The Last Temptation of Creed

Details November 2009

ARDENTLY Christian frontman Scott Stapp spent years in a wilderness of acrimony, substance abuse, and sex tapes Before finally having a religious REawakening. now he and his bandmates want you to welcome them back with arms wide open

Everything you always hated about Creed is right there, literally at center stage, during one extraordinary moment in late August.

The foursome is midway through its set at the Nissan Pavilion in Bristow, Virginia, an outdoor amphitheater an exit or two past the chain-store sprawl of the northern-Virginia suburbs. This is Creed's first tour in six years, and lead singer Scott Stapp has been doing his best to show his bandmates and fans that he's become a new, more humble man since they saw him drunkenly botching the words to Creed hits in concert, or alongside Kid Rock on a sex tape, getting serviced by a groupie. His middle-parted, shoulder-length bob is gone, shorn in favor of a stern Henry Rollins-short buzz cut. As he wipes his brow, he explains to the fans in Bristow that the band spent its afternoon visiting wounded soldiers at nearby Walter Reed Army Medical Center. "This song is for the troops," he announces solemnly to a roar from the house. "You're all heroes!"

The band strikes up "What's This Life For." Spirited by a sweet, chiming riff by guitarist Mark Tremonti, the song is one of Creed's most affecting, a grunge lighter ballad about suicide. Stapp, a lifelong Evangelical Christian, wrote it after a friend took his life. "You could never find/what's this life for," Stapp moans with a palpable sense of loss, though not even this can shake his faith: After expressing pity for unbelievers ("Their souls are lost"), he closes the song with what has to be the most aggressively Judeo-Christian refrain ever heard on Q104.3 The Edge: " 'Cause we all live/ under the reign of ONE KING."

There's no time to question why Stapp has dedicated a song about ending a purposeless life to the battered survivors of the Iraq and Afghan wars. Partway through the number, a loud collective gasp begins to envelop the theater. Fans start leaping from their seats and pointing to the mosh pit. They smile at one another, they high-five, they whoop, they pump their fists ecstatically in the air. A lone rogue nerd excitedly tweets.

Here's what they see: A clean-cut man in his mid-twenties or thereabouts, wearing a white polo shirt with some sort of armed-services insignia, is being passed overhead, crowd-surfing toward the runway that extends from the stage. No biggie, except that this crowd-surfer is a soldier, and he is seated, if that's even the right word, in a wheelchair. Creed's roadies scramble to help the vet onto the catwalk, and soon he is flanked by the visibly moved Stapp and Tremonti as they rip through the big finish of "What's This Life For." The fans are freaking, like Pentecostals taken by the spirit, only in this case that spirit bonds classic-rock triumphalism to Dixie patriotism and Christian exceptionalism. The vet raises his arms and soaks up the crowd's thunderous howls of affection, pausing only for a moment to try to catch—gasp again!—a prosthetic leg (not his own) that has been tossed up like a beach ball from the maw of the mosh pit. When the song ends, chants of "USA! USA!" ring through the thick night air. The soldier is wheeled to the side of the stage, his vantage point for the remainder of the evening. The leg is passed through the crowd back to its owner. This does not happen at an Animal Collective concert.

When Creed broke up, in 2004, after selling 25 million copies of just three studio albums, including 11 million (the rare "diamond" certification, in record-biz parlance) of 1999's Human Clay, there seemed to be little chance that the Florida quartet would ever reform, much to the dismay of their fans and the delight of their detractors. Following their split, Tremonti called his former high-school pal Stapp "a cancer," likened working alongside him to a tour of duty in Vietnam, and swore that the band wouldn't reunite "unless it was for world peace." And that was before Stapp's periodic substance abuse and humiliating public misconduct came to a head.

At last check, world peace was not imminent, but the Worst Band in the World, according to Google's search algorithms and music snobs alike, has nevertheless returned. Now in their mid-thirties, they're not quite filling seats as they did in their heyday—tonight's attendance is a modest 5,000, out of the venue's capacity of 25,000. But there's still a sizable audience for Creed's unique alchemy: skillfully crafted grunge and metal riffs atop churning bass (Brian Marshall) and drums (Scott Phillips); melodies that unite working-class teens and their once-rowdy moms; and, most memorable of all, Stapp's portentous, Christian-themed lyrics and back-of-the-throat, beefcake baritone delivery—routinely mocked by hipsters as the reductio ad absurdum of the mainstream rock phenomenon known as "man voice."

