“Creed is so back,” I kept saying aloud, as the band blasted through its Are You Ready? tour in Downtown Cleveland.
It’s true: The iconic ‘90s rock band reunited last year after an 11-year hiatus. In that time, singer Scott Stapp got sober and released a couple of solo projects, while the rest of Creed — guitarist Mark Tremonti, bassist Brian Marshall and drummer Scott Phillips — focused on their other band Alter Bridge.
But right now, they’re all back in the group they first formed 30 years ago. And they were all in the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse on Friday night for one testosterone-fueled night of hard rock. (This was one day after the band appeared at the Browns-Steelers game at Huntington Bank Field, too.)
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And after all that time away, with no new Creed music released since 2009’s Full Circle (minus a couple compilation albums, that is), it begs the question: Is Creed good? I asked this on X (formerly Twitter) a week before the big Creed concert in Cleveland. The poll only got 21 votes, and here’s how random people answered:
- Yes: 28.6%
- No: 42.9%
- Maybe: 28.6%
This is not a large sample size. It’s not balanced. But it gives you a feel for what I’m maybe getting at.
Contention.
Creed: It’s the band that won a Grammy in 2001 for its hit single “With Arms Wide Open,” and which also inspired a burst of both celebratory and derogatory memes in recent years. It’s the band that put out a string of multi-platinum records, and which also was voted the worst band of the 1990s by Rolling Stone Magazine readers.
Plenty of people love Creed — Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse brought together nearly 20,000 of those folks on Friday night — and plenty of people love to hate Creed, too. Scott Stapp’s unique, gravelly vocals, dramatic lyrics and expressive dance moves; guitarist Mark Tremonti’s heavy riffs; the band’s overall radio-friendly, over-the-top hard rock sound of the ‘90s — it all combines into a punching bag for critics, a go-to target of jokes and memes. (I have lost track of the number of Creed memes I’ve shared with friends.)
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These days, it seems like Creed is in on the joke.
For example, the band released a special T-shirt commemorating the band’s iconic 2001 Thanksgiving halftime show (which featured a trapeze aerial artist), and dozens of concertgoers wore it in Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse on Friday night. Earlier this year, Stapp and Tremonti appeared in a silly Super Bowl commercial for Paramount+. The band shared a compilation of TikTok videos from users playfully posting about their love of Creed to promote the tour.
At Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, Stapp, Tremonti, drummer Scott Phillips and bassist Brian Marshall sounded strong and steady — and also, unfortunately repetitive, for the first two-thirds of the set list — with a range of hard-rock songs that mostly blended together, until the group ran through hits at the end. And most of these songs were punctuated by Stapp’s words of inspiration — which were preachy, at times — in between nearly every track. (Brad Arnold, the singer of opening band 3 Doors Down, also interspersed a religious speech into his band’s set, while wearing a “Jesus” T-shirt.)
It could be an uneven show — but there was good energy, both onstage and in the crowd. There were some good riffs. Some good singalongs.
All in all, a solid throwback to the ‘90s.
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In the finale of the show, the band finally got to what a lot of fans were clearly yearning for: the band’s biggest hits. Hundreds of audience members finally sang along to songs like “Higher,” “With Arms Wide Open” and “My Sacrifice,” head-banging and throwing devil horns into the air, while the band sounded pristine onstage, with fire bursts and sparks framing all the musical action.
And a throwback to that one question: Is Creed good?
My answer has to be influenced by seeing this love of Creed, in action, in Cleveland.
So: Maybe. Just maybe.
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