Starr guy just under a year later. Of course, there was more than just Maurice in his early musical appreciation. Donnie had been writing raps with his little brother Mark as far back as the fourth grade. At eleven, he was in a band called Risk—“me and my friends, banging on the drums and guitars and harmonicas in the garage.”3 By the ninth grade, Donnie got into Michael Jackson, spurred on by the attention he got from girls through the association. Like countless kids across the world, he tried the moonwalk on that most ubiquitous of stages—the teenage bedroom. “I had at least four hundred posters of him; pictures all over all four walls of my bedroom,” he recalled, foreshadowing his own future.4 Like the other New Kids, Donnie grew up in a large family, so influence came not just from his parents or his friends at school, but from songs his siblings turned him on to, whether it was Led Zeppelin and AC/DC or Parliament and Funkadelic. For some of the other guys, it was Sister Sledge or Elton John. Joe’s big sister Alice, one of seven McIntyre sisters, was wild about Elton John, he remembers. “She’d teach me •

 22 •

I t S tarts W ith a W hisper

Elton John songs over breakfast.”5 His other influences were big band standards and musical theater. On road trips to Cape Cod, he’d sing “New York, New York” with his dad; back in Jamaica Plain—Joe was the only New Kid who didn’t grow up in Dorchester—he’d accompany his sister Carol and his mother to a neighborhood institution, the Footlight Club, the oldest community theater in America. “I didn’t know how lucky we were. Until, you know, you’d go to New York and see those little theaters,” Joe told me in 2014. “Here we had this big old theater and I grew up four blocks away from it.” As part of the Neighborhood Children’s Theater of Boston, Joe had parts in Oliver and The Music Man, which was his introduction to regular Friday night rehearsals: “It was just fun, a part of my life. I never thought about going for singing or acting lessons.”6 By the critical musical age of fourteen, he was already a couple of years into his tenure as a New Kid. The Knight brothers were also involved in plays at school, and were in the chorus, even though singing what would become his signature high notes often made Jordan too embarrassed to try out for solos. Thankfully, he got noticed anyway, since his desire to sing—not only in choir but in class, at home, and on the subway—was too strong. “Everyone knew me as the little kid who sang music all the time.” His influences were varied, ranging from Mozart’s mass music to Beatles songs he heard on his brothers and sisters’ records.7 “Before the group started, I wanted to go to Berklee College of Music,” Jordan told me in 1998. “I didn’t seriously start playing keyboards until I was seventeen, but before that I used to play the violin and I had a •

 23 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

recorder. I would play along to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ I’d be playing a rock guitar solo on a recorder!”8 It was all an effort to get a shot at playing in his brother David’s band, he says, although he never did get that chance. When rap came along, “I was into it right away,” he says. “‘Rapper’s Delight’ was the first big commercial rap song, and our whole bus going to school used to chant it. I liked Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and Malcolm McLaren. I was into breakdancing even before it became real commercial.”9 Just like he practiced choir when he was younger, Jordan honed his moves in his room after school—when he wasn’t scrawling his tag all over trains at night. Meanwhile, his brother Jon listened to all kinds of music. His sisters were into the Who. “My brother used to like disco music, the Bee Gees and all that.”10 Like Jordan, Jon was in choir, and recalls their choirmaster Herb teaching him vocal techniques that he says he still uses today. Like the Knights, Danny also spent time in chorus during elementary school. “I never thought I had a good voice, but I didn’t have to sing too much,” he recalled. “Donnie tried out, too, and he didn’t make it,” he said. “I was an alto in the chorus. Jordan and Jon were sopranos—they had higher voices. We would do concerts at school and once in a while we’d go to high schools and City Hall and perform.”11 At home, Danny’s oldest sisters were into pop, including the Bay City Rollers. “I used to laugh at them for that—I used to think that kind of music really stunk. I liked R&B and rap. I would listen to Sister Sledge, the SOS band, groups like that.”12 •

 24 •

I t S tarts W ith a W hisper

By seventh grade he became friends with Donnie when they were bussed from Dorchester to the same middle school, Phyllis Wheatley, in Roxbury. The New Kids have long spoken about this period in their lives as being incredibly influential—going to school as the few white kids in a poor African American neighborhood meant they were exposed to everything their fellow students were listening to. The pair would do raps together, and, like Jordan, Danny was into breakdancing and practiced relentlessly in his driveway at home. He joined a local breakdance group, Rock Against Racism: “I wasn’t the best or the most outstanding, but I was good and I was recognized for being good—and I was part of a team.”13 Many of these childhood and teenage influences make sense to New Kids fans, who have seen the guys pursue their own style of music on stage over the years, whether as part of an NKOTB concert or as a solo artist. Joe has done albums of standards, Jordan has always had an undercurrent of R&B, including on his 2014 collaboration with Backstreet Boy Nick Carter, and Donnie carved out a niche for himself as a hip-hop producer (for brother Mark and other Boston rappers) long before he landed his high-profile acting gig on Blue Bloods. “We’ve always loved rap and hip-hop and R&B,” said Jordan when 1994’s Face the Music was released. “This is the music we grew up listening to.”14 By 1998, when Jordan was set to release his debut selftitled solo album, his influences hadn’t changed much. Records he was playing in his car included Maxwell, The Beatles, and Queen.15 In concert, New Kids have covered tracks such •

 25 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

as “Sweet Dreams” by Eurythmics, “Push It” by Salt-N-Pepa, “We Will Rock You” by Queen, “Faith” by George Michael, and “Kiss” by Prince. In other words, songs that not only the New Kids heard in their formative years, but their fans, too. When I interviewed her, Salimpoor and her colleagues were in the midst of research that looked closely at what people listened to in their teens. “We’re taking pieces from a person’s past, the genres that they were exposed to, the pieces that they really liked,” she explained, “and playing that music for them now to see how they are processing that differently in their brains, [compared to] other music that they listen to.” While the study was still underway, she was able to share a preliminary observation that “essentially we’re finding that the music people listen to in their teenage years … they seem to come back to. It has a bigger impact on the music they listen to later in life than the music that they listen to in their twenties or later does.” Clearly, then, the ages around fourteen are an important part of the musical puzzle inside each of us. Which, it seems, has a huge impact for understanding the effect of both performing and listening to the music of New Kids on the Block around this age. In the 2012 biography of the band, Five Brothers and a Million Sisters, Jordan says, “By age fourteen, I was like: Here’s my trajectory, here’s my clear path. Most kids at fourteen, they get lost in the shuffle. They don’t know what they’re gonna do. From a young age, I was pulled out of all that, pulled out of the muck and set on my way.”16

•

 26 •

Rise ’N’ Grind

Maurice Starr first met Donnie Wahlberg (and his brother Mark) in the summer of 1984. Starr had already had success with another bunch of young kids from the Boston suburbs—New Edition. But in a legal scuffle early in their fame, he was forced out of the group’s management. Stung and frustrated, he retreated to his ramshackle home in Roxbury. “Then I said, ‘Nah, I’m not a sucker. I’m not a quitter,’” Starr told Greensboro, North Carolina’s WUAG-FM radio. “So I said, ‘I’m going to make a comeback and I’m going to come back with the biggest group in the history of the business.’”1 What the world needed, Starr decided, was funk in the form of a teen vocal group modeled after New Edition, but with a twist. “I’m going to take five white kids and do what I do with them black kids and we’re going to blow this thing up,” he explained. “And that’s what I did.”2 With the help of talent agent Mary Alford, a young white woman in Roxbury’s black music scene, he began the search for the right kids. The Wahlbergs were the first to make the cut, but (according to Donnie3) Mark soon decided that stealing cars with his buddies •

 27 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

was more fun than singing lessons and recording with Maurice and his brothers, Michael and Soni. Donnie stayed on, hanging out at Maurice’s home studio after school, soaking it all in. Even if Starr was working on other projects or playing basketball in the driveway, Donnie would tinker with the Roland 808 drum machine and amps. For six months, the genesis of New Kids was just this—Donnie, Starr, and occasionally his brothers, singing and laying down tracks written by Maurice. Meanwhile, Mary Alford was still looking for kids to round out the group, then called Nynuk. With Donnie’s help—remembering the Knights from the Trotter School, his old buddy Danny, and a friend of Mark’s named Jamie Kelly—she and Maurice soon had their five stars-in-the-making. Starr was now focused on getting the kids’ feet wet. Rehearsals were held in the Knights’ basement or at the Joseph Lee Elementary School in Dorchester, where Donnie and Co. were the only white kids. Danny remembers this time as boot camp. In addition to the Jonzun Crew school of singing and vocal performance, the guys worked with local choreographer David Vaughan, who also made their first stage outfits. After a few local performances, Jamie Kelly was out. Most versions of the story say he just wasn’t committed, so he left; Danny says he wasn’t a good singer or dancer and that it was a group decision.4 Either way, they needed a fifth member. “The Beatles only took four, but not everybody’s fortunate enough to be the Beatles,” said Starr. “Unless you’re Elvis Presley, you need five.”5 This time, Starr would do it right and find a youngster with the tenor and baby-face appeal of a young Michael •

 28 •

R ise ’ N ’ G rind

Jackson—a role he had given to Ralph Tresvant in New Edition. Drum roll, please: It’s time for Joe McIntyre to make his entrance. Joe, a twelve year old whose name came up repeatedly when Mary Alford called local schools for recommendations, wasn’t interested at first, but one of his sisters had seen Nynuk open for Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam, so, in Joe’s words, “I sang, and they liked me, and I got in.”6 The stories of his rough welcome—essentially light hazing from the older teens in the group, the ones from Dorchester, not Jamaica Plain—are ones that New Kids fans now know by heart. By this time it was the summer of 1985. Rehearsals and show schedules intensified, with Mary driving the kids around in her two-door Mustang. Maurice still worked closely with the guys in the studio, but this was when the New Kids themselves began to shape one of the biggest things they had going for them, something they still pride themselves on today—their stage presence. Then, like now, Donnie was often the instigator of the more physical stage flourishes. At a small Boston club called Vincent’s, he decided he wanted to enter the stage by jumping off the DJ booth, ten feet above the stage. Five years later, when the group was the biggest thing in America and their “Magic Summer” tour had the pyro and cheese to prove it, he did a similar leap and fell straight through the trap door of the stage during a concert at Saratoga Raceway in New York. He suffered bruises and cuts, but gained major fan kudos and a reputation as a bit of a bad boy that endures today. As the New Kids honed their craft, Starr busied himself mixing the tracks they’d recorded at Mission •

 29 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

Control, his brother Michael’s studio in Boston, and shopping them to record labels. These early songs, the same ones Nynuk had been performing around town, were true to Starr’s own musical interests—frothy love letters to the hook, the drum machine, and the synthesizer. Five synthesizer models are listed in the credits for the New Kids’ first album: the Roland Juno-60, Yamaha DX7, Oberheim OB-X, E-mu Emulator, and the Mini Moog, which Starr had used to great effect on New Edition’s “Candy Girl.” Lyrically, Nynuk’s songs didn’t stray far from New Edition’s either. The mid-tempo love song “Be My Girl,” which Starr had written back when he was in junior high, became their first single. “New Kids was one of my favorite acts I signed,” says Larkin Arnold, who was a senior vice president for both the Columbia and Epic labels at the time. “They were the first white act I ever signed.” Because of his work with black artists, Arnold says there has been a misconception that New Kids were signed to the black division of CBS Records and that the label’s strategy was to market them to black radio. While Starr may have had that in mind when approaching Arnold after other labels had told him to beat it (he called it going in the back door—the black door7), it wasn’t the case that an artist was signed to a black division or a white division. However, label executives did have different areas of responsibility, which is where the lines between styles came into play. “Basically, I was just a senior vice president of A&R,” says Arnold. “I had signed Luther Vandross, Natalie Cole, and worked with Gladys Knight.” When he casually refers to “Michael,” he is talking about Jackson. Larkin promoted •

 30 •

R ise ’ N ’ G rind

1982’s Thriller to the tune of more than twenty-nine million copies sold worldwide. Starr sent him a video of Nynuk performing at an all-black high school in Roxbury. “I was really impressed with the way they were received by the crowd,” says Arnold. “I thought, wow, let me go ahead and see how I can do in another vein of music. This was a chance for me to branch out.” The plan, he says, was always to pitch New Kids to pop radio—he knew what was working for black stations, and, besides, why compete with New Edition? The wall he hit was an internal one. “The record company really didn’t get behind them when I brought them there,” he says. Arnold was surprised that his more pop-oriented colleagues didn’t bite. “They were, like, eh. They didn’t want to promote them on the pop side the way I had developed acts on the black side. There was a constant fight on behalf of myself and Maurice to try to get the company to pay attention to them.” Arnold says he knew the New Kids would be big—he was remembering the success of the Osmonds—“but they beat even my wildest expectations.” So, how could he tell they had what it takes? “One, you don’t get any attention without the music,” he says. “Maurice had a way of getting nice pop-flavored R&B and it was more sophisticated [than] bubblegum music. It had a teenage appeal—especially to the girls— and it was rhythmic, danceable. Very catchy.” Of course, the guys themselves also had teen appeal: “They were all nice-looking young men and they each had their own aura about them,” says Arnold. “They weren’t cookiecutter like—I hate to say—One Direction seems to be. •

 31 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

Each of them had their own distinct personality.” The icing on the cake? “Because of all that rehearsal, they could really dance. That was something not everybody had seen.” With their new record deal came a new name. Apparently, the label didn’t like Nynuk, so the group decided on New Kids on the Block, the name of a rap from their set, co-written by Donnie before they arrived at CBS. Arnold, however, remembers this story a little differently. Hearing “Nynuk” gave him visions of Alaska, he says. “I told Maurice that’s not going to work. My idea was: I wanted to get them a TV show. The concept was that there would be these white boys who would move into the neighborhood where I used to live in Los Angeles called Ladera Heights. It’s the black Beverly Hills—in other words, a lot of expensive homes, middle-class black professionals. You know, comparable to Beverly Hills but half the price. They’d move in and they would be the new kids on the block.” The TV idea never took off and neither did the album called New Kids on the Block. Sadly, a name change along with some bright Cliff Huxtable-style sweaters and goofy grins on the album cover weren’t enough to help the mix of bubblegum and R&B make it in the market. “Be My Girl” did crack Billboard’s Top 100 Singles chart, but it only held on for a couple of weeks, and subsequent singles “Stop It Girl” and “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind),” a Delfonics cover, never made the charts. As excited as the five guys were to have a real, legitimate piece of vinyl with their name on it, their first album was a flop. The album did, however, lay a stepping-stone for the group to go from playing clubs and community •

 32 •

R ise ’ N ’ G rind

centers to becoming a group who performed their tails off and eventually had a hit single to help expand their awareness beyond the outskirts of Boston. That came via the great American phenomenon of the second chance. For the New Kids, the second chance was Hangin’ Tough. CBS was close to dropping New Kids on the Block after they didn’t make pop waves. “For the first two, three years of our existence, there was not one white person at the label who gave a damn about us,” Donnie said on a VH1 show in 2008. “There was Larkin Arnold and Cecil Holmes.”8 In the same program, Starr recalls Arnold telling him, “Maurice, they told me to get rid of New Kids but I believe you that they’re going to be something.” Starr and the guys began working on what would become Hangin’ Tough in the spring of 1987, but Arnold left CBS soon after. In 1988, he founded his own legal and management team, Arnold & Associates. Cecil Holmes, another vice president of A&R, continued to support the band and convinced label heads—guys like Tommy Mottola and Don Ienner—to give them another shot. [Holmes was the co-founder of Casablanca Records and he founded Chocolate City Records, which sold to PolyGram in 1980.] Instead of feeling beaten down, the New Kids were more determined than ever. “We were going to get back to rehearsals and back to the studio. Our attitude was, we’d failed once, but we were going to hang tough and try again.”9 — •

 33 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

What’s clear to me from these days is that the New Kids had one of the qualities most necessary for real success—perseverance, perhaps to the point of delusion. Starr was obviously a large part of that; even though the boys were still in school and their shows just modest affairs in Boston, largely made possible through favors, Starr filled the boys’—and their parents’—heads with predictions of worldwide fame. Looking at the faith he had in his idea, and at the ultimate result, I’m reminded of modern start-up business culture. Like fledgling tech start-ups, Starr had a big idea that few others could visualize as clearly as he could. He needed investors to help him open up a few key opportunities that would go on to open even more doors. And he needed to be just crazy enough to truly believe that he was right. In an essay titled “Black Swan Farming,” investor Paul Graham, one of the founders of start-up incubator Y Combinator, sums it up like this: “The best startup ideas seem at first like bad ideas … if a good idea were obviously good, someone else would already have done it. So the most successful founders tend to work on ideas that few beside them realize are good. Which is not that far from a description of insanity, till you reach the point where you see results.”10 The work on Starr’s possibly insane idea continued in earnest at the studio in his house, modestly called the House of Hits. Since the House of Hits had only one keyboard and lacked soundproofing, they also laid down some tracks at Mission Control and Normandy Recording Studio in Providence, Rhode Island. This time around, the New Kids felt as though Starr was allowing them to contribute more creatively, •

