MARK TREMONTI On The Gulf Between Media Hate For CREED & Selling Out Arenas

Creed, Nickelback, Five Finger Death Punch, etc. – you know the type of the band we’re talking about here. The one that everyone claims to dislike (or they’re “totally a guilt pleasure, dude”) and that the media is constantly hating on, but is also constantly achieving new RIAA certifications and selling out stadiums.

In a new interview with Guitar World, Creed guitarist Mark Tremonti offered some simple advice for everyone either hating or pretending to hate – just stop hating on bands getting successful.

“Whether it’s LeBron James in basketball or Creed in rock ‘n’ roll, anytime somebody is on top, people want to see them knocked down,” said Tremonti. “We were on the radio non-stop, and we were playing your city every other month. Some people push back on that. You’re seeing it now with Taylor Swift. She shows up at a [Kansas City] Chiefs game, and everybody wants to hate on the situation. It’s just a shame. Don’t hate on people because they’re successful.”

Tremonti later added that when he used to get phone calls on the road, he’d tell whoever he was talking to that they could only mention the positive stuff. Especially considering Tremonti had very likely just played to thousands of people with Creed, the band everyone “hated.”

“I remember thinking, ‘If you want to do what we do and you want to have the success we had, you’d better have thick skin.’ I did get to the point if, say, my brother called me up and said, ‘Hey, this person said this,’ I’d be like, ‘Dude, do me a favor: Don’t tell me anything negative. Just tell me things that are positive. I don’t need negativity.’ I’m looking out at these thousands of people we’re playing in front of every night, and they’re not complaining.”

In a recent interview with Consequence, Creed frontman Scott Stapp also touched on the old hate for the band, saying that it never really added up in his mind.

“I think the initial backlash, some of it was just part of being so big, so fast — eight straight number one singles. I mean, we were all over the radio. You couldn’t escape us. I think the initial narrative was completely created by kind of the elite, critical media, kind of the cool guy club, who liked bands that didn’t sell a lot of records. So it was a narrative that was kind of generated by that niche of the media and then propagandized out there to make people think that that was the voice of the people.

“And as that narrative was being put out there, we were selling out multiple nights of arenas, releasing diamond records, and had stadiums on hold. So it didn’t even line up at all with the masses. Again, it was a media-generated narrative. And once that kind of gets out there and just gets hammered home, you’ll always have the fringes that come out on both sides, but it didn’t represent the people, and Creed has always been a people’s band.

“And that’s what meant so much to us, were the awards and the recognition that we got that the people chose, and that the numbers said, and that the concert tickets said. So that’s really my perspective on it, from a thousand-foot view, but at the time it definitely kind of caught all of us off-guard. We didn’t understand because we went from being on the cover of magazines that said, ‘Creed‘s the savior of rock ‘n’ roll’ to all of a sudden the most hated band by the media, not by the public, by the media. So, it was just kind of like, ‘Hey, this doesn’t line up with our rock ‘n’ roll dream. What’s going on?’