On board the Creed cruise: the unfathomable return of the ‘worst band of the 90s’ | Pop and rock
It’s high noon on a blazing April day, which is the ideal time to be sitting in an Irish pub aboard a cruise ship the size of a small asteroid. The bar is called O’Sheehan’s – pronounced “oceans” – and it’s located deep within the belly of the boat, just above the teppanyaki joint, the sake bar and the lustrous duty-free shops. This consciousness-altering diorama of infinite seas and Guinness-themed paraphernalia is where I meet Colleen Sullivan, a 46-year-old woman with a beehive of curly red hair and arms encased by plastic wristbands. She wants to tell me how Creed changed her life.
We are both here for Summer of ’99, a weekend-long cruise and concert festival for which Creed – as in the Christian-lite rock band that sold more than 28m albums in the US and yet may be the most widely disdained group in modern times – are reuniting for the first time in 12 years. Roughly 2,400 other Creed fans are along for the round trip from Miami to the Bahamas, and the rest of the bill is occupied by the dregs of turn-of-the-millennium alt-rock stardom. Buckcherry are here. So are Vertical Horizon, Fuel and 3 Doors Down, who haven’t released an album since 2016.
To celebrate, Sixthman, the booking agency responsible for this and many other cruises, has thoroughly Creedified every element of the ship. The band’s logo is printed on the napkins and scripted across the blackjack felt. The TV screens at the bar are tuned to a near-constant loop of Creed’s performance at Woodstock ’99. The onboard library has been converted to a merch store selling Creed hoodies and shot glasses. When I turn on the closed-circuit television in my cabin, a channel called New Movies plays Scream 3 and Can’t Hardly Wait. Sixthman pulled similar stunts with Train’s Sail Across the Sun cruise and Kid Rock’s notoriously debauched Chillin’ the Most cruise – the Kid Rock cruise also took place on the vessel I’m on, the Norwegian Pearl. The idea is to teleport a captive audience back into the dirtbags they once embodied and to a simpler time, when Scott Stapp, Creed’s mercurial lead singer, controlled the universe.
Sullivan tells me that her relationship with Creed overlaps with her sobriety story. She first became a fan of the band in the late 1990s, when Higher and With Arms Wide Open were soaring up the charts. Then Sullivan started using, and her appreciation for the divine proportions of those songs faded in service of more corporeal needs. Years later, after Creed broke up and Sullivan got clean, she returned to the music and discovered a dogma of her own: maybe she had been put on Earth to love Stapp – and Creed – harder, and with more urgency, than anyone else in the world.
“He helped me grow with those old Creed songs,” she tells me. “When I saw Scott for the first time live, he had just gotten clean, too. I’d go to the shows and there would be tears streaming down my face.” Her left arm features another Stapp tattoo, with the words “His Love Was Thunder in the Sky”, surrounded by a constellation of quarter notes. It’s a lyric taken from a 2013 Stapp solo song called Jesus Was a Rockstar. The singer scrawled it on to her body himself.
Summer of 99 is Creed’s second attempt to reunite after they disbanded in 2004 and 2012 amid clashing egos and substance issues. The band couldn’t have picked a better time to get back together. If you haven’t noticed, we’re in the midst of an extremely unlikely Creed renaissance, redeeming the most reviled – and, perhaps more damningly, most uncool – band in the world. For much of the past 20 years, hating Creed has been a natural extension of being a music fan. In 2013, Rolling Stone readers voted the group “the worst band of the 1990s”. Entertainment Weekly, reviewing Human Clay, the band’s bestselling album and one of the highest-selling albums of all time, bemoaned the record’s “lunkheaded kegger rock” and “quasi-spiritual lyrics that have all the resonance of a self-help manual”.
The disrespect was reflected more sharply by Stapp’s own contemporaries. In the early 00s, Dexter Holland, the frontman of the Offspring, played shows wearing a T-shirt that read “Even Jesus Hates Creed”. After leaked images of a sex tape filmed in 1999 featuring Stapp and Kid Rock and a room full of groupies made it on to the internet, Kid Rock retorted by saying that his fans didn’t care about the pornography but were appalled that he was hanging out with someone like Stapp. Then, in 2002, after a disastrous show in Chicago at which a belligerently drunk Stapp forgot the words to his songs and stumbled off the stage for 10 minutes, four attenders unsuccessfully sued the band for $2m. Holland’s shirt didn’t go far enough – at the group’s lowest, even Creed fans hated Creed.
