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Papa Roach: “Music can move culture, can inspire and shift momentum in society, and can lift people up from a dark place”
A quarter of a century since Infest made them superstars, Papa Roach are still breaking new ground. As they prepare for their biggest ever UK tour, in which they'll become Wembley headliners, we caught up with Jacoby Shaddix and the boys in Germany to hear about the hard road they've walked, and how it's only made them stronger...
- Words:
- Nick Ruskell
- Photography:
- Paul Harries
If you’re going to get a bollocking, it may as well be from the best, and you may as well make it worth it. So it was that in the summer of 2001, Jacoby Shaddix found himself on the business end of a furious, sweary dressing down from Sharon Osbourne.
“She was fucking screaming at me, dude. ‘You’ve got the world in your fucking hand and you're fucking it up, you fucking idiot kid! The only reason I’ve fucking still got you on this tour is because you guys are selling tickets, you fucking idiot.’”
And it had all been going do dreamily. As that year’s Ozzfest rolled its way across America, Papa Roach were living large. The tour’s line-up, topped by the reunited and bigger-than-ever Black Sabbath, was a Who’s Who of contemporary metal: Slipknot, Linkin Park, Disturbed. All had swiftly become members of the million-seller club when their debut albums had dropped, and were now already on their way to becoming some of the most significant bands of all time.
It was the same for Papa Roach. Their Infest album from the previous year had sold a cool two mill without breaking a sweat, buoyed by massive singles Last Resort and Between Angels And Insects. In the top half of the festival’s Main Stage billing above most of their peers, filled with the vigour of youth, uncontrolled slingshot momentum, and weeks of victories on metal’s biggest stage in their back pockets, it was a good time.
And then the singer ignited “a full-on fucking riot.” He started by encouraging the massive crowd to throw mud. Which they did. Then they began fighting. Then all hell broke loose.
“We tore the venue apart,” he says with a rueful grin. “I was banned from the venue. I got arrested by the cops. I had to pay some fines. I thought I was this invincible fucking let's-start-a-riot rock star. That was kind of the era, too. After Woodstock ’99 and watching all that shit go down, it was like, ‘We don't give a fuck’. There was that spirit in the air.”
Dealing with the long arm of the law was easy enough for the young buck with the cash to cover his good time and the knowledge that getting nicked was a credible stamp on his rock‘n’roll timecard. As Jacoby – then with the hard-won and self-explanatory nickname Johnny Vodka – returned to Earth, it stopped being so funny. “Oh God,” he realised. “I gotta go back and face Sharon…”
She went nuclear on him, “cursing me up, down, sideways.” Both angry and disappointed, the volume and intensity of Sharon’s foul-mouthed apoplexy – and remember, as boss of Ozzfest, Jacoby had very much trodden shit into her carpet here – was matched only by the hard shake she wanted to give him for his own good.
Tail between his legs and a flea in his ear, Jacoby realised he needed to straighten up and fly right.
“I was like, ‘Okay, cool, I’m gonna mind my Ps and Qs for the rest of this tour’. We didn't start no more riots. We ripped it up and had great shows and sold tons of merch and met tons of fans, and had a great time, and bonded with a lot of bands on that tour. But yeah, I needed to be told that I was about to fuck everything up.”
Twenty four years on, this story is illustrative of a lot about Jacoby and Papa Roach. Not least that, come what may, they’re still here. And bigger than ever. Almost 13 million people a month listen to them on Spotify. Last Resort has well over a billion plays, while new track Even If It Kills Me, released last week, quickly went into seven figures. Next week, they hit the UK for their first headline tour on these shores since 2019, where they’ll be closing no less a venue than Wembley Arena for the first time.
It also speaks to the strength of the gravity around them. As one of the cornerstones of nu-metal, there’s a strong backbone there. There’s a lot to come crashing down off the back of antics like the above, but it’s solidly propped up, not least by themselves understanding when something’s threatening a loadbearing wall.
And then there’s Jacoby himself. Now 48, the young Johnny Vodka is far behind the man who in 2025 is over a decade sober and a doting father. Talking a mile a minute, and always with an answer to anything, Jacoby 2025 is great company. Perched at a table in a hotel suite as a brutal Germanic chill weighs heavily outside, he’s also infectiously upbeat and energising. Ask him if that lad would be surprised at his band’s continued good fortune after so long in the game, and he’s characteristically unambiguous.
“I wouldn't have been surprised, because I had this grand illusion that I was going to do all these things,” he says, proudly. “I think I needed to get the riot act read to me a few times over.”
We join Papa Roach in Munich. It’s here that the band – Jacoby, guitarist Jerry Horton, bassist Tobin Esperance and drummer Tony Palermo – are reconvening before their massive Euro tour kicks off. Before that, there’s an acoustic radio session in the city, before they relocate to Berlin for a week of intense rehearsals. Partly so they and their crew can get acquainted with what Jacoby boasts is “the biggest fucking show we’ve ever had”. Also handy, since they’ve not played together in months, and their last bout of proper touring was over a year ago, in October 2023.
