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Boy Band Confidential - Season 1 - Episode 03: Deep Cuts
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00:00AMB are speeding.
00:01All right, I asked you to take one, mark.
00:09So yeah, anytime you need a drink of water,
00:11you need a break, you need a restroom, just speak up.
00:14Yeah.
00:15All right.
00:16Last best.
00:17Joy Fatone, interview take one, AB, common mark.
00:26Some guy came up to me and tried
00:27to snatch my daughter out of my hands.
00:30I was looking through the front windshield
00:31at this German fan, holding her bloody arm up
00:35with my name cut into her arm.
00:37And she's like, I do this for you.
00:44Erica Strada, take one.
00:46No one knows this story.
00:48Is that to you if you want it to be?
00:50I don't know.
00:51That's just what this, that's what the point of this whole thing
00:53is, right?
01:04Here's what I'm not going to say.
01:05I'm not going to be one of those guys that says they hate fame.
01:08Fame brings you this, and this negative point, and this is a burden.
01:12No.
01:13Being famous is fun.
01:15Now, are you prepared for what comes along with fame?
01:20Absolutely not.
01:24At the beginning of NSYNC, we finally got to a level in Europe
01:27where we're like, great, holy, we're all on the cover of magazines there.
01:32We are selling out tours.
01:33It just didn't seem real.
01:39The tweens that just went, like, obsessive with these groups.
01:43It was just, it was a spectacle.
01:45Europe was pretty insane.
01:46They were very fanatic, definitely.
01:48I will say that, like, crying, screaming, fainting, over, like, like, standing in front
01:54of you, and they were, like, hyperventilating, and you go, I'm just standing in front of you.
01:58I'm not, I'm just here.
01:59Hi.
02:01So some of the fans were so over the top.
02:03There, there is a side that's not so glamorous.
02:06They would get on the buses.
02:08They would show up where they shouldn't show up.
02:10That happened.
02:12I, I saw Justin's arm almost get ripped out of his socket,
02:15because some girl ran on stage and went to grab him.
02:18And as she grabbed him, security grabbed her, and she was not letting Justin go.
02:25And the arm went with her and almost ripped it out of his damn socket.
02:28Like, no lie.
02:29So I was like, oh, my God.
02:33I remember there was one thing where this woman wrote, I love Chris hundreds of thousands of times.
02:39But not only that, it was all on pieces of paper.
02:41And then when you rolled the pieces of paper out, if you looked at it, it said, I love Chris.
02:46I love Chris.
02:46But then if you look down, it would say, like, I love.
02:49And then all of a sudden it'd be in blue.
02:50And then it would be in red for some reason in a certain area.
02:52And then it'd be right over here.
02:53Because when you looked at it down, it said, I love Chris on each individual paper of all the I
03:00love Chris's.
03:00It was insane.
03:02And it was this whole long piece of paper that we rolled out.
03:06To me, what a boy band really is, is not really about boys that are in a band who were
03:13playing instruments or dance.
03:15It's really kind of about the fan base.
03:18These bands that appealed to these young fans that just went, like, obsessive with these groups.
03:28Certainly, that's got to feel good to have all these women throwing themselves at you.
03:32But at the same time, you start to feel like an object, like a product and not a human being.
03:39None of these crazed fans are thinking about Lance Bass the human.
03:45These are larger than life personalities.
03:48And the fans are completely ignoring their humanity.
03:52They don't even realize that they're fully fledged human beings.
03:56And that often manifested in these extremely troubling behaviors.
04:03We weren't the first boy band to be created.
04:06But we were the first band that comes from a reality show.
04:10Making the Band comes out and gets amazing ratings, right?
04:12It's like a number one hit.
04:14And ABC is stoked.
04:16Oh my gosh, the show is going great.
04:18Like, we became famous immediately.
04:23We were famous before we were good.
04:26And then we signed with Clive Davis on J Records.
04:31Now we're kind of whisked away into this new world where we're on a really legitimate record label
04:36with this bonafide superstar of the music industry, Clive Davis, who believes in us and believes that we're going to
04:43be the next big boy band.
04:45Then ABC was like, well, we weren't planning on doing this.
04:49But we also didn't plan on them getting signed with the biggest music mogul in the history of music.
04:55So we're going to bring them back for another season.
04:59And then you're literally shot out of this rocket.
05:03We end up opening for Britney Spears.
05:05We're at the biggest venues in the world.
05:10Followed by number one videos on TRL.
05:14In April of 2001, you get the introduction of O-Town, All or Nothing.
05:30The Backstreet Boys and NSYNC, they went to Europe.
05:33They launched them in Germany to great success.
05:36They go to Germany.
05:37They spend years just trying to make it.
05:39Get some hit songs finally.
05:41Then come to America.
05:42Our experience was the opposite.
05:44It's kind of like we did it in reverse.
05:46Before we'd ever been to Asia, we landed and we had hundreds of fans in the airport.
05:50waiting for us.
05:51They just surged in popularity in a way that was hard to comprehend.
05:58There's also, I think, a underbelly to being famous that doesn't get talked about as much,
06:04like the darker side of fame.
06:06And one story stands out when we had flown into Germany for one of the first times.
06:11And we landed in the airport and there were throngs of fans just so excited to see us land.
06:16And there was a tour bus waiting for us out front.
06:18So they're kind of whisking us through the crowd.
06:22There was this one sweet German girl that was like screaming and yelling my name,
06:27just crying, just like shaking.
06:30Ashley, Ashley, I need to show you something.
06:33I need to show you something.
06:34And she proceeds to pull up her sleeve.
06:36And she had spent what looked like months cutting my name with a razor blade into her arm,
06:43like a self-made tattoo of my name.
06:46Yeah?
06:48And I'll just never forget being pulled onto the tour bus, looking through the front windshield
06:52at this German fan, holding her bloody arm up with my name cut into her arm.
06:58And she's like, I do this for you.
07:00It was like a very shocking moment of like what fandom can become.
07:07And on some level, for some people, very unhealthy levels of fandom,
07:11I would say that's the darker side of fame.
07:14People get delusional and obsessive.
07:20One day in 2001, it was probably in the middle of the tour, somewhere out west.
07:26And I recall on the radio, because we all had radios, because remember this stadium, big, right?
07:31And it said, everybody, all staff meet at, and they gave a location.
07:36But the location was a little bit off the premises.
07:39It was outside by the buses. I drive out, and we were notified that there's a bomb threat.
07:48There's 60,000 people.
07:50And then you have to balance up how big the threat is versus how to handle the threat,
07:56how to handle 60,000 people in a stadium.
08:00We had to all evacuate. I'm there with a bunch of dogs sniffing out.
08:05So by the end of that, we found out it was a trash bag.
08:09That's exactly what it was. It was a trash bag, and somebody pulled a prank and just said,
08:13if you look at this location, there's a black trash bag, and inside that trash bag is boom.
08:19Now, the next four or five venues, I'm on guard the whole time.
08:22I haven't slept. I'm aggravated.
08:25Even to this day, just life in general, you know, you got to really always look over your shoulder.
08:31You know, I was on the road all the time, and I had a young daughter.
08:33And some guy came up to me, and he was, like, just kind of, like, looking at me.
08:38And he was like, hey, you're Jeff from 98 Degrees.
08:40And I'm, like, you know, holding my daughter.
08:43And this guy, you know, literally, he goes, you're not supposed to have a baby.
08:47And, like, trying to snatch my daughter out of my hands, like, literally having some sort of weird meltdown.
08:53And I kind of felt scared, not necessarily of him, but how weird and how unpredictable
09:00people can be sometimes. And, you know, it was bizarre.
09:07This is the late 90s. Someone like Matthew Shepard gets murdered.
09:12Is this something inside of you that you're thinking about your safety? Is that something you had to deal with?
09:18Oh, definitely. You know, growing up, especially, you know, late 90s, early 2000s, and all you saw was negative.
09:24You know, Matthew Shepard, all these things, you know, happening in the world where you felt that if you did
09:30come out, not only would it destroy your career and your best friend's careers, but also it puts a target
09:36on your back, and you feel unsafe. You did feel like you were going to get gay-bashed wherever you
09:42went,
09:43that you were going to be taught a lesson, and just hate, and how people try to make you the
09:47villain
09:48of the story. So, yeah, it was something that I never wanted to have to deal with and scared the
09:53crap out of me.
09:55NSYNC made it ironically very easy for me to hide that I was gay, especially having this character
10:01put on you where, you know, you're supposed to be the shy one. It was so much easier for me
10:07because,
10:07wow, okay, I don't really have to speak that much, which sucked because I loved talking. I loved being
10:13outgoing. I wanted to be that person, but I knew as long as I was with this group in the
10:18public eye,
10:18I just had to play this character. And so the easiest thing for me to do was just to really
10:23kind of
10:23disappear as much as possible.
10:30Everybody thinks it's easy to do. It's not. It's hard work.
