Though “How You Remind Me” from the album Silver Side Up really turned things around for Nickelback in terms of commercial success, Chad Kroeger says that the band didn’t initially make any money off the song or the album.
Kroeger and his attorney, Jonathan Simkin, reflected on the earlier days of the band during a new Sticks and Stones podcast episode. Simkin recalled a period that he and Kroeger spent in New York City when they negotiated a deal for their own label, 604 Records — which they had written down on a napkin.
“We had a dinner, some sort of weird Roadrunner dinner. So they got us a limousine,” he remembered. “And there’s Chad and I, rolling through Manhattan. And I recall, it was silent. Like, we’re just both sort of sitting there. And one of us looks at the other one and says, ‘What the f*** just happened?’ We’re like, ‘We’re rich. We’re rich! We’re rich!’ And we’re hugging each other.”
He then clarified that they were not actually, in fact, rich. While you may think that when a rock band gets a smash hit they are automatically rich, but that’s just not the case.
“At the time, for us, I don’t think we’d made a ton of money. I don’t think that I’d seen a dollar from proceeds of ‘How You Remind Me’ or the record sales of Silverside Up,” Kroeger chimed in. ”And any touring we were doing, we were probably just breaking even because you gotta pay for the bus, you gotta pay for the employees. At no point in time had we seen a check that was like, ‘Huh! What do you wanna buy?’ I just remember thinking, ‘I’m moving.'”
Later in the podcast they discuss a NSFW incident when in looking for a private place to sign a contract, the pair were accidentally given a key to the wrong hotel room and when they opened the door found a man pleasuring himself to an adult film.
Listen to the full episode below.
Nickelback signed to Roadrunner Records in 1999. By then, they already had two studio albums under their belt — 1996’s Curb and 1998’s The State. Silver Side Up was their first release on Roadrunner, and it peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200.