I took a cruise with thousands of fellow lunatics to find out how this much-mocked rock band became so beloved
It’s high noon on a blazing April day, which is the ideal time to be sitting in an Irish pub aboard a cruise ship the size of a small asteroid. The bar is called O’Sheehan’s – pronounced “oceans” – and it’s located deep within the belly of the boat, just above the teppanyaki joint, the sake bar and the lustrous duty-free shops. This consciousness-altering diorama of infinite seas and Guinness-themed paraphernalia is where I meet Colleen Sullivan, a 46-year-old woman with a beehive of curly red hair and arms encased by plastic wristbands. She wants to tell me how Creed changed her life.
We are both here for Summer of ’99, a weekend-long cruise and concert festival for which Creed – as in the Christian-lite rock band that sold more than 28m albums in the US and yet may be the most widely disdained group in modern times – are reuniting for the first time in 12 years. Roughly 2,400 other Creed fans are along for the round trip from Miami to the Bahamas, and the rest of the bill is occupied by the dregs of turn-of-the-millennium alt-rock stardom. Buckcherry are here. So are Vertical Horizon, Fuel and 3 Doors Down, who haven’t released an album since 2016.
