Songfacts®:

• "San Quentin" is a heavy kick-the-door-down rocker that tells the story of a prison break.
• Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger wrote the song after meeting at a party the warden from the notorious high-security San Quentin prison. "I'm speaking to this guy, but in my head all I could think about was, 'I'm gonna write a song called 'San Quentin,'" Kroeger told Robyn Lane of the WRAT radio station. "That's it.' And I stuck it in my notes in my phone. And then once the riff was down, I think I screamed out this line, 'Can somebody please keep me the hell out of San Quentin?' And we just took it from there."
• The four Nickelback band members produced "San Quentin" with Chris Baseford. Producer and engineer Chris Baseford also worked with the Canadian outfit on their No Fixed Address and Feed The Machine albums.
• Nickelback released "San Quentin" as their first single from Get Rollin' on September 7, 2022. The song marked their first new material since their 2017 Feed The Machine album, though they released a cover of "The Devil Went Down To Georgia" in 2020.
• San Quentin State Prison is located on Point San Quentin, on the north side of San Francisco Bay.
  
  Johnny Cash played a famous jailhouse show there on January 1, 1959. Among its audience members was a young and incarcerated Merle Haggard serving time for burglary. Haggard credits Cash for inspiring him to turn his life around and launch a successful country music career after his release.
  
  Eleven years later, on February 24, 1969, Cash played another live concert for the prison inmates. The 1969 concert was released as an album At San Quentin and spawned the hit single "A Boy Named Sue."
  
  Other music events linked to San Quentin prison include:
  
  San Quentin inmate George Jackson was shot to death during a peculiar escape attempt on August 21, 1971. Bob Dylan recounts his story in his 1991 song "George Jackson."
  
  B. B. King recorded his Live at San Quentin album at the California correctional complex. It won a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album in 1991.
  
  The video for Metallica's "St. Anger" shows the band playing the song at San Quentin State Prison in California on May 1, 2003. The concert opened their St. Anger promotional tour and marked the live debut of their then-new bassist Robert Trujillo since being inducted into the band.