 34 •

R ise ’ N ’ G rind

allowing them to play a bigger part in the recording process. “He’d say, ‘Do you like this song? Do you like this?’ and we’d go, ‘Yeah, we like that. We don’t like that,’” says Jordan. “He was good like that. He could catch on to who you were, and your range, and tailor something for you.”11 (It does strike me as strange, however, that Starr didn’t realize that he had a lead singer in dreamboat Jordan much sooner—in the beginning he gave most of the lead vocals to the group’s unofficial captain, Donnie, and baby-faced Joe.) Jordan, Donnie, and Danny in particular spent most of their time at his house, even when Starr wasn’t ready for them to start a session. They got into a groove of messing around with the drums and recording equipment, shooting hoops, or playing ping-pong, all while playing Eric B. & Rakim songs or hits like Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It.” The trio called themselves “The Crickets” and earned a writing credit on the album’s unofficial sixth hit, “My Favorite Girl.” Donnie also convinced Starr to let the New Kids record a few songs Starr had written for a band called the Fantini Brothers: “Cover Girl,” “Hold On,” and “I Need You.”12 (Such recycling of his endless stream of songs seems to be a hallmark Starr practice.) “Donnie definitely picked up a lot from Maurice, as far as being a producer and a creative mind,” says Joe of the studio days. “Jordan would watch him—that’s how he learned to play the piano. As for himself, he admits, “I was fifteen and running around, you know. The last thing I wanted to do was learn how to play the keyboard.”13 •

 35 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

Donnie may not have gotten a credit for writing “Hangin’ Tough,” but he was a key contributor to the song’s anthemic feel: “We talked about making a song that could be a theme song for the Boston Celtics in hopes that they would play it at the Boston Garden and we could maybe sell it to the Celtics for about five hundred dollars. Buy some food, pay for some gas and keep moving forward, making more music,” he said. “‘Hangin’ Tough’ was the song.”14 Recording engineer and producer Phil Greene, a longtime Starr collaborator, was involved in both recording and mixing the album, and, even though the liner notes state “all instruments played or programmed by Maurice Starr,” Greene also played lead guitar on the track “Hangin’ Tough.” As Greene tells it, the guitar player Starr had booked didn’t show up, so he walked over to the console and handed Greene a Les Paul: “It was one a.m. and I didn’t have much time. I did it in one take.” Starr doesn’t credit his brother Michael Jonzun on Hangin’ Tough at all, but Greene says that the two of them both did post-production work on the tracks. “We were the finishers,” he says. “In the movies, we’d be the editors. Sometimes we’d add horns or guitar or Michael would add some extra keyboards. We had to throw some percussion on there, recreate the drum sounds with better-sounding ones.” As for capturing the Kids’ voices, Greene offers insight into how Starr got the best performances out of them: “They’d sit there while Maurice would sing a guide vocal.” The New Kids mimicked his singing, and Starr would create a double track. Then, he’d record •

 36 •

R ise ’ N ’ G rind

them again—turn off his track and create a double track of the New Kids singing. Voila: “An exact copy of what he did, by the Kids.” Greene describes the practice as a mainstay of pop music. “Every John Lennon vocal was a double track,” he says. “And”—for any skeptics out there—“everything I mixed, it was the Kids singing.” Fellow engineer Rich Mendelson, who was credited on Hangin’ Tough but says he didn’t do a thing on the album (he worked on the Christmas album and on Step by Step), says that vocals were always a focal point for Starr. “They worked hard,” he says. “Maurice would re-do the vocals forty or fifty times until he got there—until he got what he wanted out of them.” As committed as they were to perfecting vocals and learning the ins and outs of the studio (Danny has an engineering credit on the album), the New Kids did not seem as convinced as Starr that Hangin’ Tough would go on to become a multi-platinum hit, at least not when they were recording it. “Maurice had undying faith that they’d be the next Beatles,” says Greene. “No one around him believed him. I didn’t; the record company didn’t. He was the one who had a vision and he wouldn’t be deterred.” Hangin’ Tough was released on September 6, 1988. Before that came “Please Don’t Go Girl,” the first single, which was released on April 16, 1988. Despite what Larkin Arnold told me about his plans to break New Kids on pop radio, Columbia seems to have again tried the black radio route. It didn’t work. By this time, MTV had ushered in the age of the music video, but the label didn’t provide the budget for one. “[Starr] •

 37 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

fronted the video almost on his own,” says Arnold of the low-budget, cringe-worthy effort that was sent to BET [Black Entertainment Television]. “Again, it shows you the lack of interest that the pop department had in the band.” What finally got the Columbia pop team’s attention was the work of one radio deejay—Randy Kabrich of Tampa, Florida’s pop hit station Q105-FM. Through his own volition, says Arnold, he started playing “Please Don’t Go Girl.” It soon became the station’s most requested track, so the staff notified Columbia. “They basically, hit ’em over the head and said, ‘Listen, wake up! You have a potential major act on your hands here,’” recalls Arnold. “That’s when the company started getting behind them.” Once the Columbia marketing machine started cranking, things started to move. During that summer of ’88, the New Kids did a showcase at Disneyworld in front of crowds of high school kids.15 Then they landed a spot opening for fellow teen Tiffany on tour. Tiffany [Darwish, although she always went by only her first name] was a much more innocent precursor to Britney Spears who had scored a number-one hit with her cover of “I Think We’re Alone Now,” originally recorded by Tommy James and the Shondells in 1967. “Now we were playing every night in front of an audience that was made for us—that no one really ever thought about, Maurice included,” said Donnie. “It was a fluke, man. It was the greatest fluke that ever happened but … we weren’t meant to be a pop act.”16

•

 38 •

Listen Up, Everybody

“Please Don’t Go Girl” eventually climbed to number ten on the Billboard Hot 100 singles charts during the week of October 8, 1988. A month later, the album’s second single, “You Got It (The Right Stuff),” was released and by early 1989 it would crack the top five. That was the year everything changed. Hangin’ Tough, released in September 1988, took fifty-five weeks to reach number one—one of the longest climbs to the top in the chart’s history. The explosion of activity that occurred at the top was enough to make your head spin: “You Got It” reached its peak of number three the week of March 11, 1989. “I’ll Be Loving You (Forever)” hit number one on June 17, 1989. “Hangin’ Tough” peaked at number one on September 9, 1989. By year’s end, even the band’s first album, New Kids on the Block, had made the Billboard 200, reaching number twenty-five. “Once the second album exploded, I had our sales department put the first one out again,” says Arnold. “We put it right next to Hangin’ Tough and it wound up selling six or seven million copies.” It also generated its own top ten, the group’s numbereight cover of the Delfonics’ “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind).” “I decided to put that song from the first album •

 39 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

as a B-side on the ‘Hangin’ Tough’ single,” says Don Ienner, then head of Columbia. “So when Hangin’ Tough exploded, so did the first album.” Hangin’ Tough’s fifth single, “Cover Girl,” rose to number two and “This One’s For the Children,” off the group’s rushed-to-market Merry, Merry Christmas album, peaked at number seven. Ultimately, Hangin’ Tough spent two weeks at number one and a total of a hundred and thirty-two weeks on the chart. New Kids on the Block were named Billboard’s top artist of 1989, an honor they would win again in 1990. But what does it sound like? Once upon a time I wrote album reviews. I learned the style and format through imitation. At Interview magazine, where I was the music editor, reviews were short at no more than seventy-five words. This is not a lot to work with when you have to either introduce a new artist with a little backstory, or, if it’s a well-known band, set the scene for where they are in their lifecycle, and then cover things like the overall sound, the lyrics, instrumentation, the flow from one song to the next, what might have influenced the artists as they recorded the tracks, what messages they were sending, what stood out, what sucked, what surprised you, and what grew on you by the fourth or fifth listen. It wasn’t an easy task, although I am not complaining—the joy of being able to shut your office door, crank up the stereo, and call it work was one of the great pleasures of my early working life. What I know I can’t do, however, is apply the same review process to Hangin’ Tough. I should be able to—I know it well enough to comment on most of those facets; I know the sound inside out. But that’s the •

 40 •

L isten U p , E verybody

problem. When you know something so well, when the songs are a part of you, how do you even begin to break that down and explain it to someone else—someone who is likely a skeptic and suspicious of your bias? Knowing I couldn’t do it without help, I turned to the media archives, and spoke with professionals who worked in the biz when Hangin’ Tough came out. How would they describe these songs and why were they hits? My thinking was that by starting this conversation I could start to crack open my own response to this music, which feels more like a reflex than a thought in words. David Wild  [music journalist and former Rolling Stone editor]: I’ve always been a fan of soul–pop/soul. I grew up on things like The Stylistics and it dawned on me that the dominant musical force of this whole thing was this guy [Starr] who was trying to recreate the music I loved and put it in the mouths of these white kids—which is sort of like going back to the original rock-’n’-roll rule book. It’s like what had happened with Elvis, but this time with a black writer–producer doing it. So it was an interesting reversal. David Wild  [writing in Rolling Stone in 1989]: An infectious if derivative collection of street-smart dance pop and soulful crooning.1 Tony Rose  [music producer and friend of Starr’s from Roxbury and author of Before the Legend: The Rise of New Kids on the Block and a Guy Named Maurice Starr—The Early Years: An Unauthorized Biography]: The idea of having a white group who could sing black hadn’t been used since the fifties, when a lot of white acts sang doo-wop. •

 41 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

Dinky Dawson  [sound engineer]: Taking the Motown concept, the Jackson Five concept, but having white kids do it—it was phenomenal. These were pop hits but with the flavor of soul. It was wonderful to see, and song after song was dynamic. David Wild:  If you’re going to bust white kids for copying the R&B of their forefathers, you have to bust everybody. You know, Bowie, The Beatles—they’d all be locked up for certain things. And I do think the New Kids connected with that music. They knew and loved black music. I always appreciated them for what they were doing and I always felt it was shockingly sincere. Jerry Ade  [former New Kids booking agent]: The music was terrific. It was pure pop. They were well-structured, crafted songs, and the productions were contemporary— right on time for that period. I think the music really spoke to the kids that it hit a chord with. No question. Phil Greene:  If I had liked it, it wouldn’t have been a hit. I was a thirty-seven-year-old professional record producer. You know what tipped me off? I had a promotional cassette of Hangin’ Tough at home. We had a twelve-year-old babysitter. When we got home, she didn’t want to get paid—she just wanted the cassette. Charlie Walk  [former college radio promoter, Columbia Records; executive vice president, Republic Records]: It was great pop. Clearly, “Please Don’t Go Girl” was a great song. They were songs you really hadn’t heard before. Maurice captured a moment and found a new •

 42 •

L isten U p , E verybody

sound—which was really an old sound—and added this R&B approach for a young generation. John Dukakis  [former business manager for NKOTB]: I loved the energy in it. The music was catchy, no question about it, and it didn’t sound like a lot of other stuff on the radio at that time. Amy Linden  [in Spin]: The sound is predictable, slick and lacking in personality.2 Jordan Knight:  I think some of [our old material] is really good and some of it’s really terrible. I listen to some and I’m like, “Damn, that vocal is terrible!” But some of the songs, I can see why they were hits. I can say, “It’s got a feel, a magic to it.”3 Joe McIntyre:  There was something about that album— we started hanging out together more and being more of a group. The other guys started writing; we were singing more. There was a lot of hard work and emphasis on it. There are some great pop songs on that album. It just happened.4 Robert Christgau  [Dean of American Rock Critics]: At five million and counting, this isn’t the rank offense its demographic tilt would lead you to expect—auteur Maurice Starr has positioned two exceedingly cute uptempo hits atop two overly balladic sides. Really, why shouldn’t a black svengali mastermind the safe white R&B ripoff for once? Funkier than the Osmonds or Milli Vanilli. As hip as New Edition. C+.5 •

 43 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

The songs of Hangin’ Tough “You Got It (The Right Stuff)” Donnie Wahlberg  [on MTV]: The secret to “The Right Stuff”—the explosion—was the lyrics. We figured out with “The Right Stuff” that the most important lyric for hit records, for the next ten of our records, was oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. Those five lyrics changed everything. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. [He then sings the chorus from “Hangin’ Tough”] Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh! The ohs changed the game.6 Rich Mendelson  [assistant professor at Berklee College of Music and recording engineer]: This crossed over because the lyrics were rather innocent but they were kind of interesting—“first kiss was a sweet kiss; second kiss had a twist.” It’s nothing earthshaking but it has a kind of flow to it. It’s black phrasing—funky phrasing— and the melody is a bit funky, too. Maurice put that together with white kids and no one had done it before, not like that, and boom, it just exploded. Arsenio Hall  [at the Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony in October 2014]: You know why I love them? They make us happy. You can’t listen to a song or watch a video and not smile. I dare you. Right now—everybody look at me and say, “Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.” Look at you! Look how happy you are! Look how you’re smilin’!7 Although it didn’t make it to number one, I’d argue that this is one of the New Kids’ most recognizable songs (second only to “Step by Step”), and it’s all thanks to the hook. As Starr himself admits, hooks were the secret to his •

 44 •

L isten U p , E verybody

hit-making: “You hear the hook in the first 15 seconds. You hear it once and you want to sing it all the way through.”8 As a white girl in Australia who hadn’t been exposed to a lot of the music Maurice Starr was referencing, I remember this sounding pretty funky. It catches your attention right out of the gate. The combination of the synthesizer and the drum sound at the beginning always makes me want to hit the dance floor. Listening to it again with a deliberate plan to hear more than just the sum of its parts, the entirety of the song that lives inside me, I realized that this song is all about the vocals. The overall sound is naked and open—it’s a vocal showcase. To my ears, little else sounds like this song (as opposed to some other tracks, where the influence shows like a skeleton on an x-ray), and it contains the very essence of why I love the New Kids.

“Please Don’t Go Girl” Doug Nichol  [video director]: I first heard about them when I was sent this track in the summer of 1988 and asked to make a video. I really loved the chorus—it’s what hooked me on wanting to do it. Rich Mendelson:  The melody and the chords—it was sophisticated. There are a lot of inversions and harmonies that were sophisticated and put together in a pop way. It sounded like it could have been done by The Stylistics. But again, what made it different is that it’s done by teenage white kids. Joe McIntyre  [in 2015]: That song is timeless [laughs]. I’m willing it to be timeless! It’s a beautiful, simple pop •

 45 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

song. Because of the fans, I’ve been able to sing this song for twenty-seven years. We did a new arrangement but I keep singing it. It kind of encapsulates me making a connection with the audience in the moment—and it’s something I really am grateful for.9 “Hey, Motown!” That may be the quickest way to sum up the album’s first single, another vocal showcase, this time for an adorably young McIntyre. Other things that stand out include the synth opener, with a rhythm reminiscent of the “Get up, get up, get up / Wake up, wake up, wake up” opening of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” and Joe’s vocal flourish toward the end of the song. His, “Please don’t go, baby—no, no” is Michael Jackson singing “I’ll Be There” all over, which means Starr’s mission in casting Joe worked and may explain why New Kids used to cover that Jackson Five song in concert. Of course, at just fifteen when this was recorded, Joe sounds impossibly sweet. I also dig the keyboard “swish,” which I only recently learned has a technical name—glissando.

“I’ll Be Loving You (Forever)” Finally, Starr gives his best vocalist his own showcase, and what happens? The New Kids earn their first numberone single. Jordan fans lose their minds when he sings this in concert today. Again, Starr opens the track with a little flourish, in this case the shimmering of chimes. This song is also in the Motown family, but the spotlight on Jordan’s falsetto also brings it into Bee Gees territory. Call it the editor inside me, but the bad grammar in this •

 46 •

L isten U p , E verybody

distracts me every time. “The things you do / Is forever?” Tsk, tsk, Mr. Starr.

