It’s excessive midday on a blazing April day, which is the best time to be sitting in an Irish pub aboard a cruise ship the scale of a small asteroid. The bar is named O’Sheehan’s – pronounced “oceans” – and it’s situated deep inside the stomach of the boat, simply above the teppanyaki joint, the sake bar and the lustrous duty-free outlets. This consciousness-altering diorama of infinite seas and Guinness-themed paraphernalia is the place I meet Colleen Sullivan, a 46-year-old girl with a beehive of curly crimson hair and arms encased by plastic wristbands. She needs to inform me how Creed modified her life.
We’re each right here for Summer season of ’99, a weekend-long cruise and live performance pageant for which Creed – as within the Christian-lite rock band that offered greater than 28m albums within the US and but stands out as the most generally disdained group in trendy instances – are reuniting for the primary time in 12 years. Roughly 2,400 different Creed followers are alongside for the spherical journey from Miami to the Bahamas, and the remainder of the invoice is occupied by the dregs of turn-of-the-millennium alt-rock stardom. Buckcherry are right here. So are Vertical Horizon, Gasoline and 3 Doorways Down, who haven’t launched an album since 2016.
To rejoice, Sixthman, the reserving company liable for this and lots of different cruises, has totally Creedified each factor of the ship. The band’s brand is printed on the napkins and scripted throughout the blackjack felt. The TV screens on the bar are tuned to a near-constant loop of Creed’s efficiency at Woodstock ’99. The onboard library has been transformed to a merch retailer promoting Creed hoodies and shot glasses. After I activate the closed-circuit tv in my cabin, a channel referred to as New Motion pictures performs Scream 3 and Can’t Hardly Wait. Sixthman pulled related stunts with Prepare’s Sail Throughout the Solar cruise and Child Rock’s notoriously debauched Chillin’ the Most cruise – the Child Rock cruise additionally occurred on the vessel I’m on, the Norwegian Pearl. The thought is to teleport a captive viewers again into the dirtbags they as soon as embodied and to a less complicated time, when Scott Stapp, Creed’s mercurial lead singer, managed the universe.
Sullivan tells me that her relationship with Creed overlaps along with her sobriety story. She first turned a fan of the band within the late Nineties, when Increased and With Arms Vast Open have been hovering up the charts. Then Sullivan began utilizing, and her appreciation for the divine proportions of these songs pale in service of extra corporeal wants. Years later, after Creed broke up and Sullivan bought clear, she returned to the music and found a dogma of her personal: perhaps she had been placed on Earth to like Stapp – and Creed – more durable, and with extra urgency, than anybody else on the earth.
“He helped me develop with these outdated Creed songs,” she tells me. “After I noticed Scott for the primary time reside, he had simply gotten clear, too. I’d go to the exhibits and there could be tears streaming down my face.” Her left arm options one other Stapp tattoo, with the phrases “His Love Was Thunder within the Sky”, surrounded by a constellation of quarter notes. It’s a lyric taken from a 2013 Stapp solo tune referred to as Jesus Was a Rockstar. The singer scrawled it on to her physique himself.
Summer season of 99 is Creed’s second try to reunite after they disbanded in 2004 and 2012 amid clashing egos and substance points. The band couldn’t have picked a greater time to get again collectively. Should you haven’t observed, we’re within the midst of an especially unlikely Creed renaissance, redeeming probably the most reviled – and, maybe extra damningly, most uncool – band on the earth. For a lot of the previous 20 years, hating Creed has been a pure extension of being a music fan. In 2013, Rolling Stone readers voted the group “the worst band of the Nineties”. Leisure Weekly, reviewing Human Clay, the band’s bestselling album and one of many highest-selling albums of all time, bemoaned the document’s “lunkheaded kegger rock” and “quasi-spiritual lyrics which have all of the resonance of a self-help handbook”.
