Preacher Man

Kerrang January 13 2001

Scott Stapp loves God but isn't a Christian, divorced his wife but still lives with her and is America's biggest rock star but is hated by the press. We have a mere 30 minutes to get to know CREED's singer

Aaron Wilkes, Creed's man-mountain of a tour manager, has some bad news. He's just met us at the production gate of Freedom Hall in Louisville, Kentucky, a faceless, concrete hockey shed on the outskirts of this unremarkable city.

The deal is this: we've come out here to spend the day with what is, without doubt, America's most successful rock band of the year, Creed. We've come out here to do a fly-on-the-wall/life-on-the-road piece on this, the penultimate date of the group's year-long tour in support of their second album, "Human Clay. To do this we're going to hang out with the band, get some photos, get some quotes, get the story, bring it home. It'll be great

Only it isn't, cos nobody's told Aaron Wilkes or Creed any of this. A nice man but not one who's gonna get knocked off course by a good-cop, bad-cop routine from England, Wilkes comes lumbering out of the backstage area with a list of what we can do and a list of what we can't do. And one of these lists is a lot longer than the others.

Turns out that I can do an interview with Scott Stapp, the band's singer, for half an hour - reduced down from an hour - and snapper Wolliscroft can do some live shots but no photo session. For a transatlantic flight and a three-page feature this is not a result. The band are set to do a meet-and-greet in a few minutes - can we shoot that? No we can't. Can we just go up to the meet-and-greet and check it out? Wilkes looks at me for a moment as if puzzling something out. "Sure," he says, with his head cocked to one side.

Nothing this big happens by accident. Creed are America's most successful rock band right now, and that's not a statement that's open for discussion. You might have thought that honor would go to Limp Bizkit. You'd be wrong. Ditto Marilyn Manson, Slipknot or The Offspring. As for the Deftones, they're not even on the radar. Creed have sold eight million copies of "Human Clay", and their most recent single, the ubiquitous "With Arms Wide Open", was in the US singles chart for half a year before finally nestling itself onto the Number One spot 27 weeks after its' release. That's not a sleep hit. That's a coma.

This current tour plays in venues of between 10 and 20,000 capacity and sells out in most towns (although, strangely, not tonight in Kentucky). The logistics of such a tour are mind-busting. Creed have a road crew of 25 people, excluding local hands, band and management. The tour travels around in seven monster trucks and four buses carting around serious hardware in the form of a state of the art MDAS PA system and an XL4 mixing desk. The production, even in arenas, costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Next summer Creed plant to move their show into the stadiums of their strongest "markets" - that's a word they use a lot by the way, "markets" - places like Soldier Field in Chicago and Tiger Stadium in Detroit.

But first we have a meet-and-greet to see. The event takes place in a stiflingly luxurious banqueting room upstairs at the Freedom Hall. It's here that I first learn something fundamental about Creed: the meet-and-greet is not for fans of the band - as I'd been naïve enough to assume - but for people within the music industry who have been loyal to the cause in the past year. That means radio guys, media guys, TV guys, movers and shakers.

Creed are nothing if not radio and industry friendly. Men with pony tails, gray suits, baseball caps and radio station hockey shirts mill around drinking free beer and talking about - and I'm not making this up - Hall and Oates. And into this step Creed - that's Stapp, drummer Scott Phillips and virtuoso guitarist Mark Tremonti - looking both at home and at ease. They pose for snapshot photos, they shake hands, they sign autographs. The three of them are given Louisville Slugger baseball bats as souvenirs of their visit to the town. They look pleased. After 15 minutes of chatting and smiling, Scott Stapp makes his excuses and leaves. "I have this interview to do," he explains. He's talking about us.

"You can't plan for this level of success."

Okay, perhaps plan was not the right word. Did you aspire to this level of success?

"Aspire to?" Stapp repeats the word and then sits quiet for a moment to see if it's a good fit. "I think anybody who gets in a band wants it to go as far as it can possibly go. They want their music to get out to as many people that are into it and want to hear it. So I think that everyone would aspire to going as far as they can go."

We're sitting in Creed's dressing room which is actually a locker room for a sport team that plays at the arena, the Louisville Jaguars ice hockey team. Not that you'd know it today as the place is made into a little home away from home for the band. Sofas are placed around a coffee table in the middle of the room, a giant TV screen plays the CNN news channel and candles flicker around us.

Scott Stapp sits on one of the sofas, chewing tobacco and talking quietly. Some of the questions he answers, some he doesn't. Every so often he'll duck his mouth into a plastic cup and squirt out a mouthful of tobacco juice.

Spending half an hour with someone is not really to know what they're like, more what they're like to be interviewed. Stapp, for his part, is polite but impersonal. I'm not sure in the whole time I talked to him that he looks me in the eye once. Every question is answered in a tone and expression of grave-faced solemnity. I've not idea what it would take to make Scott Stapp laugh.

Much has been made of Creed's Christian credentials. Stapp for his part does little to dispel this notion: "I believe in God, although I'm not sure I believe in Christianity." He says, and makes no apologies for the numerous Biblical references scattered throughout the lyrics of Creed songs. Stapp is also strong on the "moral framework" that envelops his band.

