Actor and musician Creed Bratton is best known for his stint in the ‘60s performing with popular folk-pop group The Grass Roots and more recently for portraying a twisted version of himself in the hit American version of The Office. Tao Pop, the title of his latest solo album – and tenth overall – perfectly captures his mantra of living life to the fullest, taking advantage of new opportunities, and creating impactful music and entertainment.
“I’ve been on the spiritual bent for years,” says Creed during a recent Zoom interview. “I was reading books about [the philosophy of] The Middle Way, and it’s the same thing with stoic philosophy and Buddhism and things like that.”
“The Tao is you don’t want to get too high and have these really extreme highs where you’re fanatic or you don’t want to get too depressed and go down to that area. So, you want to stay kind of calm and strong in the middle. It was a strong middle with pop music, good pop music.”
Tao Pop finds him exploring his many interpretations of pop music and marks his fifth time working with multiple Grammy-Award winning producers Dave Way (Michael Jackson, Fiona Apple) and Dillon O’Brian (Keith Urban, Brian Wilson, Ringo Starr).
The album’s AI cover artwork was inspired by Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near which explores AI becoming sentient in 2045. He imagined a world where AI-bots and humans coexist. In this dream, Bratton is the last human standing in a world run by robots. He explores the topic of AI in his song “Chip In My Brain.”
“I was meditating one day, and I saw the image very clearly of the two AIs and I wasn’t sure what it meant. But I do like the ambiguity and art where you just keep going back and it questions you and makes you ask questions and stuff. I still look at the album and I question it myself and what’s going on.”
“And you can see in the album cover, I’ve got a USB port right in my head. So, the little AI mom can take out the umbilical cord and plug it right in so I can be connected to the baby. Why would anyone give their baby over to Creed? I don’t know why. Apparently, there’s no Bluetooth in the future though.”
Even when dealing with serious topics, Bratton always adds some of his trademark wit, humor and optimism.
“My subconscious is like a cheerleader trying to keep my spirits up,” Bratton says. “You get down and the subconscious goes, ‘Okay, come on. Don’t seriously go here. I’ll give you a little song and it’ll make you feel better.’ I think my songs are my subconscious talking to myself, and I don’t know if other songwriters feel that way or not, but I always have felt that.”
For Bratton, music and acting have gone hand in hand since he was young. Growing up in a small mining town between Fresno and Yosemite, he saw his mother and grandparents all playing music and got the itch to start performing himself. He later got the acting bug through school plays. He dropped out of college to perform as an independent musician, busking on streets and trying to get any gig he could get.
He performed across Africa, Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Between 1967 and 1969, he wrote, sang and played lead guitar with The Grass Roots. The group performed alongside groups such as The Doors, Cream and Howlin’ Wolf. Bratton added vocals to a pair of the group’s biggest hits in “Let’s Live For Today” and “Midnight Confessions,” while writing songs like “House of Stone” and “Dinner For Eight” over the course of work on three studio albums.
He’s enjoyed a renaissance of sorts the past twenty years as a solo performer, releasing his debut album Chasin’ The Ball in 2003. It coincided with his role on The Office, which started as a non-speaking role and quickly became a fan favorite character.
Scummy Water Tower recently caught up with Bratton to discuss his new music as well as his extraordinary career in music and acting.
You’re about to release your 10th studio album. How does it feel to reach that number?
I think it’s great. Ten obviously is a double-digit number, so that’s something. But each one is just like, “okay, let’s try to improve on the next one. Let’s make the next one better.” And we did on this one for sure. Both my producers Dave Way and Dillon [O’Brien]. I feel like we’ve done our best work on this one, and I feel that too. I’m very pleased with how it turned out. Did you have a chance to listen to it?
Yeah, I really enjoyed the album.
Oh, good. Any songs? Somebody the other day told me a friend of theirs said it sounds like Yacht Rock. And then I was over at someone’s house, and I said, “play me Yacht Rock,” and it was playing me, Christopher Cross and other things. They’re great old songs from the seventies and eighties and stuff. But I said, “I don’t think it’s yacht rock.” I think it’s its own thing, basically.
I liked “Toy Boat.” I enjoyed that one quite a lot.
Oh, thank you. I wrote that with my friend Geoff Pearlman. He had read an article about a TV show. It’s my Ringo [Starr] song for the album because all the Beatles would give him kind of a country thing to do, kind of broke up the flow.
I read somewhere that the album cover kind of pokes fun at your music career.
No, it’s kind of a tongue in cheek thing. That Creed, let’s say The Office character Creed, not the musician Creed or not the human Creed. I speak of myself in the third person all the time. It would be that Creed. There are no humans left on the planet. The AIs have taken over and he’s there. He’s got some kind of a game going on because that’s how Creed rolls. That little bit is just kind of tongue in cheek. Little fun cookie for The Office fans.
You’ve been able to find a pretty nice balance of humor, optimism, and seriousness, in many of your songs. What about that form of songwriting is appealing to you?
Occasionally there will be a song that I’ll write with someone else, let’s say “Turn the Corner of the Universe” or “Toy Boat.” But most of the songs that I write, there’s a picture. I’m not sitting down to try to write something per se, but the song just starts writing and I write longhand. So, in the morning, I’m going to go have breakfast or go exercise or do some yoga or whatever. I’ll hear the guitar basically calling and I’ll pick the guitar up and…I’m writing longhand as fast as I can…There’s a release that happens and the songs just come through. Now, I’m not different than other songwriters. A lot of songwriters say the same thing. The songs write themselves and generally those are the good ones too.
“Turn the Corner of the Universe” was influenced by a scientific article. Why did it inspire you?
Yeah. I was reading a Popular Mechanics article about how the hole in the ozone up in the Arctic Circle was healing, and was growing back together. And this, of course, is the only positive thing I have on global warming. So, I just jumped on it and said, “okay, good.” My friend Vance DeGeneres and I were starting this song together. I said, “I think I’m going to write about this.” Instead of going to hell in a handbasket, I wanted to say, “Hey, we turned the corner, the clean coral on the ocean reefs, we won’t back down.”
What I hope, which is again a very vain, conceited thing, is that all songwriters would like to write “Imagine” by John Lennon. That’s what we all would like to write, a healing song that has some profound effect on people’s consciousness. So that if I would write a song like that, there would be a comparative shift in the consciousness of the world, and they’d say, “Hey, you know what? Creed’s right, we can heal the planet.” And so there you go. Will that happen or not? Well, you’ll see your article may be the turning point, Joshua, to make this happen. It’s all on you now.
Over the years, you’ve had success both as a musician and actor. How do you think being a musician has helped you as an actor and vice versa?
That’s a good question. There are people who say you’ve got to pick one or the other. There are people that say you’re spreading yourself too thin. I don’t think there’s a lot of actors who do music and vice versa. Now, of course, I started out as a musician, but I was an acting major in college. So, from a very young age, I actually started acting very young too.
So, I look at it this way, if I’m in front of a camera and I have my lines and I have my message and I am waiting to see what my acting partner is going to do, that camera is going to pick up my emotion and my intent. It’s the same way if I’m on stage singing my song, I’m singing a song through with emotion and with a message that I want to get across. I’m looking the audience in the eye and saying, “here’s the song, here’s what it means to me.” The ambiguity may escape you, but that’s good. You can interpret it the way you will. So, the camera, the audience, they’re very close. They’re closer than people would think.
It seems like it’s more accepted that you can do both these days.
I think so. I mean, I don’t think, I don’t know why people feel that. They don’t give Lady Gaga a bad time. She can act and do really great stuff, and she’s a great performer, great songwriter. I’m not equating my success on her level. But I’ve always wanted to be a character actor, and I wanted to be considered a good songwriter by my peers. I didn’t have really giant expectations. The Office allowed me to really reach more people than I would ever have had a chance to. I mean, I took that as far as I could with The Grass Roots. I played once a month and then started taking an acting class. And then I got on The Office and…my songs went viral. Now even if I don’t do any more acting, I can still go out because of the popularity of my songs and make a living playing my songs. It’s pretty great.
It must be nice to have that variety where you can jump back and forth between music and acting. Has that kept things exciting for yourself?
