New Kid on the Block

The dressing room was really just a boys’ bathroom with folding chairs, and the fanciest thing about the stage was the hanging stars fashioned from cardboard and crinkly aluminum foil. And you don’t want to even know about the opening act, a mime whose robot dancing left the 700 kids in the audience looking similarly blank-faced.

None of that mattered to the young singer they simply call Sammie, a 12-year-old Florida boy who had flown more than 2,000 miles to begin mining his future here in Duarte, at a school in a tiny, hardscrabble city near the edge of a vast rock quarry.

“This is where it starts” is the phrase that Sammie says ran through his head the day he climbed on an airplane in Fort Lauderdale to embark on a tour of two dozen Southern California schools. “I did a lot of thinking that day,” he adds with a solemn, soulful expression that seems 20 years too wise for his age. “There’s a lot happening.”

Indeed, youth-pop is dominating the U.S. market these days--the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears sold a combined 16.4 million albums in 1999--and there’s a mad scramble underway in every corner of the music industry to find the next big thing. It goes beyond album sales, too, with the machinery of MTV, Disney, Nickelodeon and other youth entertainment powers hungry for the new face, the new voice.

Meet Sammie Bush, who has a major record deal, a single on the R&B; charts and some big-name supporters who compare him to a young Michael Jackson or Stevie Wonder. They say he is 4 1/2 feet of charisma and startling vocal skills, but the boy with the steady gaze knows that in the tumultuous, sometimes torturous, world of music, stardom is elusive.

“Maybe this is as good as it gets,” he said in the boys’ room--er, the dressing room--at Northview Intermediate School. “If it is, then it wasn’t meant to be. But I have more than one dream. I can go play football at Florida State University and study medicine and come up with cures and vaccines.”

Only the future will tell whether Sammie’s debut album, “From the Bottom to the Top,” will give the youth sales of Capitol Records a shot in the arm after its release in the spring. His single, “I Like It,” has already put his cherubic face on video outlets BET and the Box, and “Soul Train” and Nickelodeon are on tap. And if the crowd at Northview is any indication, Sammie’s onstage appeal is intense.

The album was produced by Dallas Austin, who has scored platinum sales success in the past with the youth acts Monica and Another Bad Creation. Austin says he decided to sign Sammie to his Freeworld Entertainment, the label he operates as a joint venture with Capitol, after watching a videotape of the young performer.

“Everybody says they have found the new Michael Jackson, so I don’t want to say that,” Austin said. “But I think he could mean as much to his generation as Michael Jackson did to his. I see him becoming a superstar.”

If so, the Boynton Beach, Fla., native’s success story will have begun at age 4 when he sang “Troubles Don’t Last Always” in front of the cheering congregation of the Lake Ida Church of Christ near his hometown. The standing ovation the diminutive singer got that day prompted his mother, Angila Baxter, to seek out new stages and training for the eldest of her three children.

It was one of Sammie’s two appearances in a child talent competition on “It’s Showtime at the Apollo” in 1998 that caught the eye of Joyce Irby, the former lead singer of the group Klymaxx who is now his manager. “This little boy came out in this big red suit and the second he opened his mouth,” Irby says, “I was stunned.”

The music on Sammie’s album is pop-leaning R&B; that recalls some of Austin’s work with Boyz II Men, and there’s also a healthy dose of tame hip-hop beats backing the singer’s buoyant, arcing voice. Some of the songs sound as if they could easily fit in on an ‘N Sync playlist. The themes? Meeting girls at the bus stop, going to the movies, marking a puppy-love romance with a gift of candy. . . . It’s a project that knows its target audience.

“He’s not a 12-year-old trying to be a grown-up like you’ve seen with some of the other kid acts,” Austin says. “He’s not trying to be tough or hard. He’s a 12-year-old being a 12-year-old. I think that will appeal to the kids.”

Sometimes it seems as if the entire music industry is tilting toward the youngsters. The Backstreet Boys, a group of twentysomethings who are carefully marketed to the middle-school set, have just received a best album Grammy nomination, and a parade of minors are lining up across music genres, from opera-leaning Welsh singer Charlotte Church and blues player Shannon Curfman to the bubble-gum pop of Mandy Moore and the rap of Lil’ Soldiers.

“We have had Britney Spears clones banging on a door, just vast numbers of them,” says Roy Lott, chief of Capitol Records. “Every producer, every songwriter, every agent is out there looking for an act that fits into this trend, and they all come to the door. But Sammie is the one who came in through the door.”