Simple Plan's video of its new single deals with how a drunken driving fatality affects friends, families and survivors.

09:31 AM EDT on Thursday, May 19, 2005

BY RICK MASSIMO
Journal Pop Music Writer

PROVIDENCE -- The rock group Simple Plan got an official welcome to Rhode Island yesterday before playing at the Dunkin' Donuts Center, as state and law enforcement officials praised the group for their latest single and video.

The Montreal-based band usually purveys guitar-driven pop-punk, but "Untitled (How Could This Happen to Me?)" is a piano and strings ballad of loss and regret, and the video is an expressionistic look at the effects of drunken driving. In the clip, a young inebriated motorist crashes into another car, driven by a teenage girl. As she's driving, the girl's family is shown at home, enjoying a typical evening. At the moment of impact, the family is thrown around the room. The girl is hauled out of the car by rescue personnel, who try unsuccessfully to revive her.

At the end of the video, the screen carries the words "Traffic crashes are the No. 1 killer of teens and nearly one-third of teen traffic deaths are alcohol-related," as well as the phone number and Web address of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

At the ceremony yesterday in the basement of the arena, Lt. Gov. Charles J. Fogarty said that the video was effective at piercing the air of invulnerability that many teens carry around. "You believe that bad things only happen to other people," he said. But he urged all young Rhode Islanders to watch the video for "Untitled." "It's young people with a message that is poignant and accurate."

Simple Plan singer Pierre Bouvier said that the song was written in response to a drunken driving accident that took the life of a schoolmate of the band members. The song was a last-minute addition to their October 2004 album, Still Not Getting Any . . ., and in fact they weren't sure that the song would make it onto the record, much less be released as a single. But people have responded, Bouvier says. The video is in MTV's top 10, and is a staple on the cable channel's Total Request Live show, where viewers vote over the phone and the Internet for which videos they want to see.

Col. Steven Pare of the Rhode Island State Police said that at a showing of the video at North Providence High School earlier in the day, 900 kids fell silent. "You make a difference," he told the band, "because kids listen to you."

Pare gave the band state police T-shirts and baseball hats. Lori Nunes, the mother of Justin Nunes, a passenger who was killed in a drunken driving accident in 2003, read a proclamation from Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch which said that Simple Plan deserved "respect and admiration from all residents of Rhode Island."

Gabrielle Abbate, executive director of the Rhode Island chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, said the most powerful thing about the video was that it showed "the ripple effect" that a drunken driving death causes among friends, families and survivors.

Simple Plan guitarist Jeff Stinco echoed those sentiments. Most attempts to reach young people, he said, focus on the legal consequences of drunken driving, whereas they wanted to focus on "the human side."

Dunkin' Donuts Center executive director Larry Lepore said that he was at the funeral for Zachary Stiness, 16, one of two teenagers killed in a crash in Barrington on May 1 and told Stiness' father that if there was anything he could do in conjunction with his job, he would. "I get to watch MTV quite regularly," he said, to familiarize himself with popular bands, and he saw the "Untitled" video. He was inspired to set up the ceremony. "We've lost enough young people already," he said.

"It's exciting," singer Pierre Bouvier said, "to make a video that makes people stop."

The video for "Untitled (How Could This Happen to Me?)" can be seen at www.simpleplan.com