The disrespect was mirrored extra sharply by Stapp’s personal contemporaries. Within the early 00s, Dexter Holland, the frontman of the Offspring, performed exhibits sporting a T-shirt that learn “Even Jesus Hates Creed”. After leaked photographs of a intercourse tape filmed in 1999 that includes Stapp and Child Rock and a room filled with groupies made it on to the web, Child Rock retorted by saying that his followers didn’t care in regards to the pornography however have been appalled that he was hanging out with somebody like Stapp. Then, in 2002, after a disastrous present in Chicago at which a belligerently drunk Stapp forgot the phrases to his songs and stumbled off the stage for 10 minutes, 4 attenders unsuccessfully sued the band for $2m. Holland’s shirt didn’t go far sufficient – on the group’s lowest, even Creed followers hated Creed.
All this acrimony plunged Stapp into a number of episodes of psychic misery. His dependence on alcohol and painkillers was properly documented throughout the band’s preliminary brush with success, however after Creed’s short-lived reconciliation, Stapp spiralled. In 2014, the singer began posting unsettling movies to Fb, asserting that he had been the sufferer of a monetary rip-off and was dwelling in a Vacation Inn. That very same yr, TMZ launched 911 calls made by Stapp’s spouse, Jaclyn, claiming that he had printed out reams of CIA paperwork and was threatening to kill Barack Obama. However lately, Stapp – who introduced a bipolar prognosis in 2015 – seems to be on a lot firmer floor, and the band have reportedly patched up a few of these long-gestating interpersonal wounds.
With time comes knowledge, and in 2024 neither the crucial slander nor the troubling stories about Stapp’s psychological state are anyplace to be discovered. It was round 2021, as Stapp lately informed Esquire, that folks began to return spherical to the notion that Creed have been good. The brand new paradigm seemingly solidified the subsequent yr, when Creed’s mythically patriotic post-9/11 halftime present, performed on Thanksgiving in 2001, started to accrue latter-day meme standing. The set was ridiculous and immaculately lip-synced by Stapp and firm. Yoked shirtless angels spin via the air and cheerleaders pump out pompom routines synchronised with My Sacrifice, all whereas the reside broadcast is interspersed with grim footage from Floor Zero. It’s garishly, unapologetically American. At present, each of these relics – Creed and the unified nationwide optimism – are value getting wistful about. “That is the place we peaked as a nation,” wrote soccer commentator Mike Golic Jr, linking to the video.
Creed nostalgia has solely proliferated additional for the reason that resurrection of that half-time present. The band’s guitarist, Mark Tremonti, informed the hard-rock web site Blabbermouth that he’d lately observed athletes bumping Creed as their “go-to battle music”, and, in November, a whole stadium of Texas Rangers followers belted out Increased to commemorate their group’s World Sequence victory. Earlier this yr, a viral remix of One Final Breath even started pulsing via a number of the hottest events in New York. The band have clearly crossed some form of cultural Rubicon and thrown actuality into flux – up is down, black is white and, on account of a chic confluence of irony and sincerity, Creed rocks.
All because of this the inaugural version of the Summer season of 99 cruise is buoyed up by very excessive stakes. It has been 12 lengthy years since Creed final performed a present, and the cruise is meant to be the dry run for a mammoth comeback tour that’s scheduled for 60 dates, via summer time and autumn, in basketball arenas and hockey stadiums throughout North America. The one remaining query is whether or not the band can hold it collectively. I’m there in a commemorative Creed Tremendous Bowl half-time T-shirt to search out out.
Several flights of stairs above O’Sheehan’s, the day earlier than I meet Sullivan, I discover Sean Patrick, a giddily beer-buzzed 34-year-old from Nashville who’s standing in awe of a Coachella-sized stage that appears downright sinister on the pool deck. Creed are enjoying two exhibits this weekend, and the primary is about for the very minute the boat leaves port and escapes Miami for the horizon. Which means that everybody who purchased a ticket to Summer season of ’99 – which ranges from $895 for a windowless hovel to $6,381 for a stateroom with a balcony – has ascended to the highest of the ship, making ready for Creed’s rebirth in a wash of Coors Gentle tallboys.
