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| 3/25/04 |
Ted Casablanca: Chasez Sighting ...JC Chasez meandering through a mobbed village at the Grove. City of Fallen Boy Banders. Looking a little less airbrushed than usual in a white jean jacket and black jeans--quelle horreur!--JC was chillin' with a burly dude, hopefully not waiting to see Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, as that line resembled, well, my idea of hell.
Hit Single With his bawdy new CD, ‘NSync’s JC Chasez sings the praises of going solo, in music and in love For a guy whose first solo album is filled with provocative songs like “All Day Long I Dream About Sex,” JC Chasez sure doesn’t sound like the smoothest player. Especially when he’s out on the scene with his ‘NSync bandmates. “Chris [Kirkpatrick] and I will be like, ‘Hey, look at that girl. Look how fine she is,” says Lance Bass. “And he’ll be like, “Where? What? What are you talking about?” We’re like, ‘Shut up!’ He’ll totally blow your cover.” In fact, what Chasez really dreams about most of the day is music. Stepping out of the ‘NSync mold on his eclectic CD Schizophrenic, he combines Prince-inspired come-ons, reggae ditties and synth pop that would make Devo proud. (Yes, boy-band fans, he belts out a couple of aching ballads as well.) Chasez (pronounced sha-ZAY) also wrote 16 of the 17 tracks and played keyboards on the album. “Some of the songs I think of when I’m in the shower,” he says. “Some of them I’ll think of when I’m falling into bed – I’ve got to get up and put this down! When I get bored, I’ll zone out and I’ll just sit in front of my computer and start writing any random song that comes to mind.” And sometimes they just happen to be exceedingly raunchy (“I just want to get close to you/Find out what it takes to move you/Feel the rhythm, hit the spot, getting hot/All night long”). “Here’s the deal,” says Chasez, 27. “When you write 30 songs, you have to pick so many, right? And of course, the ones that everybody likes are about sex. There’s a whole pile of other songs sitting on the shelf that aren’t about sex.” He also shrugs off comparisons to buddy Justin Timberlake, the first ‘NSyncer to go solo with 2002’s Justified. “J’s had his time to breathe,” says Chasez. “Now I’ll have my time to run and play.” Playtime was rudely interrupted by the NFL’s decision to ax his halftime gig at the Feb. 8 Pro Bowl after a certain “wardrobe malfunction” involving Timberlake and Janet Jackson. But Timberlake and Chasez quickly patched things up. “He cared enough to call to say he’s really sorry. I told him I can’t blame him for what’s happened to me,” says Chasez. Says Bass: “We call JC the daddy of the group because he’s like the father figure, the mature one.” As a kid in suburban Bowie, MD, Joshua Chasez, nicknamed JC, “was a painfully shy whip of a boy,” says second cousin and co-manager Phil Baker-Shenk, 47. The oldest child (his sister Heather, 26, and brother Tyler, 22, are both students) of Roy Chasez, 52, a technology consultant, and his wife, Karen, 50, an editor, “stood out with his incredibly beautiful voice singing Christmas carols at family gatherings.” If Chasez’s vocal skills gently nudged him into the spotlight, dancing cracked his shell wide open. At 13, he and pal Kacy Combs formed a coed dance troupe that won local contests with routines done to tunes by MC Hammer and New Kids on the Block. Their funky footwork eventually earned them third place at a 1991 national competition in Orlando, where Chasez ended soon after with a spot on The Mickey Mouse Club with Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears. Success on a par with those multi-platinum Mouseketeers would be nice, but Chasez – who will join Spears for a week on her U.K. tour starting April 27 – says he can do without a high-profile social life. “You’re not going to see me throwing paparazzi around, doing excessive amounts of drugs or having a line of girls outside my room,” he says. “I’ve seen enough Behind the Music to see that’s a road to nowhere.” As for rumors that he dated Tara Reid, he says, “We were connected at the hip for a while, but we were buddies,” adding that he doesn’t traffic in movie circles anyway. “I don’t need a Hollywood girl. They’re crazy. If you’re with an actress, you don’t know who you’re going to come home to every day.” For now he’s happily living single in an ivy-covered French chateau in Winter Park, FL. “But I wouldn’t mind a relationship with the right girl,” he admits. “Every artist needs a muse.” These days he may need two: Chasez now has dual roles to fill as he kicks off a solo tour on April 19 and gears up to record a new album with ‘NSync later this year. For the record, he insists that being in a boy band in his late 20s is cool with him. “It’s the fountain of youth,” says Chasez with a laugh. “If I’m 40 and we’re still playing shows, and people want to call us a boy band, by all means – drink from the fountain of youth!"
