June 17, 2008 @ 2:33 pm

STOKED Part Two

by: Linda Hobbs

It's B2K Week at VIBE.com. Read the second excerpt from the shocking story that has the internet buzzing.

B2K was more than just another pop sensation: They were once the biggest black boy band in the world. They didn’t get as much media hype or sell as many albums as white groups like Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync, but not for lack of talent. Jarell “J-Boog” Houston had the dazzling dance moves, Dreux “Lil Fizz” Frederic was the heartthrob, Raz B was the energetic one, and lead vocalist Omari Ishmael Grandberry, aka Omarion, had the full package: chiseled abs, soft cornrows, and a breathy alto that made teen girls melt.

It’s been more than four years since B2K posters covered the bedroom walls of count- less teenage girls, four years since they sold out arenas and got chased by squealing ponytailed fans. The reasons for their breakup have never been fully explained, but this much is certain: Behind the dreamy pop-star facade, the boys of B2K endured more than their fans ever imagined.

Long before Raz and Ricky’s videos popped up online, B2K was heading into a downward spiral. At the center of it all was the group’s manager and “father figure.” According to Boog and Fizz, Stokes controlled all aspects of their lives. “It was like a cult,” Boog has said.

“Whatever he said, we did.” They say Stokes forced them to become vegetarians, forbidding them to eat chicken because the hormones would make them grow too fast. Aside from the usual demands—rehearsals, workouts, performances, interviews —Stokes controlled their burgeoning love lives in order to keep them “focused.” They were allowed to talk to girls once every two weeks, and phone bills were checked for strange numbers.

Visits home were limited to a day or two and discipline was strict: “We were groomed from watching tapes of Michael Jackson and old tapes of Immature,” Omarion says. “Maybe one of the boys would cuss in an interview, or one of the boys would get sleepy, and the DJ thought he was cocky. We got in trouble for stuff like that.”

“Getting in trouble” was not limited to verbal warnings.

“Sometimes we’d get punched,” says Omarion. “Like, socked in the chest or something. It’s like a man thing, like, Y’all need to listen. That’s honestly why we stayed in line.”

Raz B didn’t have a problem with his cousin’s strict management style: “If we didn’t have the discipline that we had,” he says, “we probably wouldn’t have been as successful as we were.” But then there were the financial issues.  “’Til this day, I still don’t know where the money’s at,” says Raz. “We invested in houses, we invested in cars, but none of the stuff was in our name. So it was so easy for them to take our stuff.... Me personally, I’ve never seen the books or records. Chris talked about them, but I’ve never got a chance to see them.”

When Chris Stokes says, “I’m not a press person,” it’s no exaggeration.

VIBE first requested an interview with the enigmatic producer/manager in January 2008, soon after the abuse allegations aired on YouTube. His publicist offered a prepared statement. Then she requested that questions be sent in writing, so that Stokes could respond via email. After some back and forth, VIBE agreed. But the emailed questions went unanswered, and phone calls were not returned.

Communication resumed on April 23— the very day that Ricky Romance and Raz, as well as Boog and Fizz, were scheduled to be photographed for this story. That morning, a representative from The Ultimate Group (T.U.G.), Stokes’ Los Angeles-based management company, called VIBE’s New York offices to ask why we were photographing B2K without “the most important member,” Omarion.

Since B2K’s breakup, the singer and actor—who was recently released from his deal at Columbia Records and is now said to be working on a new album with producers Timbaland and Pharrell—continues to work with The Ultimate Group, as does Marques “Batman” Houston, formerly of Immature (later IMx) and now the president of T.U.G.  After arranging phone interviews with Omarion and Houston—both of whom vouched for their manager’s character and dismissed the allegations against him—Stokes himself came to the phone.

“I’m not in the public, sweetheart!” Stokes says. But he says he decided to speak because people have the wrong idea about him. “I’m a Christian man, and I’m an honest person,” he says.

“You’d probably want to be my friend if you got to know me...I just want VIBE readers to know that I treat my artists like my family, and once you achieve a certain amount of recognition and success, you become a target.” That success did not come easily for Stokes, an L.A. native who was born in 1969. “A lot of people don’t know that, but I grew up in the ’hood,” he says.

“My mom was a single parent with six kids.” He describes himself as “a really ambitious kid” who was pushing carts at the grocery store by the age of 8.

“I was kind of like the man of the house,” he says, “bringing food home to my mom and my sisters.” He remembers telling his mother that he would make $10,000 one day. “She laughed at me, her friends laughed at me,” Stokes recalls.  “Now my nickname is ‘The 100 Million Dollar Man,’ so I wonder what her friends are saying now? I’m like, ‘Mom, you pushing two Mercedes now and got the house on the hill. How you feel now?’”

Stokes says he was inspired by Michael Bivins, a former member of the seminal ’80s boy band New Edition who went on to create successful groups like Bell Biv DeVoe, 702, Boyz II Men, and Another Bad Creation. “I thought he was a great businessman,” says Stokes.

“You know, ABC had sold 3 million records, so I said, Let me do a boy group.” At age 21, Stokes began putting together the trio that would become Immature. “When we first started, we was 8 or 9,” says Marques Houston. A major fan of Another Bad Creation, Houston was a regular at his L.A.  elementary school talent shows.

“One year, Chris came to our school,” he says. “We didn’t know who he was, ’cause he wasn’t famous at the time. He told me he was hiring up a group like ABC, and I was with it.... He talked to my mom and dad and just went for it.”

Stokes got his start in showbiz as a producer for his younger sister Juanita, a rapper known as Smooth who went on to record with Tupac Shakur, among others.

