Diary of an Ex-Teenybopper
I can. I look back at those memories fondly. I remember hearing MMMBop for the first time on the radio... It was a cold morning when I was awoken from dreamland by the blaring of Hot 97, a local radio station that has since changed it's name to 97BHT and now to 97.1 and 94.3 BHT. Wanting to go back to sleep, I reached an arm out from the covers of my twin bed, and slammed my hand over the Snooze button, knocking the cheap plastic alarm clock/radio my grandmother had bought me when I had entered 6th grade. Naturally, even as it hit my carpetted floor, it didn't shut itself off. After about 30 seconds of listening to a DJ babble incoherently, I realized that I was never going to get back to sleep without my mother or younger sister barging in on me, so I opened my eyes and tried to wake myself up. Suddenly, I heard the beginning of a song playing on the radio, a song I can only describe as Bouncy. My ears perked up, and I sat up, stretching my back muscles and listening to the radio. I couldn't understand a damn thing the singer was singing, let alone distinguish if the singer was male or female, but the song was pretty catchy. After the song was over and I was still digging through my closet for clothes to wear to school that day, the DJ informed me, as well as any other listeners, that the song just played was called MMMBop and was performed by a band called Hanson. Curious to find out about any other songs from this "Hanson" band, I scrawled down the name of the band and song title on the corner of my English notebook, and reminded myself to go to the library and look up Hanson on Yahoo!. The date was March 24th, 1997. I was thirteen years old, and going to Wyoming Valley West Middle School in Kingston, PA. And I was one of the very first to hear MMMBop on the day it was released to radio stations across the United States. I consider myself one of the lucky ones, while some others may consider me one of the first to go. Either way...
I went to school that day and asked my friend Sarah as we were taking books for our first four classes out of our lockers if she had been listening to Hot 97 that morning. She said she hadn't, and I started raving about a song I had heard at about 6:30 in the morning. She said she would try to find out more on "Hanson" after school that day.
And so it began. Heaven help us all.
To tell the truth, in the beginning, I never even touched a so-called "teenybopper" magazine. Not once did I pick up a copy of Teen Beat or Bop looking for new Hanson pinups. That phase of my life came later on, a few months after, when Hanson posed for the Got Milk? campaign. Originally, I only had four posters up on the back of my door - three Got Milk? ads that I tore out of various magazines, two of which I still have in a scrapbook somewhere, and a poster from Teen, which I had already had a subscription to and was beginning to pick up on the Hanson phenomenon. But I soon realized, after visiting the magazine section in my local Waldenbooks one too many times, that I could plaster my walls with Isaac, Zac and MY favorite, Taylor. Of course Taylor was the "Favorite" in the band - he was the lead singer, the middle brother and he was roughly in the middle of HansonFans' general ages, which made him "avaliable" in teenage girls' eyes. I suppose I started liking the guy because he was cute at first - looks do count for something when you've never met someone and you're staring at images of them flashing across MTV - but I also had the whole "he's MY age" thing going on; Tay (as everyone so affectionately called him, hell, I still do sometimes) was only six months and nine days older than me. To this day, I still remember EXACTLY how much older he was than me - I had drilled it into my own head at the tender age of thirteen.
Call me a teenybopper, go ahead - don't try to change the name for girls like me, that's what we were, teenyboppers. Even though I was one, that didn't stop me from hating my own kind.
I loathed the overzealous girls that shreiked at concerts trying to get the attention of whoever was strutting across the six-foot-high stage surrounded by big, yellow-shirt-wearing security guards and a four-foot barricade, and who was wearing in-ear monitors that wouldn't let any sound in other than their own singing. I thought they were stupid. You don't YELL at someone who can't hear you, why make yourself look like a fool if you're withing sight range? This, for me, included bawling like a baby, any overt declarations of affection and/or screaming like a fool. Hell, when I saw Hanson at Hershey Arena (and we'll get into THAT later ;-) I do believe that I was the ONLY PERSON standing on my chair in the better half of the arena that WASN'T declaring that she loved a Hanson brother until the day that she dies. I just sang along with the songs like a good little Hanson-ite, hoping to God that the Hanson brothers couldn't see me in my sixteenth row seats screwing up the words to Soldier. I knew they couldn't HEAR me, so I just sang along (off-key, of course, and at the top of my fourteen-year-old lungs) for my own personal enjoyment.
Then came along the Backstreet Boys with Quit Playin' Games (With My Heart) in July of 1997. This was another song I enjoyed very much, as well as MMMBop, and hell, I could actually UNDERSTAND what these guys were saying. Well, you can just add BSB to my favorite group list as well!
