I Went to a Creed Concert

Note: The audio attached to this Webworm compliments today’s newsletter. I collected it as I met people attending a Creed concert. Their opinions may differ to mine.

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Hi,

When I was 14 I was obsessed with a band called Creed.

I’d come home from school, and the first thing I’d do is go to my room, shut my door, get out my discman, and put on Creed’s 1997 album My Own Prison.

A man who appears to be in his own metaphorical prison.

I was deep in Christianity at the time, and my musical tastes reflected that. Apart from some Britpop sneaking in, I lived on a musical diet of DC Talk, Jars and Clay and Newsboys (to this day I maintain that the songs “Supernatural”, “Crazy Times” and “Entertaining Angels” are absolute bangers).

Then Creed came along, fronted by Scott Stapp.

Creed did something very interesting, because they never marketed themselves as a Christian band — they snuck in under the radar, appealing to people who did not give a shit about God or faith. They also happened to sing an awful lot about God and faith.

An absence of a Christian label also gave them room to be slightly more edgy. They seemed more aggressive and angry, and didn’t mind throwing in the odd “goddamn” in their lyrics, which to me at the time seemed exceedingly blasphemous and naughty (and therefore cool). As I was going through the emotions of a relatively fresh teenager, Creed hit an angsty (but God-approved) sweet spot.

Creed circa 1997.

As this 2000 story from Spin magazine explains, I wasn’t the only kid listening to Creed. Creed got big.

Scott Stapp leads the most popular hard-rock band in America. Creed’s second album, Human Clay, recently went quadruple-platinum and is holding strong in the Top 10 almost a year after its release.

Their tormented, fire-and-brimstone music, which crosses the thick guitars of Metallica with the thundering dynamics of Alice in Chains, would be more at home in the grunge era. Stapp eschews baseball caps for tight leather pants and long hair, looking like an early-’90 throwback (and his baritone sounds eerily like Eddie Vedder’s).

But whether it’s the Doors or U2 or Soundgarden or Live, the world always needs at least one rock band with an overwrought sense of musical drama, and Creed hold that mantle today. Stapp’s lyrics, which draw heavily on biblical imagery, are usually news bulletins from the land of anguish. For instance, “Forked tongues in bitter mouths / Can drive a man to bleed from inside out.”

It’s sort of hard to explain unless you’re from that world, but I grew up in a form of Christianity that made it very clear everything in the world was sinful, and if you weren’t careful Satan would get his hooks in and take you directly to hell.

Like all teenagers I gravitated towards music, but I had this extra step in the process where I had to check the lyrics aligned with Biblical values. While other kids were listening to Nine Inch Nails’s The Downward Spiral, I had to carefully skip songs like “Heresy” and “Closer”.

But with a band like Creed — I could listen and not sin.

It was heaven.

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It’s difficult to say exactly when Creed peaked, but it was probably very adjacent to one of America’s biggest lows.

In the wake of 9/11, the band was invited to perform at the Dallas Cowboy’ halftime show on Thanksgiving — November 22, 2001.

The performance that followed is probably one of the most patriotic things that’s ever existed, Stapp performing the band’s motivational hit “Higher” to footage of 9/11 firefighters — all as aerialists glided, choirs sung, and fireworks exploded.

If Creed was on a rollercoaster, that was the peak. What followed almost felt inevitable in the world of 2000s fame, and Stapp ended up hooked on Percocet, Xanax and prednisone.

In 2002, less than a year after that Dallas Cowboys show, a “belligerently drunk Stapp forgot the words to his songs and stumbled off the stage for 10 minutes”. Four members of the audience sued Creed for $2 million dollars. As Slate noted, “even Creed fans had started to hate Creed.”

Four years later it was Scott Stapp’s turn to file a lawsuit as he attempted to block a sex tape featuring himself, Kid Rock, and four women. There was a domestic violence incident, and he tried to die by suicide by jumping off a 40 foot balcony.

Rapper T.I. found him, and reportedly saved him.

In 2014, Stapp posted a video to the bands Facebook page that could only be described as unhinged. He claimed to be “compliment penniless” and staying in a Holiday Inn, the IRS freezing his bank accounts.

I remember watching that video, aged 31, thinking how incredibly sad it all was. “Holy shit, that’s that band I was obsessed with when I was 14.”

I assumed that would have been my last “Holy shit!” thought when it came to Creed — but I was wrong.

Because in 2024 — Creed came back.

Creed at their peak in 2001.

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If the band’s biggest peak came in the wake of 9/11, then the band’s resurrection arrived in the wake of Covid. And don’t blame me for these grand, idiotic links I’m drawing here: Creed elicits this kind of over the top, grand thinking.

Because as Covid restrictions were lifted, sports teams started to use Creed “as their go-to battle music”… again. And it wasn’t just football.

Last November a full stadium full of baseball fans sung “Higher” to celebrate the Texas Rangers World Series win. Months later, a remix of “One Last Breath” began to be played in some of New York’s hottest clubs. Creed was in a fucking Superbowl commercial.

Somehow, impossibly, Creed was once again one of the biggest bands on the planet. “The band has clearly crossed some sort of inscrutable cultural Rubicon and thrown reality into flux—up is down, black is white, and, due to a sublime confluence of biting irony and prostrating sincerity, Creed fucking rocks,” wrote Slate.

Scott Stapp had gotten straight, and Creed had picked up their guitars again.

