Crouching Man, Hidden Message

Guitar World April, 2002

Strange maps? Cryptic messages? Bizarre internet postings? What the devil is CREED up to now? Guitar World sends our ace reporter, J.D. Considine, to investigate

I've watched them from the very beginning. In the background, my voice a faint whisper in the shadows. I have spoken to them. From small towns to major metropolises, I've trekked each step of the way with them. And yet, oddly enough, we always seem to come back here, to this place. Welcome to the crossroads.

Rock band web sites tend to be pretty much the same. There are pictures of the band, news items, tour itineraries and magazine clippings. Sometimes there are messages from the band; sometimes there is a forum for the fans. Creed's official web site (www.creed.com) is generally of that type. But in January, as the Florida-based quartet's third album, Weathered (Wind-Up), spent its eighth straight week at No. 1, the band slipped an unexplained link into the Creed News section. Under the heading "Seek and you shall find" was a URL that took visitors to something called the Creed Quest (www.creedquest.com).

I feel as if I am getting closer. All the years of searching and endless nights of wandering are starting to make sense. I look around these dusty, barren crossroads and I can feel it all coming together.

But just what was "coming together" wasn't immediately clear, as the Creed Quest site presented itself as a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Beneath its big "CQ" logo, the opening screen shows a blurry picture of a man in a dark fedora, and a second image of a hand holding an old-fashioned pocket watch. Electronically altered voices seep from the computer's speakers, whispering, "The crossroads" and "Seek and you shall find." Clicking on "enter" takes you to a second page, with a picture of the man standing at a crossroads, accompanied by a strange little story.

Like moths to a flame they will come, for they too can feel the power. I will be waiting. Eight there will be, yet in the end the eight will come together as one. I have waited an eternity for that moment, and it will not be denied me.

It turns out the cat with the hat is someone called the Seeker, and what he's seeking are clues to eight pieces of a puzzle connected to the Creed crest. Further rummaging about the site reveals that the Seeker's request for assistance - I need your help my friends. I promise the reward will be great! - is actually the setup for a game in which Creed fans sort through stories for clues about the eight pieces, answer trivia questions about the band and generally tote up points in the hope of winning one of that week's prizes. A contest, in other words.

Not an easy one, either. Part Myst, part Trivial Pursuit and part Road Rules, the Creed Quest calls not only for persistence but also for deep knowledge of the Creed catalog and good instincts for online gaming. Consisting of eight mini mysteries, each "playable" for one week, it follows the band on its current Weathered tour. But like everything connected to the Quest, there's nothing obvious about the linkage. Instead, there's just a map with dots on it, and it's up to the player to figure out what those dots mean and how they lead into the game.

Some of what you find is merely oblique. For instance, the opening clue in the first week's game is the phrase "I saw the will." Next to it is a box, inviting players to complete the phrase. Hardcore fans will recognize it as a lyric from the Human Clay song "Faceless Man," and complete the line by typing "of a warrior." This then opens a window containing the lake picture from the centerfold to Weathered, along with a story of a Native American warrior and a rampaging grizzly bear.

This is where things get hairy. Not only do more riddles pop up - questions that required a sense of geography, knowledge of Creed trivia and a good internet search engine - but there's also a hidden hyperlink in the story. Click on that, and a page pops up with pictures from the My Own Prison cover shoot and a short blurb about the place in Florida where the photos were snapped. ("The photo was taken a few miles south of Tallahassee on Woodville Highway," says the text. "Why this place? Why was it chosen? So many have seen, are we supposed to remember it?") There's no immediate way of knowing whether this is an additional clue, a second puzzle or what.

Creed were kind enough to have set up a bulletin board on the game site, so players can swap clues and offer hints for unraveling the Seeker's enigmatic stories. But none of the fan talk touches on the deeper mysteries, to wit: How long has this game been in the works? How much in these stories is real, and how much is made up? And is there more to Creed Quest than the usual mix of prizes and promotional buzz?

