We've got NKOTB Tickets!

Whew. Around ten this morning  I got my hands on some tickets for the NKOTB show in Illinois on October 4th.

Crap tickets, mind you. I had told Lis we *could* go as high as $350/ticket for 'the meet and greet/guaranteed first 10 rows' package (mind the 'could', not 'should'), but the IL version was sold out.

We'd always said that if NKOTB or Led Zeppelin reunited, or Kurt Cobain returned from the grave to avenge himself on The One Known as Courtney and return to the stage, then all bets were off. Besides, that's what the economic stimulus  package is for, right?

New Jersey still had some of the packages left, and I was willing to make the trip since I've never been to NY/NJ and might've been able to work the September concert in with a Yankees game, but Lis vetoed it.

(Fly halfway across the country  just  for the New Kids? Don't forget, on Dec 31st, 1999 we rang in the millennium at a Boston bar listening to Joey McIntyre perform live.)

Instead, the second the internet sale for IL started I was there typing away. My wife's friend Jolene wanted to go with us - her man being a Non-Believer- and that 3rd seat proved elusive.

Within 4 minutes the site said the show was sold out of three consecutive seats, so I threw Jo to the curb and tried for two tickets. Nothing. It was selling out. A few minutes later, the same thing, and then on a whim I typed in '3' again and boom, someone had forfeited their tickets and we had ours.

They are about as far away from the stage as I am from being anorexic, but they are tickets. I console myself with the knowledge that  Lisa has been within feet of Joe and Jordan over the last ten years, and that someday Donnie will star in the film version of one of my novels and we'll have the guys over for lunch.  ;)

* * * *

For fans:

On their myspace page, linked to on the prior NKOTB post, there's a very good article about the reunion. I must say they display surprising maturity - yeah, yeah, the youngest is three months older than me - but there's a lot of crap they put up with over the years. The inclination, I would think, would be to spin a good PR tale and get on with it.

But they acknowledge their past, crediting Maurice Starr and once again bluntly stating stating that they were preceded by New Edition. Joe, being Joe, mentions that one of the best things about the reunion is that all the female fans are now of legal age - and then mentions his wife will  tag along to keep him out of trouble.

Here's how the reunion came about, told mostly in the words of the ever-talkative Donnie:

The brand new New Kids album was really sparked when Wahlberg was in New York for a costume fitting for the upcoming film Righteous Kill that finds him living out another life-long dream by acting in a film alongside two of his greatest heroes, Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino . . .  Finding himself around the block, Wahlberg visited the office of his longtime music lawyer who handed him a demo tape  . . .

Putting the CD on while driving a few days later, Wahlberg heard two songs that spoke to him powerfully. “I got in the car in Boston on my birthday and I popped it in,” he recalls. “ The first song was called ..Click, Click, Click’ and from the minute it started, it just grabbed me. . . – I immediately recognized that Joey McIntryre is going to love this record, Jordan Knight is going to love this record and I love this record. The music speaks to all of our sensibilities, but they’re all totally different. It was hip-hop and honest enough for me. It was soulful enough for Jordan and pop and unselfish enough for Joe. It just had it all.

After years of blocking any reunion, Wahlberg was suddenly energized and drove to Jordan Knight’s house that night and played him the songs, “I told him. ..Jordan, this could be the moment right here.’ Jordan heard ..Click, Click, Click’ and he loved it. Then I emailed them to Joe and the same reaction — and more importantly his wife cried. So I pulled out my checkbook and we started going.”

“We’re not kids, we’re just the guys now,” Donnie Wahlberg says  . .Long the hold out from any sort of New Kids On The Block reunion, Wahlberg – who has enjoyed considerable success as a constantly working actor in the intervening years – has long made it clear that he had absolutely no interest in simply cashing in on the Kid’s good name. . . .“We never sold the New Kids house to anyone. And until we got together in a recording studio in Orlando two months ago, I haven’t even been in the same room with these five guys for fifteen years.”

 . . over the years, I’ve often thought I’d like to experience the group with that feeling of self-respect — instead of just the fame and hysteria, so it’s not about just getting something back, but about really doing something.” 

The bit about not being in a room together for 15 years needs an explanation. It's true all five might not have been in the same room, and there is some hint of bad blood in the past between John and Joe because of John's exit from the group. Still, Donnie and Joe have been in contact,  as has Donnie and Danny, Joe and Jordan, and of course Jordan and John. They obviously weren't strangers over the years.