10:34It's such a grind out on the road because you're out there, you're sleeping on a bus,
10:39you're going into a hotel, you're eating crappy catering.
10:43Is it tiring? Yes. Is it exhausting? Yes.
10:46And that's how accidents happen.
10:48It's not glamorous. There's nothing glamorous about it.
10:51I remember when I get this call and the bus pulls over and Joey says, there's something wrong with
10:57my ball sack or something. There's a bump or something. I mean, we were deep somewhere in
11:01Northern California on our way to somewhere. I don't even know. And it was like, this is all country
11:06out here. What are you going to find a veterinarian? You know?
11:08Let me tell you how it really went. Let's hear it. Let's hear it.
11:13So what happened was the bag of my genitalia swelled up and I'm thinking to myself,
11:23I didn't sleep with anybody. I wasn't doing anything. I'm like, what just happened? It didn't hurt.
11:28And I went to a first and a doctor came to my room and said, oh, does it hurt when
11:32you pee or anything?
11:32I'm like, no, everything's fine. Great. Cool. That night was a show. I did the show. As we went
11:37on the bus, I go take a shower on the bus and now the bag is even swollen bigger. And
11:43my man had a
11:45welt. It was like a grapefruit.
11:47It was like, it was making a muscle. It was like, it was making a muscle.
11:51Yes, exactly.
11:52I don't have no clue. So I tell Dave, I said, Dave, we need to go. He goes, no,
11:55we've got to go drive to the next city. I said, Dave, come here. I go all the way back
11:59to the bus.
11:59I go, what's this? And he goes, oh, oh my God. Oh yeah, we're going to the hospital.
12:05We've got to go to the hospital right now. I think we're in like Napa Valley,
12:08somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
12:10So then we go to the next venue. Another doctor comes and checks me out. He goes,
12:14I think it just got inflamed. So he just takes some antibiotics. It should be fine.
12:17He gave me these pills. The next day it was gone. What happened, I basically, yeah,
12:22the wires get crisscrossed. I think for me dancing, I hit something to where it got inflamed and it
12:27swelled up as obviously a defense mechanism, if you will. Yeah. Lo and behold, it had a grapefruit
12:32sack. Wild. There's some stories that honestly should just not see the light of day.
12:39I'm still scarred from it. Sometimes I have to sleep with the light. I'm just thinking about it.
12:46Yeah, those days were not glamorous. We got used to having kind of the worst of the worst,
12:51uh, especially performances. Oh, there's a pole in the middle of the stage that you have to dance
12:55around and oh, we only have four mics. So have fun with that. So we, you know, we had to
13:00rough it.
13:01It was never yet upscale. There was no steak and lobster going on here. I mean, again, it was a
13:05grind.
13:07We're busting our asses to get to nowhere for a while. If NSYNC was going to have it have any
13:12success,
13:12it's going to have to stand on vocals also. We did the grind. We did the small little bars and
13:17clubs
13:18everywhere. We went and sang at a Predators game. We did the Mets against Yankees.
13:23Performing tonight's anthem is one of the most popular musical groups in the world today.
13:27Multi-platinum recording artists NSYNC. And in the very beginning, you could kind of hear
13:32people booing a little bit. People would look at us like, ugh, who are these stupid kids? And then all
13:38of a sudden we would turn their, their minds around. Who's brought stripes and bright stars?
13:45And then as they started to hear, you're like, oh, okay, I get it. Oh, they can sing.
13:57Like, oh wait, y'all can sing. You're like, yeah, we had to make it happen.
14:04We were the princes of Orlando and we were treated like gods. I couldn't go anywhere
14:08without being noticed. I couldn't go anywhere without getting a free meal. And I'll be the first one to
14:14tell you, like, I didn't make the best choices in the beginning. I prioritized going out. I
14:21prioritize drinking at an early age. I prioritize all the wrong things in the beginning. And it
14:28started to show on my body. It started to show on the person that I was. I was a mess.
14:32I just wanted
14:32to do it all. And I did. And I was doing it on Lou's dime. And I know he was
14:39not happy with it. And he
14:41had many conversations with me about that. Yes, I bought a car, but no one knows this story.
14:48Talk to you if you want it to be. I don't know. That's just what this, that's what the point
14:52of
14:52this whole thing is, right? I bought a red BMW. It was really fast.
