CONTENT WARNING: Includes mentions of suicide, addiction, alcohol abuse, and other sensitive topics.
Rock bands and controversies seem to go hand-in-hand with one another. No matter how good the band performs collectively, there often appears to be some underlying issues between several of the core members.
In the 1990s, vocalist Scott Stapp and guitarist Mark Tremonti became friends at Florida State University and started making music together, focusing on themes involving spirituality. The duo held auditions for a full band shortly afterwards, bringing on Brian Marshall on bass, Scott Phillips on drums, and Brian Brasher on rhythm guitar. Around this time, the group performed under the name Naked Toddler, playing at local bars in the Tallahassee area as they tried to find their groove as a band.
By 1996, Brasher had left the group, and the rest of the band opted to deviate from the Naked Toddler name. Marshall had previously been part of a band called Mattox Creed, which became the basis for the group’s new name going forward. Creed had officially been born, dropping the Naked Toddler name for good.
In 1997, Creed released their debut album, My Own Prison. A fusion of grunge and metal, My Own Prison touches on themes of self-identity and Christianity in its lyrics, with the titular lead single discussing a loss of faith as the narrator suffers the consequences of their self-inflicted mistakes. Four singles came out of this album, including the aforementioned title track, as well as “What’s This Life For,” the latter of which peaked at number one on Billboard’s U.S. Mainstream Rock chart.
My Own Prison marked a strong debut for Creed, being certified six-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) by 2002. Things were going well for Creed so far, but how would they build on their early success?
A year after making a grand first impression with My Own Prison, Creed began recording their second studio album, Human Clay. The band was firing on all cylinders here, as some of their biggest hits came from this record. Released in 1999, Human Clay featured three of Creed’s most notable singles, such as “With Arms Wide Open,” “What If,” and perhaps the hardest hitter of them all, “Higher.”
Human Clay would reach the top spot on the U.S. Billboard 200, and it also received acclaim on several other charts around the world, such as Hitlisten’s Danish Albums chart in Denmark. Creed’s second album would go on to receive a diamond certification by the RIAA for selling 10 million copies, and by 2004, the album had reached 11-times platinum status. With all of their success from Human Clay, it seemed like Creed was destined to continue to put out hard rock bangers for the next several years.
…right?
Internally, things were not going well for Creed. In June of 2000, Marshall was struggling with addiction and alcohol troubles, and despite encouragement from Stapp and Tremonti to enter rehab, Marshall did not go. Tensions within the band rose significantly after Marshall made waves with some comments about Pearl Jam on Seattle’s KNDD radio station. Marshall criticized some of Pearl Jam’s recent material, going after the group’s lead vocalist Eddie Vedder by unfavorably comparing him to Stapp.
“Eddie Vedder wishes he could write like Scott Stapp,” Marshall said (via MTV News). “I love Pearl Jam, but I just don’t understand the route they took, and I don’t think it all had to do with Eddie Vedder.”
Marshall then went on to note that Pearl Jam had “gone in such a different direction,” saying that their change of pace had negatively affected their recent album sales. While Pearl Jam did not respond to Marshall’s insult, Stapp made it clear that Marshall’s words were not representative of Creed as a band.
“Yes, we get tired of the PJ question, but there is no excuse for the arrogance and stupidity [of Marshall],” Stapp said (via Rolling Stone). “I ask you all not to judge Creed as a band, because the statements made were not the band’s feelings, they were Brian’s. I’m sorry if Brian offended anyone, and he has already apologized for his comments.”
That August, Creed announced that Marshall was leaving the band; Marshall’s departure came just one day before the start of a 45-date U.S. tour to support the release of Human Clay. The band cited “personal and professional differences” as the reason for Marshall’s exit, as is seemingly the standard for rock bands whenever somebody leaves. To fill the void on bass for their impending tour, Creed enlisted the help of Brett Hestla, who was with the band Virgos Merlot at the time.
Upon the completion of the Human Clay tour, Creed got to work on their third album, Weathered, which was released in late 2001. With Marshall gone, this would be the group’s first album as a trio, with Tremonti playing the bass parts on the record in place of his departed bandmate.
