Nickelback, left to right: Daniel Adair, Chad Kroeger, Mike Kroeger, Ryan Peake Photo by Michael Muller

By Paul Freeman [June 2015 Interview]

Nickelback’s lyrics have given ample attention to partying - sex, drugs, booze and rock ’n’ roll. But when reached by phone for this interview, the band’s bassist, Mike Kroeger, was immersed in another kind of celebration - his daughter’s 12th birthday party, with his son’s Beatles cover band doing the entertaining.

Twenty years ago, when the Canadian band got started in Vancouver, they took their name from a phrase Kroeger repeated endlessly as a Starbuck’s barista - “Here’s your nickel back.” But in the music business, the rockers have been anything but a nickel-and-dime operation. Their worldwide sales have exceeded 50 million units. They’ve made an indelible impression with songs like “How You Remind Me.” They’ve received nine Grammy nominations, a People’s Choice Award and a dozen Juno Awards.

Quite a list of achievements for Kroeger, who grew up in the small Alberta town of Hanna. He, brother Chad (lead singer/guitarist), their cousin, drummer Brandon Kroeger (who later left and was replaced by Daniel Adair) and keyboardist/gujitarist Ryan Peake formed a cover band, The Village Idiots.

But they had a smart way of coming up with original hard rock material filled with melodic hooks and catchy lyrics.

Nickelback’s latest album, “No Fixed Address,” still rocks hard, as on “Satellite," but offers diversity musically, including a number, “Got Me Runnin’ Round,” that features rapper Flo Rida. And there’s a funk-fest called “She Keeps Me Up” driven by Kroeger’s bass lines.

In the song “Edge of a Revolution” Kroeger, who doesn’t usually get very involved in the lyric-writing, injects powerful messages.

We reached Mike Kroeger at his home in Hawaii, as the band was on a break from its “No Fixed Address” tour. Unfortunately, Nickelback was forced to cancel its remaining North American dates, due to Chad Kroeger’s vocal cord surgery. Hopefully they’ll come roaring back soon.

POP CULTURE CLASSICS:
So how’s it going, Mike?

MIKE KROEGER:
Pretty good. The shell shock is wearing off. We had a surprise birthday party for my daughter’s 12th birthday last night. It’s good that I’m talking to you, because I’m getting out of cleaning up [laughs]. The parents are finally showing up to pick up these girls. We had a houseful of them. And they’re finally starting to filter out. But the house is no less loud and chaotic, because there’s a Beatles cover band rehearsing beneath me. My son has a group of guys that he plays with. They’re between 11 and 14. Three guys. My son is the fourteen-year-old. And they’re learning all the Beatles. They’re just obsessed with it.

PCC:
So I guess the whole lifestyle has changed rather dramatically from the early days of the band.

KROEGER:
Yes. To go from what is essentially abject poverty and homelessness [laughs] and choosing to buy picks and strings versus food, to here, has been quite a ride, quite a transition.

PCC:
But in addition to that, the band’s lyrical celebration of all the partying, that has all changed, apparently?

KROEGER:
Well, it’s just a different kind of party. I mean, last night, we were having a blast. I had a few cocktails last night, too, no different from any other party. The only differences were, number one, I didn’t play. My son’s band was the entertainment last night. We just threw open the garage doors and they kicked it until legally we had to stop - being the good, responsible parents we are. I was cooking and hosting. And yeah, it’s a different kind of party, but it’s still fun. And to have a house band that plays pretty good Beatles covers is pretty awesome, too.

PCC:
You’re personally no longer based in Vancouver?

KROEGER:
No, I live in Hawaii now.

PCC:
Heaven, eh?

KROEGER:
Yeah. Alice Cooper said it’s the closest thing you can get to heaven.

PCC:
“No Fixed Address” was recorded in many locations, including Hawaii?

KROEGER:
It was. There’s two different locations where we recorded here. We were in the process of selling this really, really big house, probably the nicest house I’ll ever own. And my family moved out of the house and moved to another part of the island, closer to my kids’ school, which was the whole purpose of selling the house. And after we moved out, Nickelback moved in and we basically just moved into the house as a band and recorded there. But the best part was that we were just putting the finishing touches on, when the house was basically being handed over, so essentially, we were loading gear out the back door, when the new owners were walking in the front door [laughs].

PCC:
You recorded in Europe and B.C. as well?

KROEGER:
Yeah. And in Los Angeles, as well. We recorded in a lot of places.

PCC:
The multiple recording locations, did that have an effect on the end results?

