2. But Lance wasn’t the first fifth member of *NSYNC!<\/p>\n
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\u00a0on The Digital Get Down<\/a>\u00a0podcast in 2019,\u00a0he “used to kind of hang out with\u00a0The Mickey Mouse Club” stars.<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, recalled, noting he’d come from “an R&B, hip-hop background.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, *NSYNC was starting to fashion a look and they were talking about putting a showcase together for Disney’s Pleasure Island.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.”\u00a0<\/p>\n So Galasso ultimately went with the group that wasn’t *NSYNC.<\/p>\n