20 years later... is there life after ‘MMMBop’?
Brothers Hanson still making music, still going strong
By GEOFF EDGERS
TULSA, Oklahoma — One day, during a recent rehearsal with his brothers, Zachary Hanson used the "F" word. This, in itself, should not be notable. Hanson has four children. He drives a pickup. He recently shed 35 pounds with Lose It! And lots of people use the "F" word.
Except, for many, he is still Zac, the adorable, shaggyhaired preteen pounding out "MMMBop." The drummer in a boy band that sold 10 million copies of its 1997 debut album, performed on "Saturday Night Live" and the Grammys and at the World Series (all in the same year), and appeared on the cover of Tiger Beat with teen heartthrob Jonathan Taylor Thomas.
Zac isn't reminiscing as he talks over a new song, "I Don't Want to Go Home," with his brothers, Taylor and Isaac. He's contemplating the opening verse. The narrator, in a bar during last call, sings, "I'm feeling dangerous."
Could he switch "feeling" to that more profane word with the same first letter?
In the end, Zac leaves the lyrics alone.
"You put it in there and it feels really good, but it just colors the whole song," he says. "There's a certain point when I'm like, 'I like this song more than I like singing f---.' "
As Hanson rehearses on this Sunday afternoon, it's hard to believe the brothers are preparing for a tour celebrating a quarter century as a band. Isaac, the eldest of the brood, is 36. The work, on this afternoon, is not particularly glamorous. They tighten the breaks in "Tragic Symphony." They smooth out a new song, "I Was Born."
Finally, as Isaac noodles through the intro to "Johnny B. Goode" and Zac offers up a figure-skating analogy that doesn't particularly make sense, Taylor grows impatient.
"Let's not try to reinvent the wheel right now," he says, and they begin to play again.
At one time, Hanson's rise, from flyover Oklahoma to mega stardom, may have seemed stunning in itself. But the band's greatest feat may be how it has survived – and without a scandal, rehab or "Sharknado 4." The Hanson way has been marked by the brothers' special ability to say no – always politely, of course – to record execs who didn't get it; to a culture desperate for confessions; even, at times, to each other.
As they embark on the American leg of their anniversary tour, the brothers haven't so much reinvented themselves as merely grown into older versions of their teenage selves.
"They beat the system," says Danny Goldberg, who signed Hanson while chairman of Mercury Records and both praises them and laments that they didn't listen to him more.
"They used it, they got what they wanted out of it and then they've done things completely on their own terms, without worrying about any other metrics except their own. They could have done other things to make more money, but they put their personal happiness and contentment first."
If you were there that summer, you couldn't avoid it. "MMMBop" arrived April 15, 1997. By May, it had knocked off the Notorious B.I.G. and taken the top slot of the Billboard Hot 100. The single remained at No. 1 for three weeks and topped the charts in 27 countries, from Australia to Sweden.
Hanson mania hit. David Spade pretended to be the fourth Hanson brother at the MTV Movie Awards. Oprah had them play her talk show and, as she cut to a commercial, found herself singing the chorus. Will Ferrell and Helen Hunt took the brothers hostage in an elevator, at gunpoint, during a skit on "SNL."
"Did you write the song 'MMMBop?'" Hunt shouts after the doors close.
Ferrell hands her a pair of earplugs. He looks at the boys.
"You will now listen to the song as long as it takes for you to feel the pain that we felt this past summer," he tells them before the music kicks in.
Twenty years later, Hanson doesn't shy away from "MMMBop," even if they've had to shift it from the key of A to E to accommodate Taylor's no longer being 14. But they embrace it. After starting a beer company in 2013, they even named their signature pale ale "MmmHops."
"People will often ask us the question with that tone," says Isaac. " 'Well, do you play that song?' Of course we do."
There is one secret he shares about "MMMBop." As much as it's catchy pop candy, the song also is about losing friends and always feeling a bit different. To make his point, he speaks some of the lines.
"So hold onto the ones that really care. In the end they'll be the only ones there. When you get old and start losing your hair, can you tell me who will still care."
