Even if we don’t have a piece of it, we are trying to understand it, because of the things that we’ve been through in our careers.” We are paying attention to every penny that’s coming in, damn near to the concession stands. “Now we are making sure our budgets are right. “There were times we were taken advantage of,” DeVoe says, about the group’s battles with the music industry. Yet despite all the good will, New Edition has a few scores to settle.
There are going to be artists from different eras, like a Missy Elliott, that we will see tour again in the near future.
“You have Black artists who are global superstars, but maybe haven’t toured in a while. “ are starting to understand that there are Black music fans with disposable income,” says Hadley. Joe Hadley, the band’s booking agent at CAA, who helped sign New Edition last year to a worldwide representation deal encompassing touring, film, television, composing and literature, notes the success of the tour has caught the attention of concert promoters who traditionally lean heavily on classic rock acts as arena attractions. Gill summed up the entire experience to one interviewer: “It’s been hell, absolute hell.” “I ain’t doing no more shows.” The concerts left New Edition in debt. Toward the end of the tour, Tresvant had had enough. Security teams for the two camps pulled guns on each other. At one show in Las Cruces, New Mexico, Brown, DeVoe and their entourages got into a fight, onstage. During the course of the tour, each New Edition member traveled on a separate bus. Instead, the 1997 shows were a full-blown disaster.īrown, who’d married pop superstar Whitney Houston in 1992 and whose issues with drugs and alcohol and run-ins with the law made him the subject of tabloid headlines and the butt of late-night jokes, had suffered a heart attack just two weeks before the tour kicked off. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart with 1996’s “Home Again” and a string of solo successes, New Edition was ready for its coronation as R&B icons. (Gill, from Washington, D.C., joined the group in 1987.)Īfter scoring their first No. Since making their 1983 debut with their wide-eyed bubblegum jam “ Candy Girl,” the young singers from Boston’s tough Orchard Park projects had beaten the odds to sell over 20 million records worldwide, highlighted by their self-titled breakthrough (1984), the dramatic “All for Love” (1985) and the landmark Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis-produced “Heart Break” (1988). It was 1997, and New Edition, the most gifted vocal group since the Jackson 5, was imploding.įor Ralph Tresvant, Ronnie DeVoe, Bobby Brown, Ricky Bell, Michael Bivins and Johnny Gill, the “Home Again” reunion tour was supposed to be a victory lap.
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