The first two CDs I ever even owned were Backstreet Boys' self-titled debut (the one without Everybody on it) and Hanson's Middle Of Nowhere. You see, I was kinda CD-Player-Challenged until around September of 1997; I never really had a reason to own a CD player, I had all the tapes of the country artists I loved back then - Tim McGraw (who I still love), Faith Hill, Garth Brooks (BEFORE the Chris Gains incident), Randy Travis, Alan Jackson, Clay Walker... The list goes on. But NOW, since Hanson had released Middle Of Nowhere WITHOUT Man From Milwaukee on the tape, well, I just HAD to get that song. Which began my CD collecting days.
At the present moment, I own over a hundred CDs, most of which are just sitting on my shelf in my room collecting dust. Since Napster came along, I've been downloading songs I want instead of buying the whole disk and just burning them to a CD. But I do have a rule concerning Napster - if I download more than two songs off of a CD that I haven't bought yet, I fork over the $12.99 at Gallery of Sound and grab myself a copy of the disk. I've done this with Eminem, Limp Bizkit, Lifehouse... Many others, the list goes on. But as for my growing CD collection, I have many CDs that no one can find - and finding them was the most fun of all... But plunking down the $35 for the Australlian cut of the Backstreet Boys' Original debut album with five extra tracks on it at the counter of the Virgin Megastore in NYC was NOT fun. I must have over $400 worth of Backstreet Boys CDs alone. Well, I paid that much, anyway. I'm probably going to unload them, one by one, when I'm a college student lacking cash for my daily cinnamon-raison bagel and medium coffee, black, three sugars, at Bagel Art before class. But of course, I'll just burn whatever songs I actually LIKE off the disk onto a CD-R. I LOVE CD BURNERS. Hehehe... But until then, they'll just collect dust on my shelf, I honestly don't know why I bothered to buy the Maxi-Single and the Single for All I Have To Give - they have the same damn songs on them, anyway, and the Maxi cost two bucks more than the single. Hell, why did I even buy the single? The song is on Backstreet Boys, why did I feel the need to go out and but another copy of it?
Because I was a teenybopper, that's why.
I don't know exactly when I decided that I needed to know EVERYTHING about Hanson and the Backstreet Boys. I think it was about the time I discovered Bop and Teen Beat. Either way... Being a teenybopper meant buying the merchandise. It was like a right of passage - I HAD to have EVERYTHING with Taylor Hanson's or Nick Carter's image on it. It didn't even have to be endorsed by the band, hell, all the good stuff never had an Official Merchandise stamp on it. So, naturally, I grabbed a Hanson tee shirt (that I have since lost in the depths of my closet) and one of the unofficial books about Hanson. So I was all set - to begin with, anyway. The yellow cover for MMMBop To The Top by Jill Matthews looked pretty good alongside my CDs for Middle Of Nowhere, Snowed In and the singles for MMMBop and I Will Come To You as well as the Maxi-Single for I Will Cone To You. IWCTY was my favorite song at the time, my favorite Hanson song anyway, and it still remains in the top five to this day, even though I now realize just exactly how much the title of that song, as well as the lyrics themselves, can be twisted around like crazy and taken completely out of context.
I discovered going to concerts around Easter of 1998, when tickets to the Backstreet Boys' Backstreet's Back Tour went onsale for Montage Mountain Performing Arts Center in Scranton, PA. To tell the absolute truth, I've seen the Millennium Tour, and I've seen the B&B Tour... And they can't compare to Backstreet's Back. It was the Boys at their best, genuially happy to be singing to the fans, not just AT or FOR the fans who filled up the seats. It was before any lawsuit was filed, and it was when the Boys enjoyed being onstage just for being onstage. Not to say that they don't NOW, but I think they were having more fun during their First Big American Tour. In late 1997, they toured small venues, theaters and such, and they actually made a pit-stop in my neck of the woods, at the FM Kirby Center. I am convinced that Northeast Pennsylvania is the stepping stone for groups on the verge of stardom. Boyz 2 Men and 98 Degrees have graced the stage and the halls of the Kirby. LFO and 'N Sync have danced around the stage at a tiny (and when I say tiny, I mean about fifteen feet across and about forty feet in length, draw your own conclusions) club called Tinks, which is in Scranton PA, and 'N Sync came back a second time that year to perform in a slightly larger venue, at the Scranton Cultural Center where, most recently, O-Town has occupied. Aaron Carter has also graced the stage at the Kirby this past Feb., and I'm predicting, by his performance, that little kid is gonna be one helluva star.