KROEGER:
Well, yeah, for us, I think personally and mentally, emotionally, it was good to keep changing up the scenery, just to keep it fresh. And I think that came through in the material, too, because we didn’t do like the studio grind, where sometimes you run into a block and you’ve got a studio locked up for months, so you just sit there until you figure it out. It just sucks. Sometimes it’s just not coming. And the inspiration isn’t coming. And the creativity is stalled. But you’re still paying. And you’re still stuck in the studio. A lot of bands would just go, “Screw it, I don’t care if I’m going to go into the studio and not get anything done.” We have a more no-nonsense attitude, where it’s like, “Holy crap, as long as we’re paying for this and we’ve got this thing booked, we might as well be here.” So we just continue to hammer our heads against the wall until it comes out.

But in this case, it was better, because we would record for like three weeks and it would seem to me that, whenever those kinds of blocks started to appear, any kind of stalling, or any kind of slowdown in creativity, it was time to move to the next place. And we would have like a three or four-week break between locations, for logistics to get everything moved around. And also to take a little time to recharge. So what happened was, we kind of recorded like six, eight, 10 different sessions. And it kept it fresh and exciting and kind of new all the time, too.

PCC:
And there’s a lot of diversity on the album.

KROEGER:
There is. We wanted to try some stylistically different material. So we gave it a shot. Obviously it’s a risk to step outside the box that you create for yourself. But it was good to do. I was, personally, a little resistant to some of it at times. But after, you’re sort of accepting it and just going, “Hey, if it isn’t any good, we won’t put it on the record. Let’s just go with it and try it and give it a chance.” And we did that. And it became things that I liked. Somehow, I didn’t want to like the fact that we were going to have a rapper. I didn’t want to like that idea. But then when I heard the material, it was great. At that point, it’s just an ego thing, right? You’re being resistant just because your certainties are being shaken up a little bit. I think that’s a good thing. I usually like to be taken out of my comfort zone. In that case, I had a more apprehensive reaction than even I expected.

PCC:
The politics in “Edge of a “Revolution,” did that song just came at a time when you had a lot you wanted to say?

KROEGER:
Well, see, I don’t typically have a big role in writing lyrics. I have contributed and helped out and been in those writing sessions. But this was the first time where I actually got to say something, because a lot of the things that are in that song about things like mass surveillance and injustice, or just the nature of living in a police state, those are things that I always wanted to say, but I never really had a forum for it.

And some may argue that Nickelback isn’t really the forum for that anyway. And I understand that. I don’t have any illusions about us getting accepted as the next Rage Against The Machine. Don’t be ridiculous. But just because you play in a mainstream rock band doesn’t mean you don’t know what’s happening.

PCC:
You mentioned taking a risk. Is that a lot easier now that the band has had such tremendous commercial success? You feel you don’t have to prove that aspect anymore?

KROEGER:
Yeah, I suppose maybe we would have been a little more tentative earlier on. And maybe a little more wary of testing out new things. There is that possibility. But we do come from a lot of different stylistic places. Each guy in the band has a different sort of background of music. And we can bring that all together. I personally went through a period of time where I listened to James Brown like five years straight. That’s all I listened to. So when it came time to record a funk-flavored song, like “She Keeps Me Up,” I was comfortable in that, because, not only had I listened to all of that, I learned what those guys were doing. I learned the music. I was a student of the music. So to play something and make it feel like that wasn’t too tall of an order. I didn’t have to go to school to learn how to do that, because it was a part of my education in getting this far.

PCC:
As far as backgrounds, what was like, growing up in Hanna, Alberta?

KROEGER:
I don’t want to paint it as being too Rockwellian, because it’s not, simply [laughs]. I don’t think anyplace is really Rockwellian. It was a small town of less than three thousand people, out in the country, a very, very long distance from anything like a city. The nearest city was Calgary, which is about 150 miles away. Saskatoon, in the other direction, is about 150 miles. And essentially nothing else out there, as far as cities go. There’s plenty of little towns and each town has its own kind of thing going on. Everybody essentially knows everybody. Everybody tries to get along and be friends. But as you know, that’s simply not possible in any case, whether it’s 10 people or 3,000.

Nevertheless it is sort of like one big family or some kind of team-like environment. And you can always tell when the people who aren’t from around there are in town, because everybody’s head comes up, because they see cars they don’t recognize or people they don’t recognize. So it was very small. But we developed a lot of friendships. And there was a lot of free time, which led some kids to get bored and get in trouble. That’s just what happens, when kids get bored - they get in trouble. And music was a place for me to hide out from that boredom. I could just sink myself into the music and learn about it and learn how to play it and love it and listen to it.