In contrast to Sullivan, Patrick doesn’t possess a kind of extremely intimate histories with the band flecked with tales of trauma and perseverance. Nonetheless, he fell in love with Creed – even when it was solely accidentally.
“I believe it began as a joke. The songs have been good, however there was positively a sense of, like: Yeah, Creed!” he tells me. “However then, subsequent factor you understand, you end up in your automotive, alone, deciding to placed on Creed.”
The vast majority of the passengers on the Pearl have by no means been burdened with Patrick’s hesitance. Their relationship with Creed is real and free – cleansed of even the faintest whiff of irony – and, not like Patrick, they are typically of their late 40s and early 50s. The lady standing ankle-deep within the wading pool with a Stewie Griffin tattoo on her shin unambiguously loves Creed, and the identical might be true of whoever was lounging on a deckchair with a guide, written by Fox Information pundit Jesse Watters, titled Get It Collectively: Troubling Tales From the Liberal Fringe. Two brothers from Kentucky who work in metal mills inform me that loving Creed is virtually a household custom: their eldest brother, not current on the boat, initially confirmed them the band’s information. Tina Smith, a 48-year-old homecare employee from Texas topped with a black tennis visor adorned with golden letters spelling out the identify of her favorite band, loves Creed a lot that she launched into this journey all by herself. “That is my first cruise and my first trip,” she says proudly. (Smith is already planning her subsequent trip. It’ll coincide with one other Creed present.)
Youthful passengers are clearly acquainted extra with Creed the meme than Creed the band. These are the individuals who vibe with statements like “Born too late to personal property, born simply in time to be a crusader within the ‘Creed isn’t dangerous’ battle” – particularly once they’re organized as deep-fried blocks of textual content superimposed over the face of Keanu Reeves as Neo in The Matrix. If the institution brokers of tradition as soon as settled on the place that Creed suck, then it has been met with a youth-led insurgency that appears useless set on shifting the consensus – if for no different purpose than to savour the nectar of pure, uncut taboo.
Many members of this insurgency are aboard the Pearl, they usually’re caked in emblems of web miscellany that scream out to anybody within the know. Take into account the younger man, travelling together with his father, who’s draped in a T-shirt bearing the Creed brand under a beatific picture of Nicolas Cage circa Con Air, or the many followers who wander across the innards of the Pearl in matching Scott Stapp-branded Dallas Cowboys jerseys, a reference to that half-time present. The truth is, the perfect representatives of sardonic Creed-fandom colonists may be the youngest assortment of buddies that I’ve met on board. They’re all of their 20s, most of them work in Boston’s drugs and science sectors, and every is wearing a custom-ordered tropical button-down dotted with the angelic face of Stapp in locations the place you’d look forward to finding coconuts and banana bunches. Per week earlier than Summer season of 99 was introduced, the 4 of them made a pact, by way of group textual content, that if Creed have been ever to reunite, they might make it out to see the band play, irrespective of the fee. Their destiny was sealed.
“I hated Creed. I believed they have been horrible,” says Mike Hobey, who, at 28, is the oldest of the posse and due to this fact the one who possesses the clearest recollection of Creed’s lengthy, unusual journey towards absolution. “However then I began listening to them mockingly. And I used to be like: ‘Oh, shit, I like them now.’”
His level is indicative of an odd stress on this new age of Creed: If “the worst band of the Nineties” are abruptly good, does that imply all music is nice now? Is nothing cheesy? Have the digitised music discovery apparatuses – the melting-pot TikTok algorithm, the self-replicating profusion of Spotify playlists – blurred the boundaries of excellent and dangerous style? Am I, like Hobey, incapable of being a hater any extra?
That is what I discovered myself enthusiastic about when Creed took the stage proper because the Miami skies started to mellow right into a late-afternoon smoulder, and placed on what was, for sure, among the best rock exhibits I’ve ever seen. Stapp – trying jacked and lovely, chain on neck and chain on belt, flexing towards God in a good black shirt – launched into Are You Prepared?, the primary tune of the afternoon, his baritone sounding, by some means, precisely prefer it did in 1999. “Who would’ve thought, after our final present in 2012, our subsequent present could be 12 years later, on a ship?” Stapp mentioned. He’s risen, certainly.
