*NSYNC Skips Joey Fatone’s Broadway Debut for Justin Timberlake Show

2. But wait, Lance wasn’t the first fifth member of ‘N Sync!

That role was originally played by Jason Galassowho had known Fatone from the choir in her high school days and was involved in the singing group arts when he received a page (1990, FTW) out of nowhere from his old acquaintance. Coincidentally, he knew Chasez also because, as Galasso explained on The Digital Get Down podcast in 2019, he “used to hang out with The Mickey Mouse Club“stars like Chase Hampton and Keri Russell.

After they “locked in perfect” on a rendition of Boyz II men‘End of the Road’, that was it, he was in the as yet unnamed group. “I remember being like, ‘Dang, Justin is young!’ “He remembers. “But then I heard him sing, I’m like ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter how old he is, he can sing his ass off.

At the same time, however, the bass singer was also in a three-man group called 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 what group I want to go with,” Galasso, who is in the mortgage business these days, recalled. “Because I remember, the first time Lou Pearlman brought some music, he was thinking about the kind of music we were going to do, and I come from an R&B, hip-hop background. That’s my love, my heart, my soul.”

So when Pearlman came up with “this European style techno, I was just like,” Hmm, okay. “So, he went ahead and traveled with the other guys at Unreal to Atlanta to cut a demo, which he thought turned out great.

Meanwhile, ‘N ​​Sync began to fashion a look and they talked about setting a showcase together for Disney’s Pleasure Island. They even took a field trip Shaquille O’Nealhis house to check out his home studio in Orlando, but they hadn’t recorded any music yet. And, more consistently for Galasso, they hadn’t signed any contracts yet.

Soon both groups tried to sign him. Galasso said that he took the dueling contracts to a lawyer and, while the deal with the trio was fairly standard issue, Pearlman had written himself in the ‘N Sync contract as a sixth member, and that contract was “thick as a phone book. ” He felt that the other members of ‘N Sync were more gung-ho than he was about the deal—which was true, because they all went ahead to sign it, whether they really understood what it entailed or not.

So Galasso ended up going with the group that wasn’t ‘N Sync.