The singer was born 27 years ago to Steve and Linda Stapp. His father, now a dentist in Orlando, was and is "a very outspoken Christian person" and Stapp was raised in a household of Pentecostal austerity. Rock'n'roll was frowned on - to say the least - and he ran foul of his parents for listening to, of all things, a Def Leppard record. It begs the question what Stapp's parents think of what he's doing now.

"They're very proud, they say" is the response. Stapp lets that "they say" hang in the air just long enough for it to sound ever so slightly menacing. "It's a weird situation for me because in the beginning, when we were struggling and I had made a commitment to doing this, my father wasn't supportive at all. He was urging me to stay in school, saying that this was never going to work out, that this wasn't a good career move for me. I now have to deal with the fact of whether my parents might just be proud of me because of the attention that's been given to them through me. You know, their son's doing so well now and how that looks on them"

Do you think they feel that you have been vindicated by your success?

"Probably," he shrugs. "If I wasn't successful, then this would be an evil lifestyle that I'm leading."

On October 21, 1998, Scott Stapp himself became a father. His son Jagger Michael Stapp, "Jagger means one who carries a message and Michael means sent by God; and I feel that my son was sent by God to me," he explains, was born to his then-wife, Hillary. The pair, who were married in Las Vegas when he was 24 and she just 19, have since split, although they both continue to live in Stapp's house in Orlando raising their child together.

Wouldn't it have been more in accordance with Stapp's moral and Christian framework if the couple had stayed together?

"Oh, of course," agrees the singer.

Do you mind me asking why you didn't then?

"Oh there are so, so many reasons," he says. "All of them are personal and none of them I'm going to share with you. Relationships don't always work out. The center of it was that Hillary had a hard time dealing with my life, my success. She had a harder time dealing with it than I did. But we're still friends; we'll stay friends forever. It's just a different type of relationship now. It works a lot better."

Creed were recently on the front cover of US magazine "Spin". A letter in the following edition had this to say: "Hey, it's great to see Stryper back on the cover of Spin. What happened to their yellow jump suits?"

Credibility and respect are problems for Creed. I ask Stapp if he's aware of the fact that many in the UK think of his band as a second-rate Pearl Jam?

Second-rate Pearl Jam is vicious," he says. "That's an attack, it's something mean. We don't sound anything like Pearl Jam. The music is completely different, the lyrics are completely different. I just think people like to make comparisons. What people don't realize is that the press have really hurt me, man. I take this band so seriously, it's my whole life."

Could you give an example?

"I don't mind someone not liking the band or not like the music," he says, "but when I read something that's a vicious attack on me or the music, it's like, "What did I do to deserve that?" It's almost like you have a personal vendetta. I understand a bad review or you not liking us but you don't know me, you don't hang out with me, you don't know what type of person I am. You don't know all of the things I'm doing outside of the band with my success to help people, because that's the type of person I am. You're just ripping my throat out and that hurts."

One of the things Stapp is doing outside of the band is the With Arms Wide Open Foundation, a charity he set up six months ago to help America's poor, huddled masses. This is something Stapp says he has always wanted to do if he ever came into money, whether as a doctor, a lawyer, or as the singer in America's biggest rock band. The singer says he knows what it's like to be poor, to be without food, water or electricity. The WAWO Foundation will help poor families get apartments, give aid to single parents, help with college scholarships and even children's music education.

All worthwhile stuff for sure, even if it's difficult to shake the sour odor of ego-led philanthropy and gesture charity that pervades Stapp's descriptions of the venture. The cash is welcome, for sure, but the sentiment somehow less so. Stapp describes this a pure cynicism, but on a couple of fronts he is a hard man to pin down. Like on how much money - and charity is all about money - he's looking to plough into the WAWO Foundation.

"Next year it will be a lot," he says

How much?

"Well, next year I'll probably be working with the foundation three days a week."

Yes, but how much dollar money is going into this thing?

Stapp sounds tired: "We've raised close to a million dollars.I'll get letters from 14-year-old fans who send us $3, half their allowance, because they just want to help. And that makes me feel so good. It's so good to know that there are people out there that do have a vision to help people in need."

"But," he continues, "it started with me taking the first step. By giving some money and setting it up."

How much was your initial donation?

That's private," is the reply. Then Stapp relents. "It was enough to hire a full time person to run it, get some furniture and get it started. Next year I'm looking to give up five percent of my earnings to the foundation."

Could you tell us how much that is?

"No."

I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask.

"Well it's pretty easy to figure out."

Hardly.

"Well" he says, "it's a lot."

And with that, Scott Stapp is gone. He shakes my hand, says he has to attend to some band business, sits down at a laptop computer and waits for us to leave his space. I get the feeling that I've left no impression whatsoever on the man and were I ever to meet him again he certainly wouldn't recognize me. Just before we say goodbye, Scott Stapp gives a long-term view of what he and Creed are doing with their music and their money.

"I want to make a difference with what I'm doing," he says. "I want to leave something tangible behind when all this is done. I want to have made people's lives better with the With Arms Wide Open Foundation and I want to have left people some great music to remember us by. And I think I'm in a position to do both of those things."

.Ian Winwood