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"FacebookPinterest\n\n\"I think the last time we were in New York City we played Madison Square Garden. A lot has happened since then.\"\n\nThere's no way Scott Stapp didn't know that Nickelback was playing at Madison Square Garden when he said this last week, onstage with the recently-resuscitated Creed at New York City's Beacon Theatre. It was an irony worthy of Oscar Wilde, or Douglas Adams, or at least a pretty good episode of _MAS*H_\u2014Nickelback and Creed, in New York, 40 blocks from each other, on the same night. The evening was Nickelback's first at Madison Square Garden, perhaps Creed's first at the Beacon. In a feat of strength, determination, and a merciful two-hour set on Creed's part, I attended both performances.\n\n With all respect due to n-metal, Nickelback and Creed (Nickelcreed? Creedelback?) represented perhaps the ultimate perversion of the \"modern rock\" template established by the Grunge Explosion of '91, which started with a bang\u2014here was totally unpretentious music meant to kill Poison once and for all!\u2014 only to enjoy watering-down after watering-down, Nirvana and Pearl Jam giving way to Stone Temple Pilots and Everclear, which in turn gave way to Nickelback and Creed. While they might have sounded like something vaguely reminiscent of how Kurt and Eddie and Chris did things, the sound had been turned on its ear into a mere copy of a copy of a copy of a... well, you get it. The scene was no longer full of rebellious, strung-out dudes, instead dominated by ridiculously-coiffed bozos who chased hits with the same single-minded yet unknowing determination of Jay Leno clinging onto The Tonight Show for dear life. The values changed, and that was what was so vital about the first wave of alternative rock to so many people. But you already know this. You hate Nickelback and Creed.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nOn September 11th, 2001, the Twin Towers fell and changed the course of American history. On that same day, Jay-Z released The Blueprint and changed the course of our thought patterns regarding Kanye West. Also, Nickelback released Silver Side Up, its juggernaut album that catapulted them from run-of-the-mill Canadian dolt-rockers to incredibly successful Canadian dolt-rockers. It was alt-rock, yes, but as filtered through pop-metal bands like Def Leppard, with a tacked-on set of values more fitting of pop-country. Lead singer Chad Kroeger might have been a meathead, but he had a heart of gold. If Silver Side Up had a thesis, it was this: Chad Kroeger wanted to beat the shit out of you, but only because he heard that you had been hitting the girl he was in love with.\n\nI was 12 when the album was released. Its singles \"How You Remind Me\" and \"Too Bad\" are seared in my synapses thanks to their constant rotation on 93.3 (The Planet!), my Southern hometown's number-one \"new rock\" radio station, and my mom's willingness to sit through them when she drove me to and from soccer practice in said Southern hometown. \"Too Bad,\" much to my latter-day chagrin, is still a song I enjoy, its tried-and-true \"quiet-loud-NOW WE ARE SINGING IN ALL CAPS\" structure hitting that sweet spot between prime Mtley Cre and a super-shameless version of the Pixies. The best one can say about \"How You Remind Me,\" meanwhile, is that its bridge sounded somewhat similar to parts of Weezer's \"Say It Ain't So.\" There was nowhere to run from circa-2001 Nickelback. Except, of course, to Creed, who were waiting with\u2014excuse the pun\u2014arms wide open.\n\nIf Nickelback were the new kids on the era's Radio Rock block, Creed were the heavyweight champions, their 1997 debut My Own Prison going sextuple-platinum and 1999's Human Clay topping out at (WHOA) 11 million copies sold. While Chad Kroeger played the gruff but righteous older brother, Creed's singer Scott Stapp just seemed righteous. The stepson of a Pentecostal dentist, Stapp wrote songs that, given a close reading, grappled with the push-and-pull of Christian faith and the temptations of modern society, but were generally bland enough not to be too pushy about it. Guitarist Mark Tremonti, meanwhile, seemed to be a well from which hooky, totally competent guitar lines could be drawn at the drop of a fedora, and drummer Scott Phillips slapped the skins hard enough to anesthetize you into not thinking too much. If for some reason you don't remember, Creed's music videos tended to have Stapp striking what, for lack of a better term, could be called \"Jesus poses.\" Their 2001 album Weathered, released a scant two months after Silver Side Up, featured the three band members' faces Photoshopped onto a tree. That one only sold six million copies, probably because of the tree.