Truth be known, I ended up getting crappy seats for BSB at Montage. They weren't all THAT bad, I suppose, but if I had waited in line for the damn things like I wanted to, then I would have gotten better. The seats were in Section 400, which, by most ampitheater standards, was the second section back on the right side. We were in the third row in that section, which was good for having five people in a group. I think the tickets were about $32.50 each, with all the charges brought on by calling the 1-800 number for Ticketmaster. One hell of a lot better for the $76.75 for seats in that general area for the B&B Tour.
As I was anticipating the arrival of BSB Day, I was made aware that Hanson was also embarking on their own tour, the ever infamous Albertane Tour. Naturally, I "borrowed" my friend Sarah's computer, modem and AOL account for about three days, trying my damndest to figure out where the concerts were being held, how much the tickets cost, when they went onsale and if they weren't already sold out. Hanson had one show scheduled in Philly, I don't remember exactly where. If anyone does, e-mail me. But after finding out that the concert had been sold out for a solid three weeks, I gave up, telling Sarah, "Well, it looks like I won't be seeing Hanson this summer." DAMN was I wrong.
I found out from my friend Jenn that Hanson was going to be at Hershey Arena on August 15th, 1998, who found out from her Aunt Janet, who was surfing ticketmaster.com for any info reguarding Pennsylvania concerts and WWF events. I was told to keep my mouth shut about it, since I was going with her to the concert, and she didn't want that many people to know about it when she was trying to call Ticketmaster for tickets. I did as she told me and kept my big mouth shut, hoping to hell that we wouldn't end up with cruddy seats.
We did. The seats SUCKED, and when she told me where they were, I immediately opened the newspaper, flipped it to the back and started looking for better seats that scalpers were selling. Of course, I couldn't find not ONE seat better than section E, on the floor, which was where our seats were located in the first place. Normally, this was decent - Section E was the second section back, but - and, like Nick Carter, this is a very BIG but - they were in the 30-something row. I knew for sure that Taylor Hanson, the object of my affection and the image on my many posters (I think it was 200-something at that point) would be approximately the size of my ring finger's fingernail from where we were sitting. I never gave up on getting good seats, I was not happy with the spot I was supposed to be in. Every time I was told the price the scalper was selling the section B seats for, every time I got a busy signal when trying to win tickets from radio stations, I told myself that I was at least GOING to the concert, and that my grandfather had just gotten a new pair of binoculars.
BUT, since I never gave up on getting good seats, I eventually got them. Good things come to those who wait, I used to say back then - and the DAY BEFORE the concert, my local radio station, Hot 97 (scroll up) was giving away two Hanson tickets whenever they played a Hanson song. You had to be caller number secen to win, and I listened for hours for a Hanson song. Right after I said I was going to give up, they played MMMBop. I had already dialed the number of the station on one of my two phone lines, just to ask if they were EVER gonna play a Hanson song, and I got through. I was sitting at the bar in my basement, and when I heard a dial tone, I nearly fell off the stool. But I remembered to dial with the other phone (which was cordless and was set on touch-tone, the other was not), and I got a busy signal. Right as I was hanging up the cordless phone, the DJ picked up. "Hot 97, you're caller number one, try again," was all I heard before a click. I shook my head in frustration, but dialed again. After getting another busy signal from the cordless, I hit redial and, amazingly enough, I got through. I jumped off the stool, dropped the phone with the cord and began jumping up and down in anticipation. "Hot 97?" the DJ asked. Truthfully, I don't remember what I said, but all I remember was him telling me, "You won the tickets! You just gotta pick them up at the station before 5PM today." "I'll be there in twenty minutes," I remember saying, glancing at the green numerals on the stereo which read 3:28PM. The station hours were from 9-5 on weekdays, and it was a Friday. I was the LAST PERSON to win tickets from any radio station in Northeast PA - and was I surprised when I picked them up.
Sixteenth row. Sixteenth freaking row for a concert in which I was supposed to be in the vicinity of the hundred and sixteenth row. This was at Hershey Stadium in Hershey, PA. This place is a soccer field, for better or worse. It's home to the Hershey Bears, whom I'm proud to say that I like. GO BEARS! Anywho, I was pretty much thrilled that I was going to be sitting in the sixteenth row for a concert given by my favorite band, when those were quite possibly the best seats that ticketmaster or any radio station within a hundred mile radius of Hershey Stadium had to offer.
I decided to take my cousin Matthew, who was six years old at the time, hense too young to know that liking Hanson wasn't "cool." NOW, on the other hand... He's going to be ten in July, and the boy cannot STAND Hanson. But then, he was young enough to think MMMBop was a cool song, so he adored them; he wanted to be just like Zac. Drums and all. I thought it was adorable, and it just gave me more ammunition when my tasteless cousin Chris called Hanson girls. *Gasp, how original, right? Yea* And Chris couldn't argue with Matty for very long before Matt gave him his Puppy Dog Face and Chris gave in.
