"Excuse me," the salt-and-pepper-haired waiter says with an exaggerated gesture, "another table has bought you a round of drinks." "Dude, no way!" says Papa Roach's stocky drummer, David Buckner, as he looks around Ben Benson's, a midtown-Manhattan steakhouse, for his band's booze benefactor. "OK, who did it?" asks boisterous, spiky-haired frontman Coby Dick. "I'm stoked, man. This has never happened to us." He spots a blue-blazered middle-aged man a few tables away. It's not hard; the man is waving a hand high above his head. At his table sit two teens, one of each gender, both grinning like loons.

"Hey, man - you know P. Roach, man?" Dick asks, snapping his head back.

"My niece Jill and her boyfriend Sal are big fans," the man explains. "Do you mind if they come say hello after you've eaten your dinner?"

"Nah, man," Dick bellows. "Send 'em up! Come hang!"

It couldn't have been more perfectly choreographed: The very week Papa Roach's major-label debut, Infest, is Number Eight on Billboard's Top 200 and inches closer to platinum, the very night they make their network-television debut on Late Night With Conan O'Brien, they get the star treatment from strangers in a metropolis infinitely larger than their Northern California hometown, Vacaville. "We've always had a fight ethic," says Dick, 24. "We come from Vacaville - a town with no scene. The closest rock scene was Sacramento, where we were the bastard cousin. The bands there, like Deftones, Far and Will Haven, were tight and kinda like, 'Who the fuck are you?'"

Papa Roach have been together for seven years, but it's only been two months since their single, "Last Resort," a song about a friend's suicide attempt, launched them into the realm of national tours and MTV. "They wanted Coby to do Say What? Karaoke," says mellow, earnest bassist Tobin Esperance, 20. "He shot that idea down pretty quick. But we are gonna do Total Request Live. You gotta do what you gotta do."

Right now, what the band is doing is eating a celebratory feast of chicken, vegetables, steak (naturally) and a heaping plate of home fries, and watching Dick eat the largest lobster anyone at the table has ever seen. "It's four pounds, dude!" he exclaims, spearing a chunk. "It's as big as a puppy!"

It's the first rock-star indulgence of a culinary nature that Papa Roach have allowed themselves. "I'm used to Taco Bell, man," Dick says between buttery mouthfuls. "This is special. We figured that since we've taken that next step - to rock-star style - we can do the little cliched sh*t every once in a while."

"When we were recording our album," Buckner, twenty-four, continues - something these two old friends do constantly for each other, "we got to stay at the Bel Age Hotel in L.A. We went down there and partied and had fun."

"Don't you mean 'got wasted and fucked shit up?' " Dick asks.

"There were definitely some lawn chairs thrown over some balconies," Esperance says. "Bottles, too. There was a little getting naked in the pool. And, uh, I think someone might have trashed a hotel room."

Herein lies a warning to all hotels scheduled to house Papa Roach in the next months: Lock up your televisions. "As soon as we're certified platinum," Dick says, "we're launching TVs. It'll be an homage to rock & roll. But the whole old-school, rock-star idolatry is bullshit. And it's over. People like Slipknot are breaking it down. It's cool to be a rock star, as long as you're not a cock star."

Vacaville, known as the "onion capital of the world," forms a triangle with San Francisco and Sacramento. It is predominantly middle-class, and all four members of P. Roach still live nearby. Dick and Buckner knew each other from their school football team, where apparently they spent more time talking music than learning plays. "We weren't that good," Dick admits. "We talked about starting a band, and we did while we were still on the team. Neither of us wanted to be jocks; we wanted to be rockers."

The band is named in honor of Dick's great-grandfather, now in his mid-nineties, Papa Roatch. "He's the coolest guy," Dick says. "But the name took on its full meaning after we were together a few years. We looked at ourselves like cockroaches - we're survivors. And the thing about roaches is that if you see one, there's a million, and your whole house is infested. It's playing itself out now: We crept in quietly, underground, and now pow! We're Number Eight in the country in just two months."

