During a recent appearance on the Mark and Me Podcast, Mark Tremonti reflected on Creed’s biggest mistakes.
Seeing the record sales… When the owner of the record label would call you and say, ‘We sold this many records this week’ and they’re all excited about it, gets you excited but with success, comes stress,” the guitarist said of their early years.
He continued, “The record label was making hundreds of millions of dollars selling records with Creed and Evanescence and all the bands that they had going on at the time. We were going through business managers and managers and record labels and agents.”
“When it turns into this big successful machine, you got to watch your back because there’s a lot of wrong people that got drawn to that. A lot of people were coming around that are no longer with us anymore, that were detrimental to our careers,” Tremonti further explained.
The rocker added, “We’ve made a lot of bad mistakes along the way because when you’re a young college kid, who is now a successful professional musician, you sign bad contracts. You just want to be nice. You don’t want to, ‘Hey why does this contract say this?’ You’re just like, ‘Oh, I appreciate you even writing up this contract’ and you sign stupid things. So I wish I could go back and smack my younger self.”
Tremonti also spoke with Guitar Interactive Magazine earlier this year and said, “Throughout our early careers with Creed, we were always told that we were going to be either one-hit wonders or have one hit record, and everybody’s always telling us that it was impossible to do the things that we were going to do.”
“I know I was always fighting for survival, and always just worried that one day I would not be able to write songs for a profession anymore. It always scared the hell out of me. When we came out with the second record, when that first song came out, and the response to it was huge, that made me feel a little more secure in our career. It did very well,” Mark further said of their early career.
Creed is currently performing on their North American tour. It will end on December 31 in Las Vegas.
Photo: Getty Images North America