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Stapp serves up emotional acoustic set

Creed frontman Scott Stapp opened the door of his rather complicated psyche and let about 300 Red Deer-area fans into a wonderland of personal emotions on Sunday.

Creed frontman Scott Stapp opened the door of his rather complicated psyche and let about 300 Red Deer-area fans into a wonderland of personal emotions on Sunday.

The singer with the instantly recognizable rock voice performed a short, but intense, solo acoustic set at the Memorial Centre that was loaded with hallucinatory melodies and what seemed like highly personal feelings of loss, anger, inspiration, ecstasy, and fear.

Clutching the standing mic with both hands, Stapp often sang with his eyes closed, appearing to pour his whole being into his songs — both ones from his own solo album, The Great Divide, and from Creed. The commercially successful group was often dismissed as the Nickelback of the late 1990s by hipsters who called the band a rip-off of Pearl Jam.

Whatever. Stapp proved once again that his powerful rollercoaster of a voice and his singing style are distinctly his own.

He danced, he swayed, he flailed his arms, he kicked the air — yet he spent the whole concert sitting on a stool centre stage. (Only someone who didn’t know how Stapp can work a stool would fault him for sitting down).

The impassioned singer, who got progressively more raspy-voiced as the evening went on, appeared to relive the emotions of each song, from the tenuous joy of With Arms Wide Open — about the pending birth of his oldest son — to the bottled anger of Justify, about not having to explain his actions to others.

The backup musicians — guitarist Eric Friedman, bassist Mitch Burman, and drummer Garrett Whitlock — created a hypnotizing blanket of sound that coiled around the audience, tightening as needed.

On Creed’s Bullets, they raised the anxiety level by creating a bullet-like staccato rhythm, with Whitlock rim-playing on the cymbals and Friedmand and Burman strumming as percussively as possible.

It grew so intense that when Stapp spat out the lyrics, “at least look at me when you shoot a bullet through my head,” it made you really wonder who hurt him that badly.

Stapp might never say. He came across as a humble man of few words, imparting little more than his gratitude for audience members choosing to spend time with him on Sunday “when I know you could have done a lot of other things.”

There wasn’t a lot of songwriting explanation, but then, most of his songs are self-explanatory, anyway, especially Creed hits such as Higher.

Lesser known tunes, My Sacrifice, Surround Me, Are You Ready?, and Overcome might well have religious overtones, as Stapp has come out as a born-again Christian. But they clearly work on different levels, leaving many fans dancing as hard in their seats as Stapp was on his stool.

The singer, whose voice has been compared to Jim Morrison’s, did a killer version of The Doors’ Riders on the Storm, and a rendition of Alice Cooper’s I’m 18 that carried just the right amount of uncertainty and bravado.

In the end he got through the hour-and-a-half concert with a six-pack of bottled water and throat spray. Stapp waved at the crowd, told everyone “God bless you,” thanks and good night — and he meant it.

Not all the stomping, whistling, or “encore!” calling in the world would convince him to come back out onto the candle-decked stage.

For all Stapp’s disappointed fans: Maybe he really had a voice problem.

There was that unusual five-minute break he took that left a lot of audience members scrambling to get back into the concert hall from the concession lineup . . .

Or maybe Stapp just figured that after giving 110 per cent, he was spent.

lmichelin@www.reddeeradvocate.com