The members of the band have been enveloped by an viewers that had paid some huge cash to see them, and in that ambiance they may do no improper. They blitzed via quite a lot of album cuts earlier than arriving on the brawny triptych of Increased, One Final Breath and With Arms Vast Open, pausing briefly to want Tremonti, the guitarist, who was turning 50, a cheerful birthday. (Stapp wiped away tears afterward, a genuinely touching second, contemplating that in their first breakup Tremonti had in contrast his years collaborating with Stapp – who was then within the throes of habit – to surviving Vietnam.) Given Creed’s historic proximity to the Child Rock model of red-state overindulgence, I half anticipated the live performance to detonate with violent mosh pits and acrobatic beer stunts, however nothing remotely near mayhem occurred. This crowd was downright well mannered – chaste, even – as if it had been surprised by the grandeur of Creed.
Nothing about Creed’s music has modified up to now decade, which is to say that most of the quirks that folks like Hobey as soon as used to mock the band for have been on show throughout its first present again. However the reality is that little of the smug hatred for the group has ever had a lot to do with the music itself. Creed’s first document, 1997’s My Personal Jail, was almost equivalent to the down-tuned angst of Soundgarden or Alice in Chains, drawn properly contained in the strains of alt-rock radio. (It earned a tasteful 4/5 ranking from the longtime shopper information AllMusic.)
The issues arose solely after the band began writing the celestial hooks of Human Clay, solidifying their affiliation with different teams chasing the identical crunchy highs with machine-learning effectivity: Nickelback, Staind and so forth. Put up-grunge was the time period music journalists ultimately bestowed on this technology, and on reflection that was the kiss of demise. Creed have been abruptly positioned because the heir of the legacy of Kurt Cobain, the godfather of grunge, who bristled in any respect associations with the mainstream music business. Stapp, in the meantime, has lengthy referred to as Bono – he of the flowing locks, billionaire finest buddies, and residencies in extravagant Las Vegas monoliths – his “rock god”. Creed’s sole aspiration was to turn into the most important rock band on the earth, and for a couple of years there, the group truly pulled it off. Cobain’s grave bought a little bit colder.
Put up-grunge steamrolled the rock enterprise, lowering its sonic palette to an all-consuming minor-chord dirge. Nickelback’s How You Remind Me was the most-played tune on US radio in 2002, ultimately sparking a livid interval of retaliation from the underground. The truth is, by the late 2000s, the hatred of Creed had been so canonised that when Slate printed a rebuttal – by which critic Jonah Weiner asserted that the band was “critically underrated” – the essay was thought of so “ridiculous” and contrarian as to single-handedly encourage the viral and enduring #slatepitches hashtag, immediately prompting parodies equivalent to “Star Wars I, II, & III, higher than Star Wars IV, V, & VI”.
However frankly, after I revisit Weiner’s piece, a lot of his arguments sound remarkably cogent to trendy orthodoxies. “Creed appeared to annoy individuals exactly as a result of its music was so unabashedly calibrated in the direction of pleasure: each surging riff, skyscraping refrain, and cathartic chord development telegraphed the band’s intention to rock us, wow us, transfer us,” he writes. Sure, these simple gratifications may need been unpardonable sins in the summertime of 1999, capping off a decade anxious about all issues business and phoney. However now even LCD Soundsystem – as soon as the usual bearer of a sure type of countercultural fashionability – are reserving residencies sponsored by American Categorical. We have all turn into hedonists and proud sellouts.
That doesn’t imply Stapp now not takes himself, or his artwork, critically. The singer’s earnestness – some may say humourlessness – has at all times been a cornerstone of Creed’s model. Followers brandish private tales that intersect with Creed’s information; they finds strains about locations with “golden streets” “the place blind males see” extra inspiring than corny, and lots of of them are etched with the tattoos to show it. However within the band’s afterlife, when all its outdated context evaporates, Stapp has additionally attracted a neighborhood desperate to deal with Creed just like the celebration band it by no means aspired to be – the group of licentious pleasure seekers Weiner wrote about. They’re all right here, sprinkled all through the boat, able to drink a few Coronas and shred their lungs to My Sacrifice.
