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The History of Creed
102.1 The Edge
The cover of Rolling Stone pretty much said it all. February 28, 2002. "Creed: Love Us or Hate Us". A lot of people must love these guys. Otherwise how can you explain the fact that their three albums have sold over 20 million copies? How can you explain all the sold out arenas? Somebody's getting off on their music. But at the same time, Creed is hated and loathed by much of the rock 'n' roll community. These people, including just about every music critic on the planet, cannot stand Creed or anything they do. Opinions are very polarized. There doesn't seem to be any middle ground. It's "love us or hate us". It's rare you see such a great divide in rock. Why is Creed loved and loathed in equal amounts? This is worth investigating.
"Torn", the first track from the first Creed album, "My Own Prison". And "Torn" is a great way to describe how the world of rock and roll feels about these guys. On one side, the fans. On the other, the detractors. And in the middle, a gulf so wide that there's no hope of reconciliation. And you know that there's gotta be a story here. that's why we"re going to explore the Creed phenomenon. Although we"ll never reach a consensus on both sides of the Creed debate, perhaps we can at least promote a little understanding.
Even other bands take pokes at Creed. For example, Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters have been known to, uh, pay tribute to Creed with covers. Please, people. can't we all just get along?
We need to start at the beginning. Specifically the myths and legends that surround singer Scott Stapp. First of all, that's not the name he was born with. He came into this world as "Anthony Scott Flippen" on August 8, 1973. If you've ever been on the Creed website and you've seen posts by a know-it-all named Anthony Flippen, chances are it was Scott. So yeah, he did know it all. Anthony's biological father, an ex-marine, bailed on the family when he was about five. Scottie, which is what his family called him, then spent a lot of time with some relatives on an Indian reservation in North Carolina. And before you ask, yes, he has some Cherokee blood. Money was tight back then. Scott, his mom and two sisters. Sometimes they all had to share the same bed. Sometimes Scott had to mow lawns to make money for the family. What's more, the household was pretty religious. No rock and roll for young Scottie.
In about 1983 mom married a dentist named Steven Stapp who adopted all of the kids. It was at about this time that "Anthony Scott Flippen" became "Scott Alan Stapp". He could have become "Anthony Scott Stapp," but then his initials would have been a problem for all involved. Seriously. that's why the change. Scott's step-dad was even more into religion. When any of the kids misbehaved, the standard punishment was to make them write out bible verses, from proverbs and psalms, usually, and then write a mini-essay on what it all meant. Those essays would then be checked for coherence and grammar. Any mistakes and they'd have to do it all over again. Life revolved around the church. Not just Sundays but during the week, too. And there was still no rock and roll allowed in the house, except for U2's the Joshua Tree. That record was all right because it met certain spiritual standards.
By 1990, Scott was feeling a little stifled. The religion was a little too heavy. The confrontations with his stepfather were escalating. And it was time for some serious teenage rebellion. So one night, he just left. He was 17 years old. The next few years were pretty aimless. He worked as a janitor for a while. He got kicked out of a Christian College in Tennessee for smoking up. And there were many incidents with sex, drugs and alcohol. Meanwhile, he and his stepfather weren't talking. Scott had no idea where to go or what to do with his life. Drifting around north Florida, Scott Stapp met a girl who played him some records by The Doors. Scott became fascinated by Jim Morrison, and based on the fact that Jim went to Florida State University in Tallahassee in the 1960s, Scott decided that he would find a way to pay his way through college so he could become a lawyer. So it was off to Tallahassee up in the Florida panhandle. This is where he met Mark Tremonti. Mark was originally from Detroit and had known Scott in high school. They decided to start a band. Next to join was guitarist Scott Phillips, who was quickly moved over to drums.
Together with another couple of guys, they became a cover band under the named "Naked Toddler". They'd play just about anything, from Led Zeppelin to Radiohead, and yes, they'd play Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, too.
