Honestly, I think it had a lot to do with the fans. For the first couple shows—for the New York show and the Europe shows and the Asia shows—it was mostly still my fans who were showing up—like, it was mostly still people who were there to see ME—and like, yeah, a lot of them had heard of Chris, but he wasn’t like, this God to them in the same way that he was to my dad or my dad’s generation. And then as the tour went on, I guess word started to get around that Chris was back—that like, Chris was back to his old ways—and so people started showing up with this really different energy. People started to show up expecting a replay of their experiences from twenty years ago, and Chris just started to feed off of that in the worst possible way.

The first sign that things were really taking a turn for the worse was when we played our show in Portland, and for the first time all tour, the makeup of the crowd was almost half mine and half Chris’s. We were expecting that there’d be a big turnout for Chris—obviously, he’s a major deal there—but we weren’t expecting that they’d come out in droves, you know? And I’ve been pushing boundaries and doing some crazier shit for a while—like, it’s been a long time since the Be My Baby days—but you’ve gotta remember, like, there’s still this big core of my fan base that’s made up of teenagers and their parents. I mean, there’s a lot of people showing up to my concerts who are seeing a concert for the first time—it’s like twelve-year-olds, ten-year-olds even—and I love that about my shows. I’ve always loved that the shows belong to everybody. But Chris’s fans showed up with this energy of Us versus Them, you know? Like, they really seemed to feel like Chris was THEIRS, and like the whole concert was THEIRS, and they weren’t going to be happy unless they were able to take over the whole space.

And I mean, I’ve played shows for sort of rowdy crowds before. Like, at Summer Jamz or whatever, things can get pretty crazy, but these people were throwing things up onto the stage, you know? That had happened to me once before, like, when I was playing this show with Scaggs in Detroit, but the worst anybody did was throw up a joint or like, throw up some panties, which, like, Scaggs’s security guys would pick up and take backstage in case he wanted to check them out later. But at this Portland show people were throwing little baggies of cocaine, you know? People were throwing up heroin. And like, fifty-year-old women were flashing their tits and vomiting in the aisles, and I was just like: Whoa. This is not a vibe that I ever wanted to be a part of.

But, you know, Chris was loving it. I mean, he was already pretty hammered, but like, once he was out there and he saw how crazy the crowd was getting, he just got this look in his eyes, like—I mean, it was like this thing had been awakened in him, you know, this like, ancient, evil spirit—and I just didn’t even recognize him anymore. He just summoned his old self—like, he fully brought back the mid-’90s Chris Jeffries—and he let that guy take the steering wheel entirely.