It was the opening night of the much-hyped concert collaboration between rapper Jay-Z and R&B star R. Kelly, and already tensions were brewing – over the spotlight.
Having never rehearsed together, the duo appeared to put on a flawless concert that late September night at the Allstate Arena in Chicago to open their “Best of Both Worlds” tour.
The following night, however, tensions were beginning to emerge that finally erupted last week into a poisonous $75 million dispute.
When Jay-Z arrived for the second Chicago show, he learned that his co-star had been quietly fuming over the lighting of his solo parts, according to advisers close to the rapper.
Kelly couldn’t understand why the lighting appeared not to be working properly whenever he took the stage – and he was outraged with one of the lighting producers, according to people who worked on the concert tour.
“He believed he was being ‘sabotaged’ by the crew,” one source said.
The show was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. sharp – at which time tour manager Randy Buzzelli couldn’t locate Kelly, sources said.
“Rob [Kelly is] not even in the arena and we have a whole crowd out there waiting for a show to start,” Buzzelli, who has worked closely with Jay-Z since 1998, told The Post.
“Nobody comes and tells us where he is. Jay’s waiting in his dressing room to go on, and he’s asking me, ‘Where’s Rob?’
“Jay tells me, ‘Go find him – but if I have to go on alone, I will.’ ”
At 8:45 p.m., Buzzelli says he saw Kelly’s tour bus pull into the parking lot of the arena, but Kelly refused to let Buzzelli on the bus and didn’t come into the arena until 10:30 – 2½ hours late.
“I go tell Jay and he says, ‘Let’s just do this and we’ll work it out after,’ ” Buzzelli said.
The 21/2-hour show finally went on without the two stars speaking. They performed their opening, each did their solo sets, and during “Fiesta,” the final song, Jay-Z walked on stage left and looked over for Kelly – who was nowhere to be found.
“You could read Jay’s face,” Buzzelli said. “He was upset. It was a disaster – during Rob’s singing parts, no one was there to sing. It was just music playing.”
Kelly spokesman Allan Mayer explained that Kelly had spent a month before the tour elaborately designing the show.
“He could not get the lighting people to work with him – they always had an excuse, like their computer was down. He started becoming very frustrated.”
After the blow-up in Chicago, the next show, in Cincinnati, had to be canceled.
Due to the Chicago show’s delay, there was no way the crew could break down the set, drive 11 buses to Cincinnati and build the stage again in time for the next concert, sources said.
According to Buzzelli, at this point Jay-Z still wanted to continue the tour and called Kelly to work out the problems.
In a bid to smooth over the technical snafus, Kelly hired his own lighting specialists to work his solo sets, and the next few shows in Cleveland, Buffalo and Washington, D.C., went off with no major issues.
Then, according to Buzzelli, Kelly started having “temper tantrums” and “meltdowns” on a regular basis.
“R. Kelly was being a perfectionist,” Buzzelli said. “He wanted everything perfect, no mistakes . . . [but] his staff also had no one in charge.”
Finally, the two feuding stars – who by now weren’t on speaking terms – reached Madison Square Garden.
Kelly claims that there, while onstage singing, he saw a man in the audience “open his coat, exposing a dark object he thought could be a gun.”
Kelly walked offstage in mid-performance and locked himself in his dressing room.
After security declared the crowd safe and Kelly attempted to return to the stage, “Tyran ‘Ta-Ta’ Smith, a member of Jay-Z’s entourage, sprayed Kelly in the eyes and face with Mace or pepper spray,” according to the $75 million lawsuit the R&B man filed against Jay-Z last week.
Mayer claimed he saw Smith lurking outside Kelly’s dressing room, screaming, “I’m sick and tired of this faggot Kelly!”
Jay-Z has continued the tour without Kelly, renaming it the “Jay-Z and Friends Tour.”
“It was supposed to be the perfect marriage of hip-hop and R&B. Instead it’s going to be a terrible divorce,” said Kelly lawyer Ed Hayes.