“I stepped off the stage and I knew that I wasn't going to be on tour for a year, and I just ugly cried,” he laughs. “My wife was like, ‘What’s wrong?’ and I said, ‘I’m gonna miss this so much.’”
There’s been the odd festival. Mostly the man’s been relaxing with his family, “getting into good routines”, being there for his sons. But now…
“There's a season for everything, and now the season has come for me to fucking get out here on the road and smash,” he grins. “I've been caged up for a minute. Now it’s time to go again.”
The first time Papa Roach came to Europe in autumn 2000, Jacoby was “a fish out of water.” In a busy time awash with firsts, he found himself dealing with “all these fucking different kinds of money, Francs and Deutschmarks and fucking pounds, working out the fucking light sockets, all this different food.” Seeing landmarks like the Eiffel Tower in Paris, he says he felt the romance of seeing things he only knew from books and movies, along with a realisation of “just how fucking small and insignificant I am.”
Even hitting the UK wasn’t without its surprises. Mostly rooted in not being used to friendly piss taking.
“I was a fan of Monty Python, so I kind of understood some of the humour, but I didn't understand the sarcastic wittiness,” he laughs. “I was just this fresh-faced little goofball that took everything too seriously. I would read the headlines and think, ‘God, they fucking hate me!’” Some of it I handled gracefully, and some of it, I was just a fucking bull in a china shop.”
Even so, it was the beginning of, to use a particularly nauseating phrase for Transatlantic friendliness, a special relationship. Today, Jacoby shows us a ring he’s wearing especially for this tour, given to him by a promoter for selling out their first London show at the much-missed Mean Fiddler. So enamoured did Jacoby become with the much bigger Brixton O2 Academy, he suggested to his wife that they name their first child Brixton (he eventually got his wish for their third, youngest boy).
It was a great time. But as it went on, relentless hard work coupled with the late nights as Johnny Vodka began to catch up.
“It was such a fucking great time,” he says. “But by the end I was just worn the fuck out. I drank so much. I was just living reckless as fuck and enjoying the spoils of being a rock star. We toured for two years on that first album, and towards the end of it there's video of me, and you could just see it in my eyes: ‘Not sure if you're doing too good, dude. You don't look like you're handling fame so well.’”
"I was just living reckless as f*ck and enjoying the spoils of being a rock star"
Looking back now, there’s something of the making of Jacoby 2025 in this. It’s taken him a few goes, but having a go, tripping over, and getting back up is better than not giving it a go at all. And, he says, he learned a great deal across the two decades since he first tried.
“[The first tour I tried sober] felt great. That lasted about a month and a half, and then I was back in the gutter again,” he says. “It took me a while to kind of figure that one out.
“From 2004 to 2012 I would get a year sober, then I would fall off for a week, and then I would get six months sober, and then I go on a two-day bender. Then I'd get two years sober, and then I'd go start getting high, and then I'd end up popping pills and drinking again. It took me a while to really, finally put the brakes on, but intermittently within that, there was a lot of time sober.”
At the same time that he was learning this about himself, Jacoby began to realise the extent to which the music industry “encourages fuckery”. As a highly permissive environment with no end of work for the Devil to give to idle hands, and where it’s often acceptable to be as much of a fuck-up as you like so long as you have it together between the hours of 9 and 11pm when you shake your moneymaker and make cash for the enterprise, you will find easier settings in which to not be tempted. Worse than this passive background shrug of approval is people actively telling you that only having a bottle in your hand is real. No matter how it ends.
“I had a producer. I remember calling him, telling him I was gonna get sober. He was like, ‘That's what's fucking wrong with rock‘n’roll. You guys are getting sober,’” Jacoby says. “I was like, ‘First off: fuck you. Second off: fuck you again. And third, I'm watching my icons die and destroy their lives.’
“I've seen the tape play through when you fucking keep this alcoholic life up. It ends in cirrhosis and death. Now you see this new generation of, ‘rock stars’, and it's like, [adopts 'cool voice] 'fucking Juice WRLD died on a fucking private plane because he swallowed his fucking drugs - that's rock‘n’roll.' Fuck off, dude.
"‘I'm not a train wreck for your fucking entertainment, but watch me fucking do this thing for 35, 40, 50 years,” he enthuses. “That pissed me off. It kind of put a chip on my shoulder in a way that I think was good.”
"I've seen the tape play through when you keep this alcoholic life up – it ends in cirrhosis and death"
Jacoby can tell you the day he last had a drink: February 12, 2012. He’s often been remarkably open about this, as well as his mental health. His grandfather, he reveals, took his own life. In 2012, he himself had his own moment of coming close. He shares all this in the hope that his thoughts and experiences reach the ear of someone who desperately needs it.
