Achieving the apparent peak of success at two different times in your life, decades apart, is a rare professional feat that few people can boast, but a “reluctant rock star” of the 1960s who turned into a cult-favorite TV show icon is certainly one of them. From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, this Los Angeles musician played in a rising folk-rock group that capitalized on the jangly, sunshiney soundscape of the Summer of Love.

By the mid-2000s, his band’s legacy had undoubtedly contributed to the legacy of 1960s-70s music. But it certainly wasn’t the most memorable name out of the lot. And besides, the musician who fronted this not-as-popular band had landed a gig as an actor on a somewhat quirky mockumentary sitcom that first aired in 2005.

From Midcentury Rock Star To Cult-Favorite TV Show Icon

The Grass Roots (or Grassroots) added songs like “Let’s Live For Today” and “Midnight Confessions” to the 1960s and ‘70s folk-rock canon. Their jangly, sunshine pop combined with a healthy dose of psychedelia was the perfect sonic backdrop to the Summer of Love, which just so happened to take place the same year that Creed Bratton joined the band, which had already undergone several lineup changes by that point. This iteration proved to be incredibly commercially successful for the Grassroots.

The band was covering popular music and enjoying relatively high positions on the charts. The iconic Wrecking Crew played most of the instrumentation on their albums. And while this adds a sense of cohesiveness between the Grassroots and other music from that time, which also featured this particular group of session players, the decision to have other people play the songs became a point of contention for the band. Conflicts surrounding this issue eventually came to a head, and depending on which bandmate you ask, Bratton left the band either by his own choice or because his bandmates asked him to leave.

In any case, Bratton wasn’t worried. Music wasn’t his first choice, anyway. “The truth is, I studied drama in school. I always planned on being an actor. I played music to make money, and then the whole Grass Roots thing happened. It took a while for the whole [acting] thing to take off. But when it did, it went bigger than I could have imagined,” he told Guitar World.

A Life Story That Is Just So Perfectly Creed Bratton

The “bigger than he could have imagined” that Creed Bratton mentioned to Guitar World is largely his tenure as Creed Bratton on the hit NBC mockumentary sitcom, The Office. Fans of the show will recognize Bratton as the odd, off-putting, and wholly inappropriate Quality Assurance (quabity?) Manager who eats mung beans off a wet paper towel in his desk drawer. And as he demonstrates several times throughout the series, he’s a surprisingly good musician.

That last characteristic of this zany cult-favorite TV icon is because Creed Bratton was, of course, a 1960s rock star. And love it or hate it, The Office now has a cult following with fans continuing to watch the show years after its final episode aired, which means Bratton is now more famous than he ever was during his time in the Grassroots. Bratton called the experience “pretty extraordinary. Once the show became a hit, people started going down the rabbit hole. ‘Oh, my God!’ He really was in the Grass Roots!”

So, Bratton got his true professional wish: to be an actor, and even better, a cult-favorite TV icon. As for his time being the “reluctant rockstar,” Bratton said, “I didn’t like getting high. But I had to do it. I was part of the deal. So, I joined in. I’d wake up in the morning and go, ‘I gotta do drugs again today; I gotta throw a TV out the window again today.’ I didn’t want to. But I soldiered on.” Pausing, he adds, “That’s my stage bit. Of course, it was great! Are you kidding? It was the ‘60s. The Summer of Love. And I was in a hit band. In a perfect world, all young men in their twenties would have experienced what I went through.”

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