A three-legged feng shui toad inspired the first single off Creed Bratton’s new album “Slightly Altered,” but that’s definitely not the only time good fortune has smiled on the singer-songwriter and actor.
As lead guitarist for the Grass Roots in the late ’60s, Bratton was part of the psychedelic pop/rock band’s peak period when singles such as “Midnight Confessions” and “Let’s Live For Today” cracked the Top 10.
As a character actor, decades of scuffling around Hollywood ended in 2005 when Bratton, who’d been hired as a background player on the new sitcom “The Office,” pitched a loosely fictionalized character based on his own life and ended up a fan favorite playing the hilariously strange quality assurance manager “Creed Bratton” for nine seasons.
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“It’s unprecedented, right?” Bratton says by phone from his Studio City home recently. “To get to be in a hit band and on a hit show?
“I don’t know what I did right but I obviously did something right for that to happen,” he says. “I never imagined I’d get up in the position I’m in now because you have to understand for 30 years I was hand-to-mouth, really struggling, struggling, struggling.
“And when this hit, you think, ‘OK, well, how long will it last? It won’t last very long.’ And it just keeps going.”
‘Slightly Altered’
Bratton focused on acting after leaving the Grass Roots in 1969, frustrated by their management’s reluctance to let the band write and record more of their own material. “The Office” gave a boost to a solo career, though, with three albums released while it was on the air and now two since it wrapped in 2013.
For “Slightly Altered,” Bratton reunited with producer Dave Way, whose resume includes albums by Fiona Apple, John Doe, and recently Louise Goffin, with whom he invited three talented bands to back him in the studio.
Bratton met and befriended the Mojo Monkeys after catching a show at Ireland’s 32 in Van Nuys, later sitting in a few times with the rootsy trio who’ve backed artists such as Tower Of Power, Lucinda Williams, Richard Thompson and Mike Ness.
Way, who produced the soundtrack to the Laurel Canyon music documentary “Echo In The Canyon,” introduced him to its house band at the premiere, and they and a third group — who has a name we can’t print but includes the rhythm section from Elvis Costello’s Imposters — also joined the sessions.
His 2018 album, “While the Young Punks Dance,” was an introspective, gentle set of songs. For the new one, Bratton says he wanted to move people in a different way.
“This is more like, ‘Get up and boogie,’” he says. “I wanted to get up and dance. I didn’t want to another of the contemplative ones.”
The lead single, “Chan Chu Toad,” arrived after Bratton got curious about the ornamental toad that had occupied his house for years.
“One day I was looking at the thing and I decided to look it up, what it was, and I started reading the story,” he says of the Chinese legend about a wife who steals an elixir of immortality from her husband and is turned into a toad.
“I didn’t sit down specifically to write it — I never do that,” Bratton says. “They just come to me, and all of a sudden that information was in my head.
“And it’s so ‘Creed’ — the character Creed from ‘The Office,’” he says of the topic of the tune. “It’s weird, a very odd song. It’s like Steely Dan meets I don’t know what.”
The opening track on the album, “Mose Was a Runner,” is also a nod to “The Office,” inspired partly by the departure of writer-producer Mike Schur — who played the often-running, always weird character Mose Schrute — to launch “Parks & Recreation.”
His Grass Roots past also surfaces, though not in a predictable way. He covers “Temptation Eyes,” a single the band released after Bratton left the band. Bratton does a slowed-down arrangement that he first came up with before sitting in with other members of the Grass Roots for the Whisky A Go Go’s 35th-anniversary show in 1999.
“One day I’m just kind of learning the song, and I come up with this finger-picking part to it,” Bratton says. “It totally changes it, because it’s a driving song. So then I incorporate it into my set because I think the only (Grass Roots) song I would play when I was touring was ‘Where Were You?’ and ‘Live For Today.’
“I think anybody that’s a Grass Roots fan and knows that song is going to be very intrigued by that.”
Becoming Creed
Now 77, Bratton was born William Charles Schneider. When his father was killed during World War II, his mother remarried and now he was Chuck Ertmoed, which wasn’t an easy name for an elementary school boy to carry.
“Young boys who weren’t so cool would come up to go, ‘Hey Urrrrrp-moed!’ and put their finger down their throat so that they’re throwing up,” Bratton says.
Still, it was his name when he headed overseas with the folk band the Young Californians, a trek that led to Israel where he met future Grass Roots’ bandmate Warren Entner at a festival and exchanged phone numbers.
After working in Israel on the Kirk Douglas picture “Cast A Giant Shadow,” Bratton left the Middle East to hitchhike to Berlin and London, stopping for a few days in Athens. While there, he spent a day hanging out with a couple of fellow travelers from Oregon.
“I told them that I had this vision, I saw myself up on stage playing guitar, and I said I see myself being very successful doing this,” Bratton says. “They said, ‘What’s your name?’”
After telling them, they suggested that Chuck Ertmoed definitely was not a rock star name.
“I said, ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ and they said why don’t you make up a new one,” Bratton says. “We’d started drinking ouzo by then, no, retsina, godawful stuff.
“The next morning I wake up in a horrible hangover,” he says. “My liver is there, you know, drinking a cup of coffee, like, ‘Can I get back in your body now?’ And there on the table, I see a tablecloth.
“We had taken the tablecloth and all these names were on there, crossed out, except for one that was circled with stars around the edge. So I took my knife out and I cut that piece out and put it in the bottom of my rucksack.”
And then he forgot all about it until a year later when he was about to sign a contract with Dunhill Records as part of the Grass Roots.
“I signed, ‘Creed Bratton,’” he says. “Everyone looked like, ‘What the hell?’ I said, ‘This is my new name.’ At that moment, the ‘odd Creed’ reputation started happening.”
Becoming ‘Creed’
When “The Office” began, Bratton wasn’t guaranteed he’d ever get any lines; he was there just to sit at a desk and help create the illusion of a full office.
“So I wrote the character. I spent like a week writing little bits, once I was there on camera in the background,” he says. “Even though my computer didn’t work, I’m down below making notes, and then I shot it.
“The original premise was that Creed from the Grass Roots stayed wild and crazy,” Bratton says. “He had a blackout period, he ended up on a Greyhound bus, next thing he knew he’s passed out in a dumpster in Scranton.”
Found by Ed Truck, the Dunder Mifflin branch manager before Steve Carell’s Michael Scott, Creed was given a job and despite being horrible at it and so weird and intimidating that everyone decides to ignore him.
“That was my premise,” Bratton says. “Then I ad-libbed a bunch of stuff, sang a song a cappella about the Incredible Hulk.
“They told me it was very funny, and then the writers just took it and ran with it.”