15:01I got arrested in that car. I had a bouquet of flowers. I was driving from Orlando to go visit
15:13my
15:14mom and mother's day and pull around this truck. And as I'm pulling around the truck, there's a cop
15:21driving on the other side of the road super fast and immediately turns his lights on,
15:30spins around and comes and pulls me over, doesn't ask any questions, license and registration,
15:39opens up my door, pulls me out of the car, slams me on the hood, puts me in cuffs. I'm
15:45like,
15:45what's going on? He's like, I don't like dopers. I'm like, what? He's like,
15:51what are you doing in this red BMW going 90 miles an hour on 95? You're going in.
16:00Throws me in the car, sends me off to jail for reckless driving. I have to call Mike Cronin
16:07from the management company to come pick me up from jail. I'm embarrassed. They let me out of my own
16:12recognizance that night. Mike's like, we're going to keep this on the wraps for a while. Didn't tell Lou.
16:18Kept it on the wraps, started getting mail as to when I needed to show up for this hearing.
16:23I got to go to do this, but no one knows that I got arrested and I don't want to
16:27tell them because
16:28I just don't want this whole thing to blow up because of me. And Lou gets on the phone with
16:35me,
16:35still to this day, I've never heard him so angry. Cursing. How the hell do you think you could do
16:42this? What are you thinking? What were you thinking? What were you doing? Why did you get arrested?
16:46Why are you there? Why are you not here?
16:49I head back up to Orlando. All the guys are pissed at me. He's livid with me. He goes,
16:56I had your, I had your court date moved and met with the lawyer. I never dealt with it after
17:03that.
17:04He took care of everything and got me basically out of jail, essentially.
17:15I've never talked about this. I was probably around 23. I had one girl that came to my parents'
17:21house when I was on the road. Knocked on the door. My dad opens up the door and there's a
17:29young girl
17:30standing there. She goes, hi. She goes, my name is such and such and that's your son's daughter.
17:36My dad's like, wow, I'm sorry. My mother calls me. My mom's hysterical crying going,
17:41there's a woman here that says that this is your daughter. I don't even know what to say,
17:45but here you can talk to her. She puts on the phone. I go, hello? She's like, hey, uh, you
17:49know,
17:49I'm such and such. I don't want any money. We met a while back and it was the first performance
17:53that
17:53we ever did as NSYNC, which was around 96 is what this woman told me. We met, we hung out,
18:00we had a great time that night. And then I haven't seen her since. I'm thinking to myself,
18:05my career is over. Somebody's telling me I have a kid. Is it my kid?
18:11Fast forward to finally, I get home from tour.
18:17And all of a sudden, I get slapped with a paternity lawsuit saying that I need to go in
18:21with this woman to do a blood test. Then all of a sudden, I get a piece of paper with
18:27a birth
18:27certificate with her name, my name on it, the footprint, all that my mother's losing her mind,
18:32going, Joey, what the heck? I'm like, Miles, something not right here.
18:37The font was in one typing, and then my name was in a completely different type font.
18:41And you could see that it was white out on it. The woman was just making the whole thing up.
18:45Basically, she wanted me to get a paternity test, take a photo of all of us walking into it, so
18:50she would
18:50get paid. Get paid by the Enquirer, get paid by whoever wanted to listen to the story. And that
18:55was the only reason why. It affected everything of how I deal with fans in general. That's not what I
19:03signed up for. All right, so I got some of my memorabilia stuff out here, some of my awards and
19:13stuff. We actually got a TRL award. Billboard, too. Billboard Awards. Anybody know what Billboard is?
19:21It's a Billboard Award, American Music Award. But the Diamond Awards were kind of cool. Diamond
19:26Award is where, you know, we went 10 million albums sold, so it's pretty cool.
19:32It does mean a lot to me. It's my life. It's a lot of my career. It's all of my
19:36career what I really
19:38started doing. It's how I kicked off my career and doing other acting jobs and doing everything else.
19:42This is what really started it all. So it's kind of like, how do you not pay homage to it?
19:48How do you
19:48not thank the boy band gods above that it became successful like it did? But let's be real.
19:57Justin Timberlake wouldn't be the way he is right now. Myself wouldn't be the way I am right now out
20:01there. Lance wouldn't be doing the podcast and being his sexy gay self. You know, JC wouldn't
20:06be able to write this musical and get the attention that he's getting for a musical. If he was just
20:09a
20:10no artist, nobody would even look his way. Nobody would look at any of our way. Let's be real.
20:14So, you know, you've got to think that. You've got to be honest and go, if it wasn't for that
20:19group,
20:20yes, I probably would have done something, but maybe not to the extent of what I just did.
20:24The pinnacle of what we've done, not many people get a chance to do what we've done.
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