Nickelback Bassist: Pantera Were Fans of Us, They Were Our Brothers
A lot of people claim to be big, bad Nickelback haters, and most of them can't even name the reasons why other than the fact that other metalheads are Nickelback haters. Well, news flash — the members of Pantera have been fans of them from the start, so if they can be, you can too.
Or at least let go of the unnecessary hate.
Nickelback bassist Mike Kroeger went into a bit more detail regarding the relationship between the two bands in an interview with Australian Guitar. Remember when one of Dimebag Darrell's solos was featured in the Nickelback song "Side of a Bullet" after he died? Well, here's the story behind how that came to be.
"We’d known the Pantera guys since a really early time in our career. They were fans of ours from the beginning, and we would always see them out on the road or whenever we would go through Dallas," Kroeger reflected. "They would come out and ply us with alcohol. It was always fun to be around those guys. They were our brothers. And then when Dime was murdered, we wanted to pay tribute to him."
"A lot of people didn’t like the fact that they were friends with us, or fans of our music – but the metal world can be a little intense to its own, y’know?" the bassist continued. "So it was just really cool that they didn’t care about that, and they just wanted to be friends with us because they liked what we did."
Apparently, Vinnie Paul was blown away by the work of pop sensation Christina Aguilera. Even metal musicians don't only listen to metal.