All this acrimony plunged Stapp into several episodes of psychic distress. His dependence on alcohol and painkillers was well documented during the band’s initial brush with success, but after Creed’s short-lived reconciliation, Stapp spiralled. In 2014, the singer started posting unsettling videos to Facebook, asserting that he had been the victim of a financial scam and was living in a Holiday Inn. That same year, TMZ released 911 calls made by Stapp’s wife, Jaclyn, claiming that he had printed out reams of CIA documents and was threatening to kill Barack Obama. But these days, Stapp – who announced a bipolar diagnosis in 2015 – appears to be on much firmer ground, and the band have reportedly patched up some of those long-gestating interpersonal wounds.
With time comes wisdom, and in 2024 neither the critical slander nor the troubling reports about Stapp’s mental state are anywhere to be found. It was around 2021, as Stapp recently told Esquire, that people started to come round to the notion that Creed were good. The new paradigm likely solidified the next year, when Creed’s mythically patriotic post-9/11 halftime show, played on Thanksgiving in 2001, began to accrue latter-day meme status. The set was ridiculous and immaculately lip-synced by Stapp and company. Yoked shirtless angels spin through the air and cheerleaders pump out pompom routines synchronised with My Sacrifice, all while the live broadcast is interspersed with grim footage from Ground Zero. It’s garishly, unapologetically American. Today, both of those relics – Creed and the unified national optimism – are worth getting wistful about. “This is where we peaked as a nation,” wrote football commentator Mike Golic Jr, linking to the video.
Creed nostalgia has only proliferated further since the resurrection of that half-time show. The band’s guitarist, Mark Tremonti, told the hard-rock site Blabbermouth that he’d recently noticed athletes bumping Creed as their “go-to battle music”, and, in November, an entire stadium of Texas Rangers fans belted out Higher to commemorate their team’s World Series victory. Earlier this year, a viral remix of One Last Breath even began pulsing through some of the hottest parties in New York. The band have clearly crossed some sort of cultural Rubicon and thrown reality into flux – up is down, black is white and, due to a sublime confluence of irony and sincerity, Creed rocks.
All this means that the inaugural edition of the Summer of 99 cruise is buoyed up by very high stakes. It has been 12 long years since Creed last played a show, and the cruise is intended to be the dry run for a mammoth comeback tour that is scheduled for 60 dates, through summer and autumn, in basketball arenas and hockey stadiums across North America. The only remaining question is whether the band can keep it together. I’m there in a commemorative Creed Super Bowl half-time T-shirt to find out.
Several flights of stairs above O’Sheehan’s, the day before I meet Sullivan, I find Sean Patrick, a giddily beer-buzzed 34-year-old from Nashville who is standing in awe of a Coachella-sized stage that looks downright sinister on the pool deck. Creed are playing two shows this weekend, and the first is set for the very minute the boat leaves port and escapes Miami for the horizon. This means that everyone who bought a ticket to Summer of ’99 – which ranges from $895 for a windowless hovel to $6,381 for a stateroom with a balcony – has ascended to the top of the ship, preparing for Creed’s rebirth in a wash of Coors Light tallboys.
Unlike Sullivan, Patrick doesn’t possess one of those highly intimate histories with the band flecked with tales of trauma and perseverance. Still, he fell in love with Creed – even if it was only by accident.
“I think it started as a joke. The songs were good, but there was definitely a feeling of, like: Yeah, Creed!” he tells me. “But then, next thing you know, you find yourself in your car, alone, deciding to put on Creed.”
The majority of the passengers on the Pearl have never been burdened with Patrick’s hesitance. Their relationship with Creed is genuine and free – cleansed of even the faintest whiff of irony – and, unlike Patrick, they tend to be in their late 40s and early 50s. The woman standing ankle-deep in the wading pool with a Stewie Griffin tattoo on her shin unambiguously loves Creed, and the same is probably true of whoever was lounging on a deckchair with a book, written by Fox News pundit Jesse Watters, titled Get It Together: Troubling Tales From the Liberal Fringe. Two brothers from Kentucky who work in steel mills tell me that loving Creed is practically a family tradition: their eldest brother, not present on the boat, initially showed them the band’s records. Tina Smith, a 48-year-old homecare worker from Texas crowned with a black tennis visor adorned with golden letters spelling out the name of her favourite band, loves Creed so much that she embarked on this trip all by herself. “This is my first cruise and my first vacation,” she says proudly. (Smith is already planning her next vacation. It will coincide with another Creed show.)
