entertainment weekly #498 . august 13th/99
written by rebecca asher - walsh
photographs by patricia mcdonough
The hotties of 98& have come a long way in the last two years. For one thing, they're four years older. "When we first signed with Motown, they suggested we [lie about] our ages," Nick Lachey explains, en route to a Houston venue where 98* will headline the latest stop on All That Music & More, Nickelodeon's 38-city teen-pop concert our. "But we were so stupid," adds Justin Jeffre. "We kept getting confused." The plan, says Jeff Timmons, "lasted about a week." Two years since 98* began confessing their true ages -- Timmons and Jeffre are now 26, brothers Nick and Drew Lachey are 25 and 23, respectively -- the group is looking anything but stupid. Their new single, the marriage-minded ballad "I do (Cherish You)," has inflamed the passions of the pubescent girls who worship at the altar of MTV's Total Request Live and sparked the chart life of 98* & Rising, an album that, though double-platinum, has still only flirted with the top 10. If these heartbreakers are just now breathing down the necks of more established boy bands 'N Sync and the Backstreet Boys, Nick Lachey thinks he knows why : "We learned the hard way it's better to be ourselves."

Here's who they are : four unerringly polite, unmistakably white, middle-class hunksters from Cincinnati, who formed 98* in '95. In the crazy-qulit tradition of BSB and 'N Sync, there's a personality (and pecs) for every taste. Timmons has an awshucks-I'm-homecoming-king handsome diffidence; Jeffre's a charming every-girl's-best-friend kind of guy; Nick, a muscleman nicknamed Quadzilla by his group-mates, has a Ricky Martinesque appeal; and Drew could be everyone's younger brother - if everyone's younger brother were cute like Adonis.





But two years ago, the squeaky-clean image of 98* was all wrong - at least according to Motown. "They told us they wanted us to move to New York," says Timmons. "When we said we didn't want to, they said, 'Don't move, and your record won't come out.' So we get to New York, and they had this idea that we were country bumpkins, so they wanted us to hang with an urban crowd, get a lot of urban gear. You have a certain amount of faith that the record company knows what they're talking about, so we're like, 'Okay, maybe this is artist development.'"

Rightly anticipating the late-'90s reemergence of blue-eyed soul, Motown's then president, Andre Harrell, admits to the tampering. "I wanted them to understand [black] culture and not just mimic it," he says. "Great artists are like a ball of clay. I knew they were away from home in another cultural universe, but I knew that at the end of the day, they were going to have a piece of important information."

While the group collaborated with producers on their self-titled debut album, Motown, deeming them not "flavorful enoguh," asked them to move from Manhattan's Upper West Side to Brooklyn and join the choir of a Harlem church. "We go through the yellow pages, find a church, and drive to Spanish Harlem," remembers Drew. "And there's yellow police tape all over the building next door. The pastor gets up and says, 'We want to pray for the people who died last night in the illegal gambling hall.' We're like, "What are we doing here?'"

98* were feeling equally uncomfortable in the studio, where they were asked to record a song with lyrics so explicit they're too embarrassed even now to state the title. "It's racy," says TImmons. "Very racy," says Drew. "Very, very, very racy," adds Timmons. "It would've been a career killer." (The song, which has never seen the light of day, is called "Can I Touch You There?")

By November '97, when Harrell, now president of Sean "Puffy" Combs' Bad Boy Entertainment, was replaced by film producer (New Jack City) and record- biz neophyte George Jackson, 98* were having a meltdown. "George said, 'Tellme your feelings about the label,' and I broke down and started crying," Timmons recalls. "I told him about the identity crisis I was having because of the things they wanted us to become that we weren't." continue..