The earliest version of P. Roach must have sounded dreadful. "We had Dave on drums and me singing, with a bass player and a trombone player - for like, a month," Dick says. "We did a talent show and jammed a lot."

"They covered Jimi Hendrix's 'Fire' without a guitar player," Esperance interjects disgustedly. "Can you believe that?"

"I don't remember that, Tobin," Dick says, chuckling. "Yeah, we did it because the Chili Peppers covered it. It was laughable. We sucked ass."

A mutual friend hooked them up with guitarist Jerry Horton, 25, who liked death-metal and industrial bands like Godflesh. Horton is straight-edge - he's never drank alcohol, taken drugs or smoked cigarettes. He doesn't eat red meat. He exudes a serene calm and is clearly admired by his band mates for his stance. "I don't even hear him cuss," Esperance says. "We used to try to get him to drink and smoke, but after a while we realized how cool it was. We gotta let Jerry be Jerry."

Esperance joined as bassist in 1996, but he's been with P. Roach since their first non-backyard show, at the Vacaville Community Center in 1993. "Tobin was like, twelve," Dick says. "He was our roadie. He'd go smoke all the weed and drink all the beer while we loaded up our equipment after the show. He backed us up a few times when our original bass player, Will, went off to Christian-school camp. Then he finally joined a few years later."

"They would practice at our house, sometimes five hours a day," recalls Marge Buckner, Dave's mom. "One day, one of the neighbors came over because they thought their windows were going to shatter." Buckner's family has long aided the band, helping to finance some of their early EPs and lending support of another variety. "I felt that the guys needed some spiritual guidance," Marge says. "One evening I got together with all of them and we did a meditation which lasted about five and a half hours. It set the energy for the band. They get that feeling when they're playing, and they know that they will always be brothers. Native Americans believe that when you form a partnership, you have to work as brothers: The drum doesn't sound without all participating."

The band earned an audience the old-fashioned way - show by show - in and around California. "We used to stand outside our shows with our our three- and four-song CDs, screaming, 'Papa Roach, what the fuck? Five bucks!' " Dick says. "Dave would actually hit kids upside the head with the CDs. But that didn't work; they'd be too scared of him to buy any."

They continued to record independently financed EPs - Old Friends from Young Years, . . . Let 'Em Know! and 1998's Five Tracks Deep. That effort caught the ears of Warner Bros., which financed a demo but failed to sign the band after hearing the collection of songs that would, by and large, become Infest. "They were like, 'You're sucking ass!' " Dick says. "Then, literally the next day, we got the call from DreamWorks." They were signed.

Infest has no summer party jams for the rock & roll nation. Musically it is like standing on a precipice - sustained tension and the threat of a lethal tumble. P. Roach opt for dynamics over a wall of noise, recalling Eighties bands like Faith No More. "We spit the heavy-metal hellfire," says Buckner. "We have a metal sound but a punk-rock vibe," clarifies Horton. "Punk rock's our heart and soul - singing about your life and doing it all for the music," adds Dick. Lyrically, Dick covers difficult ground: divorce, suicide, alcoholism, alienation. His words are blunt, not imagistic. Anyone can hear that the emotion is real and that he has intimate knowledge of the subject matter.

Dick's life is stable now - he's been happily married for three years - but it wasn't always that way. "When we started out, I dabbled in crackspeak," Dick says. "Just real scatterbrained lyrics. My brother was diagnosed with ADD, and I think I have it, too. I'm pretty hyperactive and mood-swingy. I had a bed-wetting problem until I was sixteen. It was not cool; I had some issues. My mother tried to take me to counseling, but I wasn't going to talk to someone who didn't know me. By the time I was nineteen, I found a different way: I decided to write my life down on paper. And on this record I'm venting my emotions. It's blunt."

