The problem with Nickelback isn't that they make bad music.
In fact, I've often found myself leaving the station on my car radio tuned to a Nickelback song.
The music may be unoriginal, but the guitars are just heavy enough and front man Chad Kroeger is one of the best hard rock vocalists performing today.
The problem is that, in today's culture, it's impossible for musicians to just be musicians. They also have to be pop icons and have their images plastered all over MTV.
That's where my opinion of Nickelback falls apart, and it's the biggest problem with the Jim Beam Road to the Rackhouse Tour that hit Mesa Amphitheatre Thursday. Default opened the show with Course of Nature and Jerry Cantrell in support.
Nickelback put on a solid hour-long set, hitting all the highpoints off their two albums.
Fan favorites "Leader of Men" and "Breathe" off Nickelback's debut album "The State" highlighted the first half of the set, and the crowd sang along with current singles "How You Remind Me" and "Too Bad" off "Silver Side Up" in the second half.
Wedged in between the hits was the new track "Next Contestant," which was eagerly consumed by the audience.
The performance was powerful and loud, but the problem was not with the music. It was with the band's appearance.
The music industry labels Nickelback's music post-grunge, but there's nothing grunge about it. Nickelback is a bunch of pretty boys pretending to be hard rockers.
Kroeger, with his flowing perm and neatly trimmed goatee, hit the stage wearing a skin-tight black T-shirt, tucked into ass-grabbing blue jeans adorned with a studded leather belt.
Bassist Ryan Vikedal and guitarist Mike Kroeger, Chad's brother, were similarly attired. Vikedal went a step further by donning a fresh-out of-the-box Stetson cowboy hat.
Sure Kroeger's ass-wiggling got the 15-year-old girls in the crowd all hot and bothered, but watching a guy whose girlfriend (or record label) dresses him sing angrily about drugs, child abuse and whatever else is on Nickelback's agenda takes away from the music.
The band's image was more painful to deal with after watching support act and grunge god Jerry Cantrell, former guitarist of Alice in Chains.
It was pretty obvious Cantrell, to whom Nickelback owes a lot of credit for musical inspiration, didn't seem to care what the teenagers in the audience thought.
He wore a faded black Pittsburgh Steelers shirt over dirty blue jeans and appeared to have not combed his natty blond hair in a few days.
It was also obvious that he still knows how to rock, deftly weaving songs from his two solo albums "Boggy Depot" and "Degradation Trip" into a seven-song setlist that also included Alice in Chains hits "Them Bones" and "What the Hell Have I."
Reach Matt Simpson at azdude182@aol.com.
