"Promoting the new CD “Irresistible,” Jessica Simpson is bringing her Dreamcatcher tour to Carowinds Paladium Amphitheater Sept. 2. featuring an A-list of pop performers.
No doubt the lineup of titillating teen heartthrobs and honeys will have adolescent fans (and possibly some parents and older siblings) finding sugary visions of superstars dancing in their heads. The ticket is a 50-50 split with new girls on the block Eden’s Crush and Toya pumping up the girl power and crossover Christian group Plus One tipping the testosterone scales.
But, says the show’s other featured male group, Youngstown, “we’re the only one of our kind on the tour.”
Group member James Dallas says, “We feel bad for being on the tour because everybody’s so clean and we’re walking around with tattoos …”
Reality check. When the Ohio-based trio finally made some noise with their contribution to the 1999 live-action movie “Inspector Gadget,” critics immediately tagged and bagged them in the “boy band” division.
After all, they had all the right elements: perfect hair and Noxzema-clean faces, funky gear and bodies from pre-pubescent heaven.
And, the most important component of all, even Mom wasn’t embarrassed when watching them shake their bon-bons.
Members of Youngstown, so named for the city from which they hail, are still dancing machines. But they can no longer stomach (the word they used was “hate”) being pigeonholed in a category with the likes of 5ive and 2Gether, soulDecision, LFO and O-Town, or the big boys — Backstreet, N*Sync and 98 Degrees.
Dallas explains he and bandmates Sam Lopez and David “D.C.” Yeager are bonafide artists who have been writing, producing and playing music, either individually or as a group, years before they were picked up by Hollywood Records. Their hottie image, he says, was conjured up by Hollywood and its parent company, Disney, with their first recording, “Let’s Roll.”
Though already in their 20s by then, Dallas says their physical image was adjusted. They were told what clothes were appropriate to wear, their faces were made up to look younger and their tattoos were covered.
And they were restricted to the style of music the company wanted them to perform.
“We owe our entire career to Disney but we have our own style of music,” Dallas says. “We knew what we wanted to do but didn’t accomplish it on the first album.
“People think boy bands have no credibility, yet Ido just as much work as (R&B group) 112 and Boyz II Men. And it’s a little offensive to me when people call us a boy band. I’ve been in groups since 1990, so that tells you how much experience I have.”
Now pushing to be recognized as legitimate adult artists, Dallas says the group is “running into the backlash” of trying to take back their image and turning it into what they want with their second CD, “Down for the Get Down,”released Aug. 7. Disney, he says, is reluctant to back the project.
“It was a big fight to try to do what we thought was our sound, and a lot of people didn’t want us to do something else,”he says. “The label said we didn’t create this image for you and that’s not what we wanted.”
But it turns out that “Down for the Get Down” is what Youngstown wanted.
Youngstown members are fans of a wide range of music and artists, from Tupac to Butthole Surfers, and they wanted their sophomore effort to reflect that. A “smorgasbord of different kinds of music,” the second CD is a little more than a reincarnation of their “Inspector” ditties even though they sometimes retain a little of their adolescent appeal with an occasional “baby.”
Their R&B, country, rock, salsa and gospel roots were obviously influential throughout the album, which has a few tracks “you can get down to,”some “retro pop,” country and rock-inspired songs and a John Lennon remake called “Run to Me.”
“We tried to do so many different things on this album that no one could lump us into one certain kind of music,” Dallas says.
The members of Youngstown were the CD’s executive producers and recruited some reliable outside sources to help them, like producer Oliver Leiber, who produced BBMak’s “Sooner or Later” and played guitar on Chaka Khan’s 1992 “Woman I Am”; Guy Roche, who worked on Vitamin C’s “More,” and Paul Poli, the turntablist on the Black Eyed Peas’ 1998 release “Behind the Front,” whom Dallas describes as “dope with hip-hop beats.”
D.C. is responsible for most of the vocals including the Jackson 5-ish “Float Away” and the first single, “Sugar,” a rhythmically fun song that suggests a little more than first kisses.
“She’s my sugar/And she’s alright/Everything about my baby’s so tight./She gives me sugar, she gives it all night/Never knew that it could feel so good, feel so good …”
“Down”is definitely a more sexually enticing album, another indication of the group’s maturing image. It’s a logical move for the men who are now in their mid-20s and are involved in serious relationships. Dallas says he’s got “a nice little woman sittin’ at home,” a California girl he only refers to as Ali. But, he explains, ambitious females aren’t quite out of the running with him, yet.
“If the game is tight,”he says, “you might be able to tear me away.”
Back to the CD, its more funk and rock contributions include the title track, a tune called “Dance Floor (Part 2),” “Machine”which is a man’s personal declaration of independence, and “So Tight.”
“Babygirl the way you move around /Oh ya know it makes me think about /Me and you and getting down /Tell me how that sounds, you wanna get down /I gotta say that I really dig you/Girl how you move and shakin it /Do you know what you’re dealing with /All I know is I’m feeling it …”
During their rise to fame, Youngstown moved to Atlanta, where the group was in the company of artists who’d worked with R&B/hip-hop super-producers Jermaine Dupree (responsible for groups like Xscape, Da Brat and Little Bow Wow) and Dallas Austin, who has worked with Toni Braxton, Michael Jackson, George Clinton and TLC.
It was these producers with whom Youngstown would have liked to work.
“But you get into a situation where it’s a money thing,” Youngstown’s Dallas explains. “You have this much money to produce this album and it costs this much to get this producer.”
If this album produces the right revenue, they believe working with those dream producers might be a possibility next time.
For now, they hope their position on the Dreamcatchers tour will impress existing fans and attract new ones as they keep pushing for their creative independence and promoting the new album.
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