There were many big rock bands in the 90s who choose not to embrace the art of the music video, but following in their footsteps, Creed had no such qualms. Creed made big spectacle videos, promotional clips with the sort of budget you could live off for the next decade, MTV and VH1 catnip that was rewarded with heavy rotation.
Speaking to this writer recently, drummer Scott “Flip” Phillips looked back on the mini-movies the band filmed in their heyday with fondness. “Our videos were great!” said Phillips. “I think every video we made, we were always like, ‘Oh my god, what are we doing?’. And then you’d go back and look at it and be like, ‘OK, I get it now’.”
The sticksman used the example of the video filmed for the rock quartet’s gargantuan hit Higher. “I remember the treatment for that from the director,” Phillips recalled. “It was very Matrix, which was the big movie at that moment. I had watched a bunch of behind the scenes footage of The Matrix so got to see the way they did it compared to the way we did it – we literally just had to freeze there! And then you go back and watch that video and even knowing the way we made it, I’m a huge fan of it.”
Phillips said that he appreciates how important the form was in helping Creed become such a massive band in the early 00s. “We’d watch our video plays increase and then people would recognise us from those,” he said. “The budgets for those videos started at pennies and by the time we did With Arms Wide Open, which was huge budget explosions and green screen effects, stuff I’d imagine seeing on a movie set, but it’s for us four idiots from Tallahassee, Florida.”
Watch the bullet-time influenced video for Higher below:
