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You either love us or you hate us," reflects Creed's guitarist, Mark Tremonti. He's not quite sure how it's come to this. Creed have been busy making themselves the most commercially successful rock band in America -- their first two albums have sold more than 15 million copies and their latest, Weathered, has sold 4 million in a little more than two months -- but some people are clearly annoyed. "We haven't really done anything to anybody -- we've always just had a positive message," he says. He wonders whether that's it. "There's just people who don't want anything positive to come out of this world," he suggests.
Mostly, Creed have used the barbs that come their way -- from music critics, for example, and from people such as Fred Durst with whom they've had an extended feud -- as inspiration. "They're just writing another song for us," Tremonti says. Many of Creed's fiercest songs are ripostes to their detractors; when they take the stage on their current Weathered tour, they launch into three of these in a row ("Bullets," "Freedom Fighter" and "What If"), though they'd not even noticed this until I pointed it out. Sometimes, however, just for a moment, the nastiness hits home.
On a Sunday night in January, three days before their tour was to begin, Tremonti was relaxing at home after rehearsals when the call came. A friend in New York was reading the message boards on Creed's Web site. There was breaking news: Creed's tour bus had been in an accident.
At first, Tremonti laughed. After all, he was at home. But then he checked the Web site, and the posting said that both he and drummer Scott Phillips were fine but that Creed's singer, Scott Stapp, had been seriously injured. "My heart stopped," he says. He and Phillips had driven themselves back from rehearsals, but he knew that Stapp might well have ridden back in the tour bus.
He called Stapp's cell phone. No answer. He called the tour manager, who called the bus driver's cell phone. No answer. "I'm freaking out," says Tremonti.
While all this was happening, Stapp was at home, playing with his three-year-old son, Jagger. He wondered why his phone kept ringing, but he didn't wonder enough to answer it. These days, his phone is always ringing and he is always wishing it wasn't. If Creed's manager, Jeff Hanson, also a neighbor and close friend, calls after the ordained cutoff time and mentions business, Stapp will say, "It's after five" and put the phone down, and Hanson will know to call back and talk about other things. Sometimes Stapp lets Jagger answer the phone, because Jagger knows what to do: "He goes, 'Hello, leave us alone' and hangs up." Stapp recently threw a persistently ringing cell phone into a lake.
By the time everyone finally spoke to Stapp, they already knew that there had been no bus crash. It had been a ghastly joke. Whoever had posted the original lie on the message board had returned to gloat. Signing off, he had offered, by way of affiliation, "Fuck all y'all -- limpbizkit.com," unaware of quite how sick and successful he had been.
It is not surprising that it was Stapp who their latest hater chose to imagine injured. Though Tremonti, 27, is equally Creed's creative core, writing all the music and the occasional lyric, and Phillips, 29 this month, is fully involved, Stapp seems to be the focus of people's emotions. The version of Scott Stapp's life that anyone who has taken an interest in Creed knows was most famously told in VH1's endlessly rerun Behind the Music. The basics are this: Scott Stapp was brought up by Christian-fundamentalist parents, and throughout his childhood he had a father who forbade rock music in the house and made him copy out long stretches of Psalms and Proverbs whenever he failed to uphold his father's strict rule book. Eventually Scott left one night, at seventeen. Much of his writing with Creed has been a reaction and response to this extraordinary and oppressive upbringing. It is a good story, and in a loose sense it is true, but the real Scott Stapp story is much more complicated, and perhaps offers a more detailed and smarter road map to the man he's become and the group he sings in.
On their final day of tour rehearsals -- the day after the bus crash that wasn't -- Creed gather midafternoon at an auditorium in Lakeland, Florida, an hour outside Orlando. The mood is a little tense.
When I arrive, Stapp is onstage, strumming some chords on a guitar from one of their new songs, "Don't Stop Dancing." He asks Tremonti to correct his fingering. (Stapp hasn't played guitar on previous tours.) Behind them are the four immense Roman Colosseum-style pillars that dominate the stage set. These look like stone but are made of flimsy see-through mesh that hangs down in folds. Stapp sits down and chats with his friend, Yankees pitcher David Wells, who is sitting on the drum riser. Nothing much is being achieved. "Hours of time and minutes of seriousness," Tremonti says, sighing.