PCC:
And who were some of your main influences, when you began playing?

KROEGER:
I think that, in the beginning, I listened to a lot of Bowie and I listened to a lot of Pink Floyd and I listened to a lot of Jimi Hendrix and The Doors and that sort of stuff. And then from there, came Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, The Stones, the things you just need to know, you need to learn. And My Mom was a big music fan also. So there was always music in the house, whether it was a piano lesson or just something getting played, a record, believe it or not. My Mom had a record collection. To think about that now is kind of… I guess vinyl is having a resurgence. But in the last few years, it was preposterous to think that people actually had record collections. But my Mom did.

And I listened to Led Zeppelin for the first time on vinyl. And I’ll never forget hearing “In Through The Out Door” or “Good Times, Bad Times” as some of my first experiences with Led Zeppelin on vinyl. I just remember now, putting a record on the turntable, and, because I didn’t want anybody else to hear it, I would just plug in some headphones and just completely blow my brains out, whether it was Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin or what have you. That was something that I recall really, really dearly, is just being alone with music. It wasn’t necessarily a group thing. It was something I liked to explore myself.

PCC:
Playing as a cover band, was that valuable, in terms of getting your chops down?

KROEGER:
For sure, just learning how to play with other people, learning how to play in front of an audience, just learning how to be a professional. It’s kind of like any other kind of training, like probably military training or whatever, you go out there and you train for when everything goes wrong. And when you’re playing in a cover band and you’re at the beginning of your career and your equipment is probably not top-notch and it’s not well maintained, because you’re not maintaining it.

And you don’t have a support staff to make sure everything works. And you get out there and, essentially, everything does go wrong. Like the shit just breaks. And it’s valuable to go through that. It is a valuable journey to take on, basically just going out there and seeing what can go wrong. It turns out everything can go wrong [laughs].

I’ve seen and been a part of seeing everything fail in some way on stage. Something breaking. People losing their voices in the middle of a song. A lighting rig falls over. P.A. blows up. The power gets blown, the entire bar goes black and the show’s over. Whatever - I’ve been there and done that. There’s nothing like playing in front of a bar full of drunk people and then the strap on your bass guitar breaks and your instrument falls on the floor. It’s a unique position to be in. It only surprises you once [laughs], because the horror is that deep that you remember it forever and you kind of have this ingrained response after that to learn how to control that situation, by like sitting down, when the strap’s going [laughs]. All those lessons are there.

PCC:
How long did it take you and your brother to figure out that this wasn’t just fun in the garage, that music was going to be your path in life?

KROEGER:
Realizing that it’s your path in life, it’s like a lot of things, it’s a decision, it’s a choice, because, at any time in the process, you could just go - this isn’t for me, I’m going to stop. And that path could have been realized, but you decided to go in another direction. We never really said this is all we ever want to do. But we just kept doing it. It wasn’t like there was a goal or a destination or some type of plan. It was just, “Let’s keep going and see what happens.” And to be honest with you, we’re still there. We still are just keeping going and seeing what happens. Things just keep happening. [Laughs] It’s great!

PCC:
And how much was there a conscious balance of what satisfied the band musically, with what you thought would appeal to the audience?

KROEGER:
Well. that’s something where we kind of learned early on. When we were fans of artists - and sometimes it was a local artist and sometimes it was a big artist - when you’re a fan, sometimes you can be let down, when the artist that you’re a fan of takes a direction that’s so self-indulgent that it just completely throws you off. That artist may have gotten a lot of satisfaction from going in that direction that’s completely out of left field. A band like U2, for instance, they’ve decided to reinvent themselves on every album. Or Madonna who just does a completely different iteration. For people who become a fan, because of an album, when you come out with something completely different and in a polar opposite kind of way, in some cases, people can be alienated.

We realized that early on, that this isn’t really about us. If we really wanted to play self-indulgent music for ourselves, we wouldn’t have recorded it. We wouldn’t have tried to get it on the radio. We wouldn’t have gone on tour. Because, if it’s not about the people, then what’s the point of even putting it out there? That’s our opinion. We realize that our duty is to our fans, is to rock fans and to give them what they come to expect from us and to not get too self-indulgent. Just don’t get so into that self-indulgence that you forget what it is you’re doing, which is trying to keep your people happy, keep the fans happy with what you’re creating.

And larger, it’s being true to yourself as an artist. What gets you where you want to be or gets you fans is the true expression of the artist. And I think, when you start to overthink it too much, that’s when it can go sideways. And we catch ourselves overthinking all the time [laughs]. And you have to always take the 20,000-foot view every once in a while and just zoom out for a second and go, “Oh, wait! We’ve gone too far afield here We have to rein in, rein back.” Otherwise, our people are going to be confused and probably not very happy.

