Going by a new creed

Fresno Bee, June 13 2006

Scott Stapp knows he needs more name recognition to make it on his own.

If it's not his new album, it's his tabloid-worthy personal life drama. If it's not his tour with INXS, it's life after his split from his former Creed bandmates.

"I've been getting judged my whole career," Stapp says before a recent show in Minneapolis. "If it's not for being a good guy, it's for being a bad guy. I was judged as being a Christian dude with a hidden agenda; now I'm being judged as this bad boy of rock 'n' roll."

But he knows this: It's better than irrelevance. And irrelevance is what he's fighting every day.

Each night he steps out on stage, like he'll do at the Tachi Palace in Lemoore where his and INXS' tour stops tonight, he's trying to win people over — again.

"A lot of people, they see me and they think I'm the Creed guy, or I'm Scott Creed — they think that's my name," Stapp says. "They associate my name and my voice. They don't know this is the guy who wrote these songs under the name Creed. Some people don't even know I have a record out right now. They don't know the name Scott Stapp. We're trying to connect the dots."

Creed broke up in 2004. The band sold about 40 million records. With that much attention comes backlash. And Stapp bore the brunt of much of it.

Rolling Stone once called him "the most hated man in rock 'n' roll." And that wasn't too far off. He was looked at as a holier-than-thou religious crazy by some and the numbing voice of a super-annoying band by others.

Today, a polite and talkative Stapp brushes off stuff like that.

"I wonder how 40 million people could be wrong," he says. "People may be fed up with my sound because it got so much play. That's something as an artist you have to be willing to accept. They may need a break from you. If that's where I'm at, that's something I'm willing to handle."

Once Creed broke up, Stapp's notoriety kept growing.

Drunken incidents, including a drunk and disorderly arrest during his honeymoon in February, were fodder for gossip rags, and, most recently, a sex tape surfaced, featuring him and Kid Rock 10 years ago.

"It stinks — it's not something that you enjoy," Stapp says. "But it's something that has become good for me. The fact that people were paying attention, it made me look at certain things in my life and say, 'Hey, this needs to go.' One of the things that I had to look at in my life and get rid of was alcohol.

"When I saw myself, messed up and on TV, I was like, 'Oh my God, I can't believe this is how I am on alcohol.' It was humiliating and embarrassing. But it's something I'm glad happened because, if it didn't, I wouldn't be where I am now."

Where he is now is a place that feels a lot like he's starting out again, like it's 1997 all over again.

This tour with INXS is his first big outing as a solo artist, and he's playing in a humbling 45-minute opening slot, mixing songs from his new album, "The Great Divide," with some re-tooled Creed favorites.

To talk to Scott Stapp today is to talk to a man looking for control.

"You can't worry about what you can't control," he says. "All I can control in my career is getting my music out, playing in front of people and trying to get people to connect the dots. Because I firmly believe in my heart that every single person who bought a Creed record, if they knew I had a record out and if they heard it, they would like it.

"I could be blind or biased — but I believe that in my heart."

.Mike Osegueda