Being a music journalist, I had an additional tool at my disposal: Access. So on behalf of Guitar World, I decided to tip-toe into the Creed camp to take a look at the mystery behind the mystery. With some help, I hoped to shed some light on the story of Creed Quest itself.

Consider me the Sneaker.

"This has been planned from the get-go," says Creed guitarist Mark Tremonti in New Orleans.

At this point, Creed are a week into their 2002 tour and, by extension, the Creed Quest itself. Except that as Tremonti tells it, the Creed Quest has been in the works since the early success of My Own Prison, Creed's 1997 debut. "Everybody was so interested in what the voices were saying in the background of the song "Ode" and all the little quirky things on the album," he says, referring in part to a drony, minor-key rocker which includes a smidgen of semi-intelligible conversation right after the second chorus.

Just what is being said has been the object of no small speculation from fans. Two Australian fans, Andrew (a.k.a. LithiuM-16) and Ben (a.k.a. Said Eyes), have put an enormous amount of time and effort into a site (www.creedprison.cjb.net) that investigates "Ode" as well as a number of other Creed mysteries. Andrew reckons that the secret dialogue in "ode" goes something like this:

Voice 1: I have a couple of questions for ya.

Voice 2: Yeah, ahh, go ahead.

Voice 1: Where are we going?

Voice 2: 26.7 degrees, is that about right?

He then goes on to speculate that the conversation has to do with map coordinates included in the album art of Human Clay, which he (after much digging and with some help) places in the Aucilla Wildlife Management Area, 37 kilometers southeast of Tallahassee, Florida.

But Tremonti explains the "Ode" mystery in somewhat different terms. "I don't want to let anybody know exactly what it was," he says of the elusive dialogue, "but at first it was just done as a cool effect, with no message behind it. It was something where the level was so low you could barely make out what was being said. Sometimes you could hear "I have a message for you in there." (For what it's worth, my ears, hear, "Hey I have a question for you," but that's just an amateur's take on the track.)

"But that was what began it all." Tremonti continues. "People heard "I have a message for you," and they wanted to hear the message. Because there are a lot of messages in our music. So we figured, Why not play on that?"

It isn't just the cryptic album art(mostly the work of Mark's brother Dan) or odd sound effects, either; The biggest reason listeners believe that there's more to Creed's music than meets the ear is because the songs address issues much deeper than the usual "I wanna do you, baby" hard rock lyric. In particular, Creed's songs have a strong spiritual bent that is generally termed a "Christian rock" perspective-despite the fact that the band neither preaches nor proselytizes.

Most fans ascribe the music's deeper meanings to singer Scott Stapp, who is generally assumed to be responsible for the lyrics. But Mark stresses that the themes in Creed's music are developed collaboratively. "We give and take on everything," he says. "Me and Scott, we help out with all aspects of the music and lyrics together."

Generally, a song will start with an instrumental idea Tremonti has developed. "Then me and Scott will sit down and come up with melodies. A lot of times he'll take from lyrics he's written already, or maybe he'll write lyrics after he's heard the ideas. Sometimes, I'll have a line in there that will spawn ideas for him. But it's all just give-and-take. We listen to each other and have gotten past the point where it's 'I'm the music man, you're the lyrics man.'"

There's a similarly collaborative aspect to most aspects of Creed's business: the first glimmerings of a Creed game came out of the band's work with Mark Tremonti's brother Dan.

Dan took the photo on the cover of My Own Prison and has been the brain behind all the band's subsequent album art. But his "day job" is with an interactive marketing firm called Three Mountain Group. LLC. Based in Chicago, Three Mountain describes itself as "a pioneer in delivering highly customized, integrated marketing solutions that provide entertainment, enable interactivity and foster community." In other words, they develop online promotions that work like computer games.

Perhaps the best-known of their efforts was the campaign last year for Steven Spielberg's film Artificial Intelligence: A.I. Although the film itself was about a murder mystery set in 2142, when artificial intelligence had become a common factor in day-to-day life, Spielberg didn't want the prerelease publicity to "give away" the plot. So Three Mountain went online to create a virtual world that would take web surfers into the world of A.I. without explaining what, exactly, that world was.

