"I've known Todd and Matt and Brad my whole life. I don't remember meeting them, just remember knowing them, but we've known each other our whole lives. We're from Escatawpa, Mississipi. The P is silent. You say it with a B because we're all southern. It's a real small town, about 3,000 people I think, before hurricane Katrina. Probably 1,800-2,000 now." Chris recounts. "It was just natural that we were going to play music together at some point, cuz we were like the only rock'n'roll musicians in town really. Everybody else was country. I started playing in Junior High and we started hanging around, experimenting, and playing with guitar here and there. We began playing bars, parties, just anywhere that they'd let us. We recorded an independent, a demo basically, y'know, a thousand bucks, borrowed the money from Brad's daddy. We had to pay him back, and we went and recorded a demo. It came out pretty good, so we started handing it out; people were buying it, and sold a bunch of them on our own. Ended up, the local radio station got wind of how many records we were selling, and people started talking about the song Kryptonite."
This bane of Superman proved instead to be a boon to the band that would soon see them flying to fame faster than a speeding bullet.
"The radio guys were like, 'Hey man, let me get a copy of that.' So I gave it to him, took him about 6-7 months to open it and listen to it, but he finally did. The rest is history. I think he played it the first time on Sunday at 8 o'clock. By the next morning, the phones were just lit up with, 'Who the hell was that you played last night?’ He started playing it in regular rotation, and there was a record guy named Larry Sheuster who happened to be driving down I-10 and he heard 3 Doors Down. He remembers somehow getting a copy of that record from somebody. He made the connection, so he went back and listened to it, looked at the BDS Report, sent the record Universal, next thing I know I was standing in Times Square. The stars and the planets all lined up at the same time for whatever reason, and it was just meant for us. All those people happened to be doing what they were doing at that time, but for whatever reason it worked out in our favor."
Favored is an understatement, for as of May 2008, they took the #1 spot on the Billboard album chart for the second consecutive time, and the self-titled album makes their fourth Top Ten total. "I think one thing that sets 3 Doors Down apart is the fact that we really write for ourselves more than anything else. We always leave ourselves a left turn. We don't really pigeonhole ourselves in any sound. We don't say, 'Ok, we gotta write this song to sound like this because thats what we sound like'. Know what I mean? We just kinda do it, and we're not scared to experiment with different things, and different writings. Our content is whatever it may be. It could be a love song, sappy as it can possibly get, or it could be a really aggressive, smack you around song-we don't really care either way. I think we just kinda write from the heart and write about true events and our experiences as humans. We show that we're just regular people, because we really are. I think they kinda gravitate towards that," Chris theorizes.
The pull of 3 Doors Down's sound in fact was such that they had fans spiraling into their path wherever they went, forming a sort of musical event horizon which even the band was hard put to escape. "In Mississippi, [where] there were 3,000 people I couldn't pump gas without someone stopping me, couldn't go shopping with my kids, I couldn't do anything. And I'm just kind of the out of focus guitar player guy in the band. I can only imagine what it's like for Brad. So that was a big adjustment, not being able to eat at a restaurant, not being able to get my hair cut. All the things people take for granted. It's ok - now I live in Nashville. Here, like, nobody even cares. It's pretty cool. I'm going where I want to go, take my kids to school, I can be normal, and I love it."
How though, does one mesh the duties of a parent with the highflying life of a rockstar? Chris admits it's not easy. "Thats the toughest part of this whole gig, make no mistake about it, it's really hard on the family, and children, and it's hard on the father too. It's hard in every direction. No one person really gets it any worse than the other all the way around. But it's one of those things you gotta do, y'know? This is what I do for a living and I don't wanna go back to the shipyard, and I don't want to go work construction somewhere, so this is what I do now, and my family accepts it. But it's tough. I got two young girls and they don't understand. They're just, 'Daddy isn't home any more,' and they don't understand why. So it's kinda tough on them. They're starting to get it. My oldest girl, she's five, she's starting to understand coz some of her friends at school know the band and they're talking to her. She's kind of understanding that Daddy does something a little different than everybody else."
For artists pounding on the doors of fame, Chris has this to say on the keys to success. "You really don't get that many shots at this. The way this business works is that you're really probably only going to get maybe one or two real shots at making it, no matter what you do. So don't kill yourself trying to do it, but when you do get that shot make sure you're ready. Understand what I'm saying? My advice would be to try as hard as you can, take it as serious as you can without losing any of your good, close friends. Because, when it's all said and done, friends are all you've got left. I've seen a lot of people, y'know, they get into this business and they try so hard to make it and just, the law of averages deals them the boogy-hand. Next thing you know, they all hate each other, and this guy doesn't try, this guy doesn't do his part, it's his fault, y'know, it's a bitter business. Chews you up and spits you out. We make it work though. I've been in this band for 11 years. We've had our brotherly disagreements but we always seem to work it out in the end, and thats kinda what it's all about. We just want to be friends. Somehow, no matter what the band's happy, and if the band's happy, the fans are going to be. That's where it starts."
| written by Joshua Schrader
