I went to see the world's most hated bands party like it's 1999

[Celerity]

Creed, Nickelback and other leading lights of the post-grunge era explored the nostalgic limits of rock’s most reviled sound at the Summer of ’99 and Beyond Festival.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/2025/07/28/creed-nickelback-summer-99-festival-dad-rock-nostalgia/

https://archive.ph/kvzLH


Creed front man Scott Stapp at the Summer of ’99 and Beyond Festival at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wisconsin. (Photos by Kathleen Hinkel/For The Washington Post)

EAST TROY, Wis. — In the spirit of full disclosure: I was once a Creed fan. I strummed and sang along to songs from “My Own Prison” and “Human Clay” but never quite mastered the tougher licks. So more than a quarter-century later — a few lifetimes removed from a teenage youth full of JNCO jeans and burned CDs — I traveled to an amphitheater outside Milwaukee to find out whether there’s any joy to be drawn from nostalgia, or if this school of rock has simply curdled like Wisconsin dairy products in the summer sun.


The Summer of ’99 and Beyond Festival drew more than 20,000 fans to rural Wisconsin.

Memories of the late 1990s and wafts of vape smoke were in the air at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre, site of the Summer of ’99 and Beyond Festival. The two-day offering was part of an ongoing reunion tour by Creed, the Christian-ish alt-rock band that topped the charts at the turn of the millennium. But what drew me and more than 20,000 other people to rural Wisconsin was the other name at the top of the bill: internet punching bag Nickelback.


Stephanie Knab, 32, left, and Tristan Weiner, 34, were part of a bachelorette party at the festival.

Both bands are relics of rock’s last stand, signifiers of bad taste and targets of scorn and even hatred, so much so that they’ve also become memes unto themselves in the past few years. That a festival headlined by these bands is a viable commercial venture says a lot about how nostalgia can put butts in seats and overpower conventional wisdom. Creed kicked off its reunion tour last year, alongside erstwhile contemporaries such as 3 Doors Down and Finger Eleven, after more than a decade on hiatus. In addition to a Summer of ’99 cruise, it included a day-long festival in San Bernardino, California, billed as “a rock revival you can’t afford to miss.”


A fan wears a “Divorced Dad Rock” T-shirt from the band Hinder while watching A Day to Remember perform.

For the second edition of the festival, Creed moved the event to the friendly confines of the Alpine Valley amphitheater, doubled the length and upped the star power, reconvening many of the bands that dominated alt-rock radio in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Like Creed, bands such as Live, Our Lady Peace and Fuel were the ones in the trenches trying to keep rock alive during the rise of hip-hop’s global ascendancy, when labels like Cash Money Records took over in 1999 and 2000. They’re also, to put it lightly, critically reviled. While they appeared in the wake of grunge, they shared only a vague aesthetic and dynamic range of that world-changing Pacific Northwest scene. Rather than reject the arena rock that grunge supplanted, they sought to re-create it in their own suburban image.

snip


From left, Luke Griffith, Lance Griffith, Conner Harrison, Wyatt Kendall and Chris Talbot came from St. Louis to see festival headliners Creed. “We are all 24 and single,” Luke Griffith said.


The two-day festival was part of an ongoing reunion tour by Creed, the Christian-ish alt-rock band that topped the charts at the turn of the millennium.

[underpants]

1. Tristan Weiner

[FirstLight]

2. unironic, lol

I actually liked Creed and Nickelback!

I'd go to this if I could handle crowds/festivals... too old for that crap now.

[ProfessorGAC]

3. Seems Cool

I've been to Alpine Valley many tomes.
My only quibble with the article is "...outside of Milwaukee..."
Alpine Valley is around 40 miles from Milwaukee. Milwaukee's metro area doesn't extend 40 miles.
Geez, Alpine is only around 60 miles from Chicago!
I know; small quibble.

[iscooterliberally]

4. I like Nickelback. Creed wasn't my cup of tea, but I would go see them in this context.

I never really understood the hate that Nickelback got on the internet. They had some really great songs that got tons of airplay and the arena was packed when I saw them around 2007 or so. Anyway, that looks like a fun festival and I would go if I lived up that way. Thanks for the post!

[SamKnause]

5. Nickelback kicks ass !!!

[Celerity]

6. the article rips them to shreds:

Creed’s set was one last breath of Wisconsin air. It was also a change of pace from Nickelback’s headline set the night before, which played like an irony-free take on Creed’s iconic halftime show, full of strobe lights, fog machines, pyrotechnic explosions, “Guitar Hero” graphics and even a T-shirt gun. But there was no nostalgic joy to be found during the Canadian act’s set, just charmless frat-boy banter, riffs ready-made for “Monday Night Football” and lyrics that make Motley Crue sound like Andrea Dworkin.

The low point of both the band’s set and the history of recorded music was “Figured You Out,” a song about a sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll fling that goes sideways. Lyrics about pants around feet and white stains on dresses — “I love your lack of self-respect/ While you’re passed out on the deck/ I love my hands around your neck” — are as gross and stupid now as they were then.

Not that the crowd took offense; most people knew “Figured You Out” — thanks to its 13 weeks at the top of the mainstream rock charts back in the day — and were happy to sing along. But the crowd also started a “Let’s go, Brandon” chant when the band pulled a same-name fan onstage to sing “Rockstar” (a song that presaged Post Malone’s whole country rock shtick by a decade) and stayed until the encore closed with “Burn It to the Ground.” With the hook, “Take anything we want/ Drink everything in sight/ We’re going till the world stops turning/ While we burn it to the ground tonight,” the latter sounds like a kleptocrat’s anthem.

I listened to Nickelback when “How You Remind Me” took over rock radio in 2001, eventually becoming the most played song on U.S. radio of the 2000s. I almost certainly had a burned CD of “Silver Side Up,” an album whose release was the second-worst thing to happen on Sept. 11, 2001. But for the fans who stayed on the bandwagon over the next seven albums, it’s time to admit the folly of youth instead of embracing it. It’s time to acknowledge the truth, with arms, eyes and ears wide open. This month’s festival had plenty of “Summer of ’99” but was short on the “beyond.” I think the bands involved know that, too. As Nickleback’s oft-memed “Photograph” goes, “It’s hard to say it, time to say it, goodbye, goodbye.”