Yeah, exactly. I just did a couple commercials this year, one for AT&T and one for Skittles up in Canada. I have a couple movies that I’m signed up for. Well, actually one got pushed because the economy, as you know, is really iffy right now. There’s a lot of shows being canceled, a lot of people backing off for frivolous expenses and things like that. But we’ll see. We won’t back down.
You got to work with the same two producers. How do you think your relationship and music chemistry has grown compared to the first time you worked together?
That’s a really good question too. First of all, I will refer to Dave Way as the multi-Grammy award winning Dave Way. He’s brilliant. And Dillon O’Brien. Dillon and I met when I was playing guitar in the studio for the Booze Cruise. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this episode on The Office where I played guitar out on the boat. We were on an office cruise, and I played, but Michael Scott couldn’t play. So, I got the guitar, and I had actually recorded the song the night before. We couldn’t do it live. And when we recorded, I met Dillon O’Brien, he was on keyboards, and he and I became friends. He’s so talented.
We started out kind of trying to find our voice, and originally I would do a lot with just coming in and sitting down on a stool with the guitar, with a mic on my guitar. Then he’d fill them in. I did “Breathe Easy” that way, and “Tall Grass,” where I’m playing guitar and singing and Dillon’s doing everything else. That’s the old way we worked.
But watching Dave, he’s editing while we’re recording. He doesn’t go take a bunch of stuff and go, “listen.” He wants to get that superfluous stuff out of the way. So, to watch him work, he’s brilliant. So now we don’t really talk about it, the process just happened. I’ll sing and play. Dillon will make comments. I’ll make corrections on the original stuff, and then we’ll talk about who we want to play.
The album before this, [2020’s Slightly Altered], I mean, was one song I wrote called “Chan Chu Toad.” I borrowed a friend’s Chinese instrument. I get to realize my fantasies because I did a lot of that in The Grass Roots. I’d bring in a sitar or a mandolin or weird alternative tunings for my guitar in the beginning. I love the eclectic aspects of recording. I’m very happy in the studio and working with these two. Getting back to your question, working with these two got to the point that we don’t really have to discuss it anymore. It’s our shorthand. It’s kind of a shorthand way we go about things. Now it’s just understood, and we can’t stop to explain it because it’s going too fast.
Your character in The Office is loosely based on yourself. What were you hoping to achieve?
Well, a fictionalized version of myself, yes. I wrote an idea basically of what would happen if Creed Bratton the musician had stayed on drugs and alcohol and all this stuff and continued that way. So, when I submitted to Greg Daniels, I had the premise that he had had a blackout period in L.A. and ended up on a Greyhound bus, and then Ed Trucks found him in a dumpster in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and gave him a job, which he was totally ill-equipped for, but he was so weird and scary that no one could fire him. He could talk himself out of it, which they actually used on that Halloween episode. So, it’s not me and for the record, most people that meet me are either relieved or disappointed that I’m not that guy.
What do you like about playing that kind of character?
Any actor who gets to play a character, even if it’s kind of a variation of yourself, gets to do the absurdity that you wouldn’t do in real life. In real life. I’m not going to jump up on a table and scream as Creed did to the new manager. I’m not going to apparently kill people, steal from people, but to get to play that dark side is fun because that’s not me, but it’s fun. Ask any actor, they’d rather play a villain because it’s juicier.
With The Office, you took initiative and cold-called the show’s creator looking for a role. How did that come about?
I was working on the Bernie Mac Show in the background, and Bernie really liked me, and he thought I was funny. And he would give me a lot of different things in the background, and so people watch Bernie M, they’ll see Creed playing several different parts in the back and doing some funny stuff because I could make him laugh. So, Ken Kwapis came on to an episode, and he was a Grass Roots fan. He was going to direct The Office and do an American workplace. He gave me his number. I called him and asked him if I could be on the show. He spoke to Greg Daniels, and he said, “let’s bring him in the background and see if we can work something out.” Originally, that was it. I was going to be in the background. Like we said before, I created the whole character. I wrote all this. I wrote these scenes out. I ad-libbed them. I shot them, cut about an hour’s worth of stuff with my friend Joe Moore down to about five minutes, just the best of the best and stuff that made me laugh. And I thought, “okay, this is pretty funny stuff.” And I gave it to Greg.