'NSync's JC Chasez readies for the club circuit Chasez is backing his first solo album, "Schizophrenic," which hit stores last month. The set debuted at No. 17 on The Billboard 200, but it tumbled down to No. 82 in its second week. The album's cover--which shows Chasez in a straitjacket--drew the ire of Bill MacPhee, the publisher of Schizophrenia Digest magazine. MacPhee claimed in the magazine that the title and cover image ignore "the U.S. Surgeon General's call on the entertainment industry to help eliminate stigma to address the public health crisis that exists." Though Jive Records doesn't plan to change the album's title or cover, Chasez has issued a statement apologizing to those who might be offended. He claimed that the Merriam-Webster definition of schizophrenic--"contradictory or antagonistic qualities or attitudes"--was the basis for the title. In a press release issued before the album was released, Chasez said: "The title comes from the different styles and attitudes that are on this album. It's gritty, it's noisy, and it is definitely not like anything I've done before." The set includes the single "Some Girls (Dance with Women)," which features a guest appearance by rapper Dirt McGirt (a.k.a. Ol' Dirty Bastard).
Celebrity Quotes Quotes from recent Associated Press entertainment coverage: "I thought that he was a skin disease. I didn't know that his name was a person." - Jerry Lewis, on Justin Timberlake, in an AP Radio interview...
Bad cops in 'Edison' film just coincidence A young journalist uncovers a team of crooked cops in Edison. That's the plot for an upcoming movie called "Edison," starring Kevin Spacey, Morgan Freeman and pop star Justin Timberlake. While it might sound true to life, the film is not based on the township, filmmakers say. "It's more coincidence than anything," said "Edison" publicist Barbara Chomos. The title was chosen to reflect a "very glassy, electronic and powerful city," said Chomos yesterday during a phone call from Vancouver, British Columbia, where "Edison" is being filmed. "It's a city that looks like it has new money." But the recent history of New Jersey's Edison suggests that the movie could have been taken from local headlines. A 2000 broadcast of CBS' "60 Minutes" explored alleged corruption within the department and focused on the former head of the Edison Police Department's Internal Affairs Unit, who contended that his efforts to root out corrupt cops led to charges against himself and his family. The program also highlighted a former police officer who was convicted of bank robbery in 1999, and a police sergeant who was convicted in 1991 of criminal sexual contact of a woman while responding to a noise complaint in her home. "Edison" writer and director David Burke, known for his work on television shows like "Wiseguy" and "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit," wrote the movie before the "60 Minutes" report aired, said Chomos. However, the similarities between Edison the movie and Edison the township has occurred to students at the township's high schools. "We were talking about it in school," said Allison Yang, a 16-year-old junior at J.P. Stevens High School. "We heard they're making a new movie about the corruption in the Edison Police Department." Edison Police Department officials declined to comment beyond saying that the film's production company had not contacted them about the movie, and that the title seems appropriate as "the name Edison is in tribute to a world-reknown inventor, Thomas Edison, and that represents a progressive, positive image," said Lt. Matthew Freeman. "It's not surprising that the movie would use the name for a fictional city," he said. "Edison" is budgeted for $25 million, according to reports, and is being produced by Millennium Films. It's expected to be released in 2005. |
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