By the mid-90s, Creed had nailed down a low grinding, grungey sound. Those who heard them say they were out-grunging Pearl Jam. But by 1996, grunge was dead, right? Well, not in the Florida panhandle. Creed scraped together $6,000 to record an Indie CD they called My Own Prison. On the cover is a picture of a dude named Justin. Scott and Mark knew him in college. Mark's brother Dan took the photo for his film class. They quickly formed a label called "Blue Collar Records" and sent copies of My Own Prison to local record stores and radio stations in April 1997. Then a weird thing happened. It started to sell.
There are only about 140,000 people in Tallahassee, and Creed somehow managed to sell 6,000 copies of their album in the city. that's pretty amazing. No wonder a bigger company called "Wind-Up Records", a label with connections to Sony records, decided to snap up the band. Wind-up took over distribution and promotion of My Own Prison, hiring a grunge specialist named Ron Saint-Germain, a guy who had worked with Tool and Soundgarden, to give the album a quick remix to add a little more sparkle. They also tweaked the artwork a bit. This version of the album was released in the summer of 1997. And from that point on, the hits just kept on coming.
"One," a big, huge single from My Own Prison. Creed had stumbled on a secret formula. Heavy, emotional, post-grunge grunge with more than a touch of spirituality and Christian imagery. Hey, you can't spend all those hours writing commentaries on psalms and proverbs without it having some influence on you, right? This combination covered all the bases. It appealed to a large chunk of the alternative and new rock crowd. Mainstream rockers found it powerful. And there was something about Creed's sound that allowed them to be one of the only rock bands to cross over onto the pop charts when the whole "boy band" thing was at its peak.
Billboard magazine keeps a specialty chart called the "rock chart". Creed became the first band in the history of that chart to have three singles in the top 20 at the same time. It was so perfect. You couldn't have genetically engineered a more popular rock band. In less than 8 months, the album sold a couple million copies. They sold tens of thousands of concert tickets and hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of t-shirts. And things had only just begun. On September 28, 1999, Creed released "Human Clay", their second album. No one could believe it when the CD entered the charts at number one. And then the CD stayed in the upper end of charts around the world for months. "Higher". The first single from the second Creed record, "Human Clay". It stayed at number one on the radio airplay charts for 18 consecutive weeks.
That was the first shot. From there, the album sold and sold and sold. At last count, more than eleven million people have purchased a copy of "Human Clay". And don't even ask about the concert tickets and t-shirts and radio airplay. While bands like Pearl Jam saw their sales slide, while bands like Soundgarden broke up, Creed almost single-handedly kept the grunge tradition alive.
The only thing that Creed didn't manage to do was gain any critic respect from writers or their peers. Let's be honest. As popular as Creed is, there's nothing particularly original in their sound. It is derivative. It can be ham-fisted. And it's not really very progressive. They've simply taken the best of grunge and cheered it up a bit. there's a story about Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready. He says he was walking somewhere when he heard a song that sounded familiar, it sounded like Pearl Jam. And he remembers thinking "This is okay. But funny. I don't remember writing that song". that's because he didn't. The track was by Creed.
Other performers, the Foo Fighters and Limp Bizkit chief among them, didn't have kind things to say about them in public. Scott Stapp and Fred Durst still jaw at each other every once in a while. And to be honest, Creed made it worse for themselves. When the platinum awards started rolling in, they tended to come off as pretty cocky and full of themselves. But one level, you can understand why. Creed had made success look so easy.
When they played the side stage at the 1998 Edgefest show, the first thing that happened when they finished their set was a presentation of a couple of platinum albums. Remember: they were a side-stage band and they were already double-platinum in Canada. that's how quickly it happened. That cockiness came back to haunt them, though. Bass player Brian Marshall, the guy who came up with the named "Creed" in the first place, found himself booted from the band. In June of 2000, Brian gave an interview to a radio station and had some unkind things to say about Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam, not smart, especially when you consider that this radio station was in Seattle. I quote:
"Looking at Pearl Jam's album sales, and their fans, you can just see a decline. I think a lot of it has to do with Eddie Vedder and the grasp he has on the rest of the band. He wishes he could write lyrics like Scott. They're a great band. I just don't understand why they went in the direction that they did, which is songs without hooks".
