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Published in The Orlando Sentinel on August 13, 2000 Will show go on when TV ends?Walt disney worldron davis/shooting star Going up? Time will tell for Jacob Underwood, Erik-Michael Estrada, Ashley Parker Angel, Dan Miller and Trevor Penick.As season winds down, boy band is far from a phenom By Jim Abbott It`s a sunny afternoon in the last week of summer vacation. Time to search for O-Town mania. You know O-Town, right? The new boy band from Orlando that`s learning how to be a pop phenomenon in front of a prime-time TV audience, on ABC`s Making the Band (9 p.m. Fridays, WFTV-Channel 9). If you don`t know Trevor, Ashley, Jacob, Erik and Dan, ask your kids. Or come along to the food court at the Orlando Fashion Square mall, where the back-to-school crowd certainly must be abuzz about these hometown stars. There`s Martin Ming, 25, the guy handing out free samples of bourbon chicken in front of Panda Express at the Fashion Square mall. Hey, Martin, can you sense the excitement about O-Town? "I don`t know who they are," Ming said, patiently spearing a chicken nugget with a toothpick. "Never heard of it." At a nearby table, Peggy Vogt, 11, watches the show every week but can`t name any of the O-Town members. Inside Camelot Music, Tiana Hernandez, 12, is listening to Britney Spears on headsets. She doesn`t know O-Town. The clerk wonders if that`s the show with Ed McMahon. At the T-shirt kiosk, there is no O-Town merchandise to compete with the neatly folded stacks of Pokemon, Backstreet Boys and `N Sync. No posters at Spencer`s, where the clerk explains why she can`t place the group. "I go to school and I work, so I don`t have much time for fun," she says. If O-Town is this anonymous in O-town, how is the TV-generated boy band going to survive after Making the Band? The midseason reality program, which offered the band an enviable prime-time publicity platform, will air for the last time on Sept. 8. Although ABC remains enthusiastic about the show, there are no plans for its return. Not to worry, says pop impresario Lou Pearlman, who is fashioning O-Town in the image of his previous creations: Backstreet Boys and `N Sync. Equal parts harmony, choreography, hair gel, cargo pants and Doc Martens. Boy bands will be popular "as long as God keeps making little girls," Pearlman says. Besides, he says, there`s no time for TV now. Not when O-Town is preparing to record an album and embark on a concert tour this fall. "This was our game plan all along," Pearlman says. "We always anticipated that it would turn out this way." An album and single would give fans the first significant music from a group that has limited its public performances to "All For Love," a song from the show. Tonight, the group is scheduled to sing "Happy Birthday" -- with no encores -- at an Orlando city birthday celebration at Lake Eola Park. Word is that O-Town will be among the first acts signed to a new record label being launched by Arista Records founder Clive Davis, the legendary record executive whose roster of stars has included Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston and Carlos Santana. The group also has two songs on the soundtrack of the latest Pokemon movie. O-Town has traveled the country in recent weeks, singing "All For Love" at radio stations from Las Vegas to Toronto, where roughly 1,000 fans reportedly jammed the streets. The band met Carson Daly on MTV`s Total Request Live. "It`s been awesome," says O-Towner Trevor Penick, 20, who doesn`t worry about life after the TV show. "I don`t think it matters. We`ve already had the biggest platform ever. We`re just dealing with the music now. I`m pretty sure everyone knows we`re a group." Bandmate Ashley Parker, 18, notes that he is a musician, not a TV star. "Take the TV show away and everything would have been the same," he says. "We would have been trying to do the same exact thing. We just had to do things a lot quicker." Although Making the Band earned generally positive reviews from TV critics, the show didn`t yield the kind of ratings that inspire a Survivor-style national obsession. ABC yanked the series for the important May sweeps rating period, which is used to set advertising rates for affiliates. This summer, Making the Band ranks 78th among 153 prime-time shows in household ratings. It did improve ratings among young adults, 18-49, by 8 percent over ABC`s performance in the time slot a year ago. "It wasn`t a blockbuster, but in a very narrow demographic, people knew about it and may have followed it," said Eric Boehlert, who covers the music business for salon.com. "If it had been a monster hit like Survivor, record labels would have been lining up to sign these guys." Still, the world is filled with pop groups that would saw the arm off a choreographer for a network TV show with lukewarm ratings. How many mall rats can tell the difference among M2M, A*Teens, Youngstown, Innosense, No Authority and Boyz-N-Girlz United? "All of those acts have been on the radio for at least a single, and I don`t think any of them have much traction," Boehlert says. "I get new CDs every week from record labels with boy and girl groups that never get on the radio, never get on MTV, never go anywhere." The same albums land on the desks of radio program directors. They can`t put them all on the air. "Radio stations don`t want to be known as the boy-band station," Boehlert said. "You can count on one hand the advertisers that want to reach 14-year-olds. If you get pigeon-holed as the junior high station, you`re not going to make money. So O-Town sings and schmoozes the radio circuit to show that they are different in a genre that seems to reward similarity. "We had a good response when people found out they were going to be at the radio station," said Geronimo, music director and evening jock at Top 40 station 103.5 FM (WKTU) in New York. "We did our morning show live at the Intrepid, a naval ship museum, and a lot of people came out to see them. This is probably the first boy band to be more visual than musical, but they sounded good." The station was impressed enough to invite the band to perform at its "Beatstock 2000," an outdoor festival concert on Saturday featuring 50 acts on New York`s Staten Island. In Toronto, where the TV show is a bigger hit than in America, police barricaded the streets outside KISS 92.5 FM (CISS) when nearly 1,000 teenage fans came to see the band. "We haven`t seen this kind of hysteria since the Backstreet Boys first came to Canada," said KISS music director Michael Religa. "I guess TV is the drug of a nation, and it`s doing all the PR work for them. People say the 15 minutes are up for boy bands, but it doesn`t look like it." In Orlando, where kids in the mall apparently aren`t ready to rush the streets, radio jocks say O-Town is slowly building a buzz. Band members occasionally visit 106.7 FM (WXXL) to chat on-air with jocks Kid Cruz and Nikki Knight, who both participated in production of the TV show. "Every time they come in the reaction is growing with the audience of the TV show," Cruz said. "The main thing that people want to know is when will they actually do a show. People want to see them perform." But the main key to the band`s post-TV success is even more basic: "It will come down to what the song sounds like," said Pete de Graaff, WXXL music director. "If it`s a great song, they certainly have a national story established. If it`s not a great song, it will just be a Monkees without an album." |