Nickelback and Creed will headline this year’s Summer Of ’99 festival – check out the full line-up below.
- READ MORE: Nickelback: “If we’re the thing you get most upset about, you’re living a charmed life”
The nostalgic rock festival, now in its second year, will see the bands co-headline this summer at Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wisconsin. The event takes place from July 18-19.
It marks the 25th anniversary of Creed playing there in 2000, while it is 18 years since Nickelback made their debut there in 2007. It will also be the first time the two bands have shared the stage together since 1999.
Other bands performing on the bill include 3 Doors Down, Daughtry and Lit. Tickets for the event will go on sale on February 21 at 10am CST (4pm BST) here.
Check out the full line up here:
Last year, Nickelback bassist Mike Kroeger said the hate his band received in their early days was a “training ground for cyber bullying”.
The early ‘00s rockers often found themselves the target of much hate, with many music fans in that era choosing to vocally express their distaste for the band.
Kroeger – the brother of the band’s frontman Chad – even spoke to NME earlier this year about the phenomenon. Reflecting on how they have been treated over the years, he said: “The thing we came to realise through all of this is as much as the word ‘hate’ is used, it’s pretty overstated because people don’t really care that much.”
“If Nickelback is the thing you get most upset about, you’re living a charmed life. Nobody’s trying to kill you, and you’re not starving to death. If our band is the level in which your hate exists, boy, you’re living in a fairy tale!”
The bassist has expanded on the topic, saying that the vitriol was a precursor to what we now recognise in everyday life. Speaking to the Downbeat podcast, he said: “It was the training ground for cyber bullying. Everybody was learning how to pick on people online, and we got to be patient zero of cyber bullying on social media. It sucked. But it turns out it was the trial run of what would become sort of how things work.”
“I know music is a very emotional thing for people — I get that — but it also exposes a real weakness in the human condition that we’d much rather talk about the things we don’t like than the things that we do like, the fact that humanity really has a real addiction to negativity,” he added.
Last year, Chad Kroeger also said that he thinks the band are not as hated nowadays as they used to be, describing it as a “softening”.
Meanwhile, Creed’s Mark Tremonti opened up last year about his band’s reputation, saying he’d “rather sell tons of records and have people come at you” than the alternative.
The Tallahassee, Florida band broke through as part of the late-’90s post-grunge movement and became well known for tracks like ‘With Arms Wide Open’ and ‘My Sacrifice’.
They were commercially successful, selling well over 20 million records, but have long been critically reviled and dismissed by certain audiences – Rolling Stone even named them the worst band of the 1990s in 2013.
In an interview with Ultimate Guitar, guitarist Tremonti, also known for the band Alter Bridge, reflected on the band’s critical status and how he balances it with their huge success.
“After a while you just kind of realise if you want to be in a band where it got as big as Creed did, there’s gonna be people that love you, there’s gonna be people that hate you,” he said.
“Look at all the biggest bands in the world, especially pop artists. If it becomes a household name, there’s gonna be people that hate on it. And you’ve gotta take the good with the bad. Would you rather sell tons of records and have people come at you or sell no records and have everybody love you?” he pondered. “And I got to see both sides of that when we started Alter Bridge. When we started Alter Bridge and we had gotten into a few records, we got a lot of critical praise, but we weren’t selling the millions of records that Creed was. So I got to see what it feels like on both sides.”
In April, the band reunited and played their first show in 12 years as part of the ‘Summer of 99’ cruise, on the occasion of Tremonti’s 50th birthday. They went on to play a North American reunion tour later in the summer, taking in 40 cities across the continent.
Frontman Scott Stapp has also stated in January that he has “hope” that Creed will write new material.
