2. But Lance wasn’t the original fifth member of *NSYNC.
That was Jason Galasso. He knew Fatone from his high school choir and received a page out of nowhere from an old friend. Coincidentally, as Galasso explained on his 2019 podcast “Digital Get Down,” he also knew Chasez because he “used to hang out with the stars of The Mickey Mouse Club.”
He joined the group after performing Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road.” “I remember thinking, ‘Damn, Justin is young!'” he recalled. “But then I heard him sing and I thought, ‘Wow, no matter how old he is, he can still sing at the top of his lungs.'”
But at the same time, the bass singer is also part of a three-piece group called Unreal, “so I’m still undecided,” recalls Galasso, who now works in mortgage lending, noting that he has an “R&B, hip-hop background.”
So when Perlman “came in with this European-style techno, I thought, ‘Hmm, okay.'” He went to Atlanta with the rest of Unreal to cut a demo, which he thought turned out great.
Meanwhile, *NSYNC was starting to create the look and were talking about working together to showcase Disney’s Pleasure Island.
Soon, both groups were trying to get him to sign. Galasso said he took the dueling contract to his lawyer, and while the trio’s contract was pretty standard, Perlman added himself as the sixth member to the *NSYNC contract, which was “as thick as a phone book.”
So Galasso ended up going with a group that wasn’t *NSYNC.