PCC:
The fact that critics haven’t always been fair to the band, do you find that to be irrelevant, because you’re making music for the fans, not for the critics?

KROEGER:
That is the truth. I think making music for critics is probably about as logical as making music for yourself and putting it out in the mainstream. If somebody did want to be a critics’ darling - which I’ve never heard anybody say as an aspiration [laughs] - if somebody were to want to do that, the sad truth is that it’s not going to work. People develop opinions. And their opinions are going to be based on what they need to write. A lot of, like you say, the unfairness maybe, fair or unfair, I guess that’s debatable, critics or music journalists or whatever, the people that we’ve kind of crossed paths with over the years, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, everybody’s just trying to earn a living. It’s not like everybody’s Hemingway, just out there killing fish and having bar fights and living for the art, man. It’s just not like that. People are trying to pay their bills. It’s a job. It’s an occupation. It’s your profession. And I don’t get too confused with the feelings associated with that sort of stuff, because, frankly, a lot of the people who get asked to write about us or do an interview with one of us in the band or review one of our records, would just simply rather not. I haven’t had people say it to me personally, but I have read it or seen it in video reviews of our stuff, where somebody will just say straight up, “My editor made me do this. I don’t want to do this… So here we go.” [Laughs] So prepare for an objective view. But everybody is just trying to make their way. Like I said, I don’t get screwed up about feelings, just because everybody’s just trying to do their job and to feed their families and their bills and get through. And not everybody’s going to be the Siskel and Ebert of music journalism, you know? Maybe you get to be a taste-maker, maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re a house painter in six months. It’s all part of the journey. Not everybody is this for life. Everything is temporary.

PCC:
Basically the haters hating, that’s something you can shrug off or laugh off?

KROEGER:
Well, I’m sure you’ve noticed, haters can find a way to hate anything. I don’t feel all that special [laughs]. To get hated on by the haters, it’s not that exclusive a club… at all. It just means maybe people know who you are or what you do, because otherwise, somebody would be hating on you and everybody else would be like, “Who’s that?” But if they know who you are, it makes it a lot easier.

PCC:
The band name coming from your days at Starbuck’s, at that point in your life, were you even dreaming of the kind of success and longevity the band has actually achieved?

KROEGER:
Well, you know, again, I come back to this, and I’m sorry if I keep banging this drum, but I never really made any presumptions about getting played on the radio or getting to go on tour or getting played on the radio twice… You know what I mean? None of that was a part of my thought process. I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to play music in some fashion. And whether that was being a studio musician or being a journeyman touring musician with someone else or maybe I’m in a band that goes on to have some degree of achievement, then so be it. But I’ve never really read too much into it.

We just have this, I guess it’s the Albertan work ethic. You just keep your head down and work hard and you get where you get. Your journey takes you where you end up. And a lot of that is not really within your control. Yeah, you make calls, you make decisions and you can have a lot of course changes, but for the most part, there’s a lot in being an artist that’s really out of your control. It’s in the hands of the people, of the public, of the music consumer, whether you’re going to fly or not. Because people can make people play things on the radio, but they can’t make people like them. And if people don’t like something, they won’t listen to it. So we just always knew that it wasn’t for us to control or aim for. It was going to be what it was.

PCC:
Beyond the work ethic, it seems like the band has never succumbed to the whole rock star attitude, taking themselves overly seriously? Is that also due to the small town roots? Why do you think that’s been the case?

KROEGER:
I think having brothers in the band helps quite a bit, because neither me or Chad gets too far out of hand before the other one corrects [laughs], for lack of a better term. And I think that’s good. The other thing that we have, I’ve been married since right when this band started. I got married shortly after we began. My guitar player married the girl that he had been dating since high school. So we had, us two, anyway, my brother has had a different experience, but the two of us were surrounded by people that were there before the thing went off.

Because when you do sort of have some measure of achievement, a lot of people come around. It’s good to be able to recognize who’s for real and who’s not. I think that that helps a lot, too, because a lot of that kind of getting lost in the ego or whatever can be something that a lot of sycophants and hangers-on can really exacerbate. And when no one ever says no to you, sooner or later, you turn into a f-ckin’ Tyrannosaurus Rex - “No one says no to me!” I’ve met those people. I know those people. I never want to deal with those people. I’ve met and talked with those kind of people and tried to befriend them and I’ve had to just let them walk, because they’re gone. They’re lost. And I’m not going to be able to bring them back.

