Seeing that drummer (which is Creed's drummer) reminds me of a fun night back in 2000. Me and a buddy were in Baton Rouge to see Creed and opening acts Days of the New and Finger Eleven. Me and this guy had a weird quirk of luck from the universe, in that when we were together, we could randomly meet famous musicians. Happened on many more occasions than this.
In this case, we were eating with some other friends after the concert at some dive several minutes away from the concert venue, and saying our goodbyes in the parking lot when a bus pulled up further out in the parking lot. One of the other guys recognized the bus from the Centroplex (good eye--I never pay attention to unmarked buses and would've never thought twice). We went and knocked on the door, and it was Finger Eleven's tour bus. Their drummer, Rich Beddoe, came out and talked to us for a long time. Did not invite us on the bus, but that's probably for the best because I was getting high from just the second-hand smoke that was billowing out the door.
This was long before the days of cell phones that could take pictures, so my buddy had ran across the street to an open convenience store and bought some disposable cameras so we could get some pictures.
Finger Eleven had the same manager at the time as Creed, and a guy drove up in a shiny Mercedes who said he was the manager, he had bought that car earlier that day for Creed's drummer, Scott Phillips, and was going to be driving that night back to Florida to deliver it to Scott's house. I noted that I had actually met this guy on the floor by the concert stage while Creed was performing, because he was standing next to me at one point and was a chatty fellow, and he proceeded to tell me he was the band's manager, which I paid attention to not at all, because I thought he was a middle-aged, balding dweeb. Which he was, but apparently he was a truthful dweeb.
Anyway, he drives up in this new Mercedes, after Rich had been telling us how bad in debt Finger Eleven was to the record company and how they had to tour non-stop to keep from basically defaulting on record company loans, and how he hoped they could have some breakthrough success like Creed so they could stop being poor. He also told us Scott Phillips had been taking drum lessons from him while they were touring together, which I found believable, because Rich was a far superior drummer to Scott at that time. The manager greeted Rich and told him about the car, after which Rich looked at us, looked at the car, looked at the disposable cameras, and suggested we take pictures of him pissing on the new car and mail them to Scott, to teach him a lesson about flashing his wealth around struggling drummers.
He did not do that, but we did get pictures sitting inside the car. Which was running, and I thought was kinda sus on the part of the manager, because how does he know we weren't just gonna drive off with it?