I always trust my intuition. My intuition said, “you got to do this.” And I didn’t tell anybody about it. I certainly didn’t tell my children. I didn’t tell the other cast members. I didn’t tell anybody except Joe Moore because he had to shoot it with me. And then they called me a couple of days later and said, “wow, this is really funny.” Next thing I know, the Halloween episode I’ve got six and a half pages with Steve Carrell, and it worked out very, very well, and they were very happy. Were astonished. They didn’t foresee that it would be that good. And that’s not just me, that’s what they told me. They didn’t imagine it was going to be that good.
It sounds like it was pretty fun for you being on set with everyone.
No, not really. I hated all of that. [laughs]
Of course, they’re my friends. I got to laugh at work every day. It’s the best job in the world. Come on. Lucky me again, lucky me, but I’m where I am because if my little voice, my intuition tells me I need to do something, I don’t doubt it. I don’t second guess it. I don’t shy away from that. If it’s scary, I will go and I’ll embrace it. And so far, it’s worked out and you make mistakes. You’re younger, you make mistakes. But pretty soon you learn to know false voices, false intuition, or whether just ego or vanity, making you do something or when it’s the true, “okay, that’s real.” That’s a voice telling me to do this. It’s not a bullshit idea that I’m having. This is legit. Then you follow that. But people will talk themselves out of what they think they should do. Yeah, I know I should do this, but I don’t know, it’s just too many options or blah, blah, blah. They’ll always talk themselves out of achieving their goals. It’s the easy way. It’s a lazy way, but it’s an easy way to not succeed because it’s scary.
It will be interesting to see how The Office spinoff comes together.
Oh, I hope it’s funny. I want to laugh. Well, it’s Greg Daniels. Come on. You think about it. Greg Daniels, The Simpsons, King of the Hill, The Office, Parks and Rec, Upload. And this one could be good.
You aren’t involved currently, but I imagine you’d jump at the chance if you’d ever get a cameo.
I did a cameo for Greg on Upload where my head exploded. That was a lot of fun. I’m still finding residue blood on my clothes. No, of course, I would do it for Greg because I love working with him. That’s the deal you get in situations where when you love to work with certain people, it’s like being in the studio with David, Dillon and all my friends. It’s not work. It’s a joy.
With songwriting, you usually try to serve the song with your vocals and guitar and let others that are better at other instruments handle them. Why is that important?
Yes. The deal is, in recording, you surround yourself with people who are better than you. Let’s say on “Tall Grass,” like I said, I sang and played the acoustic guitar, boom, boom, boom. Then I put a lead guitar over it. And then when Covid was over and we were allowed people in, we had a jam session up at Dave’s and I met Elliot Easton for the first time and he and I really hit it off, got to play together. Elliot’s so good at these pop, short songs that are melodic. And they come in, set it up, play and they’re in and out. Bam! That’s what “Tall Grass” needs. So, I called Elliot, and I said, “would you come?” He was thrilled, and I sent him the tape.
He said, “I love this song.” So, he came in. I played the guitar, which was serviceable, but you get Elliot Easton. I have no problem with that. He’s a better lead guitar player than I’m, that’s fine. I don’t need to do all this stuff. What I need to do is write the songs, play rhythm, sing it, and once in a while I’ll still play a few little notes and stuff. I play some stuff on “Breathe Easy.” I’ll do some little riffraff in the back, kind of scrappy stuff, my scrappy stuff.
What were some of the first moments you realized you wanted to become a musician?
I played trumpet from a very young age. My mother played really good on the mandolin. My grandparents had a country western band. My grandfather, Charles, who I’m named after, played rhythm guitar, and my grandmother played drums. So, they’re all jamming one day and my mother’s playing this mandolin solo, and she’s got her head back like this, and she’s just wailing, unconsciously brilliant. And I’m watching that, and I felt I saw her joy. I saw her joy.
