The four members of 98 Degrees — Nick Lachey, Drew Lachey, Jeff Timmons and Justin Jeffre — turned the tables on Us and took over interview duties in the middle of their Us Weekly cover shoot.
“ Can you recall your most embarrassing moment on stage?” Jeffre, 50, asked his bandmate Timmons, who immediately pulled from a long list of applicable experiences.
“There’s a lot of ‘em,” Timmons, 50, said with a laugh. “Probably Jerry Rice is probably the most embarrassing one. So, Jerry Rice is a pro football player that I admire. … We were doing this United Way collaboration with all these acts [and] Jerry Rice is standing behind me on a higher riser and Nick is next to me. I’m like, ‘Oh man, Jerry Rice.’ And he’s like, ‘Just be cool. Don’t do it.’ And I turned around to shake Jerry Rice’s hand and our risers are about probably six feet off the ground. And I stepped in the hole and fell down between the risers and smacked my arm on the way down in front of all these people that I idolized. Everybody was silent to see if I was still alive.”
He continued: “And [like] Clark Griswold [from National Lampoon’s Vacation], I jumped up, I’m like, ‘I’m OK.’ And then the whole place erupted in laughter and I tried to hide behind Nick and he moved away because he didn’t want to act like he was in the group.”
Timmons, who was “getting red now” relieving the encounter, added that moment was “probably the most” embarrassing he experienced during his time in the band.
Next up, it was Drew’s time to ask a question and he made a point to ask his buddies about their collective “unfortunate” hairstyles. “I mean the ‘yellow thorn’ was one of them, certainly. But I had the frosted tips,” Drew, 47, said. “What did you guys actually honestly think of the frosted tips?”
Timmons quickly chimed in that the frosted tips looked better on Drew than they did on his older brother, Nick, now 49. “The ‘yellow thorn’ is just one thorn, [just] one thing, [but] the tips,” Timmons said, trailing off.
Nick notably had a “yellow thorn” hairdo during the group’s heyday, in which just the front of his hair was dyed blonde.
“Yeah, but they had to strip [mine] down so bad,” Drew pointed out. “That was a whole questionable era with frosted tips and hair dyeing and stripping.”
Jeffre and Nick felt good about the dyed ‘dos. “Platinum was good. [Jeff] rocked the platinum short hair,” the Love Is Blind host chimed in. “That was a good look for you. Bring it back, man.”
Watch 98 Degrees’ full interview above to get more details about which fellow boy bander they’d recruit to join, who would pick up a phone call immediately and more.
