Nickelback and fellow Canadian Matthew Good maybe the participants in the next round of rock feuds to fill the headlines. Matthew Good fired the first salvo in an interview last year in Chart Attack where Good called Nickelback little more than a carbon copy of Staind and Creed. Now Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger has kicked the feud up a notch. 

In an interview with Rolling Stone, journalist Mark Binelli asked Chad who he hated, without hesitation Chad answered Matthew Good.  A puzzled Binelli asked “Who?” and here is what Chad had to say, “Exactly! ‘Who?’ He's a Canadian artist who sells hundreds of thousands of records in Canada but couldn't sell shit in America, and since his fellow Canadian band went down to America and worked their asses off and did sell records, he thought it'd be OK to take some cheap shots at us. It's pathetic. Once you come to America and sell a million records in two months, suddenly you're a bad guy, a Creed rip-off.”

Seeing a potential headline in the making the Binelli asked Kroeger “This isn't going to end in violence, is it?” Chad’s response, “Well, I'm from Alberta, and he's a city kid, right? And I don't know how city kids deal with things, but when you talk shit about somebody from a small town, they find you in a back alley and they deal with the situation. They beat the living piss out of you and then laugh at you the next day when you're seen around town all marked up.”  

Having got his story Binelli wanted to wrap things up, “All right. Word's out. That's a good, profound note to end on.” In which Chad responded “What did I say? ‘We'll find him in a back alley, beat the piss out of him.’ You can make it sound good, right?” 

This isn’t the first time Kroeger has heard the Creed charge. The irony is the fact that Nickelback has been together longer than Creed. When our sister site Rocknworld.com interviewed Chad in 2000 our special features editor Debbie Seagle asked him about the accusation that Nickelback sounds similar to Creed, the band they were actually touring with at the time. Here is an excerpt from that interview. 

RNW:  You’ve been compared to Creed and Collective Soul . . .

Chad:  Only in our bio.

RNW:  No, I’ve heard some people say that too. . .

Chad:  Well, you’ve seen us live, what do you think?

RNW:  I don’t think so.  So apparently you don’t either?

Chad:  Nope.  Well, we’ve been around longer than Creed, so anyone that says we sound like Creed, that’s silly. 

RNW:  So, for the record, Creed sounds like you?

Chad:  No, not at all (laughter from Debbie).  Its hard to say that somebody sounds like someone else when they were there first, you know?  We don’t sound like Creed.  We have the same sort of influence that almost all the bands that are on the radio sell.  There’s this huge backlash right now of a lot of bands stemming from Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Sound Garden, Nirvana, Alice in Chains.  Those five.  I mean, if you look at what’s on the radio these days, its like, a lot of bands sound very similar, and we are one of those bands that sound a lot alike.  And its not until you actually get the record or come see us live and go, okay, now they’re a little bit different.  In the same breath, we’re not reinventing the wheel.  We’re just a rock and roll band.
 

Read the Full Rocknworld.com interview. 

Read the Full Rolling Stone.com interview. 
 

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