When myself, Matt, my sister Taryn and my mother were walking the twenty-seven miles from our car to the arena, some Anti-Hansonite idiots that were leaving the park stuck their heads out a backseat window and yelled "Hanson Sucks!" Now, is it just me, or would only the biggest airhead say something derrogatory about a band when there's 30,000 overzealous Hansonites ready to lay some serious smack down on any Anti-Hansonite that should come across their path on "Hanson Day At Hershey?" Yep. I rolled my eyes and looked to the other slightly offended and slightly younger Hansonites surrounding me on our trek fro No Man's Land to the arena. "You wanna come over here and say that?" I asked, with a handful of fellow teenyboppers standing behind me, giving their best Evil Eyes with my comment. The girls were silent as the mom drove away, snickering from the front seat. "Yeah, that's what I thought!"
Matthew isn't the easiest person to go to a concert with. Granted, this was years ago, and I hope he's changed for the better, but when we entered the gates of HS, all the little kid did was whine. He wanted a drink of water, he wanted a glow ring, he wanted a pretzel, why was it so hot outside and why did he have to wear jeans, why aren't there any other boys there, why are the girls so loud... Endless questions from bored six-year-old at Hanson concert = brain overload for excited fourteen-year-old at Hanson concert. To tell the truth, I got sick of him about halfway through Admiral Twin's opening act. For those of you who don't know, AT is a band that contains Hanson's uh, manager or producer or someone, I do believe on drums. I could be wrong, the memory's fuzzy, but either way, he was in the band and he was affiliated with Hanson, which made him cool by association.
I got rid of Matthew immediately following Admiral Twin's set. I called my mother from the cell phone I had managed to sneak in without disturbing the metal detectors and told her to get Matthew before I fed him to the Hanson brothers' dog Wicket (which has since died). So, before I could be charged with homicide, I dragged Matty to the gate and waited for my mother and sister to show up to claim him. They came a few minutes later (they were waiting to go into Chocolate World at the time and were forced to abandon their post in line when my aunt's cell phone rang from my mother's purse), claimed Matty and informed me through the gate to wait at the gate after the concert.
When Hanson started playing Gimme Some Lovin/Shake A Tail Feather, I felt this... shoving from behind me. This was not safe at all. I had all intentions to stay where I was, I didn't wanna rush the stage, I could see Taylor absolutely perfect from where I was standing on my chair - but the teenies behind me weren't pleased with their positions in the crowd of 30,000. Soon enough, before Shake A Tail Feather was over, I found myself a few people from the barricade, so close to Taylor Hanson I could see his sweat. Usually this would be a good thing. But for an inexperienced concert-goer like myself (this was my fourth concert EVER, and the three before that were Tim McGraw, Toby Keith and... Billy Ray Cirus - leave me alone, I was nine), this was not a good thing. I was alone, didn't know a damn person in the arena and I was being squished.
Has anyone ever been caught in a stampede? People moving around you, pushing and shoving in an attempt to get to the same place everyone else wanted to go? Smothering you as they strp on your feet and yell in your ear? Heaven forbid you fall, you were screwed. Good luck ever getting up again - this was how eleven people died at the infamous The Who concert at the Riverfront Colosseum in Cincinnati, Ohio. Remember seeing that on Rock Story on VH1? Yeah, I thought so. Anyway, this was what Albertane in Hershey was like for those of us who were "lucky" enough to have a ticket in the coveted Sections A, B or C.
I vaguely remember the rest of the concert - it was basically a fight between me and the teenies behind me when Taylor every so intelligently jumped into the Pit between the stage and the front row of people. I swear I lost about five inches off of my waist when he did that. Needless to say, I didn't get any pictures (for fear that security would take my camera I never even brought it in with me, but since then, I've learned the tricks of the trade in dealing with cameras at concerts) and Taylor didn't lock eyes with me from my third row spot, he didn't fall madly in love with me and we aren't dating. Damn. I think he did see me a couple of times, struggling for oxygen when he walked around the stage a few times - but alas, no sparks flew between yours truly and the middle Hanson brother.
That night, when I exited the gates of the arena, I realized that I could not move my right shoulder properly. Imagine my confusion when I realized I could not stretch without a sharp pain running through my arm. "Hmm. This is painful... What the frig..." Being almost certain that I screwed something up in it when the crowd shoved me toward the stage, I convinced my mother that we go to Hershey Medical Center, since it was pretty much right there, and I was whining like a spoiled brat that I couldn't move my arm. So, at approximately 11:10PM on August 15th, 1998, I was sitting in the Emergency Room of Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, PA, waiting for a doctor to set my arm back in it's correct place so I could go back to my hotel room at the Hershey Lodge.