That’s not the thing that triggered me onto music. That’s when I started thinking I wanted to play stringed instruments. I was sitting next to my grandfather’s amp, and I could feel this thing about it that this is what I wanted to do. I’d been playing trumpet since a young child, so I’m probably around 12, 13 at this time, and I got a Silvertone guitar and I’d been listening to all this rock and roll.
Now I’ve been playing classical music and big band stuff on trumpet, jazzy kind of stuff that they do, stuff you do in high school, but good stuff. And I brought this Silvertone guitar, and I took it out to the barn, plugged it in, and the Silvertone had an amp. So, I plug it in, and I’ve been listening to Fats Domino, Ray Charles, the Everly Brothers, all these fifties’ acts, KFWB came up from L.A. and I started to think “this is it.” I love this music. I love this rockin’ music. I heard Link Wray’s “Rumble” and immediately went out and plugged my guitar in and tuned up and turn it up all the way and hit that chord and that vibration comes and [I got] this visceral rush, and all my senses tingled up and I went, “okay, okay. Forget the trumpet. This is the guitar.”
That’s how I first fell in love with the guitar. That moment was quite something, but I’ve always loved it. I know musicians say, “well, I got into it because I wanted the girls or the money.” I got into it because I just loved the music, and I loved the way the music made me feel. I still remember after over two years touring with this folk trio in Europe and Africa being on my own in London at a girlfriend’s house, staying with her and her parents. Rubber Soul just came out and at that moment had an epiphany, I realized that pop music was more than just fluff and escapism. It was art, and I think Rubber Soul was again, and then one of those pivotal parts of my life that just changed everything, and I knew then I wanted to write something like that. It wasn’t arrogance at all. I just said, “well, why not aim high?”
During your early days of playing, you spent a lot of time busking and trying to get any gig that you could. How has that attitude helped you then and now?
Well, it keeps you humble, and you also appreciate where I’ve come from. From that point of just singing on the streets, people throwing coins on a guitar case to going up on stage with 50,000 people with The Grass Roots and hearing your song on the radio. You hear your guitar, and you hear your voice on the radio. It keeps you humble. You realize I’ve started this way, and I’ve lifted myself up by my bootstraps. I never take it lightly. I really appreciate this process and I’m very grateful to how it turned out.
What was it like getting thrust into the spotlight with The Grass Roots?
Well, you’re never ready. You’re never ready for it. We were adequate musicians, but once we did a show with Moby Grape up in San Francisco. I watched them and they played their hit “Omaha.” Jerry Miller started playing solos on this, on his big fat body Gibson. He came up, they hit the harmony. Same thing with Three Dog Night hit the harmonies. I walked back into the dressing room. I said, “guys, we need to rehearse more.” Because you think you’re ready, but you just got to. I tell bands now, my friends are Mt. Joy, who I get to play with sometimes on stage, and they work so hard. That’s what we should have done.
That’s what everybody that makes it really well and stays and has longevity is they put in the work. We worked in the beginning. But then once the hits started coming, we [stopped rehearsing] the songs and went on. We didn’t, and that’s why I left the group. I left the group because I told everybody, “We’ve got to get our own thing going here.” I listened to the music from The Band’s Music From Big Pink, and I told them, “We’ve got to do this.” They were happy to keep it the way it was, and I was not. So, I took a settlement and left the band and continued on my own for many years. I regretted it because I thought it really was a bad move, but it turned out alright.
What did you enjoy most about playing with the Grass Roots?
I most enjoyed playing with them in the beginning when we were playing around these small clubs and we were loose and nasty and dirty, and we started doing the songs that had already been cut for us. The first couple albums we did ourselves with Hal Blaine and Larry Knechtel and Joe Osborne, but Warren [Entner] and I got to play guitar, most of the stuff, and then it just became a job. And the joy wasn’t there. But in the beginning, we were up on stage just playing, and the raw music was coming out, and I just loved being on stage and just having an audience there and we’re just going for it. That was when I loved the being in the moment kind of thing, as opposed to just delivering the hits. And I don’t know if there’s anybody that wants to go out and just keep playing there. The hits, there’s no experimentation anymore.