For years, the members of Creed refused to read any of their reviews, well aware of their punching-bag status among rock critics. "I had the ostrich theory," Tremonti says. "I just buried my head—I had to tell everybody in my family, every one of my friends, 'If you see something derogatory, don't call me.'" Although much of the abuse heaped on Creed was- a by-product of—pardon the Bill O'Reillyism—the media's secular liberalism, Creed was also attacked by Evangelicals for not being Christian enough. So while rock critics accused them of obfuscating their religious message in order to infiltrate the minds of mainstream mallgoers, fervent Christians decried Stapp's occasional skepticism about organized religion, and pilloried the band for placing songs on soundtracks for "satanist" fare like Halloween H20 and Scream

Other criticisms reflected a cultural bias against the bulk of Creed's audience: red-state, white-male, and blue-collar. A cursory canvassing of the crowds at two Virginia-area shows turned up a payroll clerk, a Domino's manager, a couple of unemployed high-school grads, an Evangelical kindergarten teacher, and one hard-rocking odd duck from the Department of Homeland Security. All of them loved what they categorized as classic rock—Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Nickelback, 3 Doors Down—and all, whether openly Christian or not, felt that Stapp's lyrics are what elevate Creed above their less liturgical contemporaries. ("Scott's lyrics are from the heart" and "They're about something besides sex and drugs" were oft-cited sentiments.) The band's signature hits, like "Higher," "With Arms Wide Open," and "My Sacrifice," commercialized the soft-loud-soft grunge formula minted by Nirvana and Pearl Jam, draining it of teen angst and replacing it with devotionals to a higher power—be it Jesus, family, or the transformative mojo of rock itself. "Our music is relevant to the everyday dude," Tremonti says. "It's not too artsy-fartsy. And our fans relate to Scott's lyrics."

The seeds of Stapp's calling were planted at a tender age, when, as a boy growing up in Orlando, he was forced by his rigidly religious stepfather to transcribe long passages from the Bible as punishment. Church attendance—Wednesday, Friday, and twice on Sunday—was mandatory. Rock music, with the exception of Mom's beloved Elvis, was forbidden. Naturally, teenage rebellion followed—arriving first in the form of a smuggled Def Leppard album, which inevitably gatewayed into booze, sex, drugs, expulsion from a Tennessee Christian college, and, most calamitous of all, near-Talmudic study of Doors biographies. "That's why I moved to Tallahassee when I was 19, believe it or not," Stapp says. "Because Jim Morrison was a Florida boy."

It's the day after the Bristow show, and Stapp is in his backstage dressing room at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Virginia Beach. Outside, the band's crew is barking into walkie-talkies and grousing about the rain and gusting wind. One roadie complains to no one in particular: "This storm's been following us for most of the tour." Inside, Stapp is at the tempest's eye and appears to be trying to balance his chakras: The lights have been dimmed, and clusters of flickering candles cast a warm medieval glow onto the beige walls. Stapp pads softly around the room in flip-flops and sweatpants without a shirt. Two Bibles lie open on the glass-and-wrought-iron coffee table (one a New King James Version, the other a Living Bible, essentially the Good Book in modern vernacular). Playing softly from a nearby laptop are mixes from the upcoming Creed album that await his approval. His wife, Jaclyn, a striking brunette who was Mrs. Florida America 2008, pops in to remind Scott that his son, Jagger, 11, has to leave the tour tomorrow to begin school. Stapp nods, gives Jaclyn a kiss, and then reaches into the mini-fridge for a jug of the infant-care formula Pedialyte: "The label says for diarrhea or vomiting, but I'm drinking it for dehydration." As he swigs from the bottle, he reveals a grapefruit-size tattoo splayed across his left arm. The art is sort of chilling: two menacing steel-blue spikes fashioned into the sign of the cross, with NOVEMBER 18 2006 emblazoned atop them in bright-orange ink.

"I just about lost everything that day," Stapp says. "I think maybe in a weird way I was trying to." A few days before that date, he had checked into a penthouse suite at the Delano Hotel in Miami Beach under the name Vito Corleone, in the midst of another drug-and-alcohol-fueled blowout. "I was a binger. Every six or seven months, I'd just go nuts." The trail of headlines left in his wake affirms that: "OUT OF CONTROL" SCOTT STAPP INCITES MELEE WITH 311 AT BALTIMORE HOTEL; KID ROCK SUES TO BLOCK SCOTT STAPP SEX TAPE; SCOTT STAPP GETS MARRIED—AND ARRESTED FOR PUBLIC INTOXICATION; STAPP FORGIVEN FOR DOMESTIC BATTERY, STILL HAS NO ANSWER FOR CREED. . Each new revelation seemed like a comeuppance for the man voice, the leather pants, the icky groupie-sharing with Kid Rock—and for the Swaggart-esque hypocrisy he'd exhibited as a secretly pill-gobbling, bar-brawling, multiple-commandments-breaking Christian. "I made those choices and suffered the consequences," he says unflinchingly. "There's no blame to put on anybody else for anything that's happened to me."

On November 18, Stapp was a few days into his latest bender at the Delano when "the walls started caving in. I was alone up on the balcony, and in my deranged mind I thought I heard someone calling my name and talking about a party downstairs. I got up on the rail, leaned over, and slipped off. I fell four stories"—onto a ledge meant to catch bird droppings—"and landed on my head. I'm fortunate to be alive, and there's probably 20 doctors at the trauma center in Miami that would say the same thing. Thank God it all ended that day. That guy died."

