Boyz II Men 1992 Interview: One Week After the AMAs

In this rare 1992 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, the Philadelphia R&B group Boyz II Men arrive in the Toronto studio exactly one week after collecting their first American Music Award. All four original members are here — Michael McCary among them — still close enough to the beginning to tell the story of it from memory rather than from a press kit. This is the group behind “End of the Road” and “I’ll Make Love to You” caught in the narrow window before either song existed in the world, months away from becoming the biggest vocal group on the planet.

The heart of the conversation is the origin story, and they tell it plainly. Backstage, they walked up to Michael Bivins and asked him a single question — can we sing — and then answered it themselves, harmonizing “Can You Stand the Rain” on the spot for a corner of the room packed with stars. It is the kind of audition that sounds apocryphal until you hear the four men who lived it lay out the sequence, one detail at a time, while the award that validated it is still a week old.

The conversation widens into where they came from and where they think they are going. They talk about Philadelphia’s CAPA — the performing arts high school that functioned as a real-life version of Fame — and the training that produced four voices built to work as one instrument. Then Petty asks them where they expect to be in five years. Their answer lands differently now than it did in the studio that afternoon, because “End of the Road” was still ahead of them: the single that would spend a record thirteen weeks at number one and rewrite everything they were guessing at.

This was the moment before the moment. Unseen since its original 1992 CTV broadcast, this master tape has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show, safeguarding the last recorded conversation with Boyz II Men as four young men who still had to explain who they were.