It’s difficult to imagine a band as big–and loud–as Creed moving in next-door and playing day and night for weeks without pissing off the neighbors. But based on Tremonti’s account, the folks in that central Florida burgh of Ocoee barely seemed to notice: "Nobody ever complained and nothing ever came of it. There were a couple of people knocking on the door, but nobody really did much."

Creed was a five-piece when it first formed in Tallahassee, the college town where Tremonti had moved for school and where Stapp wound up after chasing the ghost of Jim Morrison. The other guitarist only stuck around for a few months, so they were a foursome until the summer of 2000, when bass player Brian Marshall mouthed off to a Seattle radio DJ, blasting Pearl Jam ("[Eddie Vedder] wishes he could write lyrics like Scott."). The rest of the guys were none-too-thrilled with Marshall, and few on the outside were surprised when Creed announced his exit two months later. To hear Tremonti tell it now, the Pearl Jam incident didn’t instigate Marshall’s departure, but rather sealed it. More than a year later, the chasm between Marshall and the band is still wide.

"We aren’t talking," says Tremonti. "When you throw a bunch of people on a bus, you all have to be artistically on the same page and your personalities have to not clash.… Time will tell," he concludes, unsure of the potential for reconciliation between his onetime "great friend" and the band’s remaining members.

Marshall couldn’t have picked a worse time to get off the bus, just before the start of a 45-city trek. But Brett Hestla (whose band Virgos shares management with Creed) was quickly enlisted for four-string duty, and the subsequent shows went off without a hitch. When the tour ended, Hestla went back to Virgos while Tremonti, Stapp, and Phillips decided to forge onward as a trio. "We wanted to just keep it to the guys who started it all. We wanted to keep it in the family, and if we could do it by ourselves we wanted to," notes Tremonti. That meant the dark-haired guitarist had to pull double-duty as guitarist and bassist on Weathered.

"We all had a pow-wow on how we wanted the bass to be," Tremonti explains. "We had two producers there [Kurzweg and Kirk Kelsey] and the two guys from the band over my shoulder while I recorded bass. It was kind of a cool experience where we all had to get into the mind frame of a bass player."

A year ago, Tremonti claimed all three members would be taking a stab at tracking bass parts ("Everybody fiddles around with all different instruments, so we’ll try and get everybody in there doing it."), but in the end, he wound up doing it all himself. Tremonti chuckles when reminded of his earlier speculation: "I kept on trying to think of songs where the other guys could play, but we knocked it out so quick that it just never happened."