\n\nThe pitfall of Creed, ultimately, was Scott Stapp. Like leaves falling off the Creedtree on the cover of Weathered, story after story hit the music press corroborating that Stapp, Jesus-Poser, was just that. Groupies. Drugs. Ego stuff. Alcohol. Domestic abuse. The real Stapp seemed to be less a saint and more akin to Bon Scott, the very substance-addled and very dead AC/DC singer. Stapp slowly became the Rick Ross of post-grunge in an era where the phrase \"the Rick Ross of post-grunge\" made absolutely no sense\u2014that's the reason people still absolutely loathe Creed, more than they hate Puddle of Mudd or Staind or any of their other unfortunately spelled contemporaries. They didn't suck some special amount. They were just disingenuous.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nWith that bit of sobering perspective in mind, let's talk about the actual concerts I attended. Nickelback were sharing a bill with Seether (the band that made that song \"Remedy\"), Bush (the band fronted by Gavin Rossdale, aka the guy married to Gwen Stefani) and My Darkest Days (your guess is as good as mine, although it's worth noting that they sold T-shirts that said CASUAL SEX on them in large block letters), playing their highest-profile NYC show to date, proof that there is such a thing as the Silent Music-Listening Majority. The \u2018Back might be the most hated band in America, but there was no telling the people there\u2014I tried keeping track of the number of Nickelback shirts I saw walking around trying to find some edible concert-fare (I settled on a nine-dollar hot dog that had liquid cheese in the middle of it), but gave up as soon as it seemed the shirts were multiplying exponentially. The crowd seemed less like people who had come to a rock show, and more like the people filling the stands at a NASCAR race. I could almost smell the hair gel. I felt out of place without a goatee. An uncomfortable percentage of the people I encountered looked like retired porn stars. These people hadn't seen a hipster, like, ever.\n\nBy the time I sat down, Seether and My Darkest Days had wrapped up, and Bush was probably a third of the way through their set. They were determined not to be upstaged by Nickelback, a band some years their junior and several tiers below them in critical acclaim. I entered the arena proper to Rossdale and co. covering \"Come Together,\" Gavin offering a vocal take seemingly inspired less by John Lennon's lithe yelp and more indebted to the full-throated honk of singers like Scott Weiland. Bush whipped the audience up into more of a frenzy than I've seen an opener manage in a good while, culminating in a seven-minute version of \"Comedown\" that had the folks on the floor moshing, or at least swaying aggressively.\n\nWatching the crowd filter back into the arena, fresh from a mass pee-and-beer exodus, I checked my phone for the time. 9:27. I was getting antsy\u2014what if Creed had gone on already? A quick survey of the \"#creed\" hashtag on Twitter revealed that the opener was offstage already. Nickelback needed to play. Now.\n\nFive minutes later, still no Nickelback. I began to lose hope, fearing my Post-Grunge dreams had been dashed upon the harsh alt-rocks of reality. And then, like a commandment had been passed down from some unseen, goateed force upon high, Nickelback came on. They were all wearing black. Everybody was psyched. Chad Kroeger gripped his guitar with practiced precision, taking to the stage like a sentient, overly aggressive Build-a-Bear. Fire rippled out of the bowels of MSG. The twin catwalks jutting from the stage, antennae-like, spontaneously became a pair of those moving walkway things that I thought only existed in airports. The catwalks hadn't moved for Bush. Some tech dude had been holding out.\n\n\"It smells like pot in here,\" Kroeger remarked before the \u2018Back launched into \"Something in Your Mouth,\" an edge in his voice more traditionally reserved for Libertarian political candidates. \"We don't know how you snuck it in past security, but we're excited.\" I know exactly how people had snuck pot in past the security, because I walked past security without them batting an eye. The people at MSG didn't care about that stuff; they just wanted to make sure nobody was waltzing in there with their own cheese-filled hot dogs.\n\nAs the show dragged on, the role that Nickelback plays in today's musical landscape became evident: the spectacle that people who don't particularly care about music can go and see, because they want to get out of the house and see some \"big rock band\" put on an appropriately big rock show. They're like the people who attend one Mets game per season, just because it seems like the sort of casual fun that people ought to have. \"I feel like Def Leppard, dude!