Cred lyte, continued

by Michelle Chihara

All four of the group's singles have made Billboard's Top 10 Sellers lists. They've toured with LL Cool J and with Britney Spears; they just headlined this summer's All That Music and More Nickelodeon festival tour, drawing crowds of 10,000 to 20,000 a night. And Rich Cronin is dating a bona fide starlet.

That's the positive side. The negative: it's hard to keep it real when you're on the Nickelodeon tour.

Making the band In the rock-and-roll world, the basic dream is to form a band, make cutting-edge music, and fill stadiums with people devoted to your genius. In the teen-pop scene, the dream is to assemble a band and go straight to the filling-stadiums part. Mike Caputo, LFO's "personal manager" (the guy who deals with all their logistics and press appointments), looks at teen-pop impresario Lou Pearlman and says: "I know that I have what it takes to do exactly what he did. "I can't sing a lick, but I know how to put together a group -- to pick the best, put together the best." Caputo is starting up a girl group, for the second time in five years, called Poetry in Motion. He says he tried it once before, but found that the market wasn't ready -- plus, the girls got "big-headed." Pop hunger seems particularly strong here in Boston (Caputo is from Southie), a phenomenon that can probably be traced back to the New Kids on the Block and Maurice Starr. Starr is the producer who hit it big with New Edition, the early-'80s Jackson Five-ish boy-pop band. He hit it even bigger with the New Kids, who were white. He created a mini-Motown system in Boston, and now virtually all pop roads lead back to the Kids: 'N Sync's current manager, Johnny Wright, worked with New Kids and Starr; Backstreet's Donna Wright is Johnny's ex-wife; former New Kid Danny Wood produced LFO's first tracks, which they gave to Pearlman. Chelsea native Peter Karalekas is a rapper and now a would-be impresario who remembers chilling with the New Kids back in the early '90s. He's tight with LFO's producers, and he has also been down to Orlando, where Pearlman lives. His boy band is called Just Once. He's got a tour of malls and schools lined up for them this fall -- a well-tested method of building a fan base -- and he thinks he has time before this pop wave crests. "I was told by an expert that it has a seven-year span," he says. "I think it kicked off in '97 when Backstreet lit it up with their first album. So we've got another four years to ride it." And he says he knows how to spot something more intangible than talent: "I look for what follows talent, attitude-wise. Are you hungry? Can you put in the days that I've done?" Maurice Starr himself takes no credit for cracking the pop formula. He thinks it hasn't really been cracked. "If any of these guys can figure out the combination to the lock of success, then they deserve it," he says. The real secret, according to Starr, is still the numbers: "It takes about two million to launch a group. If you got that laying around, then you can hop into the boy-band business." -- MC

Rich Cronin started out paying his dues, freestyle rapping all over New England. He got his nickname, the Lyte Funky One -- hence, LFO -- at a club in New Hampshire called the Coliseum. "He would watch the rappers," says his mom, "and then he just got up to do his thing. It was mostly black guys, and that's how he got the name." He received one of the highest of compliments when those standard-bearers of hip-hop street cred, the Wu-Tang Clan, came backstage after one of his rap sets and told him they liked the show. "I thought they were gonna kill me!" he says.

For Cronin, the screaming girls are all well and good, but props from the Wu-Tang Clan obviously mean a lot more. He thinks the whole boy-band ethos is synonymous with "cheesy music" and ephemerality. Being real, on the other hand, is a matter of street cred, originality, staying power. "We have a good relationship to pop and to rap and to rock," he says. And, like a true artist, he adds: "I just wanna spread my music.

"We write most of our own songs -- every single we ever put out, we wrote. And I just think we're different."

It's true that, among the young-male pop bands, LFO are different: they are without choreographed dance routines. They also have more rap influence. And their lyrics, however bizarre, bear Cronin's imprimatur.

But it's also true that LFO got their break from the Svengali of today's teen-pop scene: Lou Pearlman, the impresario who created the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync. Like those bands, LFO are, to a large extent, the product of Pearlman's behind-the-scenes devotion, investment, and marketing prowess.

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Pop hysteria is nothing new -- the Beatles had their fans fainting in the aisles 35 years ago. But commodifying that hysteria has become an art in itself. And one of the great practitioners of that art is Pearlman, the airplane magnate who also created the Chippendales.

Pearlman's music-industry career began the day his company, Trans-Continental Airlines, rented a plane to the New Kids on the Block. What happened that day is the stuff of legend in the pop world. Pearlman wanted to know how this bunch of upstart kids from Boston could afford to rent his plane. When he saw who they were and what they did, he wanted in on the action.

Not long after, the Backstreet Boys were born, funded and created by Pearlman's company and his newly minted record label. They were not, by any means, an immediate hit. Pearlman says he sank $3 million into them before he saw a dollar in return. He didn't give up. Eventually, he turned them into one of the top-grossing bands of all time. The breathtaking success of Pearlman's next band, 'N Sync, hard on Backstreet's heels, makes it hard to chalk up either group's success to pure luck or unique talent alone.

And then there's LFO, Pearlman's third band. Rich Cronin went to Orlando in 1996 with his then-bandmate Brian Gillis, looking for management like two hungry actors roving New York in search of an agent. In Orlando, Cronin met Lou Pearlman and the band came together quickly after that: Brad Fischetti joined the group, Brian Gillis left, and Cronin's Boston buddy Mike Caputo hooked him up with a honey-voiced singer he was managing: Devin Lima.