Wells asks Stapp for directions to his house, and teases him for not knowing which turn off the freeway it is. "You've been there four years!" says Wells. "You've got to know your surroundings."
"I can't leave my house, dude," says Stapp with a shrug. "I can go from my house to my car, from my mom's house to my car. I can come here. Going through the drive-through's a pain in the ass now. I'm going to put on a sombrero, go, 'My name is Hector. . . .' "
After rehearsals end, I drive with Tremonti in dangerously heavy rain. They live, all of them, in smart gated communities near Orlando where the lawns are mowed and the golf is plentiful; Tiger Woods and Ken Griffey Jr. have homes nearby.
As he drives, Tremonti explains that Creed provide the big-arena rock show people have been missing. "They come and see us because it's the old-school rock," he says. The show should be in the tradition of "bands like Kiss or Nugent that blew everything up." He says that the Roman Colosseum idea came from their instruction that it should look "large and massive."
I point out that as soon as one sees stone pillars on a rock stage, one can't help thinking slightly of Spinal Tap. "Right," says Tremonti. "A little bit. It's just not being afraid to go 100 percent."
Or, um, 110 percent, I suggest.
"Yeah," he says flatly. "One hundred ten percent. You know, if it was done on any lower scale than it was done now, it would look like Spinal Tap. But I think we've gone big enough to do it right."
So, I clarify, it's Spinal Tap ambition, except you've pulled it off? "Yeah. We've done Spinal Tap, but we've pushed it as far as they should have." He nods. "We're a glorified Spinal Tap," he says, playing with the words rather than meaning them. He wonders aloud whether we're on the right road for the I-4 freeway. He's not sure.
At Scott Stapp's house the next afternoon, Stapp is eating a salad and explaining fundamentals to Jagger. "Look," he says patiently. "Left foot . . . right foot. If they're pointed opposite . . . they're on the wrong foot. OK, let me fix it."
As Jagger plays on the other side of the room, Stapp fills in Randy from his management office about other news. "Apparently the stalker's still in town, because one of them is postmarked the ninth. She's on foot. Her family doesn't want her, apparently, because she has mental problems. Apparently now I'm the father of her child when she was twelve, which makes me four when I impregnated her. And she's Jim Morrison's daughter and I'm the reincarnation of Jim Morrison. . . ." He gets a lot of this. "I've got one guy that keeps writing me, Michael the Archangel, and he's been here for thousands of years. Really weird stuff. They want to end me. I try not to let it sink in."
He is interrupted by Jagger. "What do we say if two adults are talking?" Stapp asks. Jagger smiles. "We say, 'Excuse me,' and I listen. Do you want some yogurt?" Jagger moves to plant a kiss on his father's mouth, and Stapp redirects it to the cheek. "I can't get too close or I'll catch what you have." First Jagger was ill, and gave it to Stapp. Then Stapp gave it back to Jagger. Now he's worried he'll get it back again, just as they're heading on tour.
Jagger runs toward the TV. "Sorry about the chaos," says Stapp. "It's just life on a daily basis." He shouts over, "Hey, Jagger, did your antibiotics make you fart?" Jagger giggles. "I told you it would. You're a tooting machine."
Stapp and I go into the inner courtyard and sit by the pool. Stapp is Jagger's primary caregiver. He married Jagger's mother, Hillaree, six months after they met; they divorced fifteen months later. "It was real intense, real fast," he says. "She was young, I was young. We fell in love passionately, it lasted and then it fizzled out. I kind of feel like it was my fault because she didn't know what she was getting herself into -- I was gone all the time, and she was only twenty years old." He says he wanted them still to be equally involved in Jagger's upbringing, but it hasn't worked out. "She's young," he says, "and she wants to experience things."
As Jagger plays inside with Stapp's sister and personal assistant, Amanda, and her daughter, he talks.
Stapp has posted to Creed's Web site under the name Anthony Flippen. He has never publicly explained why he chose such a strange pseudonym, but it is for the simplest of reasons. The name was once his own.
Anthony Scott Flippen was born twenty-eight years ago. His biological father was an ex-Marine who'd started his own printing company. At school he was called Anthony, but his family took to calling him Scottie. His father was gone by the time Scottie was five. He spent many of those early years with his grandparents (who when he was eighteen he learned were actually his great-aunt and great-uncle -- his heritage is not uncomplicated) on their farm and on the Cherokee Indian reservation in North Carolina; Stapp's proud of his Cherokee blood.