“Cover Girl” Phil Greene:  Me and Michael [Jonzun] really had to put a lot of work into it. Maurice is a great producer and a great songwriter but this one’s album filler that we had to make into a hit. In the studio, someone pressed the wrong button and there was this organ sound. We couldn’t erase it, so we had to get creative. We worked on it for about seven or eight days and Michael replayed just about everything on it. As this get-the-girls-to-their-feet jam starts, I realize it is time to tally up the number of times the word “girl” appears on Hangin’ Tough. The answer is 131, eighteen of them in this track. With Donnie on lead, the spotlight shifts away from the vocals to a focus on the guitar, bass, and keyboard for this poppy, up-tempo crowd-pleaser. While I love Donnie’s energy, stage presence, and even his rapping, if I’m honest, singing is not one of his strongest qualities. But it’s a bubblegum bonanza that could be an Archies song. In concert, he would bring a little girl up on stage and serenade her with it. Now, in shows, he employs the same shtick, only the girls are not so little.

“I Need You” It’s the last track on the first side, which may be one of the reasons this plodding ballad gets overlooked, even •

 47 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

by fans (at least until 2015, but more on that later). It’s another Donnie lead vocal, and he gets an A for effort, but it sounds like he’s straining to get these notes out. It’s just not rockin’.

“Hangin’ Tough” Peter Watrous  [in the New York Times]: The boys get tough, spurred on by beat-box percussion sounds, sampling in a hip-hop style, a wordless chant and a beautifully incongruous, bluesy organ solo in the middle of it all.10 Amy Linden  [in Spin]: ‘Hangin’ Tough’ is hip-hop for people who are afraid of mass transit.11 Donnie Wahlberg:  “Hangin’ Tough” is just about strength. If you listen to the lyrics of the song, it’s about just being yourself and doing your own thing and not letting anybody tell you that you can’t do this or you have to do this or that. “Hangin’ Tough,” in my eyes, symbolizes that. No matter what the challenge is, and no matter how great it is, we’re going to conquer it.12 The title track. The wannabe Celtics anthem. Donnie admits that the band was blatantly trying to sound like Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” which is probably why the New Kids do a mid-song detour into that track when they sing “Hangin’ Tough” live today. The single mix of “Hangin’ Tough” jacks up the whistles and has a much funkier, R&B-soaked beat than the album version, •

 48 •

L isten U p , E verybody

which features some kind of distortion, presumably to evoke the toughness of the title, although I still find it amusing that Jon Pareles called it a “hard-rock song” in the New York Times (albeit “with choreography that made it look like a variety-show number”13). Aside from the anthemic chorus, the song features a funky organ solo, to which, in the video, Joe plays air guitar using a baseball bat. (“We’re rough!”) There’s a total ’80s bass sound to this song, which I love. It also dawns on me that you could put the “oh oh oh oh oh” of “Hangin’ Tough” into anyone’s hands—Slayer, the Rolling Stones, Taylor Swift, Jay-Z—and you’d be an idiot to fuck it up.

“I Remember When” Peter Watrous [in the New York Times]: “A song coated with enough sugar to give the entire audience a toothache.” This song goes on way too long. I’m going to hazard a guess that only a handful of die-hard Joe fans like this track. But not this one. Sorry, Joe, but your voice just sounds too shrill and nasally for me to enjoy here.

“What’Cha Gonna Do (About It)?” “Someone listened to Prince yesterday!” is what comes to mind as this funk jam begins. “What’Cha Gonna Do” is a sleeper favorite for many fans. Despite a cheesy line preceding a guitar solo where Joe sings “makes me wanna play my guitar!” it feels like the most authentically •

 49 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

funky song on the album. I’m a big fan of Prince, so I’m happy enough for Starr to raid his creative territory.

“My Favorite Girl” It’s a synth-pop bonanza, or, you know, the primordial ooze that launched NSYNC and Backstreet Boys. I love this song—it’s peppy and poppy and completely of the time. It’s all about the dance floor. It was also the opener of the New Kids’ live show for many years and I have a soft spot for any track that gets that honor. The slap bass is 1988 all over.

“Hold On” With apologies to Danny, who does a valiant effort on lead vocals here, this is more filler. That said, it has such a thoroughly ’80s guitar and drum sound that I’m surprised it wasn’t scooped up and used as interstitial music in a blockbuster movie of the time. (Related: Where is the New Kids biopic already?) Hangin’ Tough contains six or seven songs that the guys still sing in concert today. Step by Step may be as famous, but its hits are not nearly as beloved, and that album, to me, feels slick, over-produced, and lacking heart. Hangin’ Tough, by contrast, encapsulates the ’80s pop sound and it heralded a new era of the boy-band juggernaut. “Just get on the floor and do the New Kids dance,” indeed.

•

 50 •

Space Cowboy

“Ain’t nobody ever tell the Colonel to take off the fried chicken uniform. Elvis never told the Colonel to stop wearing his colonel hat.”1 —Maurice Starr

The General had no fewer than ten different versions of his uniform. There was a black suit flashing with gold awards, patches, and badges, and a red version, something like what a much more svelte Michael Jackson would rock years later. Then there was the “dress whites” uniform Starr wore during an interview with a TV program called Musiqueplus, which begins with the interviewer asking in a southern drawl, “I was wondering, Mr. Starr: Did you earn those medals on your jacket?” “I feel like I did, even if I didn’t,” the General replied.2 In 1991, he told an Orlando Sun-Sentinel reporter over a breakfast of a Whopper with cheese, large fries, chocolate shake, and a Coke that he was schizophrenic. I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean clinically, but he went on to explain that he had three distinct personalities: Maurice Starr, the record producer; Larry Johnson, a shy guy who doesn’t care about money and “just wants •

 51 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

to retire to the country, where he can garden and sing gospel music”; and, of course, the General. Apparently, he was inspired by the fictional manager characters in pro-wrestling. Starr even considered creating a rival persona, the Ninja Guy, who he’d face off against in mock battles. (Over who had the cutest boys in his boy band? Who knows.) The General, who seemed to be a necessary mind-trick to get the shy Larry Johnson on stage and before the bright lights of the media—consider it his “Sasha Fierce”—was “a navigator. A hard-core man who thinks about marketing, money, fame and fortune, and all that stuff. He’s the man who gets the job done.”3 That last line was the General’s catchphrase and news programs ate it up. But it turns out there are even wackier-sounding and crazier-looking images in Maurice Starr’s background. Do a Google image search for the Jonzun Crew. Starr, a member of this early ’80s electro band, may not be in all of the promo photos, but that guy in the rococo dandy outfit and matching canary-yellow Beethoven powdered wig? That’s Starr’s brother Michael Jonzun, the owner of Mission Control Recording Studio and an important contributor to the rise of the New Kids. Some people in the biz claim Jonzun is even more of a musical wizard than his brother. Before the awards, the badges, the suits, and the name Starr, little Lawrence Johnson grew up in DeLand, Florida, a forty-five-minute drive north of Orlando, as one of six boys. Their mother, Willie Mae, played the organ at church and their father, Vernon Johnson, Sr., was a jazz trumpeter who had played with Count Basie and B.B. King. The entire family was musical; they listened to country and western, classical, gospel, rhythm and •

 52 •

S pace C owboy

blues, and rock ’n’ roll. Starr could play multiple instruments, including the piano, tuba, and saxophone. He was part of “the Johnson Brothers Band from DeLand” by the time he was ten. The Johnsons took their version of Motown-esque sounds on the road in Florida and nearby states and developed a local following. But it wasn’t enough, so the boys moved to Boston in 1972 to try to crack the local club scene. Play the “what did you hear at fourteen?” game with Starr and you’ll come up with what looks like a blueprint of his influences. Hits of 1967 included songs by the Beatles, “Penny Lane” and “All You Need Is Love,” “I’m a Believer” and “Daydream Believer” by the Monkees, “Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone” by the Supremes, “The Letter” by the Box Tops, and “Happy Together” by the Turtles. From his later work and even the podcast he hosts today on Ustream (every Sunday afternoon, from three to seven p.m.) it is clear that Starr was into the R&B sounds of his day: ’60s soul groups like the Delfonics, the Spinners, and the Chi-Lites. By 1979, Starr had become an R&B recording artist himself. This is when he took on his new name. Maurice sounded French, and Starr, well, you know. His singles, “Baby Come On” and “Bout Time I Funk U,” introduced Starr’s disco-funk sound, but failed to make waves for his label, RCA. On the 1980 album jacket for Flaming Starr he sports a ’70s-style silver jumpsuit and delivers even more synthesizer gold with tracks like “Moving on Up” and “Dance to the Funky Groove.” Skip ahead to “I Wanna Dance With You” and hang on to your go-go boots. Wait, you find yourself thinking, isn’t this…? Yeah, it’s “Got to •

 53 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

Be Real,” for sure. Only it’s not. Nope, this is not the number-one R&B hit by Cheryl Lynn—it’s Maurice doing something I learned is even more of a signature than his use of synthesizers. He’s getting as close as he possibly can to emulating an existing hit without actually copying it. Around this time, in the early 1980s, Starr and brother Jonzun played on Sugar Hill records for Sylvia Robinson. They were paid, but not credited. Jonzun in particular was learning that session musicians were becoming replaceable by technology—that almost any sound could be recreated with a synthesizer. Starr’s next solo effort, the 1983 album Spacey Lady, proved this point with its P-Funk infatuation—all synths and funky guitar riffs. What I found more surprising was the similarity I heard between this and New Kids’ music, especially their first, self-titled album. Some keyboard flourishes sound like they could be played side by side, in the same song, even. The two albums share on over-use of the word “girl” and in Starr’s voice I hear much of the same phrasing he must have taught Jordan. On Spacey Lady, Starr has a track called “Be My Lady”; New Kids on the Block has “Be My Girl.” The 1983 song includes some spoken word interludes, complete with self-conscious giggle—another flourish Starr bequeathed his acolytes. Starr’s “Electric Funky Drummer” could be mashed up with the song “New Kids on the Block” with little effort, the drumbeats are so close. Starr’s friend and collaborator from around this time, Streetwise producer Arthur Baker, once said that Starr didn’t have a style of his own.4 What’s clear is that his •

 54 •

S pace C owboy

consistent sound, if not a style, was one of recycling hooks and beats and melodies, both from his own work and from other artists. This even applies to the Jonzun Crew, the electrofunk band he was in with brothers Soni and Michael Jonzun as well as non-Johnsons Gordon Worthy and Steve Thorpe in the early ’80s. The Jonzun Crew’s hit “Pack Jam” was a cult favorite. Its spacey sound came from live drums and synthesizers and the funk from a fat bass line. It was mixed by John “Jellybean” Benitez, who also mixed Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” (produced by Starr’s buddy Baker). Then there was the vocoder. Michael Jonzun was obsessed with this machine that allowed him, through music, to transcend reality. “We took a man and turned him into jam,” Jonzun told Dave Tompkins, the author of the brilliant vocoder book How to Wreck a Nice Beach.5 On “Pack Jam,” the vocoder—in this case the OVC (Outer Space Visual Communicator) built by Jonzun’s friend Bill Sebastian— spelled out the album title and delivers an ominous warning of “Pack Jam, look out.” “That’s my shiiiiiiit,” Donnie told Tompkins when the author asked him about the vocoder. New Kids were hanging out at Mission Control at the time, and Donnie was in awe watching Jonzun transform his voice for various records. Starr’s album Spacey Lady featured vocoder, as did the debut albums from New Edition and New Kids on the Block. Their poppy rap “Are You Down?” winds down to the vocoder name checking cities as well as Maurice Starr and Michael Jonzun. (Is it just a coincidence that •

 55 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

the robotic voice of the vocoder makes his name sound like Michael Jackson?) Continue listening to the Jonzun Crew and you’ll find yet another thread that unfurls both back and forward in time. The hook on their 1983 track “Space Cowboy” instantly took me back to 1981’s “Genius of Love” by the Tom Tom Club, and into the future, when Ol’ Dirty Bastard would sample that song on his remix of Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy.” And here comes the main bridge connecting all of this funky business to New Kids on the Block. In 1983, Starr put out New Edition’s first album, Candy Girl, which he wrote and produced after discovering Ricky Bell, Michael Bivins, Bobby Brown, Ronnie DeVoe, and Ralph Tresvant in his “Hollywood Talent Show” in Boston. Candy Girl’s got it all—vocoder, Jackson Five homages, and plenty of synthesizers and vocal flourishes that would appear on New Kids’ first album three years later. To my ears, “Popcorn Love” by New Edition begat “Popsicle” by the New Kids, and the ballad “Is This the End” would, by 1987, transform into “Please Don’t Go Girl”—and it emulates “I’ll Be There” even more than that track, which makes me wonder if Maurice wrote these two songs around the same time. The funny thing is, Starr doesn’t make any efforts to hide his “tributes.” When he first saw New Edition, they sang “ABC” by the Jackson 5. “I said, ‘Hmm, I need to go home and write a song like that,’” he said during a radio spot. “I wrote ‘Candy Girl.’”6 “Maurice had a great sense of turning chords around and creating classic pop records out of other classic pop records,” Arthur Baker told David Wild in Rolling Stone.7 •

 56 •

S pace C owboy

And to an Orlando Sun-Sentinel reporter: “When he was doing his solo albums, he would do a song that sounded exactly like another song by someone else, only not close enough to get called on it legally.”8 “He understood the art of copying,” says Tony Rose. “We all did. I would tell people, ‘Here: You want a hit record? Turn on the radio and copy it. Invert the bass line, invert some of the chords, but keep the structure and you have a hit record.’ Maurice was very good. I mean, [sings] ‘Candy Girl!’ [Then, in the same pitch, and to the same melody] ‘A-B-C!’” Starr prided himself on being prolific. He told people that he once wrote twenty-five songs on a one-hour flight. What seemed to really be going on, though, was recycling. Starr did it with pieces of songs, but also with entire tracks: That 1979 single from his solo days, “Bout Time I Funk U,” wound up on Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch’s first album, which Donnie and Danny produced. A Starr song called “Ooh, La La,” recorded by the group Perfect Gentleman in 1990, is now also on NK5’s debut album. “Step by Step,” the New Kids’ most famous song, was recorded by another group of Maurice’s, the Superiors, in June 1987. It wasn’t a hit for them, but Starr held on to it, waiting for the right vessel and the right moment. In 1990, the New Kids’ version of “Step by Step” hit number one, sold more than ten million copies worldwide, and became their all-time biggest-selling single. By this time, Maurice was riding high on the New Kids. The Wall Street Journal said that Starr sometimes earned six million dollars a week.9 He was a fifty-per cent •

 57 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

partner with the group’s manager Dick Scott so received half of the twenty-per cent management fee. He also co-owned the company that generated the truckloads of New Kids merchandise, receiving fifty per cent of those profits. And then, of course, as a producer under contract with Columbia, he earned the same royalties as the five New Kids did collectively. As the group’s primary songwriter, he earned four cents per song per record sold, plus licensing fees for radio play and other exposure.10 Sources told me that Starr’s spending during this period was in line with his increasingly flashy appearance. But, truth be told, he was more of an in-studio guy and he didn’t seem to like the limelight, despite the General’s demeanor. The thrill had gone. So he found himself more groups. “He went back to the community and found black artists and singers like The Superiors,” says Tony Rose. “We all had our little black singing groups. But Maurice was finding a slew of them because he could get money. He could go to Columbia or another record company and get a deal real fast because of the success of New Kids.” Other acts Starr enjoyed various amounts of (shortlived) success with at this time include Perfect Gentlemen (which included his son, Maurice Jr.), Classic Example, Chris Pittman, and Boston girl group Lady Soul. Each was modeled on another successful singer or act of the past, which brings to mind an entire wing of Madame Tussauds come to life and set to music. Some of these acts, like Lady Soul, had real talent. Others just had a supporting slot on the New Kids tour, which translated into thousands of fan-struck teenage girls who would buy anything associated with their beloved NKOTB. Usually, •

 58 •

S pace C owboy

though, it was a quick ride on the charts before a slide back into obscurity. “He was like, ‘I can make anybody a star,’” says Rich Mendelson. “‘I know the formula, I know what it takes.’ So he started working with people that really did not have talent.” Starr told anyone who would listen that talent was not a necessary ingredient in his recipe for “baking a cake.” “You’d pick up a magazine and see him saying, ‘Well, they don’t have to have talent. They just need someone like me [meaning Starr],’” said Donnie. “Every day of my life, I am grateful that I met him and that he believed in me. But it hurt when he took that credit away.”11 One of Starr’s weirdest post-New Kids creations was a shy teenager he spotted backstage at a talent show in Nashua, New Hampshire. In Craig Gendreau from Fall River, Massachusetts, Starr saw dreamboat potential. He wanted a modern-day Elvis in his lineup and this kid looked perfect. It didn’t matter if he could sing or not. The General could mold him. He gave the kid his number and began working on his name. He chose Rick, because girls loved Rick Springfield. As for the last name, Starr proved that he was light years ahead of Kanye and Kim, who so cleverly named their first-born North West. It came to Starr when he got lost on a highway and saw a sign that read “North, South, East, West.” That’s it, he thought. Rick Wes—no “t” on the end, because, hey, that’s how people said it. Rick Wes was signed to Columbia and his album, North, South, East and Wes, dropped in 1990. Wes became part of the New Kids tour, where he made girls scream simply by flipping his guitar around. The album failed to chart. •

