Nickelback strikes gold

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/01/2002 (8667 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IN a sleepy farm community in the middle of Alberta’s dinosaur country, they’re talking about putting up a sign at the edge of town: “Welcome to Hanna, Home of Nickelback.”

This hamlet of 3,000 is on the pop-culture map thanks to the biggest “new” rock band in North America, a blue-collar quartet that spent much of the past five years criss-crossing the Canadian Prairies.

Nickelback is the first Canadian act to score a No. 1 single in both Canada and the U.S. simultaneously since Winnipeg’s Guess Who turned the trick three decades ago.

How You Remind Me, which enjoys airplay on pop, rock and video stations alike, has allowed Nickelback to move more than four million copies of its third album, Silver Side Up, and sell out a Canadian tour that stops at Winnipeg Arena on Tuesday night.

“We just came up with that magical little song that sticks in everybody’s head,” singer-guitarist Chad Kroeger, 27, says over the phone from Victoria, B.C.

“We’ve smashed every record we ever wanted to smash or even knew existed with this song. But we’re the same people we were last year.”

To chart Nickelback’s meteoric rise from Prairie hoseheads to MTV darlings, you have to go back to the mid-1990s, when Kroeger, his bassist brother Mike, lead guitarist Ryan Peake and Edmonton drummer Ryan Vikedal left Alberta for Vancouver. They formed Nickelback in 1996, taking the name from the change Mike Kroeger had to return to Starbucks customers every time he sold a $1.95 cup of coffee.

A 1997 debut CD, Curb, earned a buzz in Vancouver, where rock radio station CFOX was the first to champion the band. The following year, Winnipeg’s Power 97 FM started spinning a song called Little Friend and Nickelback was off to the races.

“Figuratively speaking, they made a lot of noise for an indie band. They had really strong hooks,” recalls Frank Andrews, Power 97’s music director at the time.

“I heard the track on (former Power DJ) Breno DeLima’s indie show and we added it the next day. In hindsight, it was the obvious thing to do, but there weren’t many rock stations playing independent bands.”

Both CFOX and Power remained on board in 1999 when Nickelback put out The State, giving first single Leader Of Men the sort of airplay normally enjoyed only by heavyweight major-label acts. The initial, 5,000-copy run of The State quickly sold out, giving EMI Music Canada a good reason to sign the Alberta boys.

But outside of Western Canada, Nickelback remained a tough sell. Newspaper critics dismissed the quartet as a backward-looking, third-generation grunge band, while Canadian radio programmers simply couldn’t have cared less.

That all changed when Leader Of Men became a hit in the U.S. and Nickelback went on tour with the likes of Creed, Sevendust and 3 Doors Down. Suddenly, Nickelback became the Canadian band everybody wanted to own.

“We had (radio) people who weren’t interested in the band all of a sudden go, ‘Oh, you guys just went Top 10 in America? There’s some validity. We’ll play you.’ It was absolutely pathetic,” says Kroeger, who has yet to mellow in the face of six-figure royalties.

“They needed not only other Canadian program directors, but American program directors to do it first. To me, that’s a sure-fire indicator these people don’t have a clue and don’t deserve their jobs.”

By the time Silver Side Up arrived in record stores — on Sept. 11, 2001, of all horrific release dates — Nickelback had a continent-wide following. The disc sold almost 200,000 copies worldwide within its first week, despite mass consumer panic over the terrorist attacks on the U.S.

Today, as that tally nears four million, the Albertans are playing sold-out arena shows across Western Canada, following in the footsteps of their teenage heroes, Metallica.

Nickelback has become the latest in a long line of no-nonsense, blue-collar acts from out-of-the-way Canadian places to achieve rock stardom — a lineage that began with The Guess Who in the ’60s, continued into the ’70s with B.T.O. and was revived by The Tragically Hip in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

Chad Kroeger likes the idea of carrying the torch for blue-collar guitar rock, largely because he still considers himself an ordinary guy from small-town Alberta.

Sure, he’s learning to deal with autograph-seekers interrupting his lunches and suddenly having enough money to consider charity projects on the scale of water purification systems for villages in South Africa.

But most of all, he’s thrilled to make the folks in Hanna, Home Of Nickelback, proud.

“It’s kind of funny, because some of the people who want to erect the sign are probably some of the same people who wanted to run me out of town five years ago. I was a bad kid.

“I’m sure there are several people in that town who find this very amusing.”

Nickelback plays Winnipeg Arena on Tuesday, Jan. 29, with Default. The concert is sold out.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca