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Depot.com Review: 2/20/00, Greensboro, NC
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Date: Feb 22, 2000 Boymania grips Greensboro on Sunday night 02/21/00 By JERI ROWE, Staff Writer GREENSBORO -- You first heard the screams. Then the arena lights dimmed, green glow sticks that hundreds of fans bought outside burned like birthday candles and five guys in dark body armor weaved slowly toward the stage on lighted boogie boards steadied by wire suspended by the ceiling. The five guys are the Backstreet Boys. And on Sunday night the smooth-sounding quintet from Florida rolled out a Broadwaylike production that will go down as the most successful and well-attended concert to date in the Greensboro Coliseum's 41-year history Laura Palmieri, a seventh-grader from Greensboro, wasn't thinking about the packed arena Sunday night. She was in her own world. She was in the second row on the floor with her fingertips in her teeth, watching the Backstreet Boys and their 10 dancers march military style around the pentagon-shaped stage in the arena's center. "I can't believe I'm in the same room with the Backstreet Boys!" she screamed. One section over, in the first row, Brett Larkins of Kernersville felt the same way. The 13-year-old grabbed her friend and jumped like a cheerleader during a close game, pointing at the stage and yelling, "Oh my God, they are right there!" For many fans, it was a night to remember. More than 22,670 fans packed the Coliseum for Sunday night's sold-out show. The Backstreet Boys sold 20,300 tickets in 78 minutes in one day last December. But like anxious shoppers at a bargain sale, fans scooped also up the few thousand single-seat tickets still left and corralled in minutes the 646 tickets the Backstreet Boys released Sunday afternoon. So, before the Boys flew onstage, the group attracted more fans than any concert since the Coliseum opened its doors in 1959. The show also grossed more than $1 million, a larger amount than any other concert in the Coliseum's storied history, larger than Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, the Eagles or the Grateful Dead. After 3 years of working their phones and working their contacts, Coliseum officials are booking shows in bunches. "We've had so much diversity, with Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, Tina Turner and KISS, Korn, Audio Adrenaline and (gospel singer) Bill Gaither, and all that at one time is what makes a building's reputation," says Leigh Kinnell, the Coliseum's marketing director. Fans of the Backstreet Boys started showing up at the Coliseum around noon. They came from as far away as Oklahoma, Ohio and Alabama. They carried homemade signs, big posters and enough fan adrenaline to turn Sunday night's show into a modern-day version of Beatlemania, a frantic period nearly 40 years ago when the Beatles first arrived from England. You saw it everywhere Sunday. Ride down East Lee Street and a handful of roadside marquees welcomed the Backstreet Boys to Greensboro. Pull-up to the coliseum and see cars, vans and sport utility vehicles with personal messages for the Boys splashed across the side in red and blue washable paint. But sit behind Rachel Bissett in one of the 10 buses used to transport fans to and from the show and watch her bounce as she came closer to the Coliseum, saying repeatedly, "This is so cool! This is too much!" She jumped off the bus and queued up to a Coliseum door with $100 in her pocket, money she had saved since Christmas. Now she wanted everything -- program, T-shirt, just everything. You name it. She wanted it. Why? "Because it's them," gushed Rachel, an 11-year-old fifth-grader from Winston-Salem. Her father, who accompanied her, wasn't worried about her adoration of five guys between the ages of 19 and 28. He saw it as healthy. "We were kids once, and we'd all go crazy when the Rolling Stones came to town," said Steve Nash, 49, an executive for a Winston-Salem construction company. "It's typical of every generation. Everyone does it, and I think it's harmless because 99 percent of them (Backstreet Boys fans) are there because they enjoy the music and want to have a good time." And Sunday night, fans did. They danced, jumped and yelled for their favorite Boy. They stuck temporary tattoos on their cheeks, painted the letters BSB on their faces and wore their Saturday-night best in the hope of just getting noticed by a Boy at one of the biggest tours to ever come through Greensboro. The Backstreet Boys brought in 14 tractor-trailer trucks, 10 tour buses and enough overhead rigging to turn the arena into a mirror image of a big-time circus. And that set-up caught everyone's attention. They craned their necks and tried to figure out which Boy would come from where. But, Brett Larkins was just happy to be there. Her mother rolled in honey and chicken feed and let three chickens eat the chicken feed off her so her daughter could win front-row tickets from WKZL (107.5 FM.) On Sunday night, she called her mother on her cell phone and told her what she had in her hand, the plastic hanger used by Nick Carter, the blonde-haired Boy. A member of the crew gave her the hanger. "Oh my God, Mom," she yelled in the cell phone, "I'm shaking. I've gotten Nick's hanger!"
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