We never have come off the ground that far that we couldn’t get put right back. One good example - and it’s kind of something that could be a stereotype or whatever - but I remember very fondly doing a 30-month world tour, screaming fans everywhere, complete mayhem, at the sort of high-water mark of our career, and then getting home, getting off the tour bus and my wife met me with my son who was in diapers still at the time and she said, “Hey, here you go, his diaper needs to be changed.” And it’s like, “Wait a minute! I’m a…. Ohhhhhhh, yeah. I’m just a guy.” [Laughs]. It was really good for me. It’s good to have people around to call you on your shit. I think it’s really important.

PCC:
At this point, what are the most challenging and most rewarding aspects of life as a musician?

KROEGER:
I can tell you the most challenging thing is just having to be away from my family. And that has been the most challenging thing for a long time. It’s been, frankly, the only challenging thing, because I realize what a charmed kind of existence this is. And to hear people complain, when they do this job, I just feel like those people would probably complain about anything. There are people out there who will never be happy. So I don’t complain about those things, because I’m generally a pretty happy person.

I also realize that, man, things can be worse. Like really worse than this. Go take a walk through the Yemen or Somalia. Good God. And I’m going to complain? I’m sure people in this business tell you about how tiring it is and so hard. And it’s just not. It’s not. Because I’ve done real work. And I’ve been in shitty conditions. This is not that. And I don’t think my experience as a musician or an artist is any different than anybody else’s.

I meet a lot of artists, a lot of young people, especially, who are kind of negative about what they’re doing. And they’re just kind of in a negative place, while they’re sometimes riding the crest of their career. And I have to tell these guys, “Listen, your career can be over in two weeks. This could be the good old days… in like a month. So maybe you should pull your head out of your ass and enjoy this while it’s going on, instead of being a dickhead. And then, later on, you can have memories of you being happy, not memories of you being a miserable f-ck who is basically living the life of a king and you’re going to look back on it and go, ‘Did I f-ck it all up?’” And that’s what depression is made of.

Anyway circling back - sorry to go on and on, it’s just that I think this is such a great thing to do - when you talk about challenges, yeah sure, making records is hard, touring has it challenges. And you leave a little bit of your mind every time you make something creatively. I get that. All things considered - it’s not working in a coal mine. So I don’t feel like any of these challenges are even remotely insurmountable.

The benefit is, rock ’n’ roll has taken us around the world. It’s shown us places and people and things that we’d never have seen if we didn’t play in a band and tour around the world. Even just touring locally, regionally, nationally in Canada, we saw things that we never would have seen without doing what we do, let alone going to places like Russia or Japan, places that are completely different from what you know. So I would say one of the biggest benefits is you get to see the world.

And seeing the world, allows you to find out that people are just people, whether they’re Russian people or from Saudi Arabia or Australia or Canada or America or Denmark or whatever. They’re just people. Mark Twain said that travel is the best cure for xenophobia. When you go places, it’s harder to vilify people. When you’re visiting Moscow, you go, “Oh, yeah, guess what? People just go to work there. They drive their kids to school. They have dinner. They have the same problems we have. They do all the same things we do. Not everybody’s goose-stepping with the fur hat. People are just people.” And that’s been really good for me, to sort of demystify the differences between us, which are truly not very many. And another benefit is that it’s allowed me to share with my family this crazy ride. They’ve been on tour with me in a lot of places. I’m pretty sure my daughter was conceived on a tour bus. My son has lived on a tour bus almost his whole life.

PCC:
Are there still goals to reach? What does drive you now?

KROEGER:
I think right now, I wouldn’t say that there’s a lot, that there’s a drive to us right now. We’re at the point in our careers now where we’re just assessing what to do… or not do next. When you’re at the high-water mark or crest of your career, everything is really kind of obvious, what to do. You get opportunities that, you’ve just got to do them. You get these world tour opportunities, you’ve just got to do them. All these other things - you just do what’s placed in front of you. But after you receded back from that high-water mark, that’s when you have to sort of reassess your position. What do you want? What do you want to do? Where do you want to be? And how do you want to get there?

And right now, for me personally, I can say, and I think it’s kind of true for all the band, we’re kind of just assessing where we’re at. It’s kind of a unique place to be, because like I was saying, we’ve always just have kept our heads down and worked hard and just gone where we were led. Right now it feels like it’s time to put the hands on the wheel and make a more pronounced choice of where to go and what to do. Right now, we’re just contemplating that.

For the latest band news, visit www.nickelback.com.