After wrapping up the primary night time of the cruise, Creed, together with the remainder of the bands on the invoice, have been scheduled to manage a couple of glad-handing classes. On Saturday, Tremonti chaperoned a low-key portray session whereas the Pearl floated into the Bahamas. Tremonti retains busy: the earlier night he had judged a karaoke match alongside 3 Doorways Down lead singer Brad Arnold. In the direction of the top of the competitors, Tremonti grabbed the microphone for a rousing cowl of Frank Sinatra’s My Manner, which I’d prefer to assume served as a tribute to Creed’s personal tenaciousness.
Stapp, however, is slated for precisely one appointment mingling with the lots: he’ll be capturing hoops with a number of the extra athletically oriented Creed adherents on a helipad that doubles as a basketball court docket close to the rear of the boat. Stapp is, by far, probably the most well-known individual on board, evidenced by the safety element that stands guard on the concrete. So I take my seat and watch him casually drain 10 free throws in a row in mesh shorts underneath the piercing Atlantic solar with the distinct tang of contractually obliged restraint.
Afterwards Stapp slips again into the mysterious alcoves of the ship whereas an awed buzz of followers – hoping for a selfie, an autograph or a cut up second of euphoric give up – tail him till they’re sealed off for good. It’s the one and solely time I see him cameoing anyplace however the stage, drawing a stark distinction to the opposite musicians on board, who flit between the casinos, eating places and watering holes within the guts of the Pearl.
This makes some form of cosmic sense. Stapp, to his detriment and credit score, has by no means embraced the flippancy that so many different individuals wished to impose on Creed. “Generally, I want we weren’t so rattling critical,” he mentioned in a memorable Spin cowl story from 2000. “My agenda from the start was to jot down music that had that means and was from the center. You’ll be able to’t drive the hand of the muse.” Should you’ll excuse the ostentation of the sentiment, you’ll be able to perhaps perceive how somebody like Stapp may not be capable to really feel like himself when he’s orchestrating photograph ops round a free-throw line with that very same younger man wearing his Nic Cage-themed parody Creed shirt. He appears to search out nothing trivial about Creed’s music. The specter of irrelevance shall by no means tame him. You can not drive the hand of the muse.
Sadly, Stapp’s remoteness can be why Kelly Risch, a 58-year-old from Wisconsin with streaks of ringed, white-blond hair and glam-metal eye shadow, is combating again tears within the Atrium, the ship’s foyer and central bar. Risch is sipping mimosas along with her sister Shannon Crass and, like so most of the others I’ve spoken to on this cruise, they every have matching Creed tattoos memorialising a private disaster.
Twenty years in the past, Risch suffered a large blood clot in her leg and virtually died. Crass printed out the lyrics to the latter-day Creed ballad Don’t Cease Dancing – a tune about discovering dignity within the chaos of life – and pinned them up in Crass’s intensive care unit throughout her restoration. At present, the refrain is painted on their wrists, proper above Stapp’s initials.
The sisters have been two of the primary 500 clients to purchase tickets to Summer season of 99, which assured them a photograph with the band at its cabin. Because of this Risch is crying. The photoshoot got here with strict guidelines, all of which she revered: no marker pens, no hugs and no cellphones. She’d hoped for a second, although – after spending $5,000 and travelling all the best way from the higher midwest, after clinging to life with the assistance of Creed and after ready 12 lengthy years to have the band again – to thank the singer for his consolation. However Stapp, even indoors, was sporting darkish, face-obscuring sun shades. She didn’t even get to make eye contact.
“He’s so nice with the gang. He’s so partaking onstage,” says Crass. “I believe that’s why that is disappointing.”