“Dude, I've met thousands upon thousands of people in the 25 years we've been on the world stage that have told us that our music has saved their life,” he says. “In the beginning, I was like, ‘I don't know how to really take that.’ I was like, ‘That's cool, fucking right on.’ And then I understood it when I had my own brush with the darkness. And then I was like, ‘I see how music really can be healing.’”
Most recently, the band have donated all their royalties from their collaboration with Carrie Underwood, Leave A Light On, to the American Foundation For Suicide Prevention. This, he says, is one of the ways that Papa Roach haven’t really changed much at all.
“Mental health has been part of our story since the beginning,” he says. “Think about Last Resort, our first single, it's like a cry for help. Leave A Light On is the response. It's like, ‘I'm here for you. I got you no matter what.’ That's exactly what the American Foundation For Suicide Prevention provides.
“I've had my fucking battles, man. I've had my brushes with darkness. I think that's why I have a heart for it. I've been to the depths and come back, you know? And thank God, because I have friends that have succumbed to that darkness, and I see what's left behind, and it's trauma and it's pain and it's wreckage, and there, there is no healing.
“There's too much of that, man. Suicide is a leading cause of death in America. What the fuck? Come on, man, people are hurting. That's a real thing. So we want to bring a message of hope, and when I'm asked about my hope, I'm willing to share about it.”
Do you feel that as a sense of responsibility when you write music? That some people are looking to you as a strong bigger brother who understands these things? He nods.
“Yeah. This is purpose-driven music. It's not just, ‘Let's get on a mic and just make noise.’ I understand music can move culture, can inspire and shift momentum in society, and can lift people up from a dark place.”
"I've had my brushes with darkness. I've been to the depths and come back"
All this might be quite the difficult thing to square with a song like Last Resort, a floor-filler, an iconic nu-metal sing-along, a banger, also literally about how "I witnessed my best friend try to kill himself." When we bring this up, Jacoby says that this joy is actually part of it, about lifting people up, about being a lightning rod for catharsis. But if someone needs it, there’s a connection there from a man with the credibility of experience.
“When we play it, the audience goes fucking ballistic, and I love that,” he smiles. “I love what that song means to people. I love the story of that song. It's laced into the fabric of what rock and metal is, it's iconic, it's all those things. I don't approach it like Radiohead with Creep – ‘Oh man, we have to play this again.’ Nah, man, we fucking celebrate that. Because that song is an anthem of hope and inspiration, as well as something to have a good time to.”
Jacoby Shaddix 2025 is a man hard to keep up with. He positively bounces with energy as he talks, which is basically all the time. That something like Wembley is coming so far down the road he takes as an example of resilience, that getting older and wiser has also come with the good fortune of still having mountains to climb and things to do.
“I fucking wear that shit proud," he grins. “Look how fucking good I look as ‘an elder of rock‘n’roll’ as you put it! I‘m fucking holding it the fuck down. I‘m almost 50, and I‘m still getting it. I fucking ran seven miles this morning. I‘m just tooting my own horn. They call me Tootie. Toot fucking toot.”
As he says, younger Jacoby wouldn’t necessarily have been surprised by all this. He always wanted this, to a somewhat tunnel-visioned degree. The old question of what was Plan B is answered with a simple, “I literally don’t know how to do anything else. I would have kept running at this thing!”
He is, then, a lifer. And a very good one, who frequently enthuses about rock‘n’roll, keenly asking K! for new music recommendations. The things that could have brought his story to a very different end – whether genuinely dangerous moments of darkness, or fouling up in front of Sharon Osbourne – have actually made he and the band what they are now. At home, he’s proud of the dad he’s become, almost as proud as he is of his children as they set out on their own paths.
“I poured a lot of my efforts and my love and my time into my family and my wife and my kids, and the fruit of that is revealing itself now in a way that I never could have expected,” he beams. “I've got a 22-year-old son that's going to a programme to get his doctorate in physical therapy. I got another son who's playing college lacrosse, and he's writing music every day. He hits me up all the time: ‘Dad, check out this song. Check out this song.’ And I’ve got a wife who loves me, respects me and lifts me up when I'm down. She is strong where I am not, and we make a fucking great team. I've had my failures in that relationship, and we've grown and fought through those and forgiven and loved again.
“I want to break my family chain of dysfunction and abuse and neglect, and I'm doing that right. And I want to be a rock and roller that had this band that, like, travelled the world and sold millions of records and had a career doing it.”
Having done that, and got this far as a happy, worldly, likeable man who’s taken life’s bad-times as a lesson, what Jacoby wants now is to continue to help and inspire. As he’s always tried to.
“Something I'd really like to continue to do in the future is keep giving back,” he says. “I've had people pick me up when I was down, and I've been able to pick people up when they're down, really and truly down in the dirt. I’ve had that, and I want to pay it forward.
“I think that's a story worth telling,” he says. “That's a life worth living, right there.”
Papa Roach tour the UK from February 7 – 9. Get your tickets now.
