Creed Plays Disastrous Concert in Chicago

It would not be official for an additional yr and a half, however Creed successfully ended Dec. 29, 2002 on stage in suburban Chicago.

The quartet’s live performance on the AllState Arena in Rosemont, Ill.,  (previously often called the Rosemont Arena) has grow to be a legend the band members would simply as quickly overlook. Frontman Scott Stapp was, by his personal admission, “whacked out on” the highly effective anti-inflammatory Prednisone, which he’d been taking to assist heal from accidents suffered in a automotive accident the earlier April. It left him bloated and drained — “exhausted,” in his phrases — and he did not assist issues by ingesting a substantial quantity of whiskey earlier than the present.

At the time, too, tensions have been fraught inside the band, which was driving excessive on the energy of three consecutive multi-platinum albums — the latest being 2001’s Weathered, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and launched the hits “One Last Breath” and the Grammy Award-winning “My Sacrifice.”

Listen to ‘My Sacrifice’

“The Weathered shows were amazing,” Stapp wrote in his 2012 memoir Sinner’s Creed, “but behind the scenes the band was falling apart. Rumors, resentments and petty jealousies were getting out of control. People who were concerned about their own interests were trying to divide us, playing to our already over-blown egos. The stress of all the drama got to me.” Things bought so unhealthy, Stapp claimed, that guitarist Mark Tremonti even repositioned his stage displays to maintain the singer away from him.

Stapp had additionally been recognized with a pre-node callus on considered one of his vocal cords and suggested by the physician to take an extended break from singing. This, in fact, didn’t go down properly with anybody else on the Creed crew, and the tour continued till the well-known mess that was Rosemont.

According to 4 attendees who sued Creed afterwards, together with the band’s administration, Stapp appeared “so intoxicated and/or medicated” that he was unable to sing or carry out adequately. “Stapp left the stage on several occasions during songs for long periods of time, rolled around on the floor of the stage in appeared to pass out while on stage during the performance.” Some accounts stated Stapp laid down and fell asleep at one level.

In his memoir, Stapp stated he was moved to recalcitrance through the fourth track, “Who’s Got My Back?,” when he informed the viewers, “‘I don’t think these guys (in the band) have my back’…And with that I stretched out on the floor, my back flat on the ground, and sang the song in a supine position. A few fans thought I had fallen down drunk. That wasn’t the case, but I was definitely inebriated…Because of my intoxication, I made a point publicly that should have remained private. I performed the entire show, but I was far from my best.” The live performance was really minimize brief after seven songs.

Creed carried out a full present in Philadelphia two years later, on New Year’s Eve, however after a protracted interval of inactivity formally introduced its break-up throughout June of 2004. The followers’ lawsuit, in the meantime, can be dismissed however did immediate a response from Creed that learn, “The band has heard that you are unhappy with the quality of the recent Creed show in Chicago. We apologize if you don’t feel that the show was up to the very high standards set by our previous shows in Chicago…There has been much concern about Scott’s health, and we want to assure everyone that he is doing very well and is taking a much needed break at home in Orlando….For now we hope that you can take some solace in the fact that you definitely experienced the most unique of all Creed shows and may have become part of the unusual world of rock and roll history!”

Stapp informed MTV in 2004, “Basically the people who sued just wanted the press and attention and money. Everybody didn’t sue; it wasn’t a class-action suit. I think what got Mark upset was that it was his hometown and two people in the newspapers were bashing his band.”

During the off time Stapp recorded a solo album, 2005’s The Great Divide and toured on his personal whereas Tremonti and drummer Scott Phillips reunited with bassist Brian Marshall, who’d been thrown out of Creed in 2000, to type the band Alter Bridge. Almost precisely seven years after asserting their breakup, Creed returned, reuniting for a tour and a brand new album, Full Circle, in 2009. The reunion lasted into 2012 and the group has been on hiatus ever since, with no obvious inclination to renew.

“There’s always talk, but it’s tough because we have such a tight schedule,” Tremonti informed UCR in 2021. “If the Creed thing were to happen I think it would be more of a, ‘Hey guys, can you carve out 50 days to do a tour?’ ‘Cause it’s been so long since a Creed record I think we would go out with just a tour and see how people respond to the band being back on stage, and if people are clamoring for a record, who knows? You never say no to anything. I said no to the Creed thing years ago and then we went and did a reunion so, yeah, who knows?”