Clay Aiken and Ruben Studdard still share a bond like no other

NORTH LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas: Think about the bond you share with a friend that you have known for two decades, and now imagine that you met when you were both 24, on a TV show that made each of you head-spinningly famous. There were record deals. Magazines with your faces on the cover. The tabloids tried to figure out who you were sleeping with. Ecstatic fans crashed your tables at restaurants. Through it all, a rude British man got paid to insult you.

It was 2003 — very specifically 2003, the year that Fox’s ‘American Idol’ skyrocketed into ubiquity in its second season. Tens of millions of viewers gathered on Tuesday and Wednesday nights to watch the singing competition, vote for their favorites and gasp at stinging comments from the ‘mean’ judge, British record executive Simon Cowell. And everyone started to realize that this new phenomenon called ‘reality TV’ could really turn regular people into stars and would give us a whole new class of celebrities to obsessively follow.

May 21, 2003: It all came down to Ruben Studdard vs. Clay Aiken. Some 124 million votes were cast and a whopping 38 million viewers tuned in, one of the highest-rated TV broadcasts that year and the most-watched live regularly scheduled TV episode of this century so far (excluding sports). Studdard won and Aiken was named runner-up, and the two men became inextricably linked - and friends, forever.

“We like to round it up to 40 [million viewers], please,” Aiken joked, maybe only half kidding.

Aiken stopped touring a decade ago, but last spring, Studdard noted that the 20-year anniversary of their famed ‘Idol’ season was on the horizon and hinted about a possible reunion for the milestone. “I know you’ll be in Congress next year,” Studdard told Aiken, who was in the throes of his second bid in eight years for a North Carolina congressional seat.

(“He was being nice and optimistic,” Aiken said.)

Aiken lost the Democratic primary and decided he was sick of the political arena: “I’m done with all of this for the rest of my life,” he said.

“I don’t like any of them, honestly, on either side.”

Studdard told him, “You’ll make more people happy singing than you will in politics, anyway.”

Aiken was sold, leading to ‘Twenty,’ a 70-plus date concert trek across the United States and Canada that kicked off in April and continues through January and beyond. The set list is entirely cover songs, many of which they performed on ‘Idol,’ and it makes people very, very happy as they are emotionally transported to what they remember as a simpler time, when everyone watched the same thing on TV and the internet was limited to the dial-up modem on the “family computer.”

The tour has pulled into North Little Rock on a warm October afternoon at the University of Arkansas Pulaski Technical College. Aiken and Studdard are dressed as casually as possible without actually wearing pajamas, several hours before they take the stage.

Though they have separate busy lives — Aiken lives in Raleigh with his teen son; Studdard is based in Birmingham with his wife and preschool-age son — they have remained close friends all these years. And as other “Idol” stars fade from memory, America has never forgotten Clay and Ruben.

They refer to each other as brothers, and when they unite for these type of events, they are one entity. The merchandise involves both of them: One shirt reads “John & Paul & George & Ringo & Ruben & Clay.” The media played up their rivalry in 2003; even though it was a competition, they didn’t really feel like competitors. Their fans, especially the ‘Claymates,’ bickered about Studdard’s small margin of victory in the finale and claimed conspiracies. The actual Ruben and Clay were never at odds.

“We occasionally will see somebody in the audience with an old Ruben shirt, like a lady last night ... and I joked with her,” Aiken said. “But I don’t even like it when we do a meet-and-greet and someone says, ‘I voted for you’ when [Ruben] is in the room. It p----- me off! And if someone says that to him, then you better be p---too.”

“It doesn’t make me mad,” Studdard countered.

“Because we wouldn’t be here if somebody hadn’t voted for him, and vice versa, so he needs to calm down.”

“Okay, I don’t get upset when they say they voted for me. But there have been, once or twice, a few who have said it in a way that was not as empathetic. And I don’t like that at all,” Aiken protested as Studdard looks amused, like he’s heard this all before.

“We are in this together.”

It’s like eavesdropping on a conversation that has been going on for 20 years. As they sat down for a scheduled hour-long interview, Aiken and Studdard bounced rapid-fire from topic to topic, cackling about old ‘Idol’ memories, the minutiae of which they fear would bore anyone else. They get wistful expressions when they talk about a recent concert at which the venue had food delivered backstage from Buca di Beppo, the Italian chain where they used to get weekly cast dinners on ‘Idol.’ Studdard had not thought about Buca di Beppo in 20 years.

“The most fulfilling part [of this tour] is having all these nostalgic moments, like the memories. I’m not sitting at home regularly thinking about the stuff that I did when I was on ‘American Idol,’” Studdard said.

“It’s like ... I’ve forgotten most things about high school, until I’m around people that went to high school with me.”

It reminds Aiken of the adage about how you can’t make old friends.

“There are not many people who will always know what Ruben was like when he was 24, or what I was like when I was 24,” he said. Nearing his 45th birthday, Aiken sees real value in what he and Studdard, who turned 45 earlier this year, still have. The back-and-forth continues until about the 58-minute mark. “I don’t think we’ve let you ask a single question, have we?” Aiken said.

“That’s what I learned when I was in politics — filibuster, then they can’t ask you the tough s---. What do you think about the new speaker, Ruben? I’m kidding.”

Eight minutes later, after which they don’t discuss just-elected House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) but do mention temporary speaker Patrick T. McHenry’s (R-NC) bow tie and then wind up debating how to handle drunk fans who yell song requests, finally, a question: What was it like going from an everyday person to becoming a celebrity and having everyone care about everything that you do? Studdard said the hardest part in the beginning was people interrupting meals out with his family.

“Meanwhile, my grandma is loving this,” he said, because she was bursting with pride. Aiken remembered a few months after ‘Idol’ in Los Angeles, he wound up at the same Melrose restaurant as Glenn Close. No one bothered Close, but he was bombarded by photo requests.

“They thought they could pull up a chair to our dinner table and they did pull up chairs to our dinner tables,” Aiken said.

“Because they did put us there. They had a hand in it. And they felt like they knew us because we had told our stories on ‘Idol.’”

Allowing audience members to vote was one reason “Idol” caught on in the United States, adapted from the British hit “Pop Idol,” where Cowell first starred. The American version imported Cowell and added hitmakerproducer Randy Jackson and legendary singer-dancer Paula Abdul as his fellow judges.

The first season was a success in the summer of 2002, and as winner Kelly Clarkson set off on soon-to-be superstardom, producers raced to find similarly captivating contestants.

Viewers tuned in for the classic terrible auditions and Cowell’s brutally honest commentary, but many fans loved frontrunners Aiken and Studdard from the start. Aiken, in school studying special education, sang Heatwave’s ‘Always and Forever’ at his first audition while wearing glasses and puka shells, and shocked the judges with his soaring vocals.

“You don’t look like a pop star, but you’ve got a great voice,” Cowell said, a conundrum that Jackson pronounced “weird.”

Studdard, a former college football player who majored in music education, arrived in a yellow baseball hat and delivered a stunning rendition of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Ribbon in the Sky.’

The judges loved him. Aiken and Studdard were sent through to the Hollywood round and started to bond as the field narrowed.

“That was such a great season, Season 2 — and the best part is that two completely separate and distinct artists became the most unlikely duo,” Abdul said in a recent interview.