In the popular NBC comedy The Office, actor and musician Creed Bratton plays paper company employee Creed Bratton, a mysterious older man who’s lived many lives, has secret identities, and grows mung beans in his desk drawer. But as they say art imitates life and the real-life Creed Bratton indeed has seen a great many things in the world over his 80-year lifespan.
But for Bratton, whose latest album Tao Pop is out Friday (September 27), his creative journey started as a kid with brass instruments. First it was the French horn, then the tuba, and then the trumpet, which was his first love. He was first chair in high school, excelling in the blind auditions and beating out upperclassmen in the process. But it was on a summer visit to see his grandparents as a teenager when he discovered country and western music. At 13, Bratton got himself a Silvertone guitar and he was hooked for life.
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“I walked back into the barn back with my steer Rocky,” says Bratton, who grew up in a little rural town outside Yosemite National Park in California, complete with castrated bull. “And I was trying to figure out the Link Wray rumble. I turned [my amplifier] all the way up and hit the E chord and it vibrated the chamber viscerally. That was it. I thought, ‘OK, OK, this feels right.’”
A Radio Under the Pillow
Not afraid of practicing a lot even then, Bratton pushed his embouchure so hard while playing his trumpet he bent his teeth back as a kid. He developed a “beaver bite,” he says. To get better on the guitar, though, he’d sneak a radio under his pillow at night and listen to it intently when he was supposed to be going to sleep. Some nights, he says, he could get KFWB from Los Angeles and he’d absorb songs by Little Richard, Fats Domino, Ray Charles and The Everly Brothers. His sophomore year in high school, he worked during the summer as a box boy at a Safeway grocery store in Lake Tahoe and on the weekends he’d go to a dance club to mingle with coeds to hear more.
“As soon as the guitar player started,” he says, “I’d leave the girl I was dancing with and go to the stage and watch his hands until I figured out what he was doing. The rudiments, the 1-4-5 and occasionally 6. That’s all you needed.”
The Grass Roots
Born in 1943, Bratton became a member of the popular ’60s rock band The Grass Roots in his early 20s. The group enjoyed several hits, including their Top-10 breakout “Let’s Live for Today” and the beloved “Midnight Confessions.” But Bratton left that band because, he says, its members weren’t taking the job seriously enough. He thought they should be practicing more, working on harmonies, their playing, and songwriting. “I left the group,” he says, “because of that. We needed to get together and put more work in. But they didn’t want to do that.”
Music has always been a job to Bratton. A job of love, yes. A job one is lucky to do, yes. But it always required the work (hence the “beaver bite”). After departing The Grass Roots, he got himself a four-track and wrote. He’d play rhythm guitar and then overdub leads. He dove in even more so than before.
“My process is not to sit down and write a song about a subject, per se,” Bratton says. “I wake up in the morning and come down and get my green tea or I meditate or do yoga—whatever it is, just keeping healthy. And the guitar will go, ‘Mmmmm!’ and I’ll go, ‘What do you want, sweetie?’ and it will say, ‘Play me!’ and I’ll grab her and bam, the muse will just give me a song.”
He hears this “little voice,” he says, “from the other side of the veil, nudging.” And when that happens, he picks up his guitar and writes the song down as quickly has he can. “If I relax and get out of my own way—don’t think, don’t try to do it—it’s like channeling,” Bratton says. “All songwriters do that. That’s just what we do.” It’s not about “writing a song,” he says. Instead, he’s hearing the lyrics and the music and then just getting it down on paper. He cites former Beatle Paul McCartney, whom Bratton says he saw talking about the idea in an interview. McCartney said he no longer gets so fussy about a song. Instead, he writes one and then moves onto the next. It’s like taking part in a “cosmic algorithm.” Life, humanity—these are mysteries. Don’t overthink it.
The Office
It’s a lot like the character he played on The Office. Predictability was not part of the plan. And being on that program, which remains one of the most popular sitcoms of all time, offered Bratton a great deal of opportunity. Fans got to know him outside of his role as an actor and found out he had been in The Grass Roots and was still an indie musician. They heard him sing his own material in karaoke jams and on the season finale. Along with being a musician, Bratton came up studying acting. He was a drama major in college. So, on The Office, his two passions coalesced. People were touched not only by his oddball character but by his music, too. That was something special.
“Somehow, someone out there was reading my mind and giving me the perfect thing,” Bratton says of his two creative lives coming together. He recalls a time in the mid-1960s when he was hitchhiking in North Africa, starving and sleeping on the side of the road. He didn’t know if he’d wake up some mornings, wondering if he’d be attacked in the middle of the night.
“I had a vision of myself back then,” he says, “on stage, getting awards. When you see it in your mind’s eye, even in rough times, that will carry you through.” Sure enough, years later, he won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Ensemble Cast with his fellow actors. His vision out there in a ditch had come true. “If I see it clearly,” he says, “it’s that creative visualization thing—I believe a lot of that is true.”
On the finale of The Office, Bratton got to perform an original song, an emotive tune of remembrance, of friends’ lives changing through time. When he saw that he was going to be able to do that during the episode’s table read, tears came to his eyes. “I didn’t know that was going to happen,” he says. “It was an emotional moment.” Even the show’s executives were moved, he says.
Now he’s bringing that musical prowess to his 10th solo album Tao Pop, a record about modern times sung in nostalgic tones. Topics Bratton tackles include artificial intelligence, robots, chips in our brains, global warming, and intentional ignorance. He got some of the inspiration for the album from his regular meditation.
But perhaps the most memorable song is the album’s finisher “Always Be Dreaming of You,” which hearkens back to mellow 1950s music and is delivered with such warmth and welcome that it becomes an instant favorite. The song showcases Bratton’s experience as well as his roots. “I’m in my 80s now,” he says. “That stuff is in my wheelhouse and I feel my voice is very comfortable there.” Indeed, it’s the kind of song you play when you’ve lost something but you know loss isn’t all there is.
Other standouts include the dance-worthy “Having a Ball” and ominous “Breathe Easy.” Looking ahead, Bratton is set to go on tour this fall, including stops in Ireland, England and Scandinavia. “They know the songs,” he says of his fans in those regions, “and they sing along. It always feels great when an audience sings along with you. It’s a wonderful thing.”
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Photo by Shayan Asgharnia / Courtesy No Ear Buds
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