Stapp says he's been clean and sober ever since. "I'll still have a glass of wine with my wife on special occasions," he allows, "but no drugs, no weekend drinking." In lieu of rehab or AA meetings, Stapp entered what he calls "God's program. It's faith. It's family." He began studying the Bible daily, "not because of any childhood fear of heaven and hell, but because I wanted to. It was finally me digging in and saying, 'All right, let me see if there's anything in here I can learn from.'"

The term "born again" is accurate, he confirms, but insufficient. "I've made a decision to seek and follow love. As the Bible says, 'God is love.' It's a lifestyle. I was in this bubble for a while—certain things that are abnormal became normal. My mind needed to be reprogrammed. I had to get the garbage out."

"I remember reading the Bible one day," he continues. "I forget exactly what verse, but what I took from it was 'Okay, God, I'm going to try this: Every time I feel like punching a hole in the wall, any negative feeling, I'm going to do just the opposite.' I've been committed to that because I knew if I wasn't, I would lose everything that I loved."

Stapp is referring to Jaclyn and his two children: Jagger, of whom Scott was granted custody after his first marriage ended in divorce in 1999, and his daughter, Milan, age 2. As for his bandmates, they had written him off after the 2002 Weathered tour, on which Stapp was frequently loaded on a mix of hard liquor and prednisone, a corticosteroid prescribed to treat nodules that had formed on his vocal cords. Stapp, who had also been in a car accident that spring, maintains that his bandmates never understood the physical pain he had to endure. Regardless, all parties agree that he was most unpleasant to be around. The tour's penultimate show, on December 29, 2002, proved the last straw: Fans actually filed a $2 million class-action suit against the band after Stapp, glaringly shit-faced, sang the wrong words to various songs, fat-Elvis-style, and eventually could not finish the set. (The case was later dismissed.) Stapp's bandmates avoided contact with him for nearly six years. "Yeah, I was angry," says Tremonti, who went on to form the band Alter Bridge with Creed's Marshall and Phillips. "Creed is what I'd wanted my entire life, and it was a bittersweet thing. We had all the success in the world, but not all the happiness."

Finally, in late 2008, a sobered-up Stapp phoned Tremonti, told him he'd be coming to Orlando to sing the national anthem at the Champs Sports Bowl game, and suggested they meet. "I called when I got to town," says Stapp. "Mark came over to the Elvis suite at the Hard Rock. It was as simple as 'Hey, man, looking back, if I hurt you in any way, forgive me, brah, I apologize.' The same was said back. In half an hour, we were writing music."

Creed may have bro-hugged and made up, but fans have been slow to re-embrace them. Turnout for the first shows was sparse, with venues never more than two-thirds filled. Creed's manager, Paul Geary, blames the empty seats on a general lack of awareness of the band's reunion, because the comeback single, "Overcome," was late to market. "My cousin says that his friends are big fans, and they didn't even know about the tour," Tremonti laments. Perhaps Creed fans are just fickle, and Nickelback or even a country act like Rascal Flatts now scratch their itch. And a six-year absence isn't nearly long enough to spark the kind of campy revisionist nostalgia that has blessed the comebacks of once-critically-reviled acts like Journey and New Kids on the Block.

For their part, the band and their management brush off any suggestions that the tour is underperforming. "There's not been a show yet that I perceive to be less than successful," Geary says, and given that Creed is reportedly guaranteed to earn in the low-to-mid six figures for each of the 40 dates, his sangfroid is understandable. And most observers concur that Creed's new album, unimaginatively titled Full Circle, will debut at No. 1. While the prospect of once again collecting Dubya-era-size paychecks helped motivate the band to reunite, they were already living in contemporary rock-star comfort: Tremonti and Phillips in the exclusive Orlando enclave of Isleworth (where Tiger Woods is a neighbor); Marshall in Costa Rica, where he owns a bed-and-breakfast; and Stapp and family in a lavish eight-bedroom McMansion in Boca Raton.

For Stapp, simply proving—to his family, his fans, his bandmates, and, yes, his Savior—that he is no longer an angry, confused ass-hole is all the motivation he needs to reform Creed, record a new album, and complete a successful tour. Back in his candlelit dressing room, he appears relaxed and finally at ease with his past. When he says "I'm lucky to be alive"—which he does, often—he is being clichéd, perhaps, but not melodramatic. As showtime approaches, he confesses to one last remaining vice: cigarettes, a pack a day. He got hooked last year, sharing smokes with officers and enlisted men during a monthlong tour of overseas military bases. "Today's my last day, though," he says, shaking a Marlboro Smooth out of its ice-blue pack. "I'm putting the patch on tonight. I promised my wife I'd stop. So today's the day." He lights the cigarette, takes a deep pull, and smiles. "But I will relish this down to 11:50 tonight."

.Craig Marks