Rocker’s Platform: Meet Your Meat

Instead, Feldman, 36, says he’ll protest what he and the notoriously sensational People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals contend are unacceptable practices by the chain in how it acquires its principal product: chicken.

Feldman, a proudly professed vegan, has become a favorite poster boy for PETA and has participated in such animal advocacy rallies as lobster liberations and cow crusades, PETA spokesman Sean Diener says.

Goldfinger is the opening band for “The Young and the Hopeless” creators, Good Charlotte, in concert Oct. 23 at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Siegel Center. Before the band takes the stage, Feldman, joined by his “almost-vegan” fellow guitarist Brian Arthur, will protest outside the KFC at 3 p.m. A spokesperson for KFC says the chain is not aware of any protest planned outside its Broad Street location and declines to comment on PETA or Feldman’s stagings.

For the past few years Feldman increasingly has infused Goldfinger’s lyrics with anticarnivorous prose. Take “Free Me” for example, a song he wrote in Germany with lines like: “I just want to feel how life should be / I just want enough space to turn around and face the truth.”

“As a kid going to McDonald’s I was taught hamburgers are grown in patches ready to be eaten,” Feldman says by phone from a gig in Australia. Feldman has been a vegan for seven years, he says. And his intense hostility toward the food-service industry inspired a music video the band produced that features footage of what he calls “slaughterhouses” where cows, pigs and chickens are raised. He says whenever Goldfinger performs, “at least 20 kids say how it changed their life.” Feldman says he understands why: “I’ve held rescued chickens in my arms and after seeing the joy in their faces — soon enough we’ll have to start treating them like we do ourselves.”

— Brandon Walters

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