I have always been hurt at concerts. That was the worst, thank goodness, but still... Every single concert I've been to, I have gotten hurt in one way or another. I'll proceed:
Backstreet Boys, August 1998 (about a week after Albertane, I think) - I had my arm in a sling for this one, due to the overzealous fans at the Albertane Tour. Many girls that attended BSB's Second Coming to Northeast PA (the first was at the Kirby, which practically no one attended due to it being a promo tour for Quit Playin' Games in September of 1997 - those who did attend are worshipped and/or badgered by others) had attended Albertane at Hershey, I remembered seeing them there - although the "Taylor" scrawled across their foreheads had been replaced by "Nick" for the day. My friend who shall be known as "J" is obsessed with Howie Dorough. She was one of the three Howie Fans that filled up seats at Montage Mountain Performing Arts Center on that scorching August day. She was a teenybopper. Hell, she still is, and a self-proclaimed one at that. Those are the best kind, dontcha think? Anyway, does anyone know the song All I Have To Give? Of course you do. WELL, does anyone know that REEEEEEEEEEAAAAAALLLLLLLY high note that Howie hits near the end of the song, I think it's right before the last chorus, but I can't be sure since I haven't heard that song in a while. Either way, "J" got a bit too happy with my left hand since she got excited - she squeezed it. Hard. I swear I felt something pop when she grabbed it. I hit the ground for this one - it hurt like hell. My friend "K" was yelling at "J" to stop squeezing, but she didn't for a good ten seconds or so - she had this happy look on her face and was in her own little Howie World at the time. Obviously, as soon as Howie stopped squeaking (which was and is what I call it), she dropped my poor, misshapen hand. I could not move it without my hand feeling like it was being stabbed with a cleaver. Turns out that she sprained two muscles in my hand - and I swear, every time I hear that song, my hand jerks back - the girl gave me a complex.
And being the teenybopper that I was in 1998, I tried my damndest to get backstage at that concert. I wrote a letter to the local newspaper, asking if I could do a review of the concert as a Guest Editoralist. I knew big words back then, and I'm surprised that I still know them. Hell, I don't even know if editoralist is a word. Either way, I casually slipped into my letter a erquest for a Press Pass for the concert, just so that I could get an interview with the band. The Music Editor saw right therough me. I could have been transparent. I would have freaked out majorly if I had gotten backstage, and he knew it. The newspaper granted me rights to do a review, but they never really got around to getting me that Press Pass. Either way, my review never ran in the paper, and I'm still pissed about that.
I've done some damn stupid things in order to get closer to whoever was my Flavor Of The Week - whoever I was obsessing about at the time. So have my friends, they can't get out of this that easily, we're all nuts and we admit it. Freely. One time that I would care to forget, I sang Where's The Love and MMMBop on a phone line of a radio station for approximately four and a half hours to try and get second row tickets to Hanson's Beacon Theater performance in NYC (ya know, the one that was in Tulsa, Toyko and the Middle Of Nowhere). They had me on hold pretty much the whole time, but they would keep checking up on me to see if I was still singing. After four and a half hours, it was getting hard to sing, my throat was dry. So I stopped for no longer than three seconds to take a drink of water - and the damn DJ had to check up on me when I was swallowing. Which, of course, disqualified me from winning anything. I've started babbling about random subjects to complete strangers in lines for General Admission concerts in order to sucker them into letting me in line with them - GGD in December of '98 - and that one worked. My friends have done equally stupid things too - my friend "J" ran down an embankment at Montage Mountain Ampitheater in order to get next to the Backstreet Boys' busses. She did succeed, but the security guard saw her and told her to get back up the embankment - to which Nick started laughing his ass off. I do believe that she saw Howie, Brian and Nick then, but I can't be sure - this was in '98 and my memory often gets fuzzy going back then - until I ask her about it again. Lemmethink for a minute... "J" also offered to run across the field of a baseball team (the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Red Barrons) in the middle of a game, holding up a sign that said Backstreet Boys Rock on it for me to tape for MTV's FanAtic before it got cancelled. She didn't do that, but only because I couldn't being a video camera into the stadium. She would have if I had had the camera with me, I'm sure. My old friend Lisa offered to sleep with one of the roadies for an 'N Sync concert at Montage Mountain to get backstage the following year when she was only 16... My friend Angie tried to bribe a security guard at a 98 Degrees concert to get backstage... There's a lot more things, but I'm not gonna put them here.