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Alicia Crawford was a USF music student until an old friend asked for her help. Now she's on the national and world stage.
By DAVE SCHEIBER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 24, 2002
TAMPA -- Alicia Crawford is constantly reminded that she's no longer a student at the University of South Florida and just another hard-working bass player on the Tampa Bay music scene.
"Hey, I'm watching TV right now and I'm on it," she blurts out with a laugh in the midst of a phone interview last week.
Crawford, 20, has caught a glimpse of the new video by Backstreet Boy-turned-solo-pop-idol Nick Carter on MTV's Total Request Live, better known as TRL. The reason for her exuberance is understandable: She's not only in Carter's hit Help Me video -- she's the bassist in his new band. In fact, she assembled it at his request only five months ago.
That was when, with a phone call out of the blue, Crawford's entire life took an improbable turn into the fast lane of the music biz, with the kind of twist that most local performers only get to dream about.
To fully appreciate Crawford's excitement and lingering disbelief, you should know she planned to be back studying music at USF this fall. Instead, she was with Carter on Monday on Regis and Kelly, and on the 1,000th episode of TRL Wednesday. Saturday -- three days before Carter's album Now or Never hits stores -- they'll perform at Guavaween, and they're set to play the Tonight show with Jay Leno Nov. 6.
You should also know that Crawford grew up surrounded by music, as the daughter of longtime local morning-drive personality Mason Dixon. As a surprise for her 12th birthday, Dixon arranged to have the Backstreet Boys -- then an unknown outfit of boy crooners -- sing her Happy Birthday. She became instant pals with Carter, a Tampa 14-year-old.
"I'd been playing bass a couple of months, and I was mostly into alternative music, which was still the big thing," Crawford says. "But I wound up hanging out with Nick and his mom at the radio station.
"He said, 'Call me, I'd love to come over sometime.' He played drums, and the whole summer, he could come over like every day in the garage of my parents' house. And we'd write music and play cover tunes. We ended up bonding, and fighting over who was better -- Nirvana or Smashing Pumpkins."
Eventually, Carter and the Backstreet Boys left for Europe, where they launched their careers. He and Crawford fell out of touch, though he once showed up incognito to watch her rock band, Sister Sara, in Ybor City in 1998. "He called to say he was in town, and I said, 'Great, come to the show,' " she says. "Nobody knew he was there but us."
Then Carter dropped out of sight again, immersed in the Backstreet Boys' record-setting Millennium tour and riding the teen-pop tidal wave.
Crawford, meanwhile, kept plugging away locally. After Sister Sara broke up in her senior year at Tampa Prep, she entered USF, and met a singer-songwriter-guitarist named Daniel Marshall. They formed the Christian-rock Daniel B. Marshall Band, which would twice open for national act Jars of Clay.
Things were starting to look up for Crawford's band as summer approached -- it had just finished an album of originals and had signed on to perform four weeks at a youth church camp for thousands of middle schoolers. She, Marshall and drummer Jason Leiter talked about pursuing a record deal.
But then, in June, Crawford answered her cell phone while she was driving in Georgia en route to a family visit in Memphis. "It's Nick, and he goes, 'Hey Alicia, I'm calling from Sweden,' and then my phone conks out," she recalls.
Crawford hadn't heard from Carter in three years, so she had no idea why he was calling. She pulled off the road until she could get a good connection. He told her he was working on a solo album, with this kicker: "He said, 'I want you to play bass for me, and I want you to put together a band for me."
The rest happened in a blur. Carter flew to Tampa to hear the band, which had added lead guitarist Andy Pardue, and gave his thumbs-up. He told them that his management would arrange to fly them to Los Angeles for a formal audition.
Still, Crawford and Marshall struggled with the decision. They called Carter's handlers and proposed a compromise: They could do two weeks of the summer camp commitment, then fly to L.A. The answer was a firm no. "They said, we need to hear you in two days, and you need to tell us in an hour what you're going to do," she says.
Crawford says she and Marshall prayed for guidance. They felt at peace with their decision to leave their Christian band, and summer camp organizers supported them. Then came weeks of rehearsals, the video shoot in August, and an overseas tour in September ("It was like A Hard Day's Night -- 200 girls chased us down the street in Spain.")
"I like to give people opportunities, just like my friend Alicia," Carter says during MTV's Making of the Video, adding how much fun he's having with his all-Tampa group.
Crawford's parents are "really excited, but they miss me -- I've always been a homebody," she says.
In her garage apartment at her parent's house, there's still a schedule of USF classes on the wall. "I wrote, 'No Going Back' on it with a big black marker," she says. "It's just to remind myself that I have to give this my all."
PREVIEW: Nick Carter and his band perform Saturday night at the 93.3 FLZ stage, on Ninth Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets, at Guavaween in Ybor City, time to be announced.