Weathered was another commercial hit—despite being labeled by critics as being pretentious, it peaked at the top spot on the U.S. Billboard 200, just as Human Clay had done two years earlier. Six singles were released alongside the album, including “One Last Breath,” which reached the sixth position on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, and “My Sacrifice,” which received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal in 2003. Like My Own Prison before it, Weathered reached six-times platinum by the RIAA in early 2003, marking another commercial success for Creed.
However, things were not improving behind the scenes. Stapp was battling addiction, alcohol abuse, and depression during the production of Weathered, and his troubles did not subside after the album’s release. Stapp’s actions during the Weathered tour were met with controversy, particularly during a show in Chicago in December of 2002.
Four concertgoers felt that Stapp’s struggles were affecting his performance, filing a lawsuit against the band and asserting that the singer was so “intoxicated and/or medicated that he was unable to sing the lyrics of a single Creed song” (via the Chicago Sun-Times). The lawsuit also mentioned that Stapp “left the stage on several occasions during songs for long periods of time, rolled around on the floor of the stage in apparent pain or distress and [finally] appeared to pass out.”
Although the lawsuit was dismissed in court, Stapp’s relationship with the rest of the band had substantially deteriorated. Following over a year of inactivity, Creed disbanded in 2004, bowing out with a Greatest Hits album. Years later, Stapp said that he found out about Creed’s official breakup while watching VH1.
“I found out that Creed had broken up when I was watching VH1 one day and it was some kind of Spring Break type show and I heard the VJ announce ‘Mark Tremonti and Scott Phillips are here..’ and they said ‘Creed has broken up’ and then they announced their new band” (via Louder Sound). Stapp felt extremely hurt by the nature of the announcement, saying that he felt used by Tremonti and Phillips and that his former bandmates used Creed’s breakup as a publicity stunt for their new material.
During this time, Tremonti and Phillips reunited with Marshall, who was then part of a group called Grand Luxx, a collaboration with two of his former Mattox Creed bandmates. In the meantime, Stapp embarked on a solo career, releasing his first album, The Great Divide, in 2005; the album got as high as 19th on the U.S. Billboard 200, receiving a platinum certification from the RIAA by the end of the year.
Tremonti and Phillips’s reunion with Marshall soon added Myles Kennedy, who was then the lead vocalist of The Mayfield Four. Together, the quartet formed Alter Bridge, releasing their first album under that name in 2004. The record, One Day Remains, peaked at number five on the U.S. Billboard 200, with the single “Open Your Eyes” reaching the number two spot on Billboard’s U.S. Mainstream Rock chart. One Day Remains would be certified gold by the RIAA, selling 500,000 copies.
In 2006, another key component of Creed would be left behind—Alter Bridge severed ties with Wind-up Records in response to pressure from the label to bring Creed back together. Wind-up started out with Creed in 1997, beginning their partnership with a re-release of My Own Prison four months after its initial release under Blue Collar Records. Tremonti, Phillips, and Marshall chose to continue with Wind-up when Alter Bridge was first formed, but ever since Creed’s breakup, the two sides were not seeing eye to eye with one another.
“There are a lot of people who believed that Creed would get back together. It didn’t help that some people tried to portray that to the public and even push for it behind the scenes,” Tremonti said (via Blabbermouth.net). “But with this termination, I think everyone will realize that Creed is officially in our past. Creed will never exist as a band again. We’ve moved on and we hope that everyone else can move on too.”
Needless to say, a Creed reunion was not on the table, at least for the time being. In the same Blabbermouth.net article, Phillips and Marshall both stated that they were focused on creating music with Alter Bridge, with Phillips saying that he was “happier and more excited than I’ve ever been in my career.” Marshall echoed Phillips’s sentiments, noting that there were a lot of bad memories associated with Creed and that bringing back the old band was not an option.
With Wind-up out of the picture, Alter Bridge signed with Universal Republic Records for their next album, Blackbird. Having secured a new record deal, the band recorded the album throughout 2007, releasing it that October. Unlike with One Day Remains, where many of the tracks had been written before Kennedy came along, Blackbird saw Kennedy and Tremonti collaborate on much of the songwriting, with all four members being given songwriting credits.
Blackbird, Alter Bridge’s first post-Wind-up record, proved to be a hit, peaking at number two on the U.K. Rock Album chart and eventually earning a gold certification from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). The album spawned four singles, including “Rise Today,” which reached the number three position on the Billboard U.S. Mainstream Rock chart.
While they did not experience the same level of acclaim with Alter Bridge as they did during the Creed years, Tremonti, Phillips, and Marshall were doing well in their post-Creed careers. Stapp, not so much.
Stapp’s personal battles from the tail end of Creed continued for years on end, largely halting his music career aside from the 2005 release of The Great Divide. Between 2003 and 2007, Stapp lived through some of the darkest times in his life, grappling with suicidal ideations (and an attempt in 2006) and his continued troubles with addiction and alcoholism, among other things.
During this period, Stapp’s reputation had gone down the drain—in 2005, he got into a fight with the band 311 at a hotel bar in Baltimore shortly after informing his then-fiancée’s family of their engagement. Soon afterwards, Stapp appeared in an episode of Spike TV’s Casino Cinema while visibly intoxicated, slurring his words and getting a little too friendly with co-host Beth Ostrosky.
The chaos did not stop there—in 2006, Stapp was arrested the day after his second wedding for suspected intoxication. Then in 2007, Stapp was charged with one count of felony assault following a domestic violence incident at his home. The domestic violence charge was dropped shortly thereafter, however, and Stapp returned home on supervised release.
In an interview with Rolling Stone from that same year, Stapp was candid about his mental state while he was enjoying the fame he was experiencing while with Creed. “It’s weird. You can sell millions of records, be showered with all this love and admiration and still feel despised and unwanted. That’s what I felt. I’ve made a lot of mistakes I’m not proud of. These aren’t tears of sadness. I’m happy to get this out.”
Although Tremonti had previously stated that Creed was a thing of the past, he may have spoken a bit too soon. Creed reunited in 2009, releasing their fourth studio album, Full Circle, later that year. The album was the group’s first new record since Weathered in 2001, and their first with Marshall on bass since 1999’s Human Clay. After everything that the band had dealt with for much of the last decade, Creed’s return was quite the surprise.
Receiving mixed to positive reception, Full Circle peaked atop three Billboard charts in the United States: Top Alternative Albums, Top Hard Rock Albums, and Top Rock Albums. Even though this was not an indication that Creed would be back permanently, it was still great to see a new Creed album for the first time in quite a while.
Over the next few years, Creed continued touring for a bit, following up their 2009 reunion tour with the “20-10 Tour” during the spring and summer of 2010. The band worked on a possible fifth album between 2011 and 2012, which ultimately never saw the light of day. After this, Creed went on hiatus for a while, and Tremonti, Phillips, and Marshall shifted their attention to Alter Bridge.
Alter Bridge released four albums during the 2010s: AB III (2010), Fortress (2013), The Last Hero (2016), and Walk the Sky (2019). Although Stapp insisted that Creed was still together, everyone was busy with other projects at the time. Stapp himself had joined the band Art of Anarchy, appearing on the group’s 2017 album The Madness. In addition to their involvement with Alter Bridge, Tremonti formed his own solo band, and Phillips co-founded the supergroup Projected.
That being said, hope was not lost for another Creed reunion—in 2020, Phillips publicly stated that a second Creed reunion was a possibility, and three years later, it all came together. Creed began touring again in 2023, and later that same year, Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers rallied behind “Higher” as they went on to win the World Series. “One Last Breath” gained a new audience on social media, and the band’s Greatest Hits album saw a return to several Billboard charts.
Good things can become tainted with painful memories, long-standing friendships and partnerships may be severed, but if the time is right, these can be mended. It may be impossible to recapture the original vibe and recreate what was once there, though if all parties are willing, forgiveness and reunions are not entirely out of the question. Eighty-sixing something may be a necessary path forward, but after some time has passed, it may not be the worst idea to fix a fractured relationship.
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If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or substance abuse, call 988 for support. Help is available, you are not alone.
Featured image by Live Light on the Wikimedia Commons.