Younger passengers are clearly acquainted more with Creed the meme than Creed the band. These are the people who vibe with statements like “Born too late to own property, born just in time to be a crusader in the ‘Creed isn’t bad’ fight” – especially when they’re arranged as deep-fried blocks of text superimposed over the face of Keanu Reeves as Neo in The Matrix. If the establishment brokers of culture once settled on the position that Creed suck, then it has been met with a youth-led insurgency that seems dead set on shifting the consensus – if for no other reason than to savour the nectar of pure, uncut taboo.
Many members of this insurgency are aboard the Pearl, and they’re caked in emblems of internet miscellany that scream out to anyone in the know. Consider the young man, travelling with his father, who is draped in a T-shirt bearing the Creed logo below a beatific image of Nicolas Cage circa Con Air, or the many fans who wander around the innards of the Pearl in matching Scott Stapp-branded Dallas Cowboys jerseys, a reference to that half-time show. In fact, the best representatives of sardonic Creed-fandom colonists might be the youngest collection of friends that I’ve met on board. They are all in their 20s, most of them work in Boston’s medicine and science sectors, and each is dressed in a custom-ordered tropical button-down dotted with the angelic face of Stapp in places where you’d expect to find coconuts and banana bunches. A week before Summer of 99 was announced, the four of them made a pact, via group text, that if Creed were ever to reunite, they would make it out to see the band play, no matter the cost. Their fate was sealed.
“I hated Creed. I thought they were terrible,” says Mike Hobey, who, at 28, is the oldest of the posse and therefore the one who possesses the clearest recollection of Creed’s long, strange journey toward absolution. “But then I started listening to them ironically. And I was like: ‘Oh, shit, I like them now.’”
His point is indicative of a strange tension in this new age of Creed: If “the worst band of the 1990s” are suddenly good, does that mean all music is good now? Is nothing tacky? Have the digitised music discovery apparatuses – the melting-pot TikTok algorithm, the self-replicating profusion of Spotify playlists – blurred the boundaries of good and bad taste? Am I, like Hobey, incapable of being a hater any more?
This is what I found myself thinking about when Creed took the stage right as the Miami skies began to mellow into a late-afternoon smoulder, and put on what was, without a doubt, one of the best rock shows I’ve ever seen. Stapp – looking jacked and gorgeous, chain on neck and chain on belt, flexing toward God in a tight black shirt – launched into Are You Ready?, the first song of the afternoon, his baritone sounding, somehow, exactly like it did in 1999. “Who would’ve thought, after our last show in 2012, our next show would be 12 years later, on a boat?” Stapp said. He is risen, indeed.
The members of the band were enveloped by an audience that had paid a lot of money to see them, and in that atmosphere they could do no wrong. They blitzed through a variety of album cuts before arriving at the brawny triptych of Higher, One Last Breath and With Arms Wide Open, pausing briefly to wish Tremonti, the guitarist, who was turning 50, a happy birthday. (Stapp wiped away tears afterward, a genuinely touching moment, considering that during their first breakup Tremonti had compared his years collaborating with Stapp – who was then in the throes of addiction – to surviving Vietnam.) Given Creed’s historic proximity to the Kid Rock brand of red-state overindulgence, I half expected the concert to detonate with violent mosh pits and acrobatic beer stunts, but nothing remotely close to mayhem occurred. This crowd was downright polite – chaste, even – as if it had been stunned by the grandeur of Creed.
Nothing about Creed’s music has changed in the past decade, which is to say that many of the quirks that people like Hobey once used to mock the band for were on display during its first show back. But the truth is that little of the smug hatred for the group has ever had much to do with the music itself. Creed’s first record, 1997’s My Own Prison, was nearly identical to the down-tuned angst of Soundgarden or Alice in Chains, drawn well inside the lines of alt-rock radio. (It earned a tasteful 4/5 rating from the longtime consumer guide AllMusic.)
The problems arose only after the band started writing the celestial hooks of Human Clay, solidifying their association with other groups chasing the same crunchy highs with machine-learning efficiency: Nickelback, Staind and so on. Post-grunge was the term music journalists eventually bestowed on this generation, and in retrospect that was the kiss of death. Creed were suddenly positioned as the inheritor of the legacy of Kurt Cobain, the godfather of grunge, who bristled at all associations with the mainstream music industry. Stapp, meanwhile, has long called Bono – he of the flowing locks, billionaire best friends, and residencies in extravagant Las Vegas monoliths – his “rock god”. Creed’s sole aspiration was to become the biggest rock band in the world, and for a few years there, the group actually pulled it off. Cobain’s grave got a little colder.
Post-grunge steamrolled the rock business, reducing its sonic palette to an all-consuming minor-chord dirge. Nickelback’s How You Remind Me was the most-played song on US radio in 2002, eventually sparking a furious period of retaliation from the underground. In fact, by the late 2000s, the hatred of Creed had been so canonised that when Slate published a rebuttal – in which critic Jonah Weiner asserted that the band was “seriously underrated” – the essay was considered so “ridiculous” and contrarian as to single-handedly inspire the viral and enduring #slatepitches hashtag, instantly prompting parodies such as “Star Wars I, II, & III, better than Star Wars IV, V, & VI”.
But frankly, when I revisit Weiner’s piece, many of his arguments sound remarkably cogent to modern orthodoxies. “Creed seemed to irritate people precisely because its music was so unabashedly calibrated towards pleasure: every surging riff, skyscraping chorus, and cathartic chord progression telegraphed the band’s intention to rock us, wow us, move us,” he writes. Yes, these easy gratifications might have been unpardonable sins in the summer of 1999, capping off a decade anxious about all things commercial and phoney. But now even LCD Soundsystem – once the standard bearer of a certain kind of countercultural fashionability – are booking residencies sponsored by American Express. We have all become hedonists and proud sellouts.
That does not mean Stapp no longer takes himself, or his art, seriously. The singer’s earnestness – some might say humourlessness – has always been a cornerstone of Creed’s brand. Fans brandish personal stories that intersect with Creed’s records; they finds lines about places with “golden streets” “where blind men see” more inspiring than corny, and many of them are etched with the tattoos to prove it. But in the band’s afterlife, when all its old context evaporates, Stapp has also attracted a community eager to treat Creed like the party band it never aspired to be – the group of licentious pleasure seekers Weiner wrote about. They’re all here, sprinkled throughout the boat, ready to drink a couple of Coronas and shred their lungs to My Sacrifice.
After wrapping up the first night of the cruise, Creed, along with the rest of the bands on the bill, were scheduled to administer a few glad-handing sessions. On Saturday, Tremonti chaperoned a low-key painting session while the Pearl floated into the Bahamas. Tremonti keeps busy: the previous evening he had judged a karaoke tournament alongside 3 Doors Down lead singer Brad Arnold. Towards the end of the competition, Tremonti grabbed the microphone for a rousing cover of Frank Sinatra’s My Way, which I’d like to think served as a tribute to Creed’s own tenaciousness.
Stapp, on the other hand, is slated for exactly one appointment mingling with the masses: he’ll be shooting hoops with some of the more athletically oriented Creed adherents on a helipad that doubles as a basketball court near the rear of the boat. Stapp is, by far, the most famous person on board, evidenced by the security detail 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 under the piercing Atlantic sun with the distinct tang of contractually obliged restraint.
Afterwards Stapp slips back into the mysterious alcoves of the ship while an awed buzz of fans – hoping for a selfie, an autograph or a split second of euphoric surrender – tail him until they are sealed off for good. It is the one and only time I see him cameoing anywhere but the stage, drawing a stark contrast to the other musicians on board, who flit between the casinos, restaurants and watering holes in the guts of the Pearl.
This makes some sort of cosmic sense. Stapp, to his detriment and credit, has never embraced the flippancy that so many other people wanted to impose on Creed. “Sometimes, I wish we weren’t so damn serious,” he said in a memorable Spin cover story from 2000. “My agenda from the beginning was to write music that had meaning and was from the heart. You can’t force the hand of the muse.” If you’ll excuse the ostentation of the sentiment, you can maybe understand how someone like Stapp might not be able to feel like himself when he’s orchestrating photo ops around a free-throw line with that same young man dressed in his Nic Cage-themed parody Creed shirt. He seems to find nothing trivial about Creed’s music. The threat of irrelevance shall never tame him. You cannot force the hand of the muse.
Unfortunately, Stapp’s remoteness is also why Kelly Risch, a 58-year-old from Wisconsin with streaks of ringed, white-blond hair and glam-metal eye shadow, is fighting back tears in the Atrium, the ship’s lobby and central bar. Risch is sipping mimosas with her sister Shannon Crass and, like so many of the others I have spoken to on this cruise, they each have matching Creed tattoos memorialising a personal catastrophe.
Twenty years ago, Risch suffered a massive blood clot in her leg and almost died. Crass printed out the lyrics to the latter-day Creed ballad Don’t Stop Dancing – a song about finding dignity in the chaos of life – and pinned them up in Crass’s intensive care unit during her recovery. Today, the chorus is painted on their wrists, right above Stapp’s initials.
The sisters were two of the first 500 customers to buy tickets to Summer of 99, which guaranteed them a photo with the band at its cabin. This is why Risch is crying. The photoshoot came with strict rules, all of which she respected: no marker pens, no hugs and no mobile phones. She’d hoped for a moment, though – after spending $5,000 and travelling all the way from the upper midwest, after clinging to life with the help of Creed and after waiting 12 long years to have the band back – to thank the singer for his comfort. But Stapp, even indoors, was wearing dark, face-obscuring sunglasses. She didn’t even get to make eye contact.
“He’s so great with the crowd. He’s so engaging onstage,” says Crass. “I think that’s why this is disappointing.”
The two sisters are determined to make the most of the rest of their vacation. The Pearl will be pulling into Miami tomorrow at 7am, and there are plenty more mimosas left to drink. I tell them I’m going to speak with Stapp, and the rest of Creed, in an hour. Do they have anything they’d like me to ask?
“Tell him not to wear sunglasses during the photos,” they say.
Creed are finishing up the meet-and-greet obligations in a chilly rococo ballroom. The band members have been at this all morning after a late night finishing off the second performance of their two comeback sets. Creed have this down to an art. The band are capable of generating a photo every 30 seconds, and afterwards the fans exit back 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 last of those passengers disappear. A crucifix dangles above his navel and an American flag is stitched to his T-shirt. He’s still wearing those sunglasses.
I am given just 15 minutes to ask questions, in a makeshift interview set-up against the portside windows, under the watchful surveillance of the entire Creed apparatus – both PR reps, a few scurrying Sixthman operators, the photographer and so on. I ask what their day-to-day life is like aboard Summer of 99, in this highly concentrated environment of super fans, with no obvious escape routes. Stapp says that he has spent most of the time on the cruise “resting and exercising” while Brian Marshall, the band’s bassist, tells me he executes his privilege of being one of the band’s secondary members by frequenting the sauna and steam room. Throughout the weekend, Marshall is hardly recognised.
Scott Phillips, Creed’s drummer, confirms my suspicions about the cruise’s demographics. The ticket data reveals that a good number of the passengers are under 35 years old. I’m curious to know how the band members are adjusting to this new paradigm shift, and if they wish to settle common ground between the post-ironic millennials and the much more zealous gen Xers, who bear Creed insignias on their calves and forearms.
“People are drawn to our music for different reasons,” Stapp says. “That’s probably why you have the guys you were talking about, who want to chill and drink light beer and scream: ‘Creed rocks!’ and the others, who have a much deeper, emotional impact.”
“And maybe at some point, with the light-beer guys, it does connect with them,” Phillips adds. Stapp agrees.
But really the reason I’m here is because I want to ask Stapp a question I’ve been curious about for the entirety of Creed’s career. The band’s bizarre odyssey, from their warm reception among youth groups across the US to the backlash that met their success to this current psychedelic revival, has all orbited around a single lasting question: why is Scott Stapp so serious? Could he ever mellow out? Does he want to? Surely now is the time. Why must he make being in Creed so difficult?
“It’s just who I am,” he says. “It’s what inspires me. It’s where I come from. And it’s tough, because you have to live it. That’s the conundrum of it all. That’s the double-edged sword. If I started writing [lighter material], there would be a dramatic shift in my existence.”
There’s a break in the conversation, then Stapp asks me to identify the name of the new Taylor Swift album.
“It’s called The Tortured Poets Department,” I reply.
“That’s what I feel,” he says without a shred of artifice. “I connect with that title.”
Later that evening I climb to the top of the Pearl for a final round of karaoke, where fans keep the spirit of 1999 alive for a few more hours. The playlist is more diverse than I expected. We are treated to both Jay Z’s Big Pimpin’ and Shania Twain’s Any Man of Mine. Brandon Smith, one of the very few people of colour aboard the cruise, crushes Maroon 5’s She Will Be Loved. A lanky kid from St Louis unleashes a Slipknot death growl into the microphone. A queer couple quietly slow-dances on the otherwise empty dancefloor. And a 16-year-old, teeth tightened by braces, orders his last Sprite of the night.
“Rockers are the most awesome people!” shouts one transcendently inebriated guest over the clamour of his Rolling Stones cover. “Creed is awesome!” On this one thing, at least, we can all agree.
A longer version of this article originally ran in Slate