After his biological father left, his mother didn't have much money, and when the family was together he and his two sisters and his mother would all sleep in the same bed. He was about ten when his mother, Lynda, met a dentist named Steven Stapp and got remarried. Scott's life had already had religion and a certain moral strictness in it. They had gone to church on Sundays, and it was his mother who, even though she herself cleaned the house to Elvis, forbade him from having a copy of Def Leppard's Pyromania in the house, before his new father even came on the scene. (This wasn't a huge deal to him. He was more into sports.) But the change was still significant. "Our lives started revolving around religion," he says. "We started going to church on Wednesday nights, youth meetings on Friday, Sunday in the morning, Sunday at night. Every night or in the morning, he'd do . . . he calls them devotionals -- read something out of the Bible, and he would explain to us the moral behind it."
Not long after the wedding, Dr. Stapp officially adopted his wife's children. Scott had already been using his new last name at school for a while, and when the time came to officially change his name, he said he wanted to take his father's middle name, Alan, as well, and become Scott Alan Stapp. S.A.S. -- the same initials as his new father. But there was another, unstated reason. Ever since he'd started using the name Stapp at school, the other kids had noticed something. "My initials were A.S.S.," he recalls. "I got in three fights that year because somehow initials got brought up."
When his mother had been remarried for six months, Scott overslept at a friend's house, missing church, and then went with the friend's family to a nude beach. That evening he was spanked for the first time: "He just smacked me on my rear end and sent me to my room." Scott realized that he was in a new world of discipline. As he got older, the spankings decreased and copying out passages from the Bible replaced them. One punishment would be to write out a different Proverb each day for a month, along with a commentary to show that he had thought about and understood it. His father would check the commentary -- if the spelling, grammar or sense fell short, Scott would have to rewrite it.
Scott now says he realizes how much effort and love his father put into all this. In fact, just the other day his father asked him a question: "Son, do you think all those times I made you write out Psalms and Proverbs has anything to do with your lyrics now?"
And Scott told him: Of course it does. "They definitely influenced how I wrote -- they are poetic and are written in a type of rhythm and a pattern -- and probably even got me thinking about a lot of things." At the time, though, he mostly hated it. Though he sometimes enjoyed debating the Bible with his father, and would feel pride when his father used what he had said in Sunday school, and though a lot of what he was rejecting sank in deep, he began to look for and pick apart what he saw as inconsistencies. Were all practitioners of other religions really damned? Why was the Stryper record he'd bought at the Christian store still, to his father, evil because of its electric guitars? (The only record he persuaded them to tolerate, by selectively presenting its lyrics, was U2's The Joshua Tree. Stapp felt like Bono understood his predicament and was speaking directly to him.)
After one too many confrontations, Stapp left home one night when he was seventeen, rolling his car silently down the street, and moved in with a friend's family. (Only much later did he learn that his father sent them money to cover the expense.) He worked as a janitor at his prep school to pay his fees. Along the way, he discovered drinking, and then drugs. He was thrown out of a Christian college in Tennessee when he confessed to smoking pot, and messed around with Ecstasy, mushrooms, mescaline, peyote and acid. He also slowly discovered sex. In his freshman year at college, an attractive girl got him drunk and seduced him. He figured she'd now be his girlfriend, but when he called her she wasn't interested. He later learned that some sorority girls had heard he was a virgin and had made a bet over who would relieve him of this burden. He didn't mind. "She was smoking hot," he says. "I wish we hadn't drunk so much so I could have remembered everything."
He only realized what he really wanted to do when he started dating this hippie girl named Kim, his first proper relationship, and she turned him on to music. The first time he heard the Doors -- when they were, as he puts it, "being intimate" -- that was it. He read all he could about Jim Morrison, and when he learned that Morrison had hung out in Tallahassee, he decided that was where he should go: Florida State University.
For several of these years he didn't speak to his father. "He had made the determination that I didn't have Christ in my life," says Stapp. He decided he would show his father by making it his way. His mother would send him care packages with canned food in them, but Stapp was determined not to ask for anything. He was going to pay his way through college, and he was going to become a rock star. Or a lawyer. "I figured I had to have a Plan A and a Plan B," he says.