Dick moved out of his family home while still in high school, graduating on time, partying every night and holding down a variety of jobs. "I was a dishwasher," he says, "and I also cleaned up blood and piss and sh*t on the floors of a hospital on an Air Force base for a long time. I worked in the ICU; I saw a few people take their last breaths. One woman terminated right in the hallway where I was mopping."

One fateful night, Dick saw something else that he will never forget. "There was a decapitated head in the freezer that they had for the dental students," he recalls with a freaky grin. "It had no skin, so the students could learn about the muscle groups. And the eyes were still there, frozen." Later that night, Dick took psychedelic mushrooms for the first and last time. "I flipped out," he says seriously. "I was seeing Jesus, and he was crossed with my dad - who has long hair and a beard like Jesus - and this head is flashing through my mind. I called my mom in the middle of the night, like, 'Help, I'm freaking out!' All of my friends that were there looked like dogs to me. I wrote a song about it, called '8/29' - that was the date it happened."

At the time, Dick was living with the friend whose suicide attempt inspired "Last Resort." "We were wigged-out teenagers with no stability," he says. "He's autistic and an artist, and he went through this crazy downward spiral and tried to kill himself. He destroyed every piece of artwork he had ever done. I have the only one left."

"At the end of it," Buckner says, "after he tried to kill himself, he said he had killed the part of him that was depressed. He found God through it and is a Jehovah's Witness now. It's extreme, but it's what he had to do."

The song - with its "Losing my sight/Losing my mind/Wish somebody would tell me I'm fine" refrain - has connected with troubled fans. It captures the confusion and helplessness of depression, and though it provides no solutions, the underlying message is to fight for survival. "We've gotten so many e-mails from people who tell us "Last Resort" saved their lives," Dick says. "It makes some people feel less alone. But it's hard, too. A lot of people tell us they're thinking about suicide and don't know what to do. All we can say is, 'Keep your head up; find a friend, family member or counselor you can talk to. And if that doesn't work, write a song or just write it all down.'"

"I don't think we even realize how heavily some of our stuff is connecting," Horton says quietly, looking down at his plate. "A lot of people think we have answers. The only one we have is, 'Don't do it.' We try to respond to as many e-mails as we can, but it's getting really hard now that we're so busy."

P. Roach's appeal, in essence, is that they don't have any more answers than the kids in the mosh pit. They grind and growl their way through the same tribulations that have confused teenagers for years. Their fans have found something in Papa Roach. "They need to grab on to something that's real," Buckner says. "They grab it and hold it when they find it."

Now, two of those people - the duo behind our free drinks - are edging their way toward the table. "Put 'em up, dude!" shouts Dick, making the devil-horns heavy-metal sign to the burly, blushing young fella. "My name's Coby, man."

"I know," the guy, whose name is Sal, replies. "You guys are so cool."

"Oh, my God," his girlfriend, Jill, chirps. "I can't believe you guys are here! You guys are going to be on TRL, right?"

Right, but that's probably not the best icebreaker, Jill. "We're going to do it," Buckner will say later. "It's wack, but obviously MTV has helped us a lot. We owe it to them. But we were faced with a total situation: If we did TRL, it looked like we'd have had to miss a Warped Tour date. That would have been the biggest sellout move this band ever made." It turns out Papa Roach have time to catch a flight to Albany to play at Warped after the teeny-boppers scream at them on 60 million televisions. "If it came down to it, we were going to do Warped," Buckner says. "There was no way we were going to cheat the fans who had paid twenty-five hard-earned bucks to see us. Fuck that. The TRL fans probably won't be there in the future anyway."

"Yep," Dick says, rubbing his face. "Hype dies, but you can't take away a band's live show. TV is cool; radio, cool. MTV backing us is icing on the cake. But the loaf of that cake will always be P. Roach and the fans. In that way, we're in the same place we were five years ago."

[From Issue 848 — August 31, 2000]