All for One, or One for All?

“Damn this leg,” screams Sisqo as he hobbles down the hallway of his hotel in Beverly Hills. With his close-cropped silver hair and his injured right leg raking the carpet behind him, he looks as if he’s auditioning for the role of Marley’s Ghost in a glam-rock version of “A Christmas Carol.”

“I’m trying to walk this injury off, so I’ll be able to perform tomorrow night at the Soul Train Awards, but this hurts.”

Seems the 23-year-old singer was rehearsing his massive hit “Thong Song” earlier in the day when he landed wrong after doing a fearless leap off the Shrine Auditorium stage. Now he’s looking more like a gimpy athlete than an R&B; force of nature.

Overdrive is the way Sisqo, a.k.a. Mark Andrews, likes to go about his business, but sometimes it’s hard to tell whether he’s running toward some ultimate show-biz brass ring or trying to keep one step ahead of a public meltdown he believes is just one bad career move away.

Up to now, the moves have all worked. It was Sisqo’s sly purr that helped transform Dru Hill, which also features Larry “Jazz” Anthony and Tamir “Nokio” Ruffin, into the most popular R&B; vocal group of the late ‘90s.

The Baltimore-bred outfit’s five satin-sheeted No. 1 R&B; singles (six if you include its contribution to the theme song for “Wild Wild West” with Will Smith) were the best kind of radio-friendly safe sex and turned Sisqo, the group’s focal point, into one of urban music’s reigning vocal Lotharios.

Then Sisqo released a solo album, “Unleash the Dragon,” late last year. One of the cuts, the bumptious booty-shaker “Thong Song,” has become a major hit, helping push the album into the Top 5 on the chart. Total sales to date: 2.1 million.

Given the smooth upward trajectory of his fame thus far, it’s hard to fathom where Sisqo’s dark thoughts come from.

“The ones who work the hardest in this business are the ones that hang around,” says the visibly exhausted singer after settling himself behind the desk in his hotel room. “I’ve just gotta work harder than everyone else, and keep my nose clean. That’s the name of the game.”

To hear Sisqo tell it, his solo career is not a breakaway strategy, but simply a cross-promotional vehicle designed to keep the tottering Dru Hill empire alive. According to the singer, things in the Dru Hill camp haven’t been the same since original member James “Woody” Green left in 1998 to pursue a gospel career.

“Dru Hill was steadily climbing the ladder, and Woody quit the group right on the set of the video for ‘Wild Wild West,’ ” says the diminutive, soft-spoken singer. “We didn’t have a chance to stop and think about what move to make. The three of us went on tour, but it wasn’t sitting right with me, trying to trick people into thinking the three of us were Dru Hill.”

The 1998 merger of the Universal Music Group and PolyGram, which owned the group’s record label Island, led to a restructuring in which Dru Hill ended up on Def Soul, a division of the new Island/Def Jam label. It made Sisqo feel Dru Hill was getting lost in the corporate shuffle.

“I had to come up with a plan,” he says. “When Woody left the group, I had to take the ball and run with it. I was trying my best to ensure the longevity of the group by becoming a pop icon. That way, when we came back with a Dru Hill album, more than the average Dru Hill fan would be interested.”

But it hasn’t quite worked as planned.

The original idea was to have Def Soul release solo albums from all three Dru Hill members, and while Kevin Liles, president of Def Soul/Def Jam Records, claims solo projects will be forthcoming from the other members, nothing has materialized yet besides “Unleash the Dragon.”

That album’s success has perhaps left Sisqo’s estranged colleagues wondering if the singer wasn’t just getting out while the getting was good.

“I told Sisqo when he was thinking about a solo thing that Dru Hill is a brand, and you have to be very careful about that,” says Liles. “You can’t do a solo album unless you protect the brand, which means we have to make Nokio and Jazz a brand, and so on.”

“Jazz wanted his solo album to come out right after Sisqo’s,” says Nokio, who is working on his solo album. “But you learn there’s a process to all of this. You can’t just force a record on people.

“Sisqo and I disagree on a lot of stuff, but it’s not negative. I’ve always kept the business and personal stuff private. Even when you’re working with your buddies, if you’re cool, you’re always gonna be cool. If Sisqo took the ball and made the shot, you should be happy, not asking, ‘Why didn’t you give me the ball?’ ”

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All this uncertainty has left Sisqo bewildered and a little chagrined. He can’t seem to come to grips with the fact that his success might rub his partners the wrong way, that his gains might bode ill for Dru Hill. All he wants, he says, is for everyone to be happy. Every time the subject of Dru Hill is broached, Sisqo visibly deflates, like a man who’s carrying too much weight on his shoulders. To make matters worse, he’s just received word that Jazz (who declined to comment for this story) wouldn’t be joining him at the Soul Train Awards.

“I’m really down right now,” he says, absently threading a pen through a paper clip. “I’m just going through the motions. Originally I was asked to perform alone, but it was my idea to have Dru Hill do something with me. ‘Thong Song’ is the most played record in Def Jam history, and that’s a good thing, but it’s not just for me, it’s for the group.”

It wasn’t supposed to work out this way: As high schoolers with aspirations of stardom, Dru Hill always had a team ethic. They first hooked up in Baltimore’s Mergenthaler Vocational High School, where Sisqo, an honors student in elementary school and the product of a middle-class household, had been trying desperately to gain credibility among his friends as a bona fide thug.

“My mother and father were middle-class, and my grandmother lived in the ghetto, so I used to spend my summers at her house,” says Sisqo. “I was that guy that, when the police would come, I would continue to wild out. I had no self-control.”

After he was thrown in a jail cell “with no belt, no shoestrings and a bed that was a table hanging out of a wall,” he figured it was time to go straight and find a new way to forge an identity.

“I wanted to be different,” he says, “so Nokio got me to dye my hair, and put earrings in my head. I had never thought of such things before, but it gave me a look.”

He also began to think about singing as something other than an obligation he had to fulfill every Sunday at church.

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Sisqo, Jazz and Nokio, who would harmonize when the three worked together at a Baltimore candy store called the Fudgery, drove to New York and landed a recording contract with Island’s black music division on the basis of an audition. The group eventually sold more than 6 million copies of its two albums, a number Sisqo seems to think may well be the saturation point with listeners.

Having studied closely the life cycles of countless bands like a music biologist, he’s a big proponent of change for change’s sake: “It seems like every time a group gets to their third album, people don’t care anymore. They get tired of seeing the same group every time.”

But that’s not the way Island/Def Jam saw things; the label opposed the idea of a Sisqo solo album at a time when Dru Hill was still thriving.

“I knew I had a vision,” Sisqo says. “I knew [the album] was hot. If we had released an album with me, Jazz and Nokio, it would have been over.”

Sisqo plans his career like a chess grandmaster, three and four moves ahead. It’s the only way, he believes, he can keep his product from perishing on the shelves.

“That’s why I dyed my hair silver. I don’t want to be predictable,” he says. “I got a million rabbits in my hat. Now that ‘Thong Song’s’ blown up, I’m gonna go back to a ballad. It’s all about flip-flopping.”

As to whether his plans include Dru Hill, Sisqo is ready and willing, but still waiting.

“Right now, I’m doing what I can for Dru Hill, but I can’t keep chasing them, begging them to be a part of what I’m doing. I can’t keep saying, ‘Come on, let’s stand on the mountain together’ if they don’t want to come.”

And what if they don’t come?

“I guess you’ll never hear another Dru Hill album again. Maybe you’ll never hear another Sisqo album, I don’t know. It takes a certain kind of person to do this, and I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to take it. You gotta be strong for this business.”