2. However wait, Lance wasn’t the primary fifth member of ‘N Sync!
That function was initially performed by Jason Galasso, who had identified Fatone from choir of their highschool days and was dabbling within the singing-group arts when he obtained a web page (Nineteen Nineties, FTW) out of nowhere from his previous acquaintance. Coincidentally, he additionally knew Chasez as a result of, as Galasso explained on The Digital Get Down podcast in 2019, he “used to kind of hang out with The Mickey Mouse Club” stars like Chase Hampton and Keri Russell.
After they “locked in perfectly” on a rendition of Boyz II Males‘s “End of the Road,” that was it, he was within the as-yet unnamed group. “I remember I’m like, ‘Dang, Justin’s young!'” he recalled. “But then I heard him sing, I’m like ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter how old he is, he can sing his butt off.”
On the identical time, nevertheless, the bass singer was additionally in a three-man group referred to as Unreal, “so I’m still trying to decide, you know, what I want to do, what direction I want to go in as far as which group I want to go with,” Galasso, who’s in the mortgage loan business nowadays, recalled. “Because I remember, the first time Lou Pearlman brought over some music, he was thinking about the type of music that we would be doing, and I come from an R&B, hip-hop background. That’s my love, my heart, my soul.”
So when Pearlman came to visit with “this European-style techno, I was just like, ‘Hmm, okay.'” So, he went forward and traveled with the opposite guys in Unreal to Atlanta to chop a demo, which he thought turned out nice.
In the meantime, ‘N Sync was beginning to trend a glance they usually had been speaking about placing a showcase collectively for Disney’s Pleasure Island. They even took a area journey to Shaquille O’Neal‘s home to take a look at his dwelling studio in Orlando, however they’d not but recorded any music. And, extra consequentially for Galasso, they hadn’t but signed any contracts.
Fairly quickly, each teams had been making an attempt to get him to signal. Galasso mentioned he took the dueling contracts to a lawyer and, whereas the cope with the trio was fairly commonplace situation, Pearlman had himself written into the ‘N Sync contract as a sixth member, and that contract was “thick as a phone book.” He felt that the opposite members of ‘N Sync had been extra gung-ho than he was concerning the deal—which was true, as a result of all of them proceeded to signal it, whether or not they actually understood what it entailed or not.
So Galasso in the end went with the group that wasn’t ‘N Sync.
