There’s a particular feeling that happens when thousands of people sing a song back at the band that wrote it, not politely, but like they mean it, like they’ve been waiting years for the chance. That’s what The Orion Amphitheater sounded like on July 22, when Creed rolled through Huntsville on their Summer of ’99 Tour with Mammoth and Hinder in tow. Twenty-five years on, these songs still landed like a gut punch.
The crowd was a mix you don’t always see, with people who grew up on this band next to twenty-somethings who found them on TikTok or through their parents’ old CDs. Didn’t matter how anyone got there. By the end of the night, everybody was singing the same words.
Hinder opened, and they did what a good opener is supposed to do, get the people out of their seats fast. “Lips of an Angel” turned into a full-crowd singalong within the first few songs, and the set never dragged, just straightforward, hard-hitting rock that did its job and got out of the way. The self-proclaimed divorced dad rock know how to get a crowd going.
Mammoth was the real surprise of the night. Wolfgang Van Halen has clearly stopped worrying about being compared to his dad, because this band sounds like its own thing, tight, loud, confident. “Distance” hit hard emotionally, and there were stretches where the whole amphitheater was headbanging in unison. Whatever skeptics walked in, a lot of them walked out fans.
Then the lights dropped, and the place lost it before a single note played. Scott Stapp, Mark Tremonti, Brian Marshall, Scott Phillips, and Eric Friedman walked out to a roar that said everything about what this band still means to people. Creed had ascended!…