\" Kroeger remarked as he jumped on a riser to perform \"Photograph,\" which, confusingly enough, is not a cover of the Def Leppard song. And he was right. The exact late-'80s analog of this crowd would have been in attendance for a Leppard show, and they would have had the late-'80s analog of the same generically good time. It's not about Nickelback. It's about the experience. These people could have gotten the same rush at a monster truck rally. I left before the final power chords of the non-Def Leppard song had been struck. I had a date with destiny. And Scott Stapp.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nWhile Nickelback has been quietly hovering at the apex of rock radio since their rise, Creed fell from grace with the thud of their fearless leader hitting the floor after one J\u00E4gerbomb too many. In the middle of the decade, Stapp set off on a botched solo career and the rest of the Creed brigade found themselves a Stapp surrogate in mainstream-rock lifer Myles Kennedy, forming the little-heralded outfit Alter Bridge. They sounded\u2014surprise!\u2014a lot like Creed. Without their former singer's wounded growl, they were a mere shell of their former band. Scott Stapp needed the rest of Creed, and the rest of Creed needed Scott Stapp. A comeback album was issued in 2009, but it wasn't quite the Creed of yore.\n\nWith this tour, Creed is returning to its roots, performing two nights per tour, playing their \"classic\" albums My Own Prison and Human Clay each night, followed by a slew of the hits. No new stuff, only the Creed people know and love. It's a familiar strategy for performers trying to transition to \"legacy\" status\u2014Andrew W.K. is playing I Get Wet on his newest tour (he's also reissuing it, and the special edition comes with a lock of his own hair if you're into that sort of thing), as did Snoop Dogg and Lauryn Hill while headlining the roving Rock the Bells hip-hop festival in 2010. I arrived fresh off the contact high of the Nickelback show, regrettably too late to catch any of My Own Prison, but just in time to see the band (wearing all black!) launch into \"What's This Life For,\" which sounds an awful lot like pretty much every other Creed song.\n\nI should mention this: My seat at the Beacon Theatre was awesome. Sixteen rows back on the floor, dead center, close enough to see the sweaty strands of Stapp's mane and feel the punishingly adequate riffs of Mark Tremonti resonate in my chest. Unlike the tourists at the Nickelback show, the audience\u2014consisting mostly of people in their mid-to-late thirties\u2014was a squad of diehards. There are, by my estimation, at least four thousand people residing in the greater New York City area who still care about Creed, and I know this because I watched them all sing along to non-starters from Human Clay and Weathered, as well as that one single from the comeback album that literally every single human being hated. You don't do that unless you believe. And with Creed, belief was all they'd ever asked for. They didn't need the pyrotechnics of Nickelback\u2014stubby and intense, Stapp projects a Bono-esque presence onstage if you give him a chance. Tremonti at one point played an acoustic guitar that had been lowered from the ceiling. Still suspended as he picked it, the guitar looked like it was hovering. It ruled.\n\nI am a firm believer that you can sincerely enjoy yourself at the concert of somebody you couldn't give a flying fuck about, as long as the people onstage give enough of a flying fuck to put their hearts into it. I might be grading on a curve here, but before I knew it, I was\u2014and I say this with full understanding that it sounds absurd to many, many people\u2014having a totally rad time at a Creed show. Turns out I still remember every single word from \"Higher,\" a song that I once slow-danced to in sixth grade, and I am totally willing to head-bang to \"With Arms Wide Open.\" I'm fine with admitting this. They are professional rock and roll performers. Their job is to be infectious. It might just be Florence Nightingale Syndrome, but I promise that you would have enjoyed yourself.\n\nWhen \"My Sacrifice\" ended, the band embraced, and faced the audience. \"We are Creed,\" Stapp said. \"Thank you guys. God bless. And rock on!\" No matter how you feel about Scott Stapp as a singer or a rock star or even a human being, you cannot deny it's a great feeling to watch a guy who's been through the ringer realize that he again matters to someone, even if only for a night. I have been to the other side of the mountain, and Scott Stapp has always been there, waiting for someone to care."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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