98 Degrees star recalls fans sneaking onto band’s tour bus

98 Degrees member Jeff Timmons is recalling some of the wild stunts that their fans would pull for the chance to get closer to the beloved boy band. 

The “My Everything” singer revealed in the new documentary Larger than Life: Reign of the Boybands that the band received an influx of fans overnight after making an appearance on MTV’s popular music program, Total Request Live. 

“We had gone from driving ourselves around in a Winnebago that we had wrapped to, all of a sudden, not being able to get out of the Winnebago,” Timmons said. “Literally. Fans everywhere, wherever we’d pull up.”

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

Then, they started showing up inside the bus, too. “Fans would sneak on our tour bus and we wouldn’t even know they were there until the next city,” he remembered. “We ordered room service and they were in the room service cart and popped out.”

Timmons sheepishly admitted, “Some things are a little too crazy to talk about.”

Reflecting on their sudden rise in popularity, his bandmate Nick Lachey added, “I’m sure it doesn’t even come close to rivaling the Beatles, but it just felt special.”

Earlier in the documentary, Lachey and Timmons explained that the band — including fellow members Drew Lachey and Justin Jeffre — weren’t initially pleased with being called a boy band.

“With 98 Degrees, we never saw ourselves as a boy band — at least in the conventional sense — and so we resisted big time the label of boy band,” said Lachey. “But then, I think, we got very aware of the fact that this was a movement that was happening, and we were probably lucky to get kind of swept up in it.” 

Timmons noted that the original plan was for 98 Degrees to be pitched as a “true R&B group,” citing Boyz II Men as one of their biggest inspirations. “But when our label saw the frenzy that was associated with boy bands, they thought, ‘Hey, we have our version of a pop group like this,’” he said. “So we were like, ‘Maybe it’s not a bad idea!'”

Although, Lachey admitted, they didn’t exactly have the dance skills that some of their fellow boy bands like Backstreet Boys and NSYNC had. 

“We always joked that we were the non-dancing boy band,” Lachey teased. We never auditioned, we never went through dance class, we put ourselves together, we moved to California, we sang for people, we got discovered, and then from there, we kind of got swept up in a-whole-nother thing.”

Larger Than Life is streaming now on Paramount+.