The Promotional Trick That Made “Rockstar” A Nickelback Smash
On a recent episode of my Talkin’ Rock with Meltdown podcast, Nickelback bassist Mike Kroeger and I talked about many things, like “How You Remind Me” became so big, but also how “Rockstar” became such a huge hit for them.
Mike told me about a stunt that Alice Cooper’s promo crew pulled in the early 70s. The gist of it was that people in London are very prim and proper, and they’d shock them with a billboard of Alice, sans clothing with a snake wrapped around him to hide the naughty parts. They would have a truck adorned with the billboard drive throughout the city, and then “break down” in the very busy Picadilly Circus area. Hysterical and brilliant!
Fast forward to 2005 and the promo team for Nickelback would employ a similar method, as Mike told me. “They decided that what we would do is, if you’ve seen the “Rockstar” video, you know that we had sent a camera crew to the Playboy Mansion, and got the girls from the mansion on camera, and all that.” He went on to say that the narrative was going to be that the song was so sexy, so depraved, that no one should ever see it, so it was going to be banned. He said “The Billboard was banned in the U.K. The song was banned in the U.K. The video was banned in the U.K….None of it true. All a lie. And what happened was, it shot up the charts and went to number one. Everybody couldn’t get enough of the song.”
He said that usually, a song will break in the States, then break around the rest of the world. “Rockstar” broke first in the U.K. “It became a surprise smash.” That was near the end of that album cycle, as they were already recording songs for the next album. He said they jumped on a plane and headed to London to support the song, which he said really didn’t need any support.
Check out pictures from their show at Pine Knob last summer, below.
Nickelback Rocks Pine Knob For A Fun Summertime Show
