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.

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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.