Cronin bristles at the suggestion that the changes to his band were anything but organic. "It wasn't just casting, or Lou saying it," he says. "When we went to Lou's house, Brad was just over there."

Gillis, a/k/a Mista Brizz, seems to have left the band precisely because the new management was pushing in a direction that struck him as less than natural. "Brizz" is still part of Pearlman's stable, as are LFO. But Gillis is happy to have parted ways with the band. "I mean, if you look at their albums, I'm on some of their songs," he says. "But all that stuff, like `I Don't Want To Kiss You Goodnight,' that's a straight-up boy-band song, like that 98 Degrees is singing. [BMG] wanted them to go to less rapping and more singing. I believe in a nice little balance of both."

The Pearlman approach is certainly heavy-handed. Donna Wright, former manager for the Backstreet Boys, says: "You could have taken any five boys and done this. Backstreet were given clothing, housing, cars, insurance. Everything was taken care of. Their dinner, their vocal coaching -- everything was paid for.

"Girls will always love to scream over boys. Backstreet is not something special, and neither is 'N Sync. They have their special qualities. But it's a system. You have to have the right people behind you, doing marketing and promotion. Getting you the right deals, getting you respect in the industry. I was there constantly, doing radio tours, getting them sponsorships."

ALMOST HUGE: three years of constant touring has earned Massachusetts natives Lima (top) and Cronin big sales numbers -- though not as big as their Backstreet and 'N Sync buddies have. "We go to the mall, go to the movies together, whatever," Cronin says of the other singers. "Then they end up selling 10 million records. Which is . . . insane."

Now Pearlman's heavy-handed paternalism, and what some call undue greed, has him wrestling with all his offspring over their slices of the pie. Wright, Backstreet, and Pearlman are all involved in legal skirmishes over how the wads of cash they've made should be divided. 'N Sync have also rebelled; their high-profile break with Pearlman inspired the name of their latest album, No Strings Attached. (Read: we are not marionettes.)

In the wake of the high-profile mutiny of Pearlman's other two groups, there are also signs of a chill with LFO. Although Cronin will not speak ill of Pearlman -- "he believed in me when no one else did" -- Devin Lima says things like, "Let's not talk about him" and "I don't owe him anything." Caputo, LFO's tour manager, is more blunt: "I, personally, will be going my own way."

If Cronin is the only LFO member who's reluctant to alienate Pearlman, maybe that's because he alone started out as a nobody in Orlando. Or maybe he still has his eye on the level of fame that Pearlman seems to have handed the other bands. After all, who knows where LFO would be without Pearlman? And who knows where they could go with his help?

"Coming out of the whole thing in Orlando, watching Backstreet come up, and then 'N Sync, I mean, I know these guys," Cronin says. "We go to the mall, go to the movies together, whatever. Then they end up selling 10 million records. Which is . . . insane."

"I don't know if I ever believed I really could do this," he adds. "We've sold almost two million albums now. Who would have thought?" And is that enough?

At the Tweeter Center on August 11, the guys in LFO come out in baggy cargo pants, with Lima wearing a knit cap pulled down low over his ears and Fischetti sporting a tied head-bandanna. It makes you wonder whether they are both having bad hair days. Their show, unlike their openers', does not include fireworks, choreography, or back-up dancers.

That's by choice. "In Europe they had us doing all that choreography and all that garbage that I don't like," Cronin says with a sigh. But LFO pushed against their label to ditch at least the sartorial aspect of bopper pop -- what he calls "five guys dressed up in space suits who dance around and do choreography."

As the primary creative force behind LFO, Cronin is clearly aching for some of the credibility that comes with being perceived as an artist, and aching to shed the stigma of being perceived as the product of someone's smart band-assembly plan. "Nobody put Nirvana together," he says. "Nobody put the Beatles together. I don't think any great group was put together. The New Kids weren't put together. Only one came in later, and that was Joe. They went to school together."

The idea of someone "putting together" Nirvana is, of course, absurd. ("Vince, baby, I'm looking for a voice-of-his-generation who can make rage sell. You got anyone?") And there's a reason "Nirvana" and "New Kids" are rarely mentioned in the same breath. Cronin's effortless segue between the two ignores a pretty important division: in rock music, people play the music they create on their own instruments; in pop music, you get your sound from your producer. There's a reason bubblegum-pop artists are sometimes labeled entertainers rather than artists. But it's being creative in the rock sense that gives you sticking power. And sticking power is clearly part of what Rich Cronin longs for.

So LFO can only hope that their time at the top of the pop pyramid will last. For now, Cronin seems determined but realistic. "Only so many people can have their video on TRL," he says. "Only so many people can be on Jay Leno. We're fighting for those slots." He knows that LFO, despite their platinum record and best-selling singles, are not yet assured such high honors, and Cronin seems not to be worried that fighting for a spot on TRL might, in itself, be part of the problem.

In the meantime he's enjoying the crowds, enjoying dating a starlet, and resolving to fight: "If I go down, I'm going to go down swinging."

Cronin's bandmate Devin Lima, the crooner with the green eyes, seems more resigned: "Who knows what's going to happen, you know?" He seems less worried about LFO's being called a boy band.

"You can call us what you want," he says. "If we rock it, and we're a boy band, then . . . hey, we were a boy band who rocked it."

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Michelle Chihara can be reached at mchihara@aya.yale.edu.