He tells me all this sitting by the pool. We are interrupted by Jagger. "Dad, food is ready."
For most of the time we have been talking, Stapp's parents have been in the living room. It is a recent Stapp family tradition that his mother cooks a big family meal the night before he goes on tour: steak in gravy, corn, greens, biscuits and so on. Stapp pours me some "good old Southern sweet tea. . . . I was raised on this," he says.
I take a spot on the sofa next to his father, who is still wearing his long white dentist's coat with his name embroidered above his heart. A college basketball game is on the TV. When I sit down, Creed manager Jeff Hanson is already eating. I dig in and don't notice what is going on until one of the family glares at me and I realize that while I am merrily picking away, Scott Stapp has linked hands with his parents, they have closed their eyes and are saying grace.
During the meal, Stapp mentions Alice Cooper. "You know who Alice Cooper is?" he asks his father.
"He looks like the devil himself," his father says.
Stapp nods. "It just goes to show you can't judge a book by its cover."
Stapp cuddles and cradles Jagger. "I want someone to do this to me," he says. "I want to play all day and not have to worry about touring, taking care of you . . ." He asks Jagger, "You want to trade places? You want to go out on tour? Sing all the songs? You do?"
Stapp hands his father about six typed pages detailing Jagger's routine while he is away on tour. "Diet and so on," he says. He's determined that Jagger's care should be consistent. It's an interesting reversal, Stapp dictating to his parents how children should be reared. "They're completely different now," he had told me earlier. "I'm like, 'Why didn't you treat me like this when I was a kid?' . . . One of the great things about my father is that, now that I'm an adult and a father, he respects the way that I'm going to raise my son, whether he agrees with it or not."
Once the plates are taken away, Stapp still tries, with decreasing success, to avoid Jagger's nuzzling. "Why don't I ever get a cold?" he asks. "I always get strep throat or infected sinuses. It always goes right where you make the money."
"Daddy, use me as a weight!" Jagger demands. Stapp lifts him up and down above his head, then dangles him upside down, swinging him from side to side like a pendulum, saying out loud, "Tick . . . tock . . . tick . . . tock . . ." "Hard to believe someone who writes such serious songs is such a goofball," says Hanson.
"I can't be that serious all the time," says Stapp earnestly. "That would suck."
Stapp's biological father recently got in touch with him -- a letter saying he was proud of his son and happy for him. Not asking for anything. But it still made Stapp angry. Why now? Why no child support when he used to have to mow lawns when he was nine and give the ten dollars to his mother?
In fact, this wasn't the first contact he'd had with his biological father since his father had left. When Stapp was heading to Tallahassee to follow his dreams of rock stardom and law, he needed money, and he wasn't really speaking to his parents, the Stapps. His biological father gave him $1,000 to buy a motorcycle. They met at a Waffle House. "It was really uncomfortable. I was just kind of looking at him like, 'Yeah, I guess that's where I get my cheeks from.' He gave me that money, and maybe that was his way of making up for all those years."
In Tallahassee, in the fall of 1994, he ran into Tremonti (who was born in Detroit but moved to Florida as a teenager), a high school acquaintance, at a mutual friend's house, and they started writing a song together that first day. Scott Phillips (a Florida native) came onboard briefly playing bad rhythm guitar, then inveigled his way onto the drum stool. They picked up a second guitarist and a bass player, and called themselves Naked Toddler after a phrase in a newspaper headline Tremonti had clipped. On the Tallahassee cover-band circuit, though they'd increasingly throw in their own songs, they had a rich repertoire of crowd pleasers: Lenny Kravitz's "Are You Gonna Go My Way," Candlebox's "Far Behind," Led Zeppelin's "Rock & Roll," Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Suck My Kiss," Rage Against the Machine's "Bullet in the Head," Pearl Jam's "Black," Radiohead's "Creep," bits of Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden.
Names and lineups changed, and eventually they became the four-man Creed who'd make their first two albums. They hit their stride with "My Own Prison." It had the combination of religious imagery, self-doubt, anger and searching for redemption and epic grunge-tinged classic rock that would make them famous. When a local radio station began playing it, their audiences swelled tenfold in a few weeks. Their self-financed album, also called My Own Prison, was picked up by a new label, Wind-Up, and, as single after single climbed to the top of the Billboard rock charts, started selling and selling. Its follow-up, Human Clay, did even better.