As you might remember, the fallout from this interview came rather swiftly, and weeks later, (August 9, 2000), Brian Marshall was no longer a member of Creed. No one knows exactly what happened, officially, the split was "amicable". "Personal and professional differences", but you gotta wonder, right? That little gaffe did nothing to diminish Creed in the eyes of their fans. "Human Clay" just kept selling and selling and selling. And by the fall of 2001, Creed's first two albums had sold a combined total of 18 million copies. "With Arms Wide Open," a song that Scott Stapp wrote in anticipation of the birth of his new son. The kid's name is "Jagger," by the way.
Creed's third album, "Weathered", came out on November 20, 2001. And you know what they say: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". And despite all the shots from their peers and the critics, Creed stuck with what brung them to the dance. And it worked. Again. "Weathered" debuted at number one on the album charts and stayed there for eight weeks. In week one, the album sold 887,000 copies in the U.S. And tens of thousands more around the world. Week two? 458,000 copies. And then in the week before Christmas? 865,000 copies. By the first day of spring 2002, "Weathered" had sold over six million copies. Three albums, almost 25 million sold. This makes Creed one of the biggest-selling and most popular rock bands in the world. It goes to show you that the critics aren't always right.
If you've spent any time at Creed.com, you might have come across a link to "The Creed Quest". This is essentially a very strange scavenger hunt. Like the site says, "Seek and ye shall find". In fact, the main character in this game is called "The Seeker". He's looking for eight pieces of a puzzle. But to get those pieces, Creed fans have to wade their way through a bunch of stories. It's very much like a game of Myst except that you need to know a lot about Creed, song titles, lyrics, things like that.
This whole concept sprang from Mark Tremonti's brother, Dan, who not only takes care of all of Creed's album artwork, but has a day job working for a company that develops online promotions for companies and corporations. Remember the goofy virtual world that unfolded before the release of Stephen Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence? "Three Mountain Group". The same people.
Creed and Dan started work on the "Creed Quest" back in 1998. And if you know where to look, there are clues all over the place. Look at the front and back covers of "Human Clay". See those crossroads? What's the connection to the band? Pop out the CD tray and look along the inside spine. Could those co-ordinates (latitude and longitude) mean anything?
At one point, the idea was to bury a box in a six-foot hole at those crossroads, which really do exist, by the way. If you found the crossroads and dug up the box, you'd be told how to get in touch with the band so you could claim a prize consisting of guitars, amps, drums and other gear. That plan, however, was shelved. But the game continues, albeit in another vein.
It is far, far, far too complicated to deal with here. However, if you go to any good search engine and enter the words "Creed Quest," you might find something useful. No matter what you think of Creed, you have to admire the stuff that they give back. Scott Stapp runs a charitable foundation called "With Arms Wide Open". It's for kids. And every year, the foundation does things like send underprivileged kids to space camp. And that's just one of the things it does. When Creed played the Winter Olympics, they quietly hosted an event for the families who lost loved ones during the September 11th attacks. The foundation always has another projects on the go, always dedicated to preserving, protecting and fighting for the family unit. And did you know this? In June of 2000, Scott Stapp became the first inductee into the "Fatherhood Hall of Fame". This is an online organization created by a group called women4fatherhood.org that is devoted to recognizing dedicated parents and strong role models. It's pretty hard to criticize that, isn't it?
And we can't leave the subject of Creed without answering this question: Is Creed a Christian band? This is such a big deal that a good chunk of the band's "frequently asked question" section on their website is taken up by the subject. The short answer is "no". For the long answer, go to Creed.com.
.Alan Cross