Buddyhead, the LA music website and record label, is getting the documentary treatment.
The group, which was created by Travis Keller and The Icarus Line’s Aaron North in 1998, was infamous for its brash attitude in the late ‘90s and early 2000s with pranks such as stealing Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst’s baseball caps and auctioning them off for a rape charity and vandalizing The Strokes’ tour bus.
Keller and Joe Cardamone, the former frontman of The Icarus Line, are now putting together a documentary with some help from artist Shepard Fairey and Mayans M.C. co-creator Elgin James.
On The Lash: The Buddyhead Movie will be co-directed by Keller and Cardamone and produced by Fairey and James.
“It’s the birth of the internet, it’s the death rattle of the old world and its story of Buddyhead and The Icarus Line. It’s a time capsule constructed from over 250 hours of mini DV tapes and thousands of 35mm photographs shot between 1998 and 2005,” Keller wrote.
The film will feature unseen footage and unheard stories from the likes of At The Drive-In, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fugazi, Elliott Smith, Primal Scream, Iggy Pop, Queens of The Stone Age, Courtney Love, Axl Rose, Marilyn Manson, My Chemical Romance, and Stevie Ray Vaughan’s guitar.
“This is the film about me and my friends. It was a time before Instagram, before Facebook, before any social media. It was before blogs, before Vice and before Pitchfork and before everyone had a camera in their pocket. This is the story of Buddyhead.com, one of the first independent music websites on the internet as well as boutique record label. A DIY webzine that was getting 9.5 million hits a month, putting the music industry on blast via the gossip page, record reviews and interviews. And let’s not forget turning down $9 million dollars multiple times during the dot com bubble,” he added.
Keller said On The Last will have the spirit of docs such as Cocksucker Blues, The Year Punk Broke, DIG!, Decline of the Western Civilization and The Kid Stays in the Picture. “There will be no talking heads or footage not of the time, so there’s nothing to pull you out of the story. In a time where art continues to be watered down for mass appeal our doc is a reminder of what a poke in the eye punk rock hearts can be to the sanitized establishment,” he said.
The group is currently crowsourcing funds to make the doc. Keller said that the reason that it was doing so was to “ensure we get to