Inside Lance Bass, Joey Fatone’s Friendship

2. But Lance wasn’t the first fifth member of *NSYNC!

That was Jason Galasso, who know Fatone from high school choir and got a page out of nowhere from his old pal. Coincidentally, he also knew Chasez because, as Galasso explained on The Digital Get Down podcast in 2019, he “used to kind of hang out with The Mickey Mouse Club” stars.

After a rendition of Boyz II Men‘s “End of the Road,” he was in the group. “I remember I’m like, ‘Dang, Justin’s young!'” he recalled. “But then I heard him sing, I’m like ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter how old he is, he can sing his butt 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,” Galasso, now in the mortgage loan business, recalled, noting he’d come from “an R&B, hip-hop background.”

So when Pearlman came over with “this European-style techno, I was just like, ‘Hmm, okay.'” He traveled with the other guys in Unreal to Atlanta to cut a demo, which he thought turned out great.

Meanwhile, *NSYNC was starting to fashion a look and they were talking about putting a showcase together for Disney’s Pleasure Island. 

Pretty soon, both groups were trying to get him to sign. Galasso said he took the dueling contracts to a lawyer and, while the deal with the trio was pretty standard issue, Pearlman had himself written into the *NSYNC contract as a sixth member, and that contract was “thick as a phone book.” 

So Galasso ultimately went with the group that wasn’t *NSYNC.