Creed's Prison Break

Circus Magazine August 1998

"It's all happened so quick," notes Creed drummer Scott Phillips. He sips coffee, and he's surprisingly laid back for being a future rock star. "We haven't had time to settle in to the fact that we're doing pretty good. It's just one gig after the next, and then sometimes you get a chance to find out exactly how well you're doing. So far everything's been good. We're all just normal guys hanging out on a bus riding around the country."

Phillips sheepishly understates the case. Tonight's show at Embassy is a sell-out, featuring Creed headlining, with fellow Floridians Subrosa and Orlando rockers GumWrapper Curb, a band whose buzz suggests they might be Florida's next big signing. People are queuing up outside the door, and the club is filling up fast. Backstage it's the usual chaos, with managers, roadies and local glitterati milling about. Amidst it all, Creed is coolly calm, cooperating for photos, making small talk with lots of the folks backstage and maintaining a demeanor that just smacks of hometown hospitality.

"We're not atypical," says lead singer Scott Stapp. "We're pretty down to earth homebody types. [Our] idea of a good time is sitting on the couch with your girlfriend watching a movie, and then going and jamming at your buddy's house and having a couple beers, and playing with your dogs. We're not crazy-tear-apart-your-hotel-room-snort-20-lines-of-coke-and-live- the-lifestyle [type of people]. We've never been that way."

Nevertheless, Creed must own up to the fact that they are continuing Florida's legacy in fine form. With continued radio play (and major label promotion) of their breakthrough single "My Own Prison", sales of their indie debut album, My Own Prison (Wind-Up) began to literally skyrocket, and by Christmas 1997 they were at about 200,000.

Suddenly, the group found itself in the whirlwind of fame and fortune, even if they didn't have time to enjoy it in between gigs. By now, the record has sold over platinum (at 1.4 mil. copies at presstime). Other successful Florida groups have set the grueling pace, and Creed's pattern is similar. Matchbox 20, Sister Hazel and Mighty Joe Plum have each taken the better part of a year to release their respective second singles. The difference is that after only four months, Creed is on single #2 ("Torn") and the climb shows no sign of abating. Wind-Up has also released an acoustic version of "My Own Prison," which is every bit as powerful as the single on the full-length release.

It all began in Tallahassee, the college town of Florida State University and Florida's capital to boot. In fact, the former institution was where former high school classmates guitarist Mark Tremonti and Stapp began jamming together on original tunes in Mark's dorm room. Songs like "In America", a bristling, confusion-fueled epic, helped get the band attention. The song recalled grunge - elements of Pearl Jam, Live, and Soundgarden - and lyrically typifies adolescent disillusion. "What is right or wrong/I don't know who to believe in / My soul sings a different song in America." sang Stapp on the track. Local radio picked it up, and press coverage in hometown papers like the Tallahassee Democrat and nationals like Billboard didn't hurt sales of Creed's independently produced release.

By then it was official: Creed was a statewide phenomenon at least, with "My Own Prison" getting airplay in all Florida's major markets. Their deal with BMG-distributed Wind-Up Records was prompted before all this, The indie release had already sold about 5,000 copies on its own, and Creed frequently found itself in the Top 5 request spots on Florida radio stations.

After the deal, "My Own Prison" was remixed by Ron St-Germain (Tool, Soundgarden, U2). The album was recorded in The Kitchen in Tallahassee and down at Criteria Studios in Miami. After all this, the ten tracks on the album can hardly match the experience of seeing Creed on stage. Much like the band they are often compared to (Pearl Jam), Creed is a force to be contended with, as the energy of the sold-out Embassy crowd meshes with the band's own for a sonic thunder not normally associated with a medium sized club. Moshing is in magnificent abundance, crowd surfing seems out of control and, on occasion, total abandon overwhelms the audience in a mass of human activity. Stapp swings his head in grand exploding-hair fashion, losing himself in the maelstrom, counteracting that with swinging and twirling his guitar behind his head à la Jimi Hendrix. Meanwhile the rest of the band - Phillips, Tremonti and bassist Brian Marshall - flails in unabashed self-indulgence, as the crowd goes wild to the churning, grungy blast. If you close your eyes, you can imagine an arena somewhere in Seattle.

The band is quick to admit that yes, this kind of success is what they wanted. But they realize now they may have been a bit unprepared for it. They're different now. "It's changed the way I look at people a bit," observes Stapp. "Even people that are close to me. Because six months ago I was a loser, and now all of a sudden I'm everybody's best friend and everybody's hero. It's funny how success can do that."

"It changes other people's appearance of you," Tremonti concurs. "And when everyone changes around you, then you live in this distorted world. You want someone to say 'you're an asshole, shut up.' You want your friends to keep doing that. You want people around you to keep reality. It's kind of hard to deal with that sometimes. It's hard to always feel like you're having to put up a facade."

Concludes Stapp: "Sometimes I'm just like everyone else, I'm having a bad day. But I can't go have a bad day in front of 3,000 people, or have a bad day at a radio station when I'm going there to tell them thanks. Sometimes you can't be real. When that's important to you - which is important to all of us - it can drive you insane. 'Cause if someone's a jerk, in the past, you're like 'leave me alone, you're a prick' But you know, that could be someone who's responsible for 30 radio stations, and you're having to sit there and grin and bear it. Because we're the type of band that's not like 'we didn't want to get discovered, we didn't want to get on the radio, we didn't want...' That's what we wanted. That was our goal. So when you're having to play the game, so to speak, it can wear on you. It can wear on you mentally, physically. But the positives keep you going. We can't complain. This is better than anything we've ever done and we hope it never ends."

Thanks to a solid, ever-growing work ethic, the band has no intentions of it ending anytime soon. They are constantly in creative mode, thinking about the next record. And the fans benefit because of it. "We have been working on stuff," says Phillips. "We have done three or four songs before we had gone out [on tour], and we're kind of trying to perfect them on the road. There's a song called 'Young Grow Old' and 'Beautiful' that we've been doing for quite a while. Almost right after we finished the first album, we started working on those. Some of the other ones are coming along. Some are untitled. Some are just jams that we're trying to put together."

In an ironic twist on the whole rock 'n' roll lifestyle, Creed sees their current ride as the polar opposite of what joining a rock band has always meant: stability. "It feels good to finally have stability in my life, a little bit of security, at least for the next two or three years," says Tremonti. "That's a comfortable feeling to have."

With the money that pours in from the sales or My Own Prison the group should be very comfortable for some time. Perhaps regular MTV airplay and the shooting of videos will fill even more space in the band's itinerary, perhaps someday the term "household name" will be applied to them or perhaps they may even achieve that level of fame that transcends mere rock 'n' roll and finds it's way into the general mainstream. Whatever happens, the Tallahassee quartet is up to the task. Lucky for them, they're getting no pressure from the label, and their main goal, aside from all that's mentioned above, is to simply keep their feet on the ground. "[We want to] just keep doing what we've been doing and not change anything," says Stapp. "Keep writing what's coming out of us, keep being honest and sincere, keep playing music because we love it, and not because we have to. Keep the love, try to keep the innocence. That's why we're surrounding ourselves with people that we're close to. Trying to make this as much of a family type atmosphere as we possibly can, just so that innocence can stay with us. 'Cause we don't want to lose it."

"Wherever we fit in and wherever we are six months from now or two years from now, if it all ended tomorrow nationally, we'd still get together in Scott's basement and we'd still write songs and we'd still jam," figures Tremonti. "'Cause it's what we are as a group. It's what we were as friends. We were all buddies, and this is what we did for fun. We just got lucky. Someone discovered us and we got put out national." As if to put it all in perspective, Stapp concludes, "We just wanna rock, man."

.Dennis Walkling