The 2 sisters are decided to profit from the remainder of their trip. The Pearl will probably be pulling into Miami tomorrow at 7am, and there are a lot extra mimosas left to drink. I inform them I’m going to talk with Stapp, and the remainder of Creed, in an hour. Have they got something they’d like me to ask?
“Inform him to not put on sun shades throughout the photographs,” they are saying.
Creed are ending up the meet-and-greet obligations in a cold rococo ballroom. The band members have been at this all morning after a late night time ending off the second efficiency of their two comeback units. Creed have this right down to an artwork. The band are able to producing a photograph each 30 seconds, and afterwards the followers exit again down the aisle with beaming smiles, their brush with stardom consummated. Stapp chugs a bottle of Fiji water and holds out his hand for a fist bump after the final of these passengers disappear. A crucifix dangles above his navel and an American flag is stitched to his T-shirt. He’s nonetheless sporting these sun shades.
I’m given simply quarter-hour to ask questions, in a makeshift interview set-up in opposition to the portside home windows, underneath the watchful surveillance of all the Creed equipment – each PR reps, a couple of scurrying Sixthman operators, the photographer and so forth. I ask what their day-to-day life is like aboard Summer season of 99, on this extremely concentrated setting of tremendous followers, with no apparent escape routes. Stapp says that he has spent more often than not on the cruise “resting and exercising” whereas Brian Marshall, the band’s bassist, tells me he executes his privilege of being one of many band’s secondary members by frequenting the sauna and steam room. All through the weekend, Marshall is hardly recognised.
Scott Phillips, Creed’s drummer, confirms my suspicions in regards to the cruise’s demographics. The ticket knowledge reveals {that a} good variety of the passengers are underneath 35 years outdated. I’m curious to know the way the band members are adjusting to this new paradigm shift, and in the event that they want to settle frequent floor between the post-ironic millennials and the way more zealous gen Xers, who bear Creed insignias on their calves and forearms.
“Individuals are drawn to our music for various causes,” Stapp says. “That’s in all probability why you may have the fellows you have been speaking about, who wish to chill and drink gentle beer and scream: ‘Creed rocks!’ and the others, who’ve a a lot deeper, emotional influence.”
“And perhaps in some unspecified time in the future, with the light-beer guys, it does join with them,” Phillips provides. Stapp agrees.
However actually the rationale I’m right here is as a result of I wish to ask Stapp a query I’ve been inquisitive about for the whole lot of Creed’s profession. The band’s weird odyssey, from their heat reception amongst youth teams throughout the US to the backlash that met their success to this present psychedelic revival, has all orbited round a single lasting query: why is Scott Stapp so critical? May he ever mellow out? Does he wish to? Absolutely now’s the time. Why should he make being in Creed so tough?
“It’s simply who I’m,” he says. “It’s what evokes me. It’s the place I come from. And it’s robust, as a result of you need to reside it. That’s the conundrum of all of it. That’s the double-edged sword. If I began writing [lighter material], there could be a dramatic shift in my existence.”
There’s a break within the dialog, then Stapp asks me to establish the identify of the brand new Taylor Swift album.
“It’s referred to as The Tortured Poets Division,” I reply.
“That’s what I really feel,” he says and not using a shred of artifice. “I join with that title.”
Later that night I climb to the highest of the Pearl for a closing spherical of karaoke, the place followers hold the spirit of 1999 alive for a couple of extra hours. The playlist is extra various than I anticipated. We’re handled to each Jay Z’s Huge Pimpin’ and Shania Twain’s Any Man of Mine. Brandon Smith, one of many only a few individuals of color aboard the cruise, crushes Maroon 5’s She Will Be Liked. A lanky child from St Louis unleashes a Slipknot demise growl into the microphone. A queer couple quietly slow-dances on the in any other case empty dancefloor. And a 16-year-old, tooth tightened by braces, orders his final Sprite of the night time.
“Rockers are probably the most superior individuals!” shouts one transcendently inebriated visitor over the clamour of his Rolling Stones cowl. “Creed is superior!” On this one factor, a minimum of, we are able to all agree.
An extended model of this text initially ran in Slate