Three Mountain built 40 web sites as part of the promotion. The idea was to take people into the future, to 2142 , and so these sites seemed to represent everything from corporate and university sites to personal home pages. Nothing was explained, but there were enough clues built in to give the "players" a sense that there was something afoot.

Rather than give it all away, the A.I. campaign presumed that web users would react to the mystery in the usual fashion: by forming online discussion groups and sharing information. Which, it turns out, is exactly what they did. By the end of the campaign, there were several bulletin boards and discussion groups devoted to the A.I. mystery, the largest of which involved a community of 20,000 users.

When Creed began to toy with the idea of its own contest, back in 1998-99, the band had nothing so elaborate in mind. They wanted a mystery, sure, but it would be limited to hiding clues in the packaging of the album, which would be left for the more devoted fans to puzzle out.

"For the Human Clay record, we wanted to have coordinates that you'd have to figure out to find where the picture on that cover was taken, that crossroads," Mark explains. These coordinates appeared on the front cover of early copies of the Human Clay CD; later editions hid them on the inside spine of the CD tray. It wasn't complete information, either; what actually appeared was: N30 14'?.7 W084 0.0?4. Creed left it up to the fans to recognize the string of letters and numbers as map coordinates, and then to figure out what the missing numbers were and locate the crossroads on a map.

"The game was going to be that whoever found those crossroads had to dig a six-foot hole to find a box with a number to a secret phone," says Mark. "Once that phone rang, the winner would get our whole backline-Creed's drums, guitars, basses, bas amps and guitar amps. Not our actual gear, but Paul Reed Smith would donate guitars, Mesa/Boggie would donate amps, Premier would donate drums and so on. It was going to be a big thing."

Even though nothing was ever officially announced about the mystery coordinates, hundreds of posts discussing and dissecting the "clues" appeared on Creed fan bulletin boards. Even without a prize or official contest in place, a number of fans managed to "solve" the crossroads puzzle.

So why didn't the band make it an actual competition? "It would have been too easy," Mark answers. "It was just a one-time, one-winner deal." What the band wanted was something bigger and better-"a game where multiple people could win, and we'd keep everybody real interested," says the guitarist.

This is where the Three Mountain Group came in. "We have so many diehard fans," says Mark. "For a lot of the, half of their social life is spent on the computer reading our bulletin board sites. It's a freak community in there." So the band decided to bring Three Mountain in to connect with the online fans on their own level. "Dan had already done something along these lines with the A.I. movie," says Mark, proudly. "He's got a great mind, my brother, and he's going to keep it interesting. I can guarantee that."

Getting Dan Tremonti on the phone to talk about the campaign was easy; getting him to provide solid information was not. "I'd rather not have people know that" was an answer he gave more than once. (So much for the Sneaker's hopes of getting an inside track on the contest answers!) But he did give a general sense of the Creed Quest story. What's more, Dan designed this month's cover of Guitar World, in which he buried an exclusive and critically important clue.

It starts with a legend, the story of an aging Native American warrior tracking a killer grizzly bear. In the tale, the warrior finds the bear's lair but is attacked and nearly killed by the beast. Running for his life, he sees a symbol glimmering on a lake surface; suddenly, he's filled with a sense of wonder and vitality. Despite his wounds and fatigue, he starts to swim across the lake, the bear in hot pursuit. Somehow, he emerges on the other side safely, while the killer bear is pulled under.

Having defeated his enemy, the warrior tells his story to the tribal chief. He draws in the sand the strange symbol he'd seen in the water's surface, and the chief declares the design a sacred crest. A blacksmith who lives in a cabin near the tribe is brought in and commissioned to forge eight objects in steel, each bearing the crest. The first is a brand, which is used to mark the shoulder of every warrior in the tribe. But the other seven are stolen before the tribe can take possession of them.