They were on tour, and they were playing an hours’ drive away from me, and dear God I was going.

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I invited a variety of friends to go with me to see Creed, and all of them refused. 

So at 2pm on a Saturday afternoon, I created My Own Prison and started the 1.5 hour drive east to San Bernardino, California.

My Own Prison queued up on the car stereo…

I don’t really understand San Bernardino, and I still don’t — but it’s a sprawling part of Inland Empire. Being there, David Lynch’s film started to make a bit more sense.

I arrived at the Glen Helen Amphitheater at around 2pm, greeted by a giant, dusty car park and an assortment of fans tailgating to their heart’s content. Back when I was 14, I never imagined being a 41-year-old man in America going to watch them play for the first time, surrounded by a bunch of hardcore Creed fans.

And so I decided to go out and talk to them. I recorded some of that audio for you to listen to.

What I discovered was a surreal, strange thing. There was an element of the crowd that was a bit like me — there for old times’ sake.

“Just nostalgia. So, like a lot of the young kids who grew up with Creed are now adults with disposable income,” a man in pink jeans tells me.

But a few cars down, it was a very different scene — a giant truck with “We The People” emblazoned on the back window, a thin blue line flag waving in the wind.

“There’s a lot of good things in life, but there’s nothing better than an American flag,” a guy in a gray singlet tells me. “We the people — it was part of the Constitution. It just represents our American freedom. The reason we’re having a good time, and not a care in the world.”

As I walk towards the entrance to the venue, and talk to more and more fans, I realise many of them were here for God as much as Creed.

“If you don’t know, they’re really Christian based,” a dude in a bandana says. “They’re really Christian men. Dude, Scott Stapp, he was spoken to by God to make those lyrics. Hands down, hands down, he’s spoken to by God.”

The more people I speak to, the more I realise those first lads — who spoke of nostalgia and one-off hits — they were in the minority here.

A group of women — all staggered in age, drinking, and here for Creed: “I’m 53. She’s like ten years older than me and she’s ten years younger than me,” says the one in the middle. “So we have 40, 50 and 60. It’s very uplifting to me as a Catholic, Christian woman. And [Stapp’s] trials and tribulations makes it even better.” 

I can’t resist, and ask who they’re voting for. They make it very clear they think America needs Donald Trump.

The youngest explains her strange kind of logic to me: “I just don’t think that it’s wise for us to have a female president, because I think we are in international affairs, and I do still think that there are a lot of countries that don’t uphold women. They don’t respect them.”

Inside the venue, openers 3 Doors Down are playing. They are flanked on the stage by American flags, and after their hit “Kryptonite” plays, singer Brad Arnold prays over the audience to “bless America.” 

I hadn’t even realised 3 Doors Down were Christian. The entire audience erupts into claps and cheers.

It’s a hot day, and a lot of shirts are off.

Others are, unfortunately, on.

The 14 year me in his New Zealand bedroom did not imagine future fellow fans donning shirts emblazoned with “1776”:

References to the year 1776 and the American Revolution have grown substantially among the far-right as Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists have hinted at the possibility of a revolution in the wake of Trump’s election loss, which they view, falsely, as illegitimate. Trump allies and surrogates, including first-term Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), referred to Jan. 6 as Republicans’ “1776 moment.”

As the sun sets, I think about the particularly strange fusion of Christianity and America I’ve dedicated my Saturday to. I wonder if there was a version of my life where I would have been one of these people.

By the time Creed comes on stage at 9.20pm, it’s a fever dream. 

Scott Stapp is, undeniably, an incredible frontman. His voice is powerful and he looks the fittest I’ve ever seen him. He strikes ridiculous poses, and I’m reminded that he’s playing fucking Frank Sinatra in a film this year.

2024 is his year. Later this year, his band will fill up Madison Square Garden.

In between songs, he talks at length about his struggles. He has the word-count and cadence of an evangelical preacher, and the crowd is lapping it up.

“Sometimes the greatest gift we can have is desperation. Because when you run out of options, my friend, you start screaming, ‘Oh God! Oh, God. Oh, God!’ It’s a human instinct. You cry out to your maker. Think about that one. Chew on it,” he tells us, before launching into my favourite song, “My Own Prison.”

14 year old me is ecstatic. 41 year old me is ecstatic. 

He hits every hit and every note. There are guitar solos galore and giant flames erupt from the stage at perfectly choreographed intervals.

At one stage, he dramatically stops the show and asks for the lights to come up. “Quickly, quickly! Come on, come on! We need help over here! Someone’s got a pretty bad head injury over here,” he announces.

As medics make their way through the pit, he makes one request. “If you have faith and you believe in God, let’s pray. Everyone who has faith. You’ve got to protect him right now. Let’s call down the Holy spirit.”

With that, he starts praying, any illusion that Creed was anything but a Christian band long extinguished.

It’s strange, watching this particular band with this particular audience. This is the first concert I’ve attended that felt more Trump rally than rock show. I realise that Christianity and politics are deeply entwined, but I didn’t suspect this point would wallop me over the head quite this dramatically at a fucking Creed concert.

Teenage me had no idea he’d ever watch Creed perform, and certainly had no idea what they’d end up representing to so many fans.

When I was a kid, they were a band that felt safe even for a sheltered Christian. Now here they are, 27 years later, a symbol for a lying narcissist accused of multiple sexual assaults who wants to be president again. 

This is the cover of one of Creed’s very successful records - a friend added my face to the Creed tree. Thanks.