Creed Stays the Course

USA TODAY November 27 2001

'Weathered' lyrics now seem prescient

NEW YORK -- On Sept. 11, the members of the rock band Creed were about to begin mixing a new CD, their follow-up to 1999's massively successful Human Clay, when news broke of the terrorist attacks.

"No one went to work for about three days after that," Scott Stapp, the group's 28-year-old lead singer and lyricist, recalls. He's sitting in a Manhattan hotel room that, he points out, once offered a prime view of the World Trade Center, where Creed once held a party at the landmark restaurant Windows on the World, on the 107th floor of the north tower.

"No one wanted to leave home," Stapp continues. "Everyone was glued to CNN or trying to get through to friends. One of our producers has family who live here, and we couldn't reach them at first. One of my mom's friends wound up losing her husband. We were all in a depressive state."

But when Stapp, guitarist Mark Tremonti, 27, and drummer Scott Phillips, 28, returned to the studio, they decided not to change a word of the songs that they had recorded for Weathered, which arrived in stores last week. So it sounds a bit eerie to hear Stapp crooning, on the hit single My Sacrifice, "We've seen our shares of ups and downs . . . Life can turn around in an instant." Other excerpts can seem similarly prophetic: "All that was sacred to us . . . The covenant has been broken by mankind," Stapp observes on Who's Got My Back? while on Freedom Fighter, he sings of "raging on in holy war."

Neither Stapp nor Tremonti, who co-writes Creed's songs, claims to be a soothsayer or a covert intelligence expert. Rather, their reflections are in keeping with the dramatically sober but ultimately optimistic perspective that also distinguished Clay, which has sold more than 10 million copies, and its six-times-platinum predecessor, 1997's My Own Prison.

"In our music, we deal with fear and insecurity and depression -- the whole gamut of human emotions," Stapp explains. "But we don't sit around and have a pity party. There's always a moment of reconciliation in our music, a sense that no matter how low you get, you have to keep pressing on. It's like I'm saying, 'OK, this is where I need to be.' I'm not necessarily saying that I'm there yet; it's more like I'm giving myself a personal pep talk. We write these songs for ourselves, to motivate us and to give us hope and faith."

That hope and faith have been misinterpreted by some, Stapp says, noting that Creed "has been miscategorized for a long time as a Christian band." Stapp was raised in a religious family, and the singer admits that "a lot of references and analogies I use are based on the literature I was made to read and the stuff I was made to do the first 18 years of my life.

"But we all have different beliefs in this band, and we have no agenda to make people believe in Christianity. And God and spirituality have never been our primary focus. When we made My Own Prison, I was in search of beliefs, just trying to figure things out, and a lot of people in the media and the Christian community didn't understand that.

"I mean, all three of us have faith, and I think we all believe there is a God. And there is definitely an intent to point people in a positive direction, and in some songs, that is to have faith and to lean on God when times get tough. But it's not a Christian God or a Buddhist God or a Muslim God. It's the God I see when I look at my little boy," Stapp says, referring to 3-year-old Jagger, his son from a former marriage.

"It's the God I see in nature," Stapp goes on. "It's the God I see when I look at the Grand Canyon, or at beautiful, snow-capped mountains. It's the God that is revealed to me through the world around me."

Stapp's penchant for earnestness and bombast -- the guy can talk for 45 minutes without once shifting his eyes, laughing or even cracking a smile -- is even more evident in Creed's sentimental smash hits, which include Higher and With Arms Wide Open, and in the singer's brooding video persona, which can make Eddie Vedder seem like a goofball by comparison.

"Creed obviously got their sound from Pearl Jam, and Pearl Jam's music sounded, to me, like loud mush," says Chuck Eddy, music editor of The Village Voice. "It's in the vocal style, which really goes back to Jim Morrison -- this overblown, wound-tight kind of grunt. It sounds like somebody who's really constipated.

"But The Doors had more of a sense of humor; there was a certain irreverence about them, plus they had hooks. Pearl Jam reduced that to a kind of saint-rock, where the singer presents himself as if he should be canonized and turns himself into a cartoon. I think Creed has turned even more into a parody of itself."

But Creed's frontman offers no mea culpas for his serious music or demeanor. "I remember talking to Mark when we first got together, around '93. I couldn't stand what was on radio -- it made no sense to me. I was like, 'Dude, I want this band to mean something.' I wanted people to really understand what I was saying. I think a lot of songwriters hide behind using all these clever words and stuff because they just don't know how to express themselves clearly, you know?"

Clearly, Creed's utter lack of irony struck a chord with rock fans even before rumors of irony's death began spreading. "It's been a steady climb for us," Stapp says. "A lot of people think it was rapid, but that's because we were under the radar. We didn't immediately get tons of MTV and VH1 airplay, which can dynamically affect your record sales. We had sold 5 or 6 million copies of My Own Prison, and people still didn't know what we looked like. We never sought the attention of the media and the press, and it's not until now that they've caught up with us.

"All we cared about was our fans and radio, which has always been behind us, and our live shows. We played every night like it was the last show of our lives. We didn't care if only one person was there; our philosophy was, we'll win that person over, and the next time he'll bring all his friends, and then they'll bring all their friends. And that's exactly how it happened, in a grass-roots kind of way."

Spin editor in chief Alan Light feels that Creed's unabashedly fervent approach may attract even more fans in our current social climate. "Given the tone of the country and where everyone is at emotionally post-Sept. 11, I think a big, anthemic rock record -- coming off of a record that sold 10 or 11 million -- is in a very strong position," Light says. "Think of the way that U2 snapped back into focus after Sept. 11. Here was a band that was about community, and about using music to unify and speak to big masses. There was no other band out there with that sense of ambition and aspiration, that acceptance of scale. Creed is not afraid to swing for the fences like that."

Tremonti believes that the band's "straight-up arena rock" sound has helped fill a void in recent years, as teen pop and hip-hop-rock hybrids continued to dominate the charts.

"There were a lot of fans, people who liked '70s rock who had nothing to buy. Maybe they enjoyed some of the early '90s stuff, like Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, but there hadn't been any old-school-style rock 'n' roll."

Adds Stapp, "I think the day our first album was released, Soundgarden had just broken up, and in the issue of Rolling Stone that was out at the time, it said, 'Rock 'n' roll is dead.' I remember reading that article and laughing, because I thought, 'Not anymore."' Stapp maintains that success hasn't changed the group's outlook on music, fame or anything else.

"Our loyalty still lies with radio and our fans, because they've been with us from day one," he says. "Now the people who dissed us and wrote us off are acting like they've been there all along. But we don't forget. We don't harbor any hostility, though, because we're glad it happened the way it did. We earned our success, and we were able to mature and learn how to handle it. We're still not as visually out there as a lot of bands that haven't even accomplished as much as we have, and we like that."

In fact, Stapp says, "I think all three of us in the band are a little worried about how much our lives will change after this record, now that we're getting all that media attention. What's going to happen to our private lives? But we'll take it as it comes, deal with it the best way we know how and just keep making music."

. Elysa Gardner