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SUZANNAH GONZALESIt seems so long ago that her world revolved around New Kids on the Block. Would meeting one of her pop idols change that preteen image?
I'm 26, old enough to know that admitting I was a hard-core New Kids on the Block fan is not cool.
But it's true. I was in love with them when I was 11, 12, and a little bit when I was 13. It was the late '80s, before they became NKOTB, before they became too much.
I had almost all their cassette tapes, including the Christmas one. Knew all the words, all their choreographed moves, and did a gym-class aerobics routine to You Got It (The Right Stuff).
I bought all kinds of stuff from the mall: buttons, small and oversized, of Joey, Jordan, Jon, Donnie and Danny individually and as a group; a backstage video that I watched over and over; issue after issue of Bop magazine, from which I ripped their pictures, putting one of Joey on the ceiling over the head of my twin bed. A poster of the group hung crooked - on purpose - on one of my baby-blue bedroom walls.
I went to not one, not two, but three concerts. I had to beg my older sister to take me and a couple of friends to the first one. We had lawn seats. While she played solitaire, we screamed our heads off. When we got 12th row at the Rosemont Horizon in Illinois, courtesy of Farah's mom, who waited hours to get $50 tickets, I swore that Joey was singing Please Don't Go Girl to me.
So when I heard that Danny Wood was coming to Citrus County for the first "real" concert of his solo career on April 18, I knew I had to go.
Admittedly, Danny was not my favorite. He was the "ugly one." I was Joey's girl. Or sometimes Jordan's. Never Danny's.
Still, a New Kid was coming to small-town Citrus County, where I, due to random career circumstances, happened to land. It didn't matter that Danny was the ugly one. It felt like destiny.
The sign outside the Zone nightclub on State Road 44 in Crystal River said "Get here early," but my co-worker Kristen and I didn't arrive until just before 9 p.m., when the opening act, AJ Gil from the first American Idol, was scheduled to begin.
What if we don't get in? I envisioned ex-New Kids fans from far and wide crowding this small club, having driven for hours only to wait for more hours to catch a glimpse of Danny, at the very least. I had to get in.
We got in. Easily. After not having to wait to pay the $5 cover, we walked into a sad display of New Kid dispirit. The place was basically empty; the only seats you'd have to fight for were the stools around the bar.
"Where is everybody?" I asked the woman at the door.
"Oh, they'll be here," she said. "We've gotten calls from Georgia, everywhere. They'll be here."
An hour dragged by. AJ still hadn't come on. They were waiting for more people to show up, someone told us.
Kristen started to yawn.
I went to the concert with a couple of goals in mind: one, to meet Danny Wood, as a journalist seeking a story, of course. And two, to possibly make him my boyfriend. (I'm kidding. Sort of.)
While AJ went onstage, I walked into a tiny office to interview Danny. "He's right there," someone said, pointing toward the back of the room.
I was so nervous. I am a professional.
He was sitting behind a desk with his head down, writing. Maybe he was writing a new song, and I could say that I was there when he wrote it!
Hmmm. He was smaller than I remembered, a little petite, even. But it was definitely Danny, though now wearing a goatee and with a pierced bottom lip. Absent Joey, Jordan, Jon and Donnie, he didn't look so bad.
Danny wasn't working on a new song. On legal-size pieces of paper, he was writing in large letters the words to a Phil Collins song he planned to sing.
"Are you gonna read from these?" I asked. There's no way.
"Well, I'm gonna have 'em taped to the floor or somethin'," he said. "Just a cheat sheet."
I laughed. Oh shoot, don't laugh. Bad, bad move. Show some respect.
" 'Cause if it's my own song, you know, I know the lyrics good, but I wanna be able to get into the song without having to worry about remembering the lyrics," he said. During a sound check, he had forgotten them.
"Right," I said, more composed.
"Why'd you pick this one?" I asked him later, expecting him to say something about how In the Air Tonight and Phil Collins had a huge effect on his life and inspired him.
"Uhhh, it's just a good song, and it fits my voice good."
We talked about what brought him to Citrus County, what he has been up to post-New Kids, how being a New Kid will affect his solo ventures, his music, then and now.
Blah, blah, blah, he said, while I thought, I can't believe I'm sitting just inches away!
Danny has been away since the mid '90s, when the New Kids broke up. He did some writing and producing for movies and TV, but it didn't seem to work out, he said. After that, he had a tough couple of years. He went through a custody battle for his son; he won. His mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and died. After those years, he didn't do anything creatively or musically for a while, he said. And after that, he had a lot to say.
