In 1998, I was driving to work one morning, and I had the radio playing pop music. Then a song came on, and it changed me forever. lol It was I'll Never Break Your Heart by the Backstreet Boys. The following summer, I was able to go to see them in concert. Back then, BsB used to kick off their tours in Orlando, FL, but that year, a hurricane would change their plans. The first show of the tour became where I got to see them: Charlotte, NC. There was one often talked about incident at the Charlotte show. During that Into the Millennium tour, the Boys went up in harnesses and flew over the audience. During that first show, Kevin experienced a wardrobe malfunction and lost his pants. I missed it, though, as AJ flew over my section.
These are some pictures from that show. They were taken with a throwaway camera, and these images were processed onto floppy disks. So the quality is not as good as it could be.
On January 9, 2000, AJ, as Johnny Suede, played to a standing room only crowd at Hard Rock Live in Orlando. I was able to be there that night. Due to copyright issues over the name, AJ changed the name to Johnny No Name for the mini-tour he performed. I was able to attend a second performance at 9:30 Club in Washington DC.
While in Orlando, I met up with friends who knew where the guys lived, and they took me on a tour of the BsB highlights of Orlando including Edgewater High School (Howie's high school), Howie's parents' house, Kevin's house, and AJ's house. We also went to NYPD Pizza, where there was quite a bit of BsB and N*Sync memorabilia, including framed gold records. Lou Perlman was there when we were there, and he was on the phone complaining about the lawsuit with N*Sync. You can learn more about all of that by viewing Lance Bass's documentary on YouTube: The Boy Band Con.
While in Orlando, something happened to my throwaway camera, and the images reflect that. I am looking for all of my pics from the trip, so these are all I have at the moment.
In 2011, I had the chance to see one of the tour dates where the Backstreet Boys toured with New Kids on the Block. I'd been a BSB fan for years, but had never really gotten into NKOTB music. The guys themselves were incredibly awesome, and were extremely sweet when they came up to us at the fence. Only a few pics below. Seats I had were front row at the end of the long stage they'd had set up...right by the small stage that went up in the air. Great show.