 59 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

“I’ll never forget when I heard that record,” says David Wild. “The actual record began with a voice saying that Rick Wes was going to be bigger than the Beatles—that was on the record. It showed that someone was getting ahead of himself. You know, it’s not easy to make a phenomenon. But he had a few swings at it.” Just as Starr had taken a back seat in the daily life of the New Kids, he began to pay less attention to the sweet melodies and addictive hooks that were his secret sauce, even when churning out music for his new acts. He hired ghost producers who were given instructions on what to do in the studio, from recording to mixing. “He was like ‘The Emperor Has No Clothes,’” says Rich Mendelson. “Nobody wanted to tell him, ‘Look, forget about the General bullshit and just go back to writing great songs and finding artists that are really talented.’” Even though he’d taken his eye off his prize act, the New Kids themselves didn’t seem to mind. “They grew up,” says Mendelson. “They did not need somebody to tell them what songs to do. Basically, they wanted out. Nothing [Starr] was doing was succeeding and he just lost touch, I don’t know if he understands this, even now.” “He was wearing General medals and shit, saying he could make anybody a star,” says Joe. “Not only was it embarrassing for us while we were trying to fight for our credibility, but he looked like a buffoon. And, sure enough, he couldn’t make anybody a star.”12 Starr remained undeterred and kept hunting for a new act. The New Kids parted ways with him in 1992 (buying him out of their management) and he had nothing to do •

 60 •

S pace C owboy

with their 1994 album Face the Music. Starr spent the late 1990s and early 2000s developing a gospel act named Five Young Men, and in 2000—after the explosion of the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC—tried to launch a new boy band in Atlanta, breaking his “it has to be five” rule with Six Piece. In 2007, he told the Orlando Sentinel that he was searching for kids aged nine to twelve to be in his new group, Heartbeat. There were always other projects, too—he alternatively spoke about making “how to create a star” videos, a movie about what really went on during the New Edition kerfuffle, and a documentary film about inner-city kids. None of them have yet seen a movie theater or TV screen. — Before setting out to find Starr, I spoke to some of his contemporaries, and while many admitted to some bewilderment at his eccentricities, there was an overarching respect for his talents. Don Ienner:  Maurice did a really good job of writing and that’s what it really comes down to. It’s always about a song. It’ll always be about a song. Jerry Ade:  He is a gifted guy. You can’t take anything away from Maurice because, were it not for Maurice’s vision, none of this would have happened. Phil Greene:  Maurice is a lot of things, but one thing he is, definitely, is talented. He’d put a drum machine down, add a little bass, maybe a synthesizer and a vocal, •

 61 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

and then he’d put it on a boom box and take it round Dorchester. That was a focus group. Tony Rose:  He understood a hit record. He didn’t want the B-side. He understood A-side kid music. He’s a brilliant musician, at writing hit songs. And he is better than anybody of his generation. He was phenomenal. He was a king. The first place I found Starr was online. A dated website at the domain starrdreamz.com proclaimed to be “the Networking Door to the World of Entertainment.” It featured photos of him as the General, with New Kids and New Edition, and a handful of shots of his new teen group, New Kriation, being shopped to radio and standing in the office of Warner Bros. record exec and Sire Records founder Seymour Stein. Another site, starr98.com, was titled “The Only Place In The World Where You Can Hear The Best In Classic Soul & Gospel Plus Maurice Starr & Friends Hit Music.” [Starr seems to like using title case or all caps in his digital media.] Again, there were photos of him as the General and with his former acts, including one with New Kids at their Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony in October 2014. This time there was no sign of the New Kriation teens; instead, there were photos of Starr with five pre-teen boys. No name was evident, but I would later find them via Facebook. Funnily enough, they too were called New Kriation. The main purpose of starr98.com was to act as a portal to Starr’s weekly podcast on Ustream. There, under the account “Maurice Starr Entertainment,” with 126 followers, I was able to listen to—and watch—Starr •

 62 •

S pace C owboy

host a radio show out of his home office. His platinum records adorned the wall behind him. Sadly, he always wore a suit, no General’s outfit, and he came across as soft-spoken, almost wistful. Of the three personalities he had described, this seemed to be the one in the middle—Maurice Starr, the record producer. During his four-hour streams he played mostly R&B from the ’60s and ’70s and a few tracks from the ’80s and ’90s. Phone calls with artists punctuated the show. The only vision during the podcast is the camera trained on Starr seated at his desk. When songs played, you could see him checking his phone, nodding his head along with the beat, sometimes looking off-camera to chat with others in the room. As the first podcast I watched was nearing the end of its slot, Starr looked at his phone and said, “It’s probably my mother calling. She always calls and says, ‘It’s seven o’clock. You have to close the radio show.’” The next time I listen in, Starr seems to be musing on his own career. “Can you believe I’m a deejay?” (He doesn’t seem to believe it.) “Wow, what happened? Is this what happens when … I won’t say it,” he trails off with a laugh. Clicking around online, I learn that Starr is now calling the pre-teen version of New Kriation “NK5.” It’s impossible not to laugh out loud. New Kids on the Block were always called NKOTB in abbreviation and fans would often shorten it even further and simply refer to them as “NK” when communicating with fellow fans. Was he serious? Naturally, I had a long list of questions for Starr. I wanted to know what he was thinking with that name, but I also wanted to know more about his musical •

 63 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

inspiration, the direct influences on his songs, especially those on Hangin’ Tough—even why he put so many damn parentheses in his song titles. Starr accepted my friend request on Facebook, I messaged him there, and he sent me his number. I was excited to be on the phone with the man who was responsible for music that had given me so much pleasure over the years, and I told him so in explaining the focus of this book. He got the gist. “Sure,” he told me. “I’ll give you anything you want—for …” I didn’t think I’d heard his next few words correctly, so I asked him to repeat them. “Excuse me?” “A check,” he said. “Money.” I’m not sure why I was initially surprised. Talking to his peers and reading his old press made it clear that he relished making money. Call me naïve, but I thought Starr would leap at the chance to tell the story his way, for the sheer pride of his accomplishments. I paused briefly and explained that I had no budget or any money upfront from my publisher and, regardless, this was a passion project. I was not doing it for payment. It was also a journalistic endeavor—I didn’t believe in paying interviewees. Even though Starr declined to participate in the book, he did not rush to end the call. Surprised by this, I took notes throughout the conversation, from which I share the following illustrative highlights: Starr told me that I was smart to have contacted him, since he owned the name New Kids on the Block, that he was the guy who made it all happen, who still owned the publishing rights to Hangin’ Tough. (In fact, the current trademark of New Kids on the Block is held by NKOTB, Inc., •

 64 •

S pace C owboy

the five band members. But he’s right on the other two counts.) He advised me that you’ve got to spend money to make money and suggested that I find investors, just like he had done when putting together the New Kids. He seemed to gain steam with every word he said, and I could feel the General looming large down the phone line. I got the sense that he was enjoying himself, especially when he astutely claimed that I wouldn’t be writing about New Kids if it weren’t for him. While I was disappointed that a formal Starr interview was not going to happen, I was tickled to be experiencing the General in action. It felt like I had traveled back in time and seen what it might have been like to do business with the impresario in his heyday. I was intrigued by the difference between the braggadocio he displayed on our call and the quieter, more reserved demeanor I saw when watching his radio show streams. I thanked Starr for being upfront and told him if something changed I would get back to him. He reiterated his point about the check and finding an investor. “Call me back when you’re ready to sit at the table and we can have a steak dinner,” he said, the words rolling off his tongue in a way that made it sound like he’d said them before. “Don’t take me to McDonald’s because I can take myself.” — “Give it up forrrr … N-K-Fivvveeeee!” I went to DeLand for the NK5 show at the Sanborn Activity Center not because I had found investors, but •

 65 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

because I wanted to see Starr in his natural habitat, to see him creating his magic. (Or should that be “kriating?”) This was a small-time gig, but that’s how it all began for the New Kids, too. I take a seat near the back of the room, which, when NK5 finally come on, I realize is a mistake. I can barely see them above the rows of heads in front of me since all of them are less than five feet tall and there is no raised stage. Dressed in all-white suits, with headpiece mics, the kids bounce around to a mid-tempo pop song called “On My Jizzy” (not a typo). The middle-school girls scream right on cue anytime one of the boys breaks the line and approaches the front row. “C’mon, do it with us!” says Ice, the lead singer and mini-wannabe Donnie Wahlberg of NK5. The boys break into a slow song next and I realize I have heard this chorus before. “I like the rainnnn,” they croon, going on to reinforce their love for both the sunshine and the rain. Later, I remember that I had seen the song on YouTube, sung by another of Starr’s young groups, the Heartbeat Boys, in a tragic video that felt like a Saturday Night Live skit, all boy band moves in front of an SUV in the dark (… in the rain). There is more recycling happening in another song performed by NK5, where each member has a spoken word solo, introducing himself: “I’m the one they call … brrrrr … Ice! And I’m looking for a special lady!” The girls scream and a middle-aged lady in front of me murmurs approvingly: “All right, Ice! All right, all right.” One by one, the boys introduce themselves, which is something New Kids did on their early track “I Wanna Be Loved By You.” Aside •

 66 •

S pace C owboy

from Ice, NK5 is comprised of Finess, Lil Gee, Gee Que (a nickname Jon used on that first New Kids album), and the tiniest one, who makes the crowd simultaneously gasp and “oooh” when he squeaks out “I’m seven years old and they call me Lil Redd.” Even though they are all wearing headset mics, the boys pass a hand-held mic to each other as they take turns doing their intros. The middle-school girls faux-fan-girling for these boys are the same age as the New Kids fans were— around thirteen or fourteen. But where screams for twenty-year-old Donnie and Danny and even sixteenyear-old Joe fit right in with the typical teenage girl crush scenario, this just seems wrong. Teenage girls screaming over seven and ten year olds surely has to be about a kind of “oh, look, how cuuuute!” novelty—or it is all coached by a certain ringleader. The show continues with what we’re told will be NK5’s first single, “Birthday Party,” and another peppy song in which Ice leads a call-and-response: “There’s a party on the dance floor!” Crowd: “With NK5!” “There’s a party at your momma’s house!” “NK5!” “A party in the cluuuuub!” “NK5!” “NK5—five! It’s time to get a whoop, whoop!” The quintet wraps the show with a cover of New Edition’s “Candy Girl” before being shuttled off to a separate function room, where they will take photos with their adoring fans. The main room clears out, even though there are other acts still on the bill, and Soni Jonzun presses on as emcee. •

 67 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

I find Starr in the foyer and introduce myself as the one writing this book. He is polite—tolerant—but not exactly warm. I try to engage him in conversation about NK5 and he provides short answers, his eyes darting around, looking for a distraction, an out. This is not the General, the same version of Starr who’d asked me for money on the phone. He comments on the occasional screams of excitement we can hear coming from the photo op room. “Boy, listen to those girls screaming,” he says, shaking his head as if he were talking about the ear-drum-killing shrieks of a New Kids show, circa 1990. “It must sound familiar,” I offer, before asking him the only question I have for him today: “So, do you think NK5 are going to be as big as New Kids?” Starr doesn’t look at me. “Um, I want all my groups to be big,” he replies, gazing across the foyer. Without saying another word, he wanders away from me, towards the refreshment stand where neighborhood ladies are selling hot dogs and your choice of a bottle of water or two juice boxes for one dollar fifty. — Are NK5 on a trajectory that will mirror that of the New Kids? Could five little boys from DeLand become as famous as five white teens from Dorchester and Jamaica Plain? Or even as big as five black kids from the Orchard Park projects in Roxbury? It seems unlikely, although perhaps they will find modest success à la the Johnson Brothers Band from DeLand and that will be enough. Their album, Beautiful Soul, was released on June 2, •

 68 •

S pace C owboy

2015, and the single “I Like the Rain” to my surprise hit number one on Billboard’s Hot Singles Sales Chart in August 2015. Starr and the boys did a small tour of summer festivals, including one gig in New England where most of the audience appeared to be women in their thirties and forties—prime New Kids fan age. Today, DeLand is a medium-sized town, population 28,237. The median household income is $37,744. A cab driver tells me he knows of Starr, that he’s dropped people off at his house in town a few times. “There are no other houses like that in DeLand,” he says. “Is it big?” I ask unnecessarily. The 10,000-square-foot brick mansion is a short walk from downtown DeLand, where I was disappointed not to stay at the DeLand Country Inn B&B, since it billed itself on its website as “Probably the Best Guest House in DeLand.” (Clearly, that’s why it was booked.) Downtown DeLand was charming, if quiet, and the surrounding streets had a small-town, lower-middleclass feel. I guessed that DeLand was not home to many other millionaire record producers and songwriters. On either side of the Starr house and across the street are modest one-level homes with untended lawns, empty carports, and no fences. They make Starr’s house, which he built for his parents in 1990, rimmed with a brick and wrought-iron fence, look as absurdly out of place as the General’s suits, which I can only assume are stored in a closet inside, next to his fifty-six-track recording studio perhaps, or the office from where he streams his Sunday podcasts. — •

 69 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

Jerry Ade:  He is not of this earth, Maurice. At that time he wasn’t. It was a fight that Maurice put into this. It was gargantuan. He saw it clearly before there was a group. Tony Rose:  Persistence—that is the key word. Maurice is a persistent dude. As a record producer, that’s what you do—lock down an idea and you believe in it, you take it and go with it. And if nobody believes in it but you? You still believe in it. You have to be insane. Danny Wood:  We started out with Maurice and it was like a family. I can’t say anything bad about Maurice— other than him wearing that general suit. I wanted to knock him out.13 Joe McIntyre:  Maurice mortgaged his house to make Hangin’ Tough. He used to have this saying—people would ask him, “How ya doin’, Maurice?” And he’d say, “Starving to death. Starving to death.” He liked being hungry—he loved being hungry. He loved proving himself to people. But at a certain point, it’s like, Maurice, you don’t have to prove anymore. You can just be who you are. He’s a sweetheart of a guy. But I think his ego got in the way and he couldn’t stay humble and grow as an artist.14 Donnie Wahlberg:  Ten stars would disappear from the Hollywood Walk of Fame if this man hadn’t come into so many people’s lives. Without the hand of Maurice Starr, this star and my brother Mark’s would be gone.15

•

 70 •

S pace C owboy

Tony Rose:  The legacy of New Kids on the Block will be Maurice Starr. It’s that simple. They have to think about him every night in their dreams. Jordan Knight:  But he didn’t wind us up like toys and make us what we are.16

•

 71 •

Click, Click, Click

In the swirl of New Kids’ backlash of 1989 and into the 1990s, much of the criticism hurled their way had to do with the perception that they were “not real.” To serious music fans, “being real” seemed to mean playing instruments and writing meaningful lyrics. The charts, however, were filled with pop dudes and divas—George Michael, Whitney Houston, Belinda Carlisle—and commercially oriented rock bands such as Guns N’ Roses, Aerosmith, and Bon Jovi. But the put-downs went beyond that, of course—critics slammed the group for being young, for having even younger fans, for their bubblegum sound, and for their increasingly “boy band” look. My friend Zain Garcia remembers the backlash well: “It was hard being a New Kids fan, specifically a proud one living in the Bronx—it just wasn’t cool,” she says. “You were basically asking to get bullied for it.” David Wild admitted that perhaps the only reason Rolling Stone had devoted a balanced feature on the New Kids in 1989 was because he assigned it to himself. “I’m sure I took some shit for it,” he says. “But it’s not like anyone else wanted to be assigned [the story].” The only other time the New Kids graced the magazine’s pages •

 72 •

C lick , C lick , C lick

in a significant way back then was when Rolling Stone readers voted them as the honorees of the worst single, worst album, and worst tour of 1989. New Kids were booed as they accepted their American Music Awards for Best Pop/Rock Duo or Group and Best Pop/Rock Album in 1990, but their fans’ screams were louder than the boos. Watching this footage today, it’s easy to see why “real” musicians might object to the New Kids’ image, at the very least. They wore earrings and weird hats. Colored leather jackets, an abundance of Aqua Net, and too much eyeliner. But back in the Hangin’ Tough days, their look was more, well, real— and I’d say that it was that realness, coupled with their natural good looks and their regular dude personalities, that played a large role in their success. Watching the music videos for the songs on Hangin’ Tough, and the home video that came out featuring backstage footage, I realized just how hard it was to separate the music from the videos. It was a reminder of how important image—not just looks but that intangible feel—is to a band’s appeal and ultimate success. Since he wanted “regular guys” for his group, Starr had the Kids dress themselves most of the time, although they did have matching stage outfits in the early days— snazzy ensembles designed by choreographer David Vaughan, who still works with Starr on NK5 today. For the Hangin’ Tough album cover shoot, hair and make-up artist Jody Pollutro remembers thinking the Kids had dressed themselves, although there is a stylist credited— Laura Wills, who dressed Cyndi Lauper and owned the beloved downtown New York boutique Screaming Mimi’s. The brief for this shoot seemed to be to •

 73 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

capture the New Kids looking like regular young guys riding the subway—it was shot at New York’s Transit Museum—but the effect was lost on Spin’s Amy Linden, who wrote “I think they look like a bunch of pissed-off Celtic season ticketholders. Maybe they are incorrigible hooligans, maybe they stole their styling gel, who cares?”1 Many of the clothes the guys wore became fan favorites—Jordan’s Batman t-shirt from the “I’ll Be Loving You” video and Joe’s topless hat and smiley face leather jacket from the “Hangin’ Tough” video are just two examples. (Some of these styles are so iconic that they were included in “The Ringside Exhibit,” a backstage VIP-only display of memorabilia at the New Kids’ Main Event tour in 2015.) The rat’s tails worn by Donnie, Jordan, and Danny were a constant source of discussion, and Danny also rocked a trend Vanilla Ice would later adopt—lines shaved into the side of his head. While a lot of this sounds and looked ridiculous, we have to remember that it was the late ’80s, and, from where we stand today, everyone looked goofy. My friends and I wore brightly colored club tops with denim shorts and black tights underneath to our first New Kids concert. The outfits were topped off by our matching NKOTB jackets, amateur rip-offs of their official merch, custom-made in the Philippines since we couldn’t buy the real deal Down Under. The point was that the New Kids looked like real guys—cute, kinda cool guys you might meet at the mall. After all, we fans were wearing high-tops and stonewashed blue jeans, too. •

 74 •

C lick , C lick , C lick

“They looked like real teenagers to me,” says writer Heidi Hurst, who was a fan and went on to become an editor at teen bibles BOP and Tiger Beat. “When you look back at their pictures, they weren’t perfect. They might have had a stylist, but they didn’t look like they did. You can tell One Direction has a stylist.” “They were not preppy,” says Rich Mendelson. “They looked cool. They were the first white kids I was aware of who adopted the styling of urban black youth, which is huge now. And they did grow up on the wrong side of the tracks, so it wasn’t fake.” In 1990, Starr made a point about wanting a “raw” look, not a group of kids who looked like models, in an interview with the Boston Globe. “It’s a more interesting look,” he said. “It does something to girls.”2 For this girl and no doubt millions of others, the New Kids’ music videos were one of the main vehicles for this feeling. Doug Nichol directed five music videos for the New Kids over a period of eighteen months, including four singles from Hangin’ Tough (the fifth was for “This One’s For the Children”). He also shot the Hangin’ Tough Live home video, which earned him a Grammy nomination. Even though there was already a terrible music video for “Please Don’t Go Girl”—the one that was sent to BET—the record company didn’t like it. “Columbia sent me the track and I wrote up an idea about NKOTB hanging out in New York, then making their way to Coney Island on a hot summer’s day where they meet some girls,” Nichol says. Everyone liked the new idea, and Nichol had himself a gig, although he admits there wasn’t much of a budget. “We shot it with a pretty •

 75 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

small crew on a weekend in July 1988,” he remembers. “CBGBs let us use their stage one afternoon for the performance, then we rode the subway down to Coney Island the next day, shooting on the train and various rides on the boardwalk.” As Donnie said during an MTV appearance, there are two things that are about to be extinct in this video. “One is CBGBs and one is Astroland at Coney Island. It’s fitting that those relics are part of that video—those landmarks—because that video is sort of a landmark for us. It was our first hit record.” Nichol tells me that the guys liked how he had captured the spirit of the band, so they continued to work with him, and the label was thrilled when “Please Don’t Go Girl” finally got traction on the charts. “We had a lot of fun. I would come up with an initial treatment that the record company signed off on and then, while we were shooting, the guys would throw in their ideas and we would collaborate and make them together.” The “Right Stuff” video was shot in October 1988 when the New Kids were in New Orleans on tour with DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. “I had just made a [blackand-white] video for another artist in New Orleans,” says Nichol. “I used the same film stock for the New Kids video to save some money. Donnie was obsessed with the Sean Connery movie The Untouchables and was going around imitating Sean so I shot him doing something like that at the beginning before he jumped in the car. Of the five guys, Donnie seemed to be most interested in filmmaking, and he and I would toss ideas back and forth a lot.” “The Right Stuff” video was the first one I remember seeing back in 1989. It opens with the sound of tires •

 76 •

C lick , C lick , C lick

squealing, which to me signaled excitement—as though these hot older guys were inviting you to jump into their car and go cruise around. Plus, being black and white made it look cool as hell, and it’s where they debuted the dance that us fans thought was a New Kids original. It turned out to be a Morris Day and the Time move, one other music fans may remember from the Prince movie Purple Rain. “That dance will haunt us forever,” Danny said in 2007. He recalled choreographer Tyrone Proctor—famous for his work on Soul Train and with Jody Watley—bringing them the move. “The first thing we said was, that’s Morris Day and the Time, man. ‘Jungle Love.’ He was like, ‘No, I’m telling you: This other audience hasn’t seen the dance.’”3 “I remember working really hard with the choreography,” Joe said on MTV. “It was in Tipitina’s jazz club.” Proctor, he said, was, “just cracking the whip and it paid off.”4 Their current choreographer, Kevin Maher, remembers seeing this dance when he was a kid. “It definitely made its mark,” he says—and he has worked with the guys to incorporate the same vibe and overall feel into the live performance of this and other songs from Hangin’ Tough today: “The older songs are way more fun to choreograph than the new ones. I love the challenge of taking the nostalgia that lies within them and giving them an upgrade.” Aside from the signature dance move, “The Right Stuff ” video was a hit with teenage girls because it showed the guys in the band driving around in a convertible and hitting on … teenage girls. The song, as Rich Mendelson •

 77 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

pointed out, had a youthful focus on first kisses and sweet anticipation. It was music made for teenagers by teenagers, in a time when most of the popular music had a more adult orientation (even the songs by the juvenile-acting hair bands). Towards the end of the video, the guys play a game of hide-and-seek with the girls in a cemetery, a playful sequence with just a hint of sex. “Testosterone for days, folks,” said Joe. “Just pouring out of the convertible and on to the streets of New Orleans.”5 For their next single, “I’ll Be Loving You,” shot in New York City in February 1989, Nichol again went with the crowd-pleasing combo of New Kids and cute models, giving fans a taste of what it would be like to hang out in a pool hall or grab a slice of pizza with the guys. “In one of the last edits, there was a girl who leaned down over the pool table and [there was] a great shot of cleavage,” recalled Joe. “My mother called Donnie Ienner, the head of Columbia Records at the time, and said, ‘I don’t think so!’ I was the only minor, so … they took that clip out. Sorry, guys.” The video also has some performance footage, shot in a midtown high school gym, and shots of the guys walking through New York City in slow motion. “We shot some helicopter stuff on the Williamsburg Bridge,” says Nichol. “The band was starting to get successful so the record company gave us extra money for the aerial shots.” “That’s where we learned that if you put anything in slow motion you look like a rock star,” said Joe. “You could flush a toilet in slow motion, that could look beautiful.” •

 78 •

C lick , C lick , C lick

“All New Kids videos have moments that were designed by the world’s smartest psychotherapists,” joked Donnie. “Moments that are meant to … We don’t even know what they are. But it releases these endorphins and then things happen.”6 Next up was the video for the title track of Hangin’ Tough and it was taken from the larger full concert video that Nichol also shot. “In May 1989, the record company wanted to package the videos with some documentary stuff of them on tour and release it as a home video,” he says. “They also wanted a live performance of them—a full-length concert—so we started on both at the same time. I went on tour with the band as they played dates in LA and Las Vegas. We shot stuff in the old neon sign graveyard in Vegas and down in the LA riverbed and Venice Beach, all in black and white.” “We were excited to shoot there because NWA had shot there,” said Donnie. “We’re big hip-hop fans* so, you know, NWA, New Kids—same alley.” It’s also the spot where the drag racing scene from Grease was shot, along with scenes from Transformers. The concert—which appears in the music video for “Hangin’ Tough” and is the show featured in the home video, Hangin’ Tough Live—was filmed at the Mayan

 For some hip-hop artists, the feeling is mutual. Public Enemy’s Flava Flav performed with New Kids at the 1991 American Music Awards and I’d heard that Chuck D was a fan of the group. When I asked Chuck D on Twitter if that was true, he replied: “Yeah and @DonnieWahlberg is my dude for life.” *

•

 79 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

Theater in downtown LA in front of a thousand screaming, many crying, girls. “It was funny for me as it had been only nine months since we shot the first video, and now everything was different,” says Nichol. “There was a much bigger entourage, new handlers and people to deal with—but the guys were still the same, even under all that pressure they were dealing with.” Both the music videos and the official home videos (they released another to accompany Step by Step in 1990) were a critical part of a New Kids fan’s experience of the band—watching them over and over again after school fueled the infatuation but also provided a more accurate picture of the guys themselves than any media coverage of the time could. (The official videos were released in Australia and we scoured late-night airings of American shows from CNN and CBS for any reports on the rise of the New Kids. Any piece of new footage we found was revered.) Behind-the-scenes footage of the New Kids on the Hangin’ Tough home video took you into the guys’ worlds—on to their tour bus, where Donnie and Joe were playing video games, Jordan was noodling on his keyboard, and Joe was pictured in black-and-white, staring out the window at the passing scenery, talking about how the only time they had to themselves was on the bus. I remember being absolutely captivated by the huskiness of Joe’s voice—by this point he was almost seventeen and growing into more of a heartthrob by the minute. “You just shoot a ton of stuff,” says Debbie Newman, who ran what was then a new division of Columbia, •

 80 •

C lick , C lick , C lick

producing home videos starring the label’s artists. “You turn the camera on and let the Kids be the Kids.” The concept was simply “being in their midst as they were being normal people,” which meant the videos gave fans a sense of feeling close to their favorite New Kid. Director Tamra Davis, who would later shoot the New Kids video for “Call It What You Want,” agrees. “You’re dealing with the fantasy of a teenage girl. You give them these four or five different options [of guys]—and it’s safe. It makes me think of people like Leif Garrett and the teen icons that I had, that fantasy and what they meant to me.” Phil Greene points out that Hangin’ Tough happened to come out on the right format for its demographic. “It was the ultimate Walkman fodder,” he says—perfect for the girl who wanted to put on her headphones and block out the world. “They sold way more cassettes than records. Kids get the cheapest things they could get, and they wanted to walk around with their music.” This was the music that thrived in the bedrooms of girls across America and around the world. The place where girls spent the bulk of their after-school hours, listening to the radio, reading teen magazines, and chatting with friends on the phone. Before New Kids, my friends and I had crushes on boys in higher grades, guys who never gave us the time of day. These five guys from Boston didn’t know who we were either, but they appeared on our TV screens professing their love for their fans. They were young enough to still be in school, and, if only we lived in America, maybe we’d have a chance with them. The New Kids never gave us the feeling that it was impossible. •

 81 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

Naturally, psychologists have ready explanations of what is going on here. Writing in Psychology Today, Mitch Prinstein, the director of clinical psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says that when boy bands “sing about unconditional love and acceptance, devotion, and romance,” it’s music to a tween girl’s ears. (And, presumably, a teen’s and even a thirtyor forty-something’s.) “And as one of the most popular people on the planet, his acceptance translates to the highest sense of her own self worth.”7 In this scenario it is the pin-up, the New Kids, who has the most power. But the guys in the band will tell you themselves that the fans are just as much a part of the story—the ones who got them to the top and made them who they are today. “The most powerful commodity that everyone wants is a white girl,” says Tony Rose. “She’s not pirating music, she’s not stealing music. She is actually buying music. If you can get a white audience to purchase your music, you have selling power.” This is, he says, the difference between New Edition, which had a primarily black audience, and the New Kids, where “all of a sudden you are looking at five or ten million—fifteen million in sales—for the same thing.” The secret, he says, to the New Kids’ rapid rise was simple: “Maurice got America. He got white-girl America. He got you.”

•

 82 •

Let’s Get This

Back in the day, I didn’t get to see New Kids live until they came to Australia in early 1992, when Joe was practically a grandpa at nineteen, so my early appreciation of New Kids came from their records and TV media coverage as well as videos of their concerts, like the Hangin’ Tough Live home video (yes, as in a VHS tape) or the pay-perview concert from 1990 that I somehow got my hands on via an old-fashioned American pen pal system. This was crucial because it gave me a glimpse of the New Kids in their element—on the stage. Their choreographer Kevin Maher, who has worked with the band since their 2008 comeback tour, says that the guys are relentless in rehearsal, even today, in their forties. But they have always been willing to put in long hours to prepare for the stage. “It was hard,” said Jordan of their early years of rehearsals. “We’d come home beat tired and we’d have to go to school the next day.”1 I doubt any of the New Kids or Starr kept a log of the time they spent going over dance moves and vocal technique, but if you look at their overall schedule between the years 1985 to 1990, it’s not a stretch to say •

 83 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

that they could have logged forty hours per week. Over those five years, this would equal ten thousand hours— the amount of time Malcolm Gladwell says in his book Outliers that many extremely successful people spend practicing in order to master their craft. To succeed at a high level does require innate talent, he acknowledged, but “achievement is talent plus preparation.” The hours spent training, and the love for the practice that propels people to keep at it, is what separates the average from the elite. “We were out on the road before anyone had heard of Hangin’ Tough,” said Jon. There were “dust-bowl places” with hay on the stage and chickens running around underneath it … and then there were the black clubs and theaters.2 “White audiences wouldn’t have been tough enough on them,” Starr told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1989. “I wanted them to work for black audiences. They’ll boo you off the stage. I knew when they were good enough to be accepted by black audiences, they were ready.”3 Radio programmer Elroy Smith, who ran Boston’s black radio station 1090 WILD in the ’80s, put one of New Kids’ songs into rotation when they were simply too big locally for the station to ignore. He says, “We booked them to perform at a black-oriented event, the Annual Kite Festival, located in Franklin Park, Massachusetts. Unfortunately, some of the audience expressed their disapproval by emitting boos. Despite it all, the opposition did not stop NKOTB from doing a great job.” New Kid Danny recalled the same show in an interview with WUAG-FM in 2007: “People had been •

 84 •

L et ’ s G et T his

known to get shot there and get jumped there. It’s a big festival where people were meant to be floating kites but really kids went there to get in trouble and talk to girls. We got booed and things thrown at us—there were records flying through the air at us.” But Danny wasn’t complaining. “We went through a kind of training that the groups who came after us don’t even know,” he said.4 David Corey was doing an internship at Kiss 108 radio in the mid-’80s, but also had a job at the Boston club 9 Lansdowne (“the Nine”). “They used to play in there on black night—Monday night,” he remembers. “Here were these little white kids up on stage performing and it didn’t go over well at all.” “I remember in the beginning when no one cared,” says Charlie Walk, who did college radio promotion for Columbia in Boston. He also recalls the days at the Nine, although with a different audience that the band’s team began to cultivate: “Every week they would do these shows with mothers and their daughters [in the audience] and soda pop and popcorn. It was about breaking out of a community—it wasn’t a national platform. This was a local Boston band that broke first in Boston. There was no satellite radio and social media and digital and YouTube.” The real work, he says, was done on local stages and via local radio, which then helped the story spread “organically, market by market.” Dinky Dawson was running another club, the Channel, and his lawyer introduced him to Starr and Michael Jonzun, who were looking for places to get the New Kids’ feet wet. “So we had them over to the club to learn how to do their stuff live,” he says. He watched them grow more comfortable being on stage and ultimately •