"That song," he says, "was basically about getting the stink eye from a bunch of folks at our church because we wanted to do rock 'n' roll, and they were like, ' Why would you do rock 'n' roll? Why wouldn't you just sing gospel songs?' "
This explains an important part of the Hanson dynamic. It's why they never totally let their guards down, never completely trust outsiders. That's what happens when you're always somewhere between embraced (by your still obsessive core of fans) and misunderstood (by the adults). The answer, for Hanson, has been to pull back, compartmentalize, to keep some spaces for themselves. Consider their approach to faith – one of the more polarizing subjects in modern culture and certainly pop music.
As kids, the boys would overhear the whispers among the mothers at their church. It's just a phase. They'll get over it. As teen stars in a secular field, they knew people wouldn't understand why they still went to church. They dodged when asked whether they prayed. They made it clear that music and religion were separate entities in their lives.
In 1997, when famed director Gus Van Sant approached Hanson as a fan and proposed making their next video, Goldberg put in a call to their father, Walker. He wanted to make sure they were OK being associated with the director of "My Own Private Idaho."
"I told them about Gus and explained that he was gay and told them about some of the movies he's made," Goldberg says. "Without hesitation, Walker says, 'If you think he'll make a great video, that's the right person.' "
Hanson approaches interviews and publicity with a guarded warmth. They'll welcome you to their home town, chat for hours at a restaurant and let you scour their merch room. They won't take you home to hang with the family or to church on Sunday. They certainly won't let your reality show in.
That's what A&E discovered, 10 years ago, after greenlighting a pilot for a Hanson family show. The deal fell apart when the production company suggested a staged argument between the Hanson wives over what they fed their children.
"The thing that would drive the ratings, all the drama around family and raising their kids, having to share all that was not acceptable to them," says Jordan Berliant, one of their managers at the time.
"That's the difference," Isaac says when explaining why they've never been desperate for attention. "I don't think we were ever trying to be famous. That wasn't the goal. The goal was, 'I want people to sing my songs.'"
That dynamic, of keeping things to themselves, extends to the relationship among the brothers. There's nothing special about sibling strife in rock bands, from the Everlys to the Kinks, Oasis and the Black Crowes. Isaac is loath to discuss it, though, calling it "dirty laundry." Zac is more open.
For Hanson, a low point came about four years ago, when the band embarked on what was meant to be a 20thanniversary celebration. In 2013, after releasing their sixth studio album, "Anthem," and touring, they were tired of the record/tour/record cycle – and of each other. What exactly happened is unclear.
But Hanson took most of 2014 off. Ultimately, they decided to regroup.
"I don't know the Davies brothers," says Zac. "I don't know the Kings of Leon and how they hate or love or whatever. I have been training for this job my whole life. The idea of conflict resolution is not some new thing. It is simply what you have to do every day of your life. And so we just do it. When we yell at each other, we yell at each other until we are not yelling at each other. And when somebody says, ' Maybe I'll quit today,' you say, 'You are an idiot and I'll see you tomorrow.' Because there is so much in it, so much you care about. The answer is not 'I give up.' It's just not."
Perhaps the most important misunderstanding – and biggest frustration for Hanson – is how their music has been viewed by the wider world. In Wiki-shorthand, they're still the teeny-boppers who ushered in the boy-band era and, in the process, tortured most of adult America.
The comparisons to ' N Sync and the Backstreet Boys still bother them. Their music, after all, has always had more in common with Spoon and Squeeze than anything in Lou Pearlman's stable. And Hanson's latest song, "I Was Born," released this summer, is as catchy as anything the band has done. NPR praised it as nothing short of "fantastic."
They do know music, having made their most formative connection via a Time/Life anthology of 1958 hits purchased by their parents. When Walker and Diana Hanson took the family to South America for a year in 1989, the boys played that tape – stuffed with Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Eddie Cochran – over and over.
Isaac and Taylor also took piano lessons while abroad and started singing together, which continued when they got back to Tulsa. A family video, circa 1992, shows the boys – 11, 9 and 6 – singing Bobby Darin's "Splish, Splash." The Hanson Brothers, as they were called, made their first performance at an arts festival in Tulsa in 1992. By 1996, Hanson had released two self-produced albums and went to the South by Southwest festival in Austin to try to get attention. It didn't work at first.
"There was no way I was going to sign them," says Steve Greenberg, a Mercury talent scout.