 | Nickelback: Mint Condition
 | Nickelback
| If you would've told the four members of Vancouver's Nickelback that their third album, Silver Side Up, would bust onto the Billboard albums chart at #2 — besting new efforts by Bob Dylan and Mariah Carey — they would have laughed you all the way back over the border. These are the same guys who, just a few years ago, had to go into record stores and bug clerks to restock their independent album on shelves.
Now, however, the grungy quartet — singer/guitarist Chad Kroeger, guitarist Ryan Peake, bassist Mike Kroeger and drummer Ryan Vikedal — are having the last laugh. After touring almost nonstop with the likes of Creed, Fuel and 3 Doors Down since the early 2000 U.S. release of their previous album, The State, Nickelback's time has come. They have a radio hit with the snarling breakup song "How You Remind Me," and, as Peake and Kroeger told Jeff Cornell just before their big chart debut, they're ready for the roller coaster of rock-and-roll fame.
MTV: For a big, breakthrough hit, the video for "How You Remind Me" is not very flashy. Chad Kroeger: We brought the Brothers Strause on board [to direct]. They did special effects for "Titanic." They're absolute special-effects wizards. They said, "Let's try something different. Let's do something a little more organic." We're huge special-effects buffs, so we were like, "No, no, no. Not now! [Do that on] someone else's video. We want [lots of action scenes]." They were like, "No, no, no. We'll do this in a cinematic style. We'll do it letterbox." So, we have this very organic video that's about a relationship. It's about me and this girl who is haunting me. I [finally] get a clue at the climax of the song and give her the push, like, "Please, just get out of my life."
MTV: Do people come up to you and talk about the personal connection they feel with the song? Kroeger: Absolutely. It makes me feel like we're doing something right. I could tell [there was something special about it] when I brought the song to the band. You start arranging it, and you get that [feeling] in your stomach. You're like, "OK, this is good — this is really good." You can tell. Every part of that song was thought out, and a lot of effort was put into it. However, it did fly together very fast.
Ryan Peake: When people relate to the story or tell us how they see it, it's cool. People like having their stories told. When you listen to that song, you're like, "Oh yeah, I know ..."
Kroeger: "... how that feels." And, for some reason, women like bashing the person I sing about in the song.
MTV: You've had a very slow buildup to get where you are now. Are you ready for this thing to get huge?
Kroeger: I don't know if we're ready. I'd like to try. I've got my ticket for the roller coaster. I'm ready to get on.
Peake: I've got my helmet. We're used to this slow, gradual build.
Kroeger: That way, you get time to adjust to everything. It's been a nice, constant uphill [ride]. It's never gone [swirls his finger upwards].
MTV: "Never Again" really rocks, but it sounds like it has a serious side, too.
Kroeger: That song is about domestic violence and being in an abusive situation where the head of the family is exceeding the limits of his power. [He's] abusing everybody around him. It is not autobiographical, but I've seen the damage that domestic violence does in families around me. I've seen it absolutely rip them apart. A lot of people can identify with it. That's what makes it a good song.
MTV: Talk about your songwriting process. Do you constantly work on new material?
Peake: We were just jamming on a couple of new songs in the back of the bus this morning.
Kroeger: We probably have another six already, and this album is just getting released. We're going to start performing these new songs soon. Once again there's going to be brand new material that kids are going to be taping and making into MP3 files. People are going to be like, "I can't wait until they record that song." That's the best thing, when you can play a new song for the crowd and realize, "OK, they really didn't like that one." Most of the time we're pretty lucky, because we're getting good responses and the songs wind up translating well on tape. Some songs will just bowl over the crowd. Then we'll record them and it's like, "Nope, it's not working."
MTV: You mentioned that you're already working on a home video/DVD collection.
Kroeger: Yeah, it's being edited. I went onstage every night during "Money Bought" and shot footage from every place we played, from 35,000-seat venues with Stone Temple Pilots to our shows headlining 2,500-seaters. There's tons of shenanigans on there — just us being absolute morons, boneheads.
Peake: I thought most of it was pretty classy, actually.
Kroeger: I have him on tape crawling out of the tour manager's bunk completely naked.
Peake: That was staged, by the way.
MTV: When your albums come out, are you the kind of guys that will go to the store and check them out? Maybe even buy one?
Peake: I'll never buy one.
Kroeger: You look kind of silly going into the store and buying a copy of your own CD.
Peake: Although we do go in there and ask, "Hey, have you got the new Nickelback album yet?" And if they ask, "Who's that?" we'll say, "A new band out of Canada. They're fantastic."
Kroeger: As an independent band, when we were distributing our own stuff, we would go into the stores and make sure the records were on the racks. If it was completely sold out, we'd go up to the front and make sure they restocked it. That's been a hard habit to break. ... We've slowly stopped doing that, but even halfway through our recent tours, we'd pop into a couple of record stores. If the album wasn't there, we were on the horn right away with the label going, "There's no copies in this store! They're trying to get a hold of it. Why don't they have it?" We were completely being the watchdogs.
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