 85 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

develop the secret ingredient to their success. “The audience could feel that they were performing to them,” he says. “It’s a show.” One of the first pivotal moments for New Kids came when they were able to break out of clubs with a slot opening for teen queen Tiffany on her mall tour in the summer of 1988. Starr had hired booking agent Jerry Ade, whom he had known for years. It turned out to be a fortuitous move. “We put New Kids on the Tiffany tour and all the little girls who came to see Tiffany had a heart attack when they saw New Kids,” says Ade. “It made their record explode. When girls like something, the world finds out in six minutes.” Getting the guys on the road was always a priority, says John Dukakis, who helped manage business for the New Kids. “That’s how they were going to make money. Their record deal wasn’t going to be a huge moneymaker. They loved to perform and they were really good at it so we got them on the road pretty quickly.” In a twist, now part of the New Kids lore (for fans, at least), the Tiffany tour that had helped push “Please Don’t Go Girl” up the charts in 1988 became a completely different experience when they were booked to do it again in the summer of 1989. By this time “The Right Stuff” and “I’ll Be Loving You (Forever)” were bona fide hits and New Kids fever was building at a rapid pace across the entire country. “It was clear that Tiffany could not follow the New Kids,” says Ade. “Because the place was wild after the New Kids got off stage. So I said to George Tobin [Tiffany’s manager], ‘We’ve got to switch it.’” At first, •

 86 •

L et ’ s G et T his

the idea didn’t go down so well. “I still remember him cursing at me. Finally I had to say, ‘George, go fuck yourself. I don’t care—keep it the way it is!’ and I hung up. He calls back and says, ‘You’re right. We have to switch it.’” From that point on, the New Kids were constantly on stage—stages that were growing bigger every day. Ade recalls booking stadiums a year in advance and having them sell out. “It wasn’t like we sold out one stadium. We sold out one hundred and fifty stadiums and it was nonstop.” It’s clear to me that touring is where the New Kids earned every accolade they received. Starr may have run the studio and got them started, but it was Jon, Jordan, Joe, Donnie, and Danny who were up there on stage night in and night out, singing, dancing, and charming the hell out of every last girl in the audience. Of course, their popularity made tickets a coveted commodity, but if a girl didn’t have the chance to be there in person, she could live the experience vicariously through Hangin’ Tough Live, the home video that went twelve times platinum, spent seventy-five weeks on the charts, with a stint at number one, and “made CBS a shitload of money,” according to Debbie Newman, who produced it. “They came up in the Jackson Five school of music,” Tony Rose reminds me. “So their whole thing was choreography—music and dance. And it worked.” “I have never met a group of individuals so focused and so dedicated, who worked so hard,” says Ade. “That’s the bottom line—in their hearts, in their brains, in their balls, these kids didn’t quit—ever. And it was tough. I mean, they worked for seven years straight on the road. •

 87 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

That’s like going to combat. You don’t know where you are on any day of the week because every night is Saturday night. They had to look at a book of matches to know where they were. They held it together and very few people can hold it together like that.” As Tony Rose told me, no big idea can work—actually succeed and sell—without infrastructure. And with Starr back in the studio or pushing his new acts, that infrastructure for New Kids came in the form of a rock solid team of industry professionals, first and foremost manager Dick Scott. “He was a father figure to them on the road,” says Ade. Scott had come from Motown, where he’d been the road manager for the Supremes. He brought years of experience to the New Kids team, along with a presence that was both firm and gentle at the same time. “He was able to soothe the parents and lawyers and accountants,” says Ade. “And he made a painstaking effort to keep the kids happy and calm. He was their continuity.” Scott’s team, including tour managers such as Peter Work, Johnny Wright, and Cathy McLaughlin, took care of the day-to-day on the road, which was booked by an old-school pro in Ade. Their legal and business teams were the best in the business, and they had creative allies in people like Doug Nichol and Christopher Austopchuk, Columbia’s creative director. Even when they were young, according to Susan Blond, who did their PR in the very early days and again when they were huge, New Kids listened to the advice of those on their team. Many of the people who worked with the New Kids have gone on to bigger and better things. Johnny Wright •

 88 •

L et ’ s G et T his

worked with both Backstreet Boys and NSYNC and today manages Justin Timberlake. John Dukakis went on to manage Boyz II Men and is now working on the Boston bid for the 2024 Olympics. Miguel Melendez, another New Kids tour manager, now manages Will Smith and his family. Their former keyboardist and musical director Kevin Antunes went on to work with Madonna, Rihanna, and Justin Timberlake and direct the Cirque du Soleil show Michael Jackson ONE. Back-up dancer Jennifer Lopez, who performed with NKOTB at the 1991 American Music Awards, is, well, J. Lo. A relatively unknown singer from the club scene, Lady Gaga, had a slot opening for the New Kids tour in 2008 when she had just one single out: “Let’s Dance.” What I’m saying is: New Kids attract talent and likeminded hard-workers. That’s telling. — The tours were undeniably money-spinners, but what was it that made them so successful in the live setting? Not only were the guys giving it all they had, but they had an incredible receptive audience. Within the context of a pop concert, according to the book Girlhood in America, “girls possess, for at least a couple of hours, a freedom to express themselves that is unmatched in any public space besides the local shopping mall.”5 New Kids concerts gave fans the chance to partake in a shared activity, which can lead to what history professor and author William H. McNeill calls “boundary loss”— the diminution of strong feelings of self.6 Jazz musician, cognitive scientist, and writer William Benzon called •

 89 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

this a “coupling,” which would occur when people “synchronize the sounds and movements they make, enter similar emotional states, and hence attune their nervous states to one another.”7 Any New Kids fan will tell you that one of the best parts of a show is the two-way communication between the stage and the audience. “I really think that a huge part of the NKOTB phenomenon is psychological,” fan Kim Carlton told me in 2008. “They have this weird, crazy, borderline faux-telepathic way of making you feel that every word they’re saying is directed at you.” The live show is such an integral part of the New Kids experience that they have gained new fans on the road since 2008. Fan Jenni Murphy from Charlotte, North Carolina, tells me that she wasn’t into New Kids back in the ’80s. Her interest was sparked by the music video for their 2013 single “Remix.” She got a ticket to their Charlotte show that June just hours before it began, finding herself in the very last row. “Like the for-real last row. Partially blocked by a speaker,” she says. “It didn’t matter. As soon as Donnie started talking and they appeared on the stage, my life was changed, and I didn’t care that they were the size of ants.” Murphy explains that she had been suffering from postpartum depression. “But the night of the concert, I felt alive for the first time in over two years. During ‘Hangin’ Tough’ I told myself that I was going to figure out what had finally sparked me back to life. I didn’t know what it was, but I wanted to keep that feeling alive.” She discovered a whole new world when she began following the New Kids—and fellow fans—on Twitter, and she hasn’t looked back. •

 90 •

L et ’ s G et T his

There are hundreds, probably thousands, of fan stories like Murphy’s that speak to the inexplicable power of the New Kids. Many Blockheads measure their happiness with their New Kids relationship based on tweets or meet-and-greets or conversations with the guys backstage, at after-parties, on the annual cruise, or even on the set of Blue Bloods in New York City, where they track down Donnie when he’s filming. But, for me, the magic lies squarely in the live experience. There, it’s a combination of nostalgia, excitement, familiarity, and connection that transports me to my happy place. The anticipation is through the roof as the lights first go out and the bars of that tour’s opener begin. I love seeing the guys dance and make the arena vibrate with screams as they launch into their hits. But it’s also about being present with them, as corny as that sounds. At their 2014 “After Dark” shows in Vegas, first Joe and then Donnie forgot some of their lines in “Summertime.” But they turned the gaffe into a shared laugh, owning up to it in song and seamlessly getting back into line and continuing their dance steps. All five of the guys are funny, especially Joe, who is such a ham, so quick with witty retorts, that I asked him if he had ever considered becoming a stand-up comedian. “That’s so funny,” he said. “You know what? I feel like I’m a comic at heart—I really do. The crowd interaction is something that’s always been effortless for me and that’s the juice. That’s what I love.” His co-star on the short-lived 2014 CBS sitcom The McCarthys, Jimmy Dunn, who has done years of stand-up, thinks he has what it takes, too: “He’s got this overwhelming charisma, which you definitely need to do standup. And •

 91 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

he is incredibly funny—he can tell a story. That’s what comedy is about.” It’s this stage presence and moments between the polished routines, like the Vegas gaffe, when the guys are unapologetically real, that resonate with fans as much as their familiar dance moves. (An avalanche of pelvic thrusts, delivered with gusto and a wink during “The Right Stuff ” these days gets a pop, too.) What makes a show even more electric for me is any moment of connection with one of the guys—a high-five with Donnie as he walks through the crowd, a wave from Jon, or the chance to stare at Joe as he looks right back at me, singing, as if singing for me. I was relieved to read in Nikki Van Noy’s biography of the band that Joe understands exactly what I’m talking about. Back in 1990 he was a huge Madonna fan and would listen to Like a Prayer over and over and over again on his tour bus. “I was seventeen and Madonna was thirty-one,” he recalled. “I went to Worcester Centrum and I was right in the front row, and she looked at me and winked at me. It sounds clichéd, but right at that moment, I was like, ‘Oh my God. We do that every night when we look at someone.’”8 “So much of what we did has to do with our charisma and our showmanship,” Joe told me in 2014. “We were good singers, but what we thrived on was the show. Getting up on stage and singing for our supper. Just going for it, working it the hard way. Our first year of making it, we performed at the Apollo—and we killed ’em. We got a standing ovation. That kind of stuff, it’s old school. People throw around ‘old-school’ all the time but we came up that way. Getting up on stage and showing ’em what you got.” •

 92 •

Put You in a Trance

Our brains are incredible processors. But what is actually going inside them when we hear music? Berklee’s Susan Rogers admits that music is a “mysterious stimulus,” but the growing field of music cognition is helping us learn more and more about its particular alchemy. “A lot of things are happening,” she says in answer to my question. “Music, as a reward, lights up the same areas of the brain that respond to other things that excite us and make us happy—sometimes food or sex. It sends a little flood of neurotransmitters to our body that are working on different planes.” The groove or the drumbeat is synchronizing our motor system, she says. Meanwhile, our brains are also processing other layers of the music. “The lyrics are answering questions for us or solving problems or accompanying us on a journey.” Other parts such as chord changes and harmony and melody can also be “deeply, deeply moving,” she says. So, what if we were to turn the house lights onto the fans—what is happening in the collective audience brain during a New Kids concert? •

 93 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

“There is so much more stimuli when we hear live concerts,” says Rogers. “We get to watch performers’ body gestures and that will mimic emotions in the music. Then, through the emotional contagion, we will begin to feel what the singer is feeling. When I listen to Led Zeppelin, I feel … not like Robert Plant, but I feel, there is a Led Zeppelin-ish quality about them that is unique to them and I like feeling like that.” No doubt, New Kids fans love the New Kids-ish quality they feel during a live show, but is there something else at play during those concerts today? Is it nostalgia that causes the excitement that swells inside as we wait for a New Kids concert to begin, almost three decades after we first heard them? Novelist Emma Straub (The Vacationers; Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures) remembers seeing Joe at a solo show in 1999. She had never seen the New Kids in concert when she was younger, but she knew their music back to front, and Joe had always been her favorite. I asked her if it was nostalgia she felt when she first saw him appear on stage. “No, it was alive,” she says. “The feeling was alive. I went in not knowing how I was going to feel, but when the lights went out and he was about to come on, my heart was racing and I was beside myself. I couldn’t believe what was about to happen, that I had figured out a way to actually be there standing in that room. It wasn’t nostalgia; it was pure excitement. It was thrilling.” “I think there is a nostalgic component,” says Rogers. “But there is also the satisfaction of having your expectations met. Music is a lot like food in that we can have a craving for it and we want that same taste—to know •

 94 •

P ut Y ou in a T rance

exactly what we are going to get—and yet we are still delighted and happy when we get it. It is very satisfying.” Some of this has to do with associative memory, Rogers explains. “Say, if you are out with your girlfriend and had a really good time and a song was on either in the car or the club, or when you were out shopping … When you hear that song later, it will subconsciously trigger some of the association. So if you heard it during the happiest moment of your life, hearing that song [again] is going to make you happy.” Scientists have learned that the thing making us so happy is dopamine, a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centers, helps regulate movement and emotional responses, and enables us to see rewards, and take action to move toward them.1 What interested me most when I first read about Valorie Salimpoor’s and Robert Zattore’s research in the New York Times was not simply their explanation that dopamine was released in the brain when pleasurable music was heard. It was their description of how the levels of dopamine were amplified. “What’s interesting,” says Salimpoor, “is that dopamine is usually increased when you know something that you like is coming up—you’re very excited about it and you’re anticipating it. That anticipation is really what’s releasing the dopamine.” From a biological perspective, she says, this process happens to reinforce behaviors that are necessary for survival—things like eating and sex. It’s surprising that music triggers a similar response. When we listen to music, says Salimpoor, “what we are essentially doing is recognizing patterns and sounds over time. Each of •

 95 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

those sounds by itself doesn’t have any reward value. It’s not exciting. But when you organize those sounds together into some kind of pattern—it’s the way the brain interprets those patterns that gives us this intense pleasure.” Even scientists find this mind-blowing, because “music is not even tangible,” says Salimpoor. “It’s fleeting—it’s not something you can hold on to.” They think the pleasure lies in our recognition of the patterns we are hearing, based on all the music we have heard in the past. In a 2013 study Salimpoor and her colleagues looked into what happens when someone listens to a new piece of music. They found that “essentially you’re activating these areas that are storing the content.” Meanwhile, other parts of the brain are forming predictions. “If these predictions are right on or even better than you expected, then you get activity in the dopamine areas.”2 What about when we hear music that we’re familiar with? “If you’re listening to a piece of music you know extremely well, in most cases you wouldn’t necessarily get a lot of dopamine released because there are no surprises,” says Salimpoor. “But this is where anticipation kicks in. The anticipation is what causes the dopamine release.” I asked Salimpoor if we would get that same release if the singer did a song we know differently—in a different tempo or key or if they added a new chord change to what we expect. Would we process that surprise in the same way? “It depends on our very personal templates, whether we would consider that a pleasant surprise or not,” she replied. “If it’s a pleasant surprise, then yes, absolutely.” •

 96 •

P ut Y ou in a T rance

You can see where I am going with all this. Whether through the familiarity or the chance that New Kids may do something completely new with one of their bestknown songs, does dopamine have something to do with the enduring power of Hangin’ Tough, especially in its live concert incarnation? According to Salimpoor, yes. “Going to the concerts and getting excited—anticipating it and then walking through the doors right before the five singers come out on stage, there is so much build-up in that excitement,” she says. “That build-up is what releases dopamine in the brain.” Even though New Kids fans may have previously seen the guys live, the anticipation of what’s to come seems to keep them coming back again and again—to see them sing the same songs time and time again. Sure, the guys throw in new tracks, but the loudest screams are always for the songs off Hangin’ Tough. As the first drum beats of “Hangin’ Tough”—every show’s finale—pound through the dark and the strobe lights flash, entire stadiums lose their minds. They know what’s coming, and they love what’s coming. Salimpoor explains that this is related to the brain’s reward systems. “If something happens in our environment, these reward systems help determine how significant it is—how important. If it’s really important, they release dopamine so you can remember it for later.” Again, the all-important age of fourteen is relevant here. These systems, she says, are “really overactive in adolescents,” so anything that we consider significant at that time is exaggerated. “That’s how it also gets recorded in the brain,” says Salimpoor. “Here’s an example: If you •

 97 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

have a crush on someone during the teenage years, it seems to be so overwhelming and powerful. People often describe it as more powerful than later on in their lives. That’s because the systems are so overactive during adolescence that the emotions are considered so much stronger than they really should be.” Hmm. So we’ve basically set ourselves up to love New Kids as adults way back when we were fourteen? Bingo. “So this is probably one of the biggest explanations of why, if you start off liking New Kids on the Block—if you had these wonderful emotions and memories associated with that and then the reward systems kicked in to give more value to that in the brain—then they are going to have a much bigger impact on you.” The exaggerated emotions and the exaggeration of their reward value is what makes sure the music and the memories are imprinted in the brain. “That’s what dopamine does.” Salimpoor, who was a New Kids fan herself as a teenager, admits that it helps to throw in the crush factor on top of the music—that “you have five cute boys” as part of this equation. Speaking of rewards, another one of Salimpoor’s interests is neuroeconomics, which I realize is something I’ve already been thinking about, although in my own head I call it “New Kid Math”: the detailed consideration and calculation that goes on for a New Kids fan when deciding whether or not to go to yet another concert, and, if so, how many and which ones? Which ones are the most likely to generate the greatest reward—and by that, I realize now, I mean which will give us the biggest hit of dopamine? •

 98 •

P ut Y ou in a T rance

“Neuroeconomics really has to do with rational decision making,” says Salimpoor. “The reward systems are always in some sort of an argument with the rational systems of the brain. When something exciting happens, your reward systems kick in and tell you that this is very exciting and rewarding and you should do it. Then all of a sudden the frontal lobe kicks in and says, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s consider all aspects of this. Let’s consider future consequences, let’s consider current consequences; let’s think about what different alternatives might be.’” It’s a scenario many Blockheads can relate to, which has always made me wonder, does this mean fans are essentially junkies? Not just constantly wanting another hit of their drug, but doing so because they are always trying to recapture the best time—the first time they saw New Kids? “When people do cocaine for the first time, it’s very powerful and very exciting,” says Salimpoor, who cautions that while what I described is similar, there are crucial differences as well. “The second and the third and fourth time they do it, it’s never really as good. Every time, they’re trying to get those feelings back again. Novelty also in itself releases dopamine, so the first time is usually the best.” What makes the New Kids addiction scenario different has to do with how the brain processes dopamine. “Cocaine is an exogenous drug, meaning it’s not being produced in your body; it’s coming from outside. The more people do it, the more they get desensitized,” says Salimpoor. “But endogenous dopamine [the kind our body creates itself, as it does when listening to music] can be addictive in a good way.” •

 99 •

HANGIN’ TOUGH

The neuroeconomics come into play, says Salimpoor, because “you are willing to do anything to experience that feeling again. And the better you are able to replicate it, the more you’re willing to pay to re-experience that feeling.” Luckily, for most Blockheads at least, there is no reason to call the producers of Intervention just yet. At least not from a scientific point of view. “It’s not bad for you; it’s not going to give you withdrawal symptoms,” says Salimpoor. “That’s the cool thing about how music can release dopamine—it’s natural, not necessarily a bad addiction that’s going to destroy your life.” Blockheads should also take solace in the fact that the New Kids understand. “I listen to ’80s [music] on Sirius,” says Joe. “You get a goofy, evergreen, youthful feeling when you listen to it. You know, ‘Come on Eileen’ or a Journey song or ‘Shoop.’ It’s a reminder that our music does that for our fans. It can help them let go and remember and fantasize and just get away through our music. I can totally relate.”3

 100 •

•

BH Love Eternal

It’s rare to see Donnie Wahlberg lost for words, but on October 9, 2014, he struggled to find the right ones in between tears. His bandmates had nominated him to be the designated speaker as the New Kids attended the unveiling of their star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “When we started all those years ago … we were playing in empty high school gyms, playing just for the love of what we were doing. And if there’s one thing we really, really wanted to get out of all of this—it was you. We wanted our Blockheads. We wanted …” he paused to pat his heart, and wipe his eyes. “We wanted someone to share this journey with. We can write a million songs. We can wear the best clothes. We can go on a million TV shows. We can do dance steps until we’re blue in the face. Without you, it means nothing.” He was addressing the two thousand fans who had been waiting on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea Avenue since the early morning for this moment. He was also addressing every Blockhead around the world watching the ceremony stream live online from their offices, their homes, and their cars.  101 •

•

HANGIN’ TOUGH

“Our Blockheads are the sixth New Kid. You’re more than fans. You are our friends. You are …” Again, Donnie choked up and paused to collect himself. “You are our family. You are the foundation that inspires us every day, to get up and keep doing this. To say, ‘To hell with the naysayers. To hell with our crinkly bones.’ To keep going, to keep digging in, to keep working. You guys are our fuel, our energy—our inspiration. We love you and we know that this would never happen without you, so thank you so much. To all the Blockheads around the world, we love the shit out of you.”1 — New Kids on the Block did not want to participate in this book. Or, at least, their management didn’t want them to, for reasons never offered. I found this perplexing, since this is one of the few written tributes to something they so rarely get credit for—their music. And I’m a Blockhead. Doesn’t that make me their friend? Family? I can’t say why they (or their management) chose not to talk to me, although one could guess it’s because it’s not about their current music, or simply because it’s not an official project their team has control over. They’re certainly not press shy—the five guys have appeared on major network shows and in big magazines recently. Donnie has been interviewed by WebMD.com, and all of the guys weighed in on the virtues of toilet paper and going commando for a Cottonelle “correspondent.” I made several attempts to reach the guys in the band directly, to appeal to them as a fan as well as a serious writer who wanted to honor their music and pay tribute  102 •

•

B H L ove E ternal

to Hangin’ Tough. I traveled to Vegas to catch their only North American shows of 2014; I went to Philly to see Jordan perform with the Backstreet Boys’ Nick Carter; I flew to LA to attend a taping of The McCarthys before it was canceled. And, as I mentioned at the outset, I flew to New York City so I could watch them film what was a commercial disguised as a fan-club-only concert. I managed to get an interview with Joe, tied to his press for The McCarthys, in late 2014 and on the call I asked him a few New Kids questions, like whether or not he got sick of singing the songs from Hangin’ Tough: “Noooo,” he replied. So, do you like those songs? “I do,” he told me. “They all have a special place. We’re not going to put the CD in and listen to the songs, you know what I mean? But it’s a privilege to get to sing these songs for fifteen thousand people … and celebrate it and be a rock star. That doesn’t get old.” Some people might credit the eventual success of Hangin’ Tough to Maurice Starr’s blind faith and hit-formula songwriting; others might point to the fact that the music business is essentially a lottery. Or was it blind luck that a Tampa deejay decided to play a song that wasn’t being supported by the record label? However you view it, there is one critical component of the equation that doesn’t change—the amount of work that five young guys put into what began as an afterschool project but became a show that would change their lives forever. As I completed these pages, the New Kids were kicking off their 2015 Main Event tour. Dopamine was flying around those arenas like the confetti that kept falling from  103 •

•

HANGIN’ TOUGH

the ceiling. It doesn’t matter to fans that they’ve heard the same songs hundreds, if not thousands, of times before. To them—to us—it doesn’t matter if Maurice Starr did or didn’t rip off the Jackson Five or New Edition when he wrote “Please Don’t Go Girl.” Blockheads couldn’t care less if New Kids didn’t write or play a note on any of their albums. All they care about is seeing their five guys up on stage, singing and dancing for them. Fans love the music, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not about the music alone. Peel away these songs and put them in another group’s mouths and bodies and fans wouldn’t love them as much. Similarly, New Kids could probably sing whatever they wanted—any cover at all— and fans would eat it up. (Case in point: Joe’s shirtless cover of “Sweet Dreams,” or Jordan’s earlier renditions of “Kiss.”) There are, no doubt, fans who sometimes think of Maurice Starr, who are grateful that he wrote the songs he did for New Kids. But the real power of Hangin’ Tough lies firmly in the hands of Jon, Jordan, Joe, Donnie, and Danny. If Starr was the sole secret to the album’s success, why hasn’t he replicated anything like it since? It’s not like he hasn’t tried. He’s cooked up many new groups using his secret ingredients and yet no “cake,” no New Kids or anything approaching their level of success, has come out of his kitchen since 1990. One of his biggest hit songs, “Step by Step,” first made its debut in 1987, but if the genius is in the songwriting alone, why didn’t the Superiors make it big with that version? Success of the NKOTB magnitude transcends a formula of talented songwriter with a bag of tricks plus five kids plus hours of singing and dancing lessons.  104 •

•

B H L ove E ternal

Meanwhile, the power of the five guys in New Kids on the Block is as potent as ever. Their appeal onstage and on record is amplified today in a very real and significant way by their presence on social media. The New Kids took to Twitter with gusto in 2009 and it’s still their go-to forum for communicating with their fans. Donnie in particular has shaped a Twitter universe where he is a ringleader, a guru—a “Global Defender of BH Love for Life,” as he puts it. He engages in conversations with fans and tweets replies using a chosen buzzword (#Twug, #Cuff, #Love, #MissYouMuch) to hundreds of people in the space of a few hours. He posts motivational statements and gently chides fans for getting snarky or negative. All five New Kids tweet, but it’s Donnie’s commitment to the medium that has earned him more than seven hundred thousand followers, a good four hundred and fifty thousand more than any of his bandmates. Where fans used to scream in their faces, chase them down the street, and cry like babies if they met their favorite New Kid back in the day, now they can carry on a conversation with them. The guys make themselves appear more accessible than they were at the height of their fame, even if it’s a sleight of hand. They seem to give just enough of themselves to keep the fans hooked and wanting more. In this way, they are forever unattainable, which is seductive in and of itself. In the final days of writing this book, and on the first day of their 2015 tour in Las Vegas, I experienced this inexplicable approachable-yet-just-out-of-reach feeling first-hand, along with Donnie’s latest fascination— Periscope, the live streaming app. As I entered the backstage area of Mandalay Bay Event Center (after  105 •

•

HANGIN’ TOUGH

springing for the “VIP Upgrade” ticket, which included a front-row seat for the show and a photo op with the band) Donnie held out his phone and proceeded to film our “meet and greet.” Fans at home watched and commented “Hi, Donnie!!!” as he spoke to the camera and filmed his band mates goofing around. The experience went by in a flash, but I still used some of my fleeting moments with the guys to let them know about the book. They either hadn’t heard about it from their management or they feigned ignorance. So I forged on. I asked Donnie what he thought about when he sang “Hangin’ Tough.” “Sushi after,” he deadpanned. When I prodded him to be serious, he told me it was his favorite song to do live. “I always look out at the crowd and think about the fans,” he said. “That’s when we have the lights on and I can see everyone. The confetti falls down and I just look around at everyone’s faces. You can see everyone. I just soak it up. Every time.” Their concert that night was in stark contrast to the intimate Cottonelle show. From the boxing-themed entrance to the streamer-filled finale Donnie referred to, it was intricately choreographed, with lots of running across the massive stage, swiveling to face the other side of the arena, and riding elevated platforms that went up into the air and down again in Tetris-like patterns. There were pyro explosions and tuxes, as well as under-thestage “change cams,” revealing the guys in their drawers. But it was all designed, by the New Kids themselves, to try to give as many people in the fifteen thousand-seat arenas a good view—a great show. This was pure entertainment, but they still took the time to joke with each  106 •

•

B H L ove E ternal

other and appeal to the crowd. For Donnie, this meant sitting at the piano and playing “I Need You,” one of the tracks I’d considered album filler, as selfies of himself with fans flashed over the Jumbotron. He teared up as the song morphed into Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me” and he asked the crowd to sing along. To the uninitiated (and indeed to some local music reviewers covering the tour), this might seem cheesy, or even manipulative. But to Blockheads, it’s nothing but pure Donnie sincerity. It may be corny—“that’s as much mushiness as you’re going to get out of me,” he joked when the number was done—but it was nothing if not in character. A week into the tour, he took to Twitter to talk about this song, which he hadn’t sung in thirty years and was never a hit or a fan favorite: “Why choose ‘I Need You’ over any other song on this tour, some have asked?” he tweeted on May 7, 2015. “This moment is why. To honor those BHs [Blockheads] lost or in the fight.” The tweets right before this were RIP messages honoring a fan named Stacey who had passed away after battling cancer; that night, Donnie dedicated his performance of “I Need You” to her. It’s the realness that made the New Kids so attractive to girls in the ’80s that continues to make them so seductive today. “Their personalities are still the same as they were when they were teenagers,” says Aimee Nadeau, the A&R rep for New Kids’ two most recent albums. As a diehard fan, she’d pinch herself when she was in the studio with the guys in 2008. “They’re the same guys that they were twenty-five years ago, just more mature—and more handsome.”  107 •

•

HANGIN’ TOUGH

Donnie has compared the New Kids story to that of Rocky—they were kids with the spirit to fight who had a shot at a title, went for it, and took it. Others have called it the result of the right music for the right time, a perfect storm of pop hooks and marketing. But the story of New Kids is also one of chemistry. Not just the dopamine the music cognition experts speak of, but something you’re not likely to see show up on a brain scan—the chemistry of these five guys coming together not just when they did in 1985 but coming together every day they have performed together since then. I asked everyone I spoke to whether it could have been five other guys, any five guys Starr found at the time, or if it was something special about these five particular guys that made New Kids click and led to Hangin’ Tough selling more than seventeen million records. All of them said no, it couldn’t have been anyone else—it was these five guys. I’ll add that it also has to be all five guys, not three or four of them, for the magic to work. (When Jon left the group in 1994, they disbanded soon after.) Back in 2008, I asked New Kids themselves what it was that made them so special. “Uh … it’s hard to say,” said Donnie. “I think it’s Jon’s dark hair,” joked Joe. Jon laughed him off but shrugged: “I don’t know. Some questions it’s hard to ask us … Because we’re not on the other side,” he said. “Well, that’s what I’m interested in,” I pressed. “What you see from your side.” “What I see is the way we were brought up,” said Danny. “Our upbringings, our families, the way we went to school—four of us were bussed to all-black schools.  108 •

•

B H L ove E ternal

The character of growing up in Boston has a lot to do with what separates us from some of the other groups. For me, that’s what I see every night on stage when I watch [the guys] do what they’re doing. The personalities. I love watching them do their thing every night.” “Along those lines,” said Joe, “This group wasn’t a cattle call. It wasn’t a nationwide search. When you see those groups, they exude that manufactured feel, and that’s not how we were put together. And maybe it feels real. Maybe we feel like the guys from these girls’ neighborhoods or guys from high school they wanted to go after. Who knows? I don’t know what it is. But it’s not manufactured. Who we were was never manufactured. It’s just the luck of the draw in the way it all happened. [We’re just] some talented dudes who bring a lot of talent and a lot of energy and a lot of hard work to what we do. From day one, it was just the five of us coming together and trying to entertain people.” Finally, Donnie spoke up with his own take on it all: “I don’t know if this is why the fans are coming back or what’s so special, but I do think that the fans appreciate that we’re not scripted. We’re just who we are. We’re not perfect. We’re not the best singers, we’re not the best dancers. We don’t always have the best dances. But we do our best. You know? I think there’s … I don’t want to say an earnestness about us but there is a sincerity about us. It was after us that the blueprint was sort of made. It was like, ‘Oh yeah, we need the young cute guy and the bad boy and the shy guy and the tall, dark, and handsome guy.’ But all that stuff came later. We just were who we were.” “So, it’s real?” I asked.  109 •

•

HANGIN’ TOUGH

“Yeah. There’s no script with us. You’re gonna get what you’re gonna get. Sometimes I think it just helps fans relate to us a little bit more. We bring them joy. That’s why we’re here. We’re ambassadors of joy.”

 110 •

•

Pose for Me

All Images © copyright Doug Nichol. All rights reserved. No reproduction of images allowed without photographer’s permission.

“Please Don’t Go Girl” video shoot, Harlem, July 1988.  111 •

•

HANGIN’ TOUGH

Filming “Please Don’t Go Girl” at Coney Island, July 1988.

Joe and Jon, July 1988.  112 •

•

B H L ove E ternal

Jordan and Donnie, “The Right Stuff” shoot, New Orleans, October 1988.

Doug Nichol shooting Donnie, October 1988.  113 •

•

HANGIN’ TOUGH

NKOTB with Doug Nichol, Hangin’ Tough home video shoot, Las Vegas, May 1989.

Donnie, Las Vegas, May 1989.  114 •

•

Notes

Do You Remember? 1 2 3

Daniel Levitin, This is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (Dutton Penguin, 2006), pp. 219–20. Ibid., p. 304. Robert J. Zatorre and Valorie N. Salimpoor, “Why Music Makes Our Brain Sing,” New York Times, June 7, 2013.

It Starts With a Whisper 1

2 3 4 5

Danny Wood, WUAG-FM interview by Jarrell Mason, WUAG-FM / The Time Machine / NJS4E. Summer 2007. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=VTIukvoYhXA New Kids on the Block: A Behind the Music Special. VH1. September 28, 2008. The New Kids on the Block Partnership, Our Story: New Kids on the Block (Bantam, 1990), p. 9. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 29.  115 •

•

HANGIN’ TOUGH

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 22. Jordan Knight interview, September 1998. New Kids on the Block Partnership, Our Story, p. 22. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 57. Columbia Records, “NKOTB,” news release [accompany release of Face the Music], January 1994. Jordan Knight interview, September 1998. Nikki Van Noy, New Kids on the Block: Five Brothers and a Million Sisters. The Authorized Biography (Touchstone, 2012).

Rise N’ Grind 1

Maurice Starr interview by Jarrell Mason, WUAG-FM / The Time Machine / NJS4E, Summer 2007. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zYt5TLoxESw 2 Ibid. 3 Van Noy, New Kids on the Block, p. 32. 4 Danny Wood, WUAG-FM interview, 2007. 5 Jim Abbott, “Guru Seeks Boy-Band Resurgence: Decades After His Greatest Successes, Maurice Starr Dares to Dream Big About a Comeback Featuring 3 Pop Groups He Wants to Create,” Orlando Sentinel, January 21, 2007.  116 •

•

N otes

6

New Kids on the Block Partnership, Our Story, p. 66. 7 New Kids on the Block: A Behind the Music Special. 8 Ibid. 9 New Kids on the Block Partnership, Our Story, p. 77. 10 Paul Graham, “Black Swan Farming,” September 2014. http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html 11 Jordan Knight interview, September 1998. 12 Van Noy, New Kids on the Block, p. 67. 13 Joe McIntyre interview, February 1999. 14 New Kids on the Block: A Behind the Music Special. 15 New Kids on the Block Partnership, Our Story, p. 78. 16 New Kids on the Block: A Behind the Music Special.

Listen Up, Everybody 1

2 3 4 5

David Wild. “New Kids on the Block: From Puberty to Platinum,” Rolling Stone, November 2, 1989. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/ new-kids-on-the-block-from-puberty-to-platinum19891102#ixzz3YLIK5eA2 Amy Linden, review of Hangin’ Tough (Columbia), Spin, June 1989. Jordan Knight interview, November 1998. Joe McIntyre interview, May 19, 2015. Robert Christgau. Consumer Guide review of Hangin’ Tough (Columbia), 1988. http:// www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist. php?name=New+Kids+on+the+Block  117 •

•

HANGIN’ TOUGH

6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13

New Kids on the Block interview about their music videos, VH1/MTV, 2008. http://www.mtv.com/ artists/new-kids-on-the-block/video-interviews/ Arsenio Hall at the New Kids on the Block Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony, October 9, 2014, streamed live online. Variety. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=83cgiXAA10I Ron Givens, “Meet the Man Who Brought You New Kids on the Block,” Entertainment Weekly, June 22, 1990. Joe McIntyre interview, May 19, 2015. Peter Watrous, “Pop View; White Singers + Black Style—Pop Bonanza,” New York Times, March 11, 1990. Linden, review of Hangin’ Tough. New Kids on the Block: Hangin’ Tough [VHS], Sony, 1989. Jon Pareles, “Review/Music; New Kids on the Block End Tour,” New York Times, March 27, 1990.

Space Cowboy 1 2 3

Maurice Starr interview, WUAG-FM, 2007. Maurice Starr interview, Musiqueplus, August 4, 1990. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=B-Qz1soGIig Paul Schneider, “A Starr is Made: New Kids on the Block Creator Maurice Starr Doesn’t Discover His Superstars, He Invents Them—and the Last Thing He Looks For is Talent,” Orlando Sun-Sentinel, March 10, 1991.  118 •

•

N otes

4 Ibid. 5 Dave Tompkins, How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder From World War II to Hip-Hop, the Machine Speaks (Stop Smiling, 2010). 6 Maurice Starr interview, WUAG-FM, 2007. 7 Wild, “New Kids on the Block.” 8 Schneider, “A Starr is Made.” 9 Ibid. 10 Maria A. Sanders, “Singing Machines: Boy Bands and the Struggle for Artistic Legitimacy,” Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 20: 525 (2002): 543–53. 11 New Kids on the Block: A Behind the Music Special. 12 Joe McIntyre interview, May 19, 2015. 13 Danny Wood interview, WUAG-FM, 2007. 14 Joe McIntyre interview, May 19, 2015. 15 Donnie Wahlberg at the New Kids on the Block Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony, October 9, 2014, streamed live online. Variety. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=83cgiXAA10I 16 New Kids on the Block Partnership. Our Story, p. 67.

Click, Click, Click 1 2

Linden, review of Hangin’ Tough. Nathan Cobb. “The Man and the Kids: The Hottest Pop Group in America, New Kids on the Block is the Complete Creation of Maurice Starr, From Concept to Look to the Songs They Sing,” Boston Globe, April 29, 1990.  119 •

•

HANGIN’ TOUGH

3 4

Danny Wood interview, WUAG-FM, 2007. New Kids on the Block interview about their music videos, VH1/MTV, 2008. http://www.mtv.com/ artists/new-kids-on-the-block/video-interviews/ 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Mitch Prinstein, “Why Girls Get Bieber Fever: Hollywood, Are You Listening?,” Psychology Today, January 11, 2011. https://www.psychologytoday. com/blog/the-modern-teen/201101/why-girls-getbieber-fever-hollywood-are-you-listening

Let’s Get This 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

New Kids on the Block Partnership. Our Story, p. 67. Ibid., p. 72. Dennis Hunt. “New Kids Cause a Pop Sensation by ‘Singing Black,’” Chicago Sun-Times, June 16, 1989. Danny Wood interview, WUAG-FM, 2007. Miriam Forman-Brunell, ed., Girlhood in America: An Encyclopedia (ABC-CLIO, 2001), p. 657. William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Harvard University Press, 1995). Mithen, Steven J. “The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body” (Orion Paperbacks, 2006), p. 216. Van Noy, New Kids on the Block, p. 135.

 120 •

•

N otes

Put You in a Trance 1 2 3

https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/dopamine Valorie Salimpoor, “Interactions Between the Nucleus Accumbens and Auditory Cortices Predict Music Reward Value,” Science 340 (2013): 216. Joe McIntyre interview, May 19, 2015.

BH Love Eternal 1

Donnie Wahlberg at the New Kids on the Block Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony.

 121 •

•

Works Cited

Books and periodicals Abbott, Jim. “Guru Seeks Boy-Band Resurgence: Decades After His Greatest Successes, Maurice Starr Dares to Dream Big About a Comeback Featuring 3 Pop Groups He Wants to Create,” Orlando Sentinel, January 21, 2007. Benzon, William. Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2001). Christgau, Robert. Consumer Guide review of Hangin’ Tough (Columbia), 1988. http://www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist. php?name=New+Kids+on+the+Block (Accessed August 24, 2014). Cobb, Nathan. “The Man and the Kids: The Hottest Pop Group in America, New Kids on the Block is the Complete Creation of Maurice Starr, From Concept to Look to the Songs They Sing,” Boston Globe, April 29, 1990. Columbia Records, “NKOTB,” news release [accompany release of Face the Music], January, 1994. Forman-Brunell, Miriam, ed., Girlhood in America: An Encyclopedia (ABC-CLIO, 2001). Givens, Ron. “Meet the Man Who Brought You New Kids on the Block,” Entertainment Weekly, June 22, 1990. Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers (Little Brown & Co., 2008).

 122 •

•

W orks C ited

Hunt, Dennis. “New Kids Cause a Pop Sensation by ‘Singing Black,’” Chicago Sun-Times, June 16, 1989. Levitin, Daniel J. This is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (Dutton Penguin, 2006). Linden, Amy. Review of Hangin’ Tough (Columbia), Spin, June 1989. McNeill, William H. Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Harvard University Press, 1995). Mithen, Steven J. “The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body” (Orion Paperbacks, 2006). The New Kids on the Block Partnership. Our Story: New Kids on the Block (Bantam, 1990). Pareles, Jon. “Review/Music; New Kids on the Block End Tour,” New York Times, March 27, 1990. Prinstein, Mitch. “Why Girls Get Bieber Fever: Hollywood, Are You Listening?,” Psychology Today, January 11, 2011. https:// www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-modern-teen/201101/ why-girls-get-bieber-fever-hollywood-are-you-listening (Accessed March 7, 2015). Rose, Tony. Before the Legend: The Rise of New Kids on the Block and … a Guy Named Maurice Starr: The Early Years: An Unauthorized Biography (Amber Communications Group, Inc., 2008). Salimpoor, Valorie. “Interactions Between the Nucleus Accumbens and Auditory Cortices Predict Music Reward Value,” Science 340 (2013): 216–19. Sanders, Maria A. “Singing Machines: Boy Bands and the Struggle for Artistic Legitimacy,” Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 20: 525 (2002): 543–53. Schneider, Paul. “A Starr is Made: New Kids on the Block Creator Maurice Starr Doesn’t Discover His Superstars, He Invents Them—and the Last Thing He Looks For is Talent,” Orlando Sun-Sentinel, March 10, 1991. Tompkins, Dave. How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder From World War II to Hip-Hop, the Machine Speaks (Stop Smiling, 2010).

 123 •

•

HANGIN’ TOUGH

Van Noy, Nikki. New Kids on the Block: Five Brothers and a Million Sisters. The Authorized Biography (Touchstone, 2012). Wallwork, Rebecca. “Joe McIntyre On His Loyal Blockheads: ‘We’re All Going to Grow Old Together,’” New Times Broward-Palm Beach, June 2, 2015. Watrous, Peter. “Pop View; White Singers + Black Style—Pop Bonanza,” New York Times, March 11, 1990. Wild, David. “New Kids on the Block: From Puberty to Platinum,” Rolling Stone, November 2, 1989. http://www. rollingstone.com/music/news/new-kids-on-the-block-frompuberty-to-platinum-19891102#ixzz3YLIK5eA2 (Accessed August 24, 2014). Zatorre, Robert J. and Salimpoor, Valorie N. “Why Music Makes Our Brain Sing,” New York Times, June 7, 2013.

Online Graham, Paul. “Black Swan Farming,” September 2014. http:// www.paulgraham.com/swan.html (Accessed March 27, 2015). Hall, Arsenio, at the New Kids on the Block Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony, October 9, 2014, streamed live online. Variety. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83cgiXAA10I (Accessed January 14, 2015). New Kids on the Block interview about their music videos, VH1/ MTV, 2008. http://www.mtv.com/artists/new-kids-on-theblock/video-interviews/ (Accessed March 1, 2015). Starr, Maurice, interview by Jarrell Mason, WUAG-FM / The Time Machine / NJS4E, Summer 2007. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=zYt5TLoxESw (Accessed December 28, 2014). Starr, Maurice, interview in Musiqueplus, August 4, 1990. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-Qz1soGIig (Accessed April 29, 2015). Wahlberg, Donnie, at the New Kids on the Block Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony, October 9, 2014, streamed live online.  124 •

•

W orks C ited

Variety. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83cgiXAA10I (Accessed January 14, 2015). Wood, Danny, interview by Jarrell Mason, WUAG-FM / The Time Machine / NJS4E, Summer 2007. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=VTIukvoYhXA (Accessed December 28, 2014).

Video and television New Kids on the Block: A Behind the Music Special. VH1. September 28, 2008. New Kids on the Block: Coming Home [DVD], AGP Management, 2010. New Kids on the Block: Hangin’ Tough [VHS], Sony, 1989.

Interviews Unless noted below, all interviews conducted for this book took place August 2014–May 2015. Jordan Knight interview, September 1998. Jordan Knight interview, November 1998. Joe McIntyre interview, February 1999. Joe McIntyre interview, December 2, 2014. Joe McIntyre interview, May 19, 2015. New Kids on the Block interview, November 2008.

 125 •

•

Acknowledgments

All my gratitude goes to this fan’s biggest fan, Sam Barclay. Never once did he complain about how often I play New Kids music or talk about “that one time” one of them did something hilarious. Thanks for rocking out with me at their FLL concert, your support for this book, and for your feedback on these pages. Love. I can’t believe she isn’t here to see this, but I know she wouldn’t be surprised. I couldn’t have done any of this without my biggest New Kids enabler, my mother Sandra. Thanks to my Dad, Grandma, and the rest of my Wallwork, Burke, and Barclay family all over Australia. Special thanks to Phillip Crandall, one of the smartest and funniest people I know and the reason I got to write this book. Thanks for the push(es) to submit a proposal and for the unflagging encouragement, advice, musical expertise, books, and research notes you shared with me. Thanks also to Christa Ryan for coming with me to a New Kids show and letting Harper hear them before she even arrived. Thanks to Randi Hecht for her stellar copy editing and for taking the Long Island Rail Road with me to  126 •

•

A cknowledgments

Nassau Coliseum in 2008 so we could fan-girl in the second row.

Shout-outs to my fellow Blockheads The first wave: Sharon Woodland and Janice Ervin (BTG 4 eva!); Yvonne Whitty (especially for sleeping on the streets of Sydney for our 1992 tickets) and Karen Clouston. My NYC/MA crew: Zain Garcia, Ann Miller, and Toni Picone. Thanks for the rides, the holiday meals, the IMs, and all the ’90s concert fun. Extra thanks to Zain for driving us to Boston in the wake of a snowstorm for the HOB show. Diana Miller—P1, my partner in crime for so much fun, at Paradise, LIV, in Sydney, and at sea. All the fans I’ve met along the way, including Gianina, Nicole, Ursula, Heather, Jackie, Roxanne, Carla, and the Vegas group. Plus the BHs I know on Twitter, including Jenni, Lori, Maria, and Kelly. Thanks to everyone who has shown support via a Facebook like, retweet, or Instagram heart. To my non-Blockhead best friends, Anna Dokoza and Brekke Fletcher: Thanks for joining me at NKOTB shows, for your love and support of my writing, and patience with my New Kids chatter. Thanks to my friends and colleagues for their delight in this project, especially Matthew Hall, Crazy Legs Conti, Elizabeth Harlow, my Loews Hotels friends, Sarah Greaves-Gabbadon, Juliana Shallcross, John Mihaly, and the FHM crew.  127 •

•

HANGIN’ TOUGH

Thanks to Dani Shapiro, “my MFA,” along with my fellow cohorts in her workshop, for the multitude of lessons and encouragement. Thanks to two editor mentors who guided me early in my writing career: Graham Fuller and Jack Marx. A huge thank you to everyone I interviewed for this book, for sharing your memories, stories, and opinions. Extra thanks to Susan Rogers and Valorie Salimpoor for helping me understand my own brain. Thanks, Doug Nichol, not only for sharing your music video stories, but also for allowing me to share some of your amazing behind-the-scenes photos from them. Thanks for the leads, Christian John Wikane and Fran DeFeo. Cheers to Ally-Jane Grossan and the Bloomsbury team for this most magnificent 33 1/3 series forum. Jon, Jordan, Joe, Donnie, and Danny: Of all the people listed here, you are among those I’ve “known” the longest. Thanks for sticking it out in the early years, and for coming back. Thank you for the thrills, the songs, and the laughter. For the dynamite shows, your time off-stage, and for staying in touch on social. Your music has been the soundtrack of my life, and if I hadn’t been a New Kids fan back in the day I don’t know that I would have become a journalist or moved to the US. I definitely wouldn’t have written this book! Above all, thank you for everything you do for your BHs. Thank you for giving us you.

 128 •

•

Also Available in the Series

 1. Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes  2. Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans  3. Harvest by Sam Inglis  4. The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller  5. Meat is Murder by Joe Pernice  6. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh  7. Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli  8. Electric Ladyland by John Perry  9. Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Sign ‘O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos 11. The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard 12. Let It Be by Steve Matteo 13. Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. Exile on Main Street by Bill Janovitz

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

 129 •

•

Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli Ramones by Nicholas Rombes Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno Murmur by J. Niimi Grace by Daphne Brooks Endtroducing … by Eliot Wilder Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese Low by Hugo Wilcken Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes Music from Big Pink by John Niven In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy Doolittle by Ben Sisario There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis The Stone Roses by Alex Green In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti Loveless by Mike McGonigal The Who Sell Out by John Dougan

HANGIN’ TOUGH

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns Court and Spark by Sean Nelson Use Your Illusion Vols 1 and 2 by Eric Weisbard Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier Aja by Don Breithaupt People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor Rid of Me by Kate Schatz Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel Horses by Philip Shaw Master of Reality by John Darnielle Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs Gentlemen by Bob Gendron

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

 130 •

•

Rum, Sodomy & the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl Pink Flag by Wilson Neate XO by Matthew LeMay Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier Radio City by Bruce Eaton One Step Beyond … by Terry Edwards Another Green World by Geeta Dayal Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69 Love Songs by L. D. Beghtol Facing Future by Dan Kois It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo Song Cycle by Richard Henderson Spiderland by Scott Tennent Kid A by Marvin Lin Tusk by Rob Trucks Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer American Recordings by Tony Tost Some Girls by Cyrus Patell You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen Dummy by R. J. Wheaton

A lso A vailable in the S eries

 86. Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem  87. Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson  88. Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer  89. I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall  90. Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum  91. Entertainment! by Kevin J. H. Dettmar  92. Blank Generation by Pete Astor  93. Donuts by Jordan Ferguson  94. Smile by Luis Sanchez  95. Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven  96. Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold  97. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves  98. The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild  99. ( ) by Ethan Hayden

100. Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley 106. Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica by David Masciotra 109. A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole

 131 •

•