His new album, Second Face, comes out this summer. The single is When the Lights Go Out, which broke a record on Citrus 95.3, staying No. 1 on the "Top 7@7" 21 times in a row. Starting May 19 for eight weeks, Danny will play at more small venues like the Zone. He's starting from scratch, but, he said, it's a joy to do his own thing.
Danny said his music now is different. It's more mature. It has soul. He described it as rock with a pop edge. He said that he worked on the album for three years and poured his heart into it. The songs were written from a dark place, he said. There's only one happy-sounding song.
"I made a record for people like you," he said, looking at Kristen, meaning now-mature former New Kids fans. But all I heard was that Danny Wood made this album for me.
"I feel like I got a lot to prove," he said. "I gotta go in there and show people that I'm an artist."
Okay, but why in a little club in Citrus County?
"I don't want to be trying to play in big places and no one shows up and, you know what I mean?" he said.
"The New Kids was a long time ago. It was one thing with the New Kids to perform in front of 20,000 people and hear them all screaming. But you know, someone else wrote them songs, and this is me. So if it's five people sittin' there enjoying what I'm doing, that's worth it for me."
I learned a lot from Danny that I didn't learn from Bop. The fame the New Kids on the Block found was unexpected. They came from nothing, from inner-city Boston, Danny said. All they wanted was a hit record and to buy scooters.
They still keep in touch. "Like brothers," Danny said. Donnie is doing a TV show, Boomtown. Joe has a recurring role on Boston Public. Jordan and Danny are in music. "And Jon's doing real estate," Danny said.
I also found out that Danny can't be my new boyfriend. Now 31 and living in Miami, he is married with four kids: the son of whom he won custody, his wife's son from a previous relationship, a daughter they had together and a daughter they adopted from Russia.
So it would never work out between us. But meeting one of the New Kids was my 12-year-old dream come true, and I had some unanswered questions.
"Do you hate when people ask you about the New Kids?" (Translation: Do you hate or love talking to me right now?)
"No, not at all," he said. (Phew.) "I mean, what am I gonna expect, man? It's gettin' me into a lot of doors."
"What would you say to a typical New Kids fan who came to your show because she was obsessed with the New Kids?" (Translation: What would you say to me if you knew how hard core I was?)
"Listen to the music," he said coolly, "because I'm not going to be up there doing The Right Stuff, dancing or anything like that."
This night, he would perform 12 songs, none of them New Kids material.
"What if they scream for it?" I asked.
"I'll bring you up onstage and you can do it," he said.
"Have this, right," he said, holding his Budweiser up to me, "and drink it really fast."
I'm laughing uncontrollably now. Danny Wood is handing me a beer.
"Oh, so you're here to review the show," he said to me at one point.
Well, no, not exactly, I said, leaving out the part that I usually cover the police beat. This interview is for a possible story I'm going to pitch, I said.
"Well, in that case, how you doin'?"
OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOD!
"How many of you remember the summer of '91 to '95?" Danny's road manager said enthusiastically, trying to pump up the audience. He called out to the ladies over 25.
This was not the New Kids concert experience I remembered. There were no masses of screaming, almost-in-tears girls who hung on every word and sang along to every song. There were some screams, whistles and claps between songs, and one woman, maybe my age, with a video camera stood about 10 feet from the stage.
It was the same Danny, and it wasn't. In the middle of the concert, he asked for a Bud and held one in his right hand while he performed a few songs. Very un-New Kidlike. And he had a big tattoo on his upper right arm.
He looked at the cheat sheets during the Phil Collins song. Sometimes the crowd chatter was as loud as he was. An ending of a song went unnoticed.
"Take it off! Take it off! Take it off!" women chanted before his last song.
I can't believe they're asking him to take it off!
I was horrified and embarrassed for him. So disrespectful, so beneath him. Don't they realize who's onstage?
Danny was smiling and looking like he was thinking about it. Was he really going to do it? No, of course he wasn't.
But he did. He took it off, exposing another tattoo, sprawled over the left side of his chest.
Then and there, for me it was over.
I don't know what came over me. I bought all that was for sale at the concert: a poster, a black and white autographed photograph, a CD by "D-Wood" and a CD single of When the Lights Go Out - for 17 bucks. A bargain!
And now that I have all this stuff, I don't know what to do with it. It's sitting on a kitchen counter, unopened and barely touched.
Danny's right. This time, it is different.
- Suzannah Gonzales can be reached at at (352) 860-7312 or sgonzales@sptimes.com