Papa Roach’s Jacoby Shaddix – HuffPost 12.7.09

[Note: This is advice to new artists in the context of contributing to the culture in practical ways.]

Mike Ragogna: When did your band start helping the needy?

Jacoby Shaddix: It began in April 2009, and we worked with a local charity called Loaves & Fishes in Sacramento. When we were working on our record Metamorphosis, we were paying attention to what was going on in the world around us and directly in our community of Sacramento. There were a lot of home foreclosures, so we started to really dig-in and research the homeless population and what was going on there. There was so much desperation and hopelessness. 55-65% of each state’s homeless population is made up of Korean War, Vietnam, Iraq, Desert Storm, and Kosovo war veterans. A lot of these guys go serve our country and then have a real tough time getting back into society.

That’s exactly where I came from. My family was once homeless, my father was a Vietnam veteran. It’s what helped destroy our family unit because he had way too much wreckage and baggage and issues and a drug problem. He just didn’t know how to connect back into society as a normal, hard-working American apparently.

So we started working with Loaves & Fishes, and people were tripping out. People were going, “Oh my God, there’s a rock star serving us food. We’d never seen this before!” Seeing smiles on people’s faces, I was like, “Alright, that’s cool. I like the fact that I can go down there and cheer people up and serve them plates, but what can I really do. How do I really put food on their table ’cause that’s what I want to do.”