Screaming Chorus for New Kids : Concert: Teen-age ‘Blockheads’ flock to sold-out Pacific Amphitheatre to hear their pop idols.

Sitting away from the crowd, wearing simple black dresses or jeans, the group of four young women didn’t look like they were ready for the New Kids on the Block concert Wednesday night.

All around them, thousands of young girls rushed to be first in line, covered from head to toe in New Kids clothes and buttons, screaming whenever they saw a limousine that they thought might be transporting one of their favorite group members inside.

“They hate that,” 18-year-old Nancy Myers said of the five young men who make up one of the hottest pop groups in the country. “They meet so many thousands of girls and they always get that.”

Unlike most of the more than 18,000 fans who attended Wednesday night’s sold-out show at the Pacific Amphitheatre, Myers and her friends said they were “real fans.”

Like fans of the Grateful Dead, these young women follow the New Kids around to see every concert. Myers, a self-proclaimed “Blockhead” from Fresno, was getting ready to see the group for the 25th time.

“We know the real them,” Myers said with her Blockhead friend from Detroit, Danielle Frydrych, also 18. “They’re not bubble-gum-chewing, perfect people. They are just normal teen-age guys.”

The New Kids are five men under age 21 who sing and dance with a rap-like, pop music sound. The fact that many young girls think they are cute doesn’t hurt ticket sales either.

“They sing good and dance, but I think they’re cute,” said Kristin Carpenter, 13, from Ventura.

Outside the theater, vendors sold T-shirts for $15 to $22, glossy programs for $15, peace medallions for $12, photo packs for $7. Some lucky fans got free shirts and shoelaces tossed to them from at least one van that was giving the goodies away.

Dozens of limousines dropped off hordes of screaming teen-age girls. Hundreds of other fans came dragging their mothers and some mothers dragged their kids. Some parents left the hectic scene behind, dropping their children off to enjoy the show and finding solace in a special Parents’ Room--an outdoor patio complete with nachos and beer.

“I’m not going to let her go to something like this without being right here,” Eileen Croke of Huntington Beach said of her 13-year-old daughter, Heather. “She’s such a die-hard fan and that’s all she wanted for her birthday.”

Croke, an assistant professor at Cal State Long Beach, paid a ticket agency $300 for the two 10th-row, center seats that Heather shared with her best friend, Marilena Marrelli, 12, of Rancho Santa Fe.

Tickets to the show, which has been sold out for two weeks, weren’t hard to come by Wednesday. Several people were selling them--not necessarily trying to make a profit, just trying to get their money back. But one ticket seller said she wasn’t having any luck because everyone seemed to have their tickets already.

However, there were some who were trying to pocket a little extra cash from sales.

One man, who asked only to be identified as a resident of San Fernando Valley, said he advertised several $25 tickets at $65 each.

“These tickets are worth a fortune,” he said. “I’ll be honest. I had to buy these tickets in February to get in on it. . . . It’s not easy work. You can lose money too.”

Most of the teen-agers who attended the show, however, got their tickets seven months ago at face value of between $19 and $25. Two girls, who bought their tickets when they were in the eighth grade and are now in high school, said they have matured since then and were trying to get back some of the $170 they paid for the two tickets.

“They changed their attitude too much,” said 14-year-old Dawn Hurldurt from West Covina. She said she stopped liking the group when one member put an earring in his nose and let his sideburns grow. “I don’t like that.”

But for almost everyone else who came to see the show, the New Kids could do no wrong. Despite recent reports that group members have gotten into fistfights with outsiders, almost every young girl there had a favorite member.

Laurie Settles, 20, of Cerritos said she named her 18-month-old son after group member Jonathan Knight “because I love him.” Her son’s name is Jonathan Rashliegh Settles. She attended Wednesday night’s show but had to sit in the first-come, first-served seats in the back of Pacific Amphitheatre. But she and her best friend will be at tonight’s sold-out performance also, sitting in the second-row seats for which they paid $250 each.

BACKGROUND

Like their ‘60s kid-pop predecessors, the Monkees, New Kids on the Block began as the concept of a savvy record producer and music entrepreneur. Boston-based Maurice Starr’s plan was to put together a group that would sing a blend of funk, pop and rap music patterned after the Jackson 5. In 1984, he conducted auditions to assemble a group of young white Bostonians, the New Kids. The group members are Donnie Wahlberg, 20, brothers Jonathan Knight, 21, and Jordan Knight, 20, Danny Wood, 21, and Joe McIntyre, 17. But the musical force behind New Kids, writing almost all of their songs and producing the records, is Starr. Over the past two years, Starr and his clean-cut proteges have exploded into a money-making machine by selling records and all manner of New Kids merchandise to an audience of mostly teen-age and preteen girls. A 1988 album, “Hangin’ Tough,” gave New Kids their commercial breakthrough (it has sold more than 8 million copies). This year’s release, “Step by Step,” has continued that momentum, topping the charts and selling more than 3 million copies so far.

Times staff writer Kevin Johnson contributed to this report.