You got the chance to share stages with a lot of popular groups at the time. What are some of your favorite stories?
We played the Miami Pop Festival and Three Dog Night had already performed, so I was sitting there with Mike Allsup, the guitar player from Three Dog Night. We were pretty high in the side of the stage, and Mark Bowman and The Turtles were on stage, and they were doing “Happy Together,” and Mark had this big pendant hanging thing. Huge thing. And this pendant went swinging like this. As he comes to the side stage, that pendant gets stuck and he had a big afro, big curly afro. The pendant gets stuck, so he’s trying to pull it out, and the microphone cord is now stuck in his chain and his hair, and he can’t get it out without tearing his hair. And we start laughing. He looks over at us and we’re dying. It’s the funniest, you had to be there. It’s the funniest thing. Finally, his roadie comes up with scissors. He’s trying to cut the hair to get it out. Yeah, things like that. Where were the video cameras around when that was going on? [laughs]
Again, I’ve had moments where I saw Richie Havens 10 feet away and play “Freedom” for us at a party with that D40 Guild guitar. He had laid that big thumb over it like that open tuning and started playing “Freedom.” I’ve sat in on rehearsals with Pentangle…I’ve been privy to just some amazing moments. I’ve toured with The Doors and Cream. I’ve seen Eric Clapton play with Cream, which was quite something.
I know there’s just too many to even think about. It’s just a wonderful time. And to an extent, the sixties are a blur too, because you’re playing music and you’re high as hell all the time, so there you go.
What were some of the biggest surprises making the album?
I had a breakthrough a few albums ago on a song called “Matters Like This,” where I was just sitting there showing him the song and acoustic guitar, and Dave went, oh, wow, one of those situations.” He runs and puts the mic in front of me, sticks it on the guitar. We’re all sitting around learning the song. We’re just running the song, and the first time we run the song, we get it. And I was very pleased with the way my vocals sounded, and I’m not like anybody else.
I’m not a big fan of my voice, but on “Chip In My Brain” and “Always Dreaming of You,” especially on “Chip in my Brain,” I’m singing the song and I’m going, “wow, this feels like the sweet spot.” So, I think it was a flat major seventh that that song is in, and I found that I felt very, very comfortable singing that song. So, this album is a precursor of better ballads in the future for Creed. That was a pleasant surprise. And by the way, it shows that even at 80, the process still can improve. It’s not over you. For you youngsters.
It looks like you’ll be doing some touring with the album. What can you tell me about your future plans?
In October, I’m off to Ireland and England and Norway, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and then Germany and Slovakia, Spain, I think. And then Prague and Prague just called and said they sold out the first show. So, we’re doing a second show together. So, it’s good. It’s doing very well. I’ve been told already the seats are filling up, so I’m looking forward to going over there and playing for my fans. And they treat Creed very well. I eat a lot of smoked salmon. I love it over there. And you can eat all the food here. There’s a lot of preservatives, but over there it’s all good stuff.
Do you think you’ll add shows in the U.S. at some point?
I will, but right now it’s tight here in the United States. Everyone’s backing off a little. With most of the people I know, their tours are starting to sell. Things are slowing down, especially in the movie business too. They’re letting off a lot of people. Paramount’s letting off a lot of people, A lot of things are slowing down. We’ll just have to see how this recession works out. And it is. It’s going to be, there’s no sugar coating this thing, folks. It’s going to happen.
That’s it. But at least I can go over to Europe and do the occasional film that they give me and let me do. But I have been asked to do a lot of independent films. They’ve got to excite me. And if I’m not excited and a “hell yeah,” then I’m just not going to do it. It’s got to be, “oh my God, I could really mess up if I don’t do this right now.” That’s the one I want to do because the only way I’m going to grow is by testing my limits.
You can follow Creed on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok and listen to his music on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube.
Joshua is co-founder of Scummy Water Tower. He’s freelanced for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including: Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Guitar World, MTV News, Grammy.com, Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, A.V. Club, SPIN, Alternative Press, Under the Radar, Paste, PopMatters, American Songwriter, and Relix. You can email him at josh@scummywatertower.com.