Flash forward to the present. Somehow, the Seeker - whoever he may be - has recognized the crest in Creed's artwork (it was the centerpiece of the stage set on Creed's last tour) and believes the band and its fans can lead him to the missing eight objects. Thus, each week of the Quest features a new story in which the Seeker stumbles into a person or onto a place that has some secret connection with the crest.

As an organizing system, using the Seeker to carry on a sort of spiritual scavenger hunt is nothing short of ingenious. Where things begin to get weird, however, is when players have to go online to find answers to the clue questions the game demands we solve.

For instance, after reading the first story - about the bear and the warrior and the shining symbol on the lake - most players will realize that the picture of a lake provided for the tale is the same one included in the center spread of the Weathered CD. A coincidence? Of course not. But no amount of rereading, picture study or lyric analysis is enough to solve riddles like "I am told we must find the tallest peak in the Sawtooth Range." For that, we need to do actual research.

Rummaging about online, it turns out that there actually is a place called Grizzly Lake. And that the nearest tribe has a tradition called the Bear Dance. And there was a lot of mining in the area. And.and.

Okay, none of this proves that the story of the warrior and the bear existed before Creed started their Quest. But it is worth noting that the crest itself is not something that Creed made up. As Mark explains, "I can't give it away. But the crest was something that already existed before all this. It wasn't something created form our minds. It was a real thing."

Down in Australia, the indefatigable Andrew traced the Creed crest to the Abajo mountains in Utah, where some 7,000 Native American carvings can be found. And what was the tribe responsible for all those carvings? Most references give their name as Creek Indians, but as Andrew points out, "Another pronunciation of Creek Indians was in fact 'Creed Indians.'" Moreover, Andrew claims that the Creed crest is definitely one of the Native American symbols carded into rock there in the Abajo mountains.

Creed.rock.could it be another secret message?

"It's funny, because a lot of things they're finding are true," says Dan Tremonti when asked about the Australian site.

"We intentionally started planting clues on the second CD," adds Justin Brown, Dan's collaborator at Three Mountain. He admits that Australian Andrew is "pretty creative and imaginative," but cautions that some of what appears on the site includes interpretations and information "that wasn't really meant to be." Naturally, Justin doesn't go into detail, but he does say that Andrew's explanation of the clocks in Creed's Human Clay and Weathered CD art isn't entirely correct. "All the clocks are in there," he says. "But the significance of the times on the clocks? There really isn't any."

"Well, on a couple of them, there is," says Dan. "But the funny thing about it is, that's what seems to surround Creed. A lot of this almost becomes believable because things just add up too much. It just feels like, for some reason, some of these things happen, that they're just too coincidental."

Like, for instance, the fact that Justin just happens to be the guy holding his head on the cover of My Own Prison? Well, let's not get carried away.

In any case, both Dan and Justin claim they can't reveal the whole secret of the Creed Quest because - as with the A.I. online game - a certain amount of the action depends on the players' reaction. "There are fundamentals of what the storyline is, and how it should play out," says Justin. "But it kind of adapts itself, and fits in based on how people are interpreting things."

"That's the reason we've presented the Seeker," adds Dan. "The Seeker is not some guy who's telling everyone the answers; he's learning from the players, as well. So the story line will happen organically, based on what the players and the Seeker Figure out."

In other words, there's no secret answer for the Sneaker to swipe - no shortcut to the eight items, or cache of hidden quiz answers.

There really shouldn't be, though, because a cheat sheet of answers would suggest that the game has definable limits - and what Creed wants is nothing of the sort. "Scott wants everything to be ambiguous," explains Dan. "That's what the whole point of the crossroads was. The crossroads and the forming of the person in Human Clay was telling people to draw their own conclusions and choose their own paths.

Nor will this be the only quest Creed will offer their fans. "We're hoping to carry this on through all of our albums," says Mark. "It's a new kind of thing, something no band has ever done, and something that will be kind of our trademark."

.J.D. Considine