What the Hell Is on Joey's Head
Part of a series on Nickelback's "Photograph". [View Related Entries]
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About
"What the Hell Is on Joey's Head" is a memorable line from the 2005 song "Photograph" by the Canadian rock band Nickelback.
Origin
On September 20th, 2005, "Photograph" was released as the first single for Nickelback's fifth studio album All the Right Reasons (video below). In the song, singer Chad Kroeger sings, "Look at this photograph/Every time I do it makes me laugh/How did our eyes get so red?/And what the hell is on Joey's head?"
Spread
On July 30th, 2008, an anonymous Yahoo! Answers [1] user asked, "In the video for Photograph by NIckelback what really is on Joey's head in the picture at the beginning? Update: Trophy or pirate hat??? idk." Another user responded, "joey and chad were mucking around and the chiller end up on his head turned wrong way up. chad as explained this object on joeys head many times in interviews since the release of that song" (shown below).
The lyric soon became one of the more popular aspects of the song, becoming a de facto representation for the song as a whole. On June 13th, 2017, the CBC[2] published an interview with Nickelback's Chad Kroeger, asking him about the lyric. He explained that the photograph. He said:
The picture in question features Kroeger and the band's friend/producer Joey Moi, who appears to have a silver trophy on his head.
"It literally looks like he has the Stanley Cup on his head, and it was just a big, very well-polished champagne chiller, and we were just messed one New Year's Eve, out of our minds, and someone took that picture."
"The photograph I'm holding in the video is the photograph," he says. "I just didn't know where I was going with it, just spitting stuff out. Next thing I know, there was a line, 'What the hell is on Joey's head?'"
The picture in question features Kroeger and the band's friend/producer Joey Moi, who appears to have a silver trophy on his head.
"It literally looks like he has the Stanley Cup on his head, and it was just a big, very well-polished champagne chiller, and we were just messed one New Year's Eve, out of our minds, and someone took that picture."
There's also one person who should have been in the picture, but through post-editing was denied his place in history.
"It's not just Joey and I," says Kroeger. "Rob Mackie is standing right beside me and someone cropped him out and then gave me the picture, and one to Joey."
At this point, guitarist Ryan Peake chimes in, singing "Cold-blooded" in a falsetto, which causes Kroeger to answer back in an even higher falsetto, clearly an inside joke related to the time the photo was taken.
"The champagne chiller is falling off Joe's head and you can see Rob's hand is in it and he's holding it on Joe's head for the picture, so for all those pictures he's like, 'Yup, that's my hand,'" says Kroeger.
On May 19th, 2018, YouTuber Reed Windle shared a comedy sketch about a man attempting to figure out what was on Joey's head (shown below).
Various Examples
Search Interest
Not Available.
External References
[1] Yahoo! Answers – What the hell is on joey's head
[2] CBC – The true story behind Nickelback's smash hit, 'Photograph'
Top Comment
rattlehead
Oct 03, 2019 at 10:05PM EDT