By L. Kent Wolgamott
The guys in Nickelback weren’t dreaming about selling millions of records and filling arenas when they started playing together in tiny Hanna, Alberta, back in 1995.
“We had no idea what this even looked like and what it meant to be winning in the music business,” said bassist Mike Kroeger. “When you're 19 years old, and you're trying to figure out how to play the instrument and maybe get a couple of people to stop and see you play at your local community center or even just come to the garage and pop a couple of beers
and watch, you're not thinking to yourself about arenas.”
Nor did Kroeger, his younger brother, singer, and songwriter Chad and keyboardist/backing vocalist Ryan Peake have a clue about the reality of the “rock star” life they’ve led since 2005’s chart-topping album “All The Right Reasons” propelled them out of the clubs and opening act slots to arena headliners.
“I'm, right now, sitting on a tour bus that I travel on by myself,” he said. “My blessings are so many that I couldn't possibly try to count them with you. I'm so happy and fortunate to be where I am. But there's no chance any of us had any idea what this was going to look like as we went along.”
And, Nickelback certainly couldn’t have predicted one of the elements that fueled its rise to popularity – Napster and the other “peer-to-peer” file-sharing apps that emerged on the music scene in 1999 -- just before the release of “The State,” the Canadian quartet’s third album – and he band’s first to go gold.
“We were just starting to come up when Napster was just starting to come up and that whole dust-up with Metallica and some of the other artists and societies going on,” Kroeger said. “We were one of the most downloaded and probably uploaded artists on Napster when we were just coming up."
“To be honest, I think that the timing of being the new band at the genesis of this new sort of interface with fans served us tremendously,” he said. “I don't think we'd be where we are now without the whole illegal file sharing.” Napster, Kroeger said, let Nickelback build a relationship with fans who wouldn’t have paid for the music and helped spread the band’s songs beyond radio and the tight selection of the band’s hits that would get played a few times a day.
A quarter century later, however, Kroeger has some issues with what arose when Napster undermined the industry by providing free music–streaming services, which largely do the same.
“What that kind of relationship has done to the music business since Napster, I'm not as happy about,” he said. “It's essentially hollowed out about 65% of the capital in the music industry. There's no sort of licensing."
“It's a very rare thing to see a label or somebody else actually investing money to develop talent now because there's just no money,” Kroger said. “That exploratory capital just doesn't exist anymore.”
As Kroeger talked about the growth of Nickelback – “I wouldn't want to sound too self-aggrandizing to say evolution, like we're kind of closing in on some kind of perfection or something” – he turned to speaking of how Chad Kroeger has gotten ever better as a songwriter. “I think he’s got it down,” he said.
Chad Kroeger’s songwriting, Nickelback’s now two-decade-plus experience, and the versatility within its music – hard rock, metal, ballads, love songs, and nostalgic songs -- have combined to make the band better, record by record, year by year, Kroeger said.
These qualities can be heard on “Get Rollin’” -- the band’s new album and the songs from it that get nightly showcases in Nickelback’s set.
“We’re doing three every night on the tour, stuck in there with the old standbys,” Kroeger said. “It’s not like we put them into a block together where everybody’s gonna go buy a beer...We want to keep our momentum up on stage and keep people excited.”
While it rarely, if ever, makes headlines, Nickelback is a band led by brothers, who, defying the norm set by The Kinks and Oasis, have managed to get along since day one.
“Truthfully, not everybody can do that,” Kroeger said. “We all know about the bands that have brothers in them that have made the papers or whatever. There was one point really early in our career I'll never forget. We'd gone overseas. I remember where I was, in London. I got this phone call in the middle of the night. It was a person on our record label’s team. They were suggesting Chad and I get into a public fistfight in London to drum up some noise. I was just like, ‘Okay, I know you're, I know you think you're trying to help, but that's a level that we will not stoop to, and that's it.’”
And the fact that Nickelback fills arenas night after night is evidence that thousands of people like the band, for which Kroeger is grateful. “Just to hear that phrase – It never gets old – filling arenas,” Kroeger said. “It's an incredible, humbling gift”.
Nickelback will be performing at Darien Lake Performing Arts Center on Wednesday.
