DOUBLE HEADER
In the world of rock ‘n’ roll egos, co-headlining tours are not unheard of, yet are somewhat rare.
But hard rockers Seether and Papa Roach have pooled together for a month-long North American tour that kicks off, where? Right here in our back yard at North Myrtle Beach’s House of Blues.
Papa Roach frontman Jacoby Shaddix told Loudwire.com: “Seether, you know, these guys just have hit after hit after hit. It’s gonna be a great night of rock music.” And what does Seether think about Papa Roach? “When we play with Papa Roach, we have to try that much harder because they have such a killer live show,” Seether’s bassist Dale Stewart, according to Loudwire.com.
Between them, the two groups have multiple industry awards, several No. 1 hits, millions of albums sold, legions of fans and reputations as killer live acts.
Weekly Surge caught up with both bands in advance of the tour, so read on below to find out what Seether and Papa Roach have cooked up for Friday’s show at the HOB. Hint: it might include an onstage collaboration.
Jacoby Shaddix’s metamorphosis keeps Papa Roach on track
This year marks the 15th anniversary as a recording act for Papa Roach. Looking back, vocalist Jacoby Shaddix can say, at the least, it’s been quite an adventure.
“The long and short of it is it’s been a fucking roller coaster,” he said in a December phone interview. “There have been moments where we felt like the wheels were going to fall off. There were some great high points and some extreme low points.”
For Shaddix in particular, the past three years have been something of a microcosm of the extremes that have characterized the band’s entire career. But today he’s excited about where his life is at and what Papa Roach can accomplish moving forward.
“I feel like we’re in the middle of the ride and I see 15 more years, 20 more years of doing what we do,” he said.
Three years ago, Shaddix wasn’t able to see a future with anything like that sort of optimism. As the band was working on its 2012 album, “The Connection,” its singer was hitting rock bottom.
“Half way through the record I was like ‘I’ve got to get sober again,’” Shaddix explained. “My wife left me. I’m just really broken and in the most desperate place in my life. And my confidence as a musician was gone, as a person, everything. I was shattered. That record was really the record that I felt the power of music, how it could, people say ‘Music saved my life, man. Music saved my life.’ I’d hear people say that, but I never really knew the true effect of it until that record, ‘The Connection.’ That record saved my life, in a literal sense.”
The drinking and drug problems were nothing new for Shaddix. He’d been battling his addictions for a decade, moving from periods where he cleaned up and went on the wagon, only to relapse into familiar indulgences.
Despite Shaddix's various phases of addiction and sobriety, Papa Roach managed to thrive musically through much of its first 15 years as a band, a career that will open a new chapter on Jan. 27 with the release of its eighth studio album, “F.E.A.R.”
The band, which formed in 1993 in Vacaville, Calif., blasted into prominence with its 2000 major label debut CD, “Infest,” which sold more than three million copies and featured the hit single “Last Resort.”
The 2002 follow-up CD, “Lovehatetragedy,” however, topped out at about 700,000 copies, causing some to say Papa Roach had suffered the sophomore jinx. But with its third album, 2004’s “Getting Away With Murder,” the band answered the doubts, as the CD topped one million copies sold and featured two Top 5 rock radio hits in the tracks “Getting Away With Murder” and “Scars.”
Since then, sales of the group’s more recent albums have dipped markedly, but much of that has mirrored industry-wide declines in album sales that have left even long-established bands selling mere fractions of the numbers of albums they did through the 1990s.
Even as sales dipped, Papa Roach has continued to turn out top five rock radio hits including “Forever” (from the 2006 CD “The Paramour Sessions”),“Lifeline” (from the 2009 CD “Metamorphisis”) “Still Swingin’” (from “The Connection”).
Along the way there have been a couple of personnel changes – the most notable being the 2007 dismissal of long-time drummer Dave Buckner -- as well as Shaddix’s personal ups and downs that culminated in his low point during the making of “The Connection.” That’s when Shaddix decided he had to make sobriety work once and for all.
“I went out on the road, and we toured for that record,” he said. “And I stayed sober the whole record cycle and really just saw the world a bit clearer and a little more focused and got my confidence back as a songwriter and as just a human being and started just making better decisions in my personal life and the relationships around me started to become healthy again.”
In recording “F.E.A.R.,” (it stands for “Face Everything And Rise”) Shaddix gave himself a major test to see if he could resist the behaviors that had at times threatened not only his health, but the existence of Papa Roach.
“I went to Las Vegas, the scene of the crime, to record this (new) record,” Shaddix said. “Some of the greatest failures of my life have been in that city. I had to go back there and try to like make things right with myself, and I just threw myself into this record and was on fire from the first note that was written rather than ‘Oh, where the fuck’s ‘Coby, dude? He’s off on a bender and we don’t know where he is,’ I was present and I was pushing the band. It was just a great feeling to be there with the guys instead of the guys waiting for me to come with it.
“Facing our fears is huge, man,” he said, sounding very much like a man who has learned from the errors of his ways. “If we don’t face our fears in our lives, it can stifle our growth as a human being, as a person, as a spirit, and it can define your life.”
Shaddix is clearly proud of the “F.E.A.R.” album, and feels that Papa Roach has really hit its stride musically in finishing “The Connection” and then making the new album. The band’s sound, which originally had a strong rap-rock element (an emerging trend in the early ‘90s), has shifted toward more of a melodic hard rock sound on recent albums.
“We definitely picked up where we left off on ‘The Connection,’ moving into ‘F.E.A.R.’ stylistically and musically,” Shaddix said. “We kind of settled into a place that we thought was just good for the band. There are some old-school sounds in there, bringing back those big riffs.”
Papa Roach, which also includes guitarist Jerry Horton, bassist Tobin Esperance and drummer Tony Palermo, will begin introducing its newest material this month, as it begins a month-long co-headlining tour with Seether, which kicks off Friday at the House of Blues in North Myrtle Beach.
“We’ll probably play three or four new songs on this tour,” Shaddix said. “And then we’ll just pick and pull the classics from the older records. There are a couple of mandatory tracks we have to play. Both of our bands have those tracks that we’re just like if you didn’t play that song, it just wouldn’t be a Papa Roach or a Seether show.”
The two groups have crossed paths frequently over the years and shared some festival dates, but can only recall one other time they’ve toured together – a stint opening for Staind quite a few years ago.
Nevertheless, the members of the two bands are friends, and Shaddix said Papa Roach is up for creating a spot in the evening where members of both bands share the stage. Whether that will happen will depend on a number of variables, including whether schedules before and during the tour allow for the two groups to come up with a collaboration that works.
“Either we’ll come up with something and do it or we’ll talk about doing it and be too lazy to actually make it happen and just play our show,” Shaddix said, touching on the reality of how things actually work on tour, as well as showing a sense of humor that comes with being back in a good place with his life and his music.
This story was originally published January 7, 2015 at 4:38 PM with the headline "DOUBLE HEADER."