“I did a lot of producing,” he says. “I can’t really remember exactly because it’s been so long.” He mentions producing for Bobby Brown and Bell Biv DeVoe, adding that “Michael Bivins was a very good friend of mine.”

“Huh?” says Bivins when asked about Stokes’ work for BBD.

Bivins does recall meeting Stokes back when he was still a member of New Edition. “He told me his sister Smooth was a big fan and she wanted to meet me,” recalls Bivins. “He might’ve submitted something,” Bivins adds, “but there’s not a song on our album[s] from Chris.”

In 1992, Immature’s debut, On Our Worst Behavior, was released by Virgin Records. “The first time I ever saw the kids was in a video,” Bivins says. “I was like, Oh okay...I got to keep my boys hot because somebody is trying to steal their spot.” After negotiating a new deal with MCA, Stokes went on to produce three more Immature albums: 1994’s Playtyme Is Over, their biggest seller, which went gold, followed by 1995’s We Got It, and 1997’s The Journey.

He worked with the future superstar Brandy Norwood, as well as with a 12-year-old singer from Texas named Quindon Tarver. Stokes even tried his hand at performing with his business partner Ketrina “Taz” Askew in the duo Wataz, whose 1998 debut, Natural High (Fully Loaded), included the single “Ooh Ahh Ooh,” which peaked at No. 81 on Billboard’s R&B Singles chart. “You have a lot of moguls out there who have been successful [performers], like Jay-Z and Puffy,” says Stokes. “But me personally, I felt I was a better businessman than singer.”

Focusing on his business, Stokes established The Ultimate Group, a powerhouse of young R&B hopefuls.

The company kept a house in Studio City, Calif., that was reminiscent of O-Town, Lou Pearlman’s $6 million recording and rehearsal facility in Orlando where groups like ’N Sync and Backstreet Boys honed their skills. “I saw my colleagues like Diddy, Jermaine [Dupri], and Master P building their repertoire,” Stokes says. “I felt like all of these were rap-driven. I wanted to be the one to build the first R&B empire.” To that end, in the year 2000, he recruited his wife’s nephew Omarion to become the lead singer in his new group B2K, which stood for “Boys of the New Millennium.”

Stokes wanted to create a Puffy-like empire, and the Bad Boy CEO was featured on the biggest hit Stokes ever produced, B2K’s 2002 smash “Bump, Bump, Bump,” which hit No.  1 on Billboard’s Hot 100, driving sales of their album Pandemonium! to platinum status.  Stokes-managed artists were soon headlining the nationwide Scream Tour, and Stokes would go on to write and direct the dance flick You Got Served (Screen Gems), starring Marques Houston and B2K. The $8 million film opened in January 2004 as the No. 1 box- office hit in America and ended up grossing more than $40 million worldwide.

“The proudest thing in my life? My children,” says Stokes of his accomplishments.  “Stanky is 3. Kristie is 10. Michael is 13. And Miko is 17.”

Miko has already entered the family business, joining the boy band 2Much, which is signed to Interscope Records and managed by his mother and father. (Chris and Monyee Stokes have been together for 17 years and were married almost four years ago.) While Stokes claims that he’s never seen Raz and Ricky’s infamous YouTube videos—“I am way too busy, sweetheart, to even sit there and look at that,” he says—the allegations, or “fibs,” as he calls them, have come to his family’s attention.

“I’ll tell you a funny joke, a little scenario,” says Stokes. “My son Michael came home from school one day and said, ‘Dad, I want to punch Raz B because he’s making up lies about my daddy!’” Stokes pauses for a moment, letting the image sink in.

“Actually it’s not funny at all. It’s not cool...because they have classmates and stuff like that, so to me it’s really sad. But like I tell them, ‘Daddy’s famous and I guess people take stabs at him.’”

Stokes refers to the allegations in the videos as “a cry for attention” from people who are jealous of his success. “If they want to keep telling lies,” he says, “they can get themselves sued for defamation of character.”

He insists that when his voice is heard during Ricky’s video that he was turning down a request for money—but his words were edited and taken out of context. (He says his attorneys have uncut copies of those calls.)

“I thought they were crazy,” he says. “If you want me to be honest, I felt like, These people need mental help.”

Stokes’ opinions are based on more than just a few minutes of video footage, as both Ricky and Raz B are his cousins. “A lot of people might not even realize that,” says Stokes. “I raised [Raz] from the time he was 13 because he comes from a troubled home, and I put him in B2K.”

Ricky gave a somewhat different account in a December interview on WPGC-FM: “Chris got my mom to sign custody while she was on drugs,” he said. “So he had full custody of my brother. He was receiving all of my brother’s money and everything.” Stokes says he is no longer Raz B’s guardian.

“He was in a very bad situation. He was in the court systems,” says Stokes. “I took care of him. I looked out for him. ...And to be honest with you, I still have continued to help him over the years. And now he’s biting the hand that feeds him.”

Stokes is eager to put all the controversy behind him and to focus on his latest venture, an Internet video show called Chris Stokes: I Wanna Be A Star! “I want to help people that can’t get deals, and get them out there,” says Stokes. “By the time this [article comes out], I’m going to be on network TV.”

But for now, Stokes has been soliciting auditions via YouTube and MySpace. Despite the publicity he’s received in recent months, he has been inundated with audition videos from eager young performers vying for the chance to win the grand prize—a deal with T.U.G.

“Everybody can have a chance,” Stokes promises on his YouTube solicitation. “Anybody who follows the rules will qualify.... Do you have what it takes to be the next superstar?”

Come back to VIBE.com tomorrow for part 3 of “STOKED.”

Read "STOKED" Part One.

Article tags: Chris Stokes, B2K, Omarion, Marques Houston, Immature 

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