"I'm in love with them," said a sobbing Kim Jensen, 13, of Minneapolis.
She was wearing two Backstreet Boys necklaces, a T-shirt and baseball cap. "They should have announced it earlier."
"It upsets me royally," said Anna Bruder, 16, of Blaine, who had paid $100 for VIP seats.
"We went to Milwaukee two weeks ago to see them and we missed it because we got stuck in traffic," said Dena Bruder, 18, of Blaine. "I'm so mad that they canceled."
KDWB program director Rob Morris, who had made the announcement onstage, said backstage that he got the word during the performance by Next, the group that preceded BSB, that BSB would not appear. That's about the same time the Backstreet Boys themselves found out, singer Kevin Richardson said in an interview Sunday night.
The 25-year-old sister of BSB's Howie Dorough had died unexpectedly Saturday of lupus in Raleigh, N.C., Richardson said. The group had planned to perform the Canterbury show as a quartet, something BSB had done a handful of times before. Two of the band members were at their Twin Cities hotel, one was en route to Canterbury Park but another was stranded in Tampa, Fla., partly because of the recentNorthwest Airlines strike, Richardson said.
"We would have been able to do the show at 10:30 [p.m.], but that's too late on a school night," he said in a phone interview after appearing on KDWB Sunday night. "In six years of touring, we've never canceled a show. We're sorry. It's not the fault of the radio station. It's important for us to make it up."
On its current tour, BSB has two more concerts in the United States and two in South America and then plans to record its next album. Richardson said he thinks the band can rework its recording plans to make up the Twin Cities concert.
The biggest-selling recording act of 1998 (not named Celine Dion), the Orlando, Fla., quintet has sold 6 million copies of "Backstreet Boys" in the United States and more than 22 million worldwide. The group's bubblegum soul hits have included "As Long As You Love Me" and "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)."
Morris told festivalgoers that a concert with the Backstreet Boys would be rescheduled. "We may have to do two shows at Target Center or one at the Metrodome," he said. Sunday's concertgoers can receive a refund or hold on to their ticket stubs for the rescheduled show, he said.