"People didn't even know what we looked like until we'd sold 12 million records," Stapp points out.
"We had no gimmick," says Tremonti. "It was all about the music. Looking back, we did it perfectly."
What attention they did get was not always helpful. In lyrics, particularly those on the first album, Stapp's conflicted feelings about his unusual upbringing spilled everywhere. "I was angry," says Stapp. "I was battling myself in my brain. I was kind of tormented by it because I was still dealing with guilt issues about all the Ten Commandments and all the other things the Bible says that I wasn't living in my life." And so, with their early success came the constant assumption that they were a Christian band. When given the opportunity they would deny it, but it is an awkward thing to deny.
"We'd say, 'No, we're not a Christian band,' like it was a negative thing," Stapp reflects. "I don't think it's a negative thing. But we just wanted to clarify that we had no agenda to make people follow a specific religion. . . . If we were a Christian rock band I'd proudly proclaim that." As it happened, they all believed in God, but they'd never intended or expected this.
"I grew up listening to Slayer, Celtic Frost and Metallica," Tremonti says. "The last thing I ever thought was that people would say I was in a Christian band."
"After a while of us going, 'No, we're not . . . no, we're not . . . no, we're not,' " says Phillips, "it got to a point where there was not much more we could say or do aside from coming out with satanic T-shirts onstage."
Stapp now says that, personally, he has settled into a religious belief system with which he feels comfortable. "I'm at peace with it. There's no guilt anymore. No condemnation anymore." He has started telling his own son about God. When Jagger first noticed the stars, Stapp explained that God made them.
"Who's God?" Jagger asked.
"Well, I don't really know him," Stapp explained. "I never met him. But Daddy believes he made the whole world. . . ."
Backstage in Atlanta, on the afternoon of their first show, Tremonti -- who has a Ping-Pong table on tour with him, owns seventeen pinball machines and is learning magic -- fingers his Meso-Tech bars ("best protein bars in the world -- I eat one every morning") and raves about the original pieces of artwork he has been buying of Dungeon and Dragons manual covers for $1,500 each. The on-tour trainer, a muscly man named Daniel, comes in with a shake for Tremonti: beets, carrots, apples, wheatgrass and other healthinesses. "These detoxify your system," Daniel declares. Tremonti takes one sip. "That's horrible," he says.
Stapp walks in. He has been to the doctor's. Stapp has woken up with Jagger's sinus infection, a condition that Tremonti thinks wasn't helped by how freezing the tour bus got last night on the drive from Florida warmth to winter Georgia chill. "I woke up with green snot and my throat was hurting," Stapp says. "I knew I shouldn't have been kissing on him."
Aside from a handful of TV appearances, Creed have not performed in front of an audience for more than a year. They begin with a barrage of their rockiest songs. The idea, Tremonti has explained to me, is that they "come out heavy": explosions and riffs. After that, the show dips, but builds momentum as they hit their more inspirational repertoire. "Hide" already sounds like the kind of song that'll be on the radio for months. Its hypnotic tune and rush of images about escaping from past torments is a typical example of how Creed resonate with this near-delirious audience. "We're not inspired by happy times," Stapp has said, and pointed out that only two of their songs, "With Arms Wide Open" and "Lullaby," come from something happy. "We're dealing with self-doubt, depression, fear, something negative that we're going through in our life -- but we always want to find a way out."
It is for "With Arms Wide Open," the song Stapp wrote to welcome his then-unborn son into the world,that lighters around the arena are held aloft. On the surface it is Creed's most sentimental song, except that, just before the end, it also turns into one of their most interesting and most powerful. Until then, the lyric has simply been a hymn of welcome to an innocent, wishing and promising the newborn the best. But then it becomes something far weirder, messed up and heartfelt as the intensity rises and Stapp sings, "If I had just one wish/Only one demand/I hope he's not like me." (Earlier, I asked Stapp about this. "It's just honest and direct," he said. "I would hope that he doesn't have that inner struggle that I go through in my mind all the time. I feel like that's a curse and not a blessing.")
Toward the show's end you can see Stapp relax, which is to say that you see him clenched up, shutting his eyes and pumping his left fist just below his chin by way of emphasis. You either believe in the kind of passion that comes dressed like this or you don't, but you would be a fool to imagine that Creed aren't fully enraptured themselves.
It has become part of the Creed mythology, though it is also an accurate observation, that rarely has a band been more successful but received less critical respect. (The next morning's Atlanta Journal-Constitution review is strictly according to the book: "The problem with Creed is not the earnest messages or the derivative music. Rather, it's the arrogant, ham-fisted aura that the band projects . . . messiah-like gestures . . . impersonal platitudes . . . more bombastic than revelatory, more dogmatic than prayerful.") It has been like this from the beginning.
"I think it's just a matter of, 'If the masses enjoy it, it must not be good enough for the critics,' " says Tremonti. "Bands like Hootie and the Blowfish and Bon Jovi and Poison -- bands that were the biggest of their genre -- they have a ton of fans, but being the biggest guy you're going to get the most flak. You think, would you rather be in the position you're in or be the artistic band that the one kid who wore all black and wore stockings on his arms in class listened to? We don't want to be that band. We want to be the band that writes the big songs that everybody sings along to, and the songs that twenty years from now you still hear on the radio."
The Fred Durst war, now apparently being so ably fought by his fans, began at a 2000 K-Rock concert in New Jersey, where Durst attacked Stapp from the stage, suggesting that he was egocentric and remote -- "He's backstage right now acting like he's Michael Jackson" -- and that the audience would need sleeping bags for Creed's set. Creed like to dismiss it as jealousy, pointing out that Durst seemed annoyed he wasn't headlining. A few weeks later, Stapp challenged Durst to a boxing match for charity. "I thought it would be hilarious," says Stapp, who seems disappointed that Durst never responded.
I ask him whether the offer still stands. "It stands forever," Stapp replies.
In the meantime, Stapp can find his way into an occasional freestyle fight without Durst's help. The most recent incident happened in a Florida bar owned by his tour accountant. A guy came up to him four separate times, trying to get a reaction. Stapp says that, trying "situational avoidance" after a previous incident in a tattoo parlor, he offered to buy the guy a beer. But the guy kept coming back for more and finally got a rise out of Stapp with, "It's nice that you exploit your son for money." (The below-the-belt reference is presumably to "With Arms Wide Open," and perhaps to the VH1 footage of Stapp holding Jagger in his arms onstage while he sings the song.) Poor timing: There was a lot of bad stuff going on then with his divorce, and, in fact, later that night he'd be sitting in tears discussing it with his friends. "That was when I popped him a couple of times," says Stapp. "I jabbed him with the left and then crossed with the right, and he went down, and that was it." Someone photographed Stapp as he attacked, and he figures that was the reason behind the whole thing.
"These situations, I'm not proud of how I handle them," he says. "Whatever anyone says, they're just words. I have to learn that." He learned a good lesson one day playing golf with Ken Griffey Jr. Stapp was telling these stories, explaining the things people said to him.
"You can't do that stuff, no matter what they say," Griffey advised him.
"Ken," Stapp said, "it's just hard when they start hitting your family and -- "
Griffey interrupted. "What about when they call you nigger?" he asked.
An hour or so after the Atlanta show has finished, Stapp is sitting in the dressing room, barefoot. "I'm not even taking a shower," he says. "I'm a stink bastard." He says he was nervous -- "like if you hadn't ridden a motorcycle in a long time" -- and the nervousness made him use too much energy too quickly. "I blew my load in the first five songs," he says. He puts in some eyedrops, which roll down his cheeks like tears. "I got lots of pyro in my eyes," he says.
The dressing-room TV is tuned to VH1, which has broadcast the first five songs live, and now begins rebroadcasting the same footage. Stapp watches.
After the second song, the onstage Stapp says how glad Creed are to be back. "I didn't know what to say," mutters the real Stapp. "I forgot my mojo." He watches. "I was so winded right here, dude." Mostly he sits in silence, though he occasionally critiques the performance, pointing out what he says is a wrong Tremonti chord in "Bullets," or saying during "My Own Prison," "It's about half a beat too fast." The broadcast finishes. Perhaps he's wondering whether their show looks as poorly lit and undramatic as on VH1, which in the flesh it doesn't, but he says nothing, just rises from the couch. On the TV behind him, Creed's VH1 special begins for the millionth time. "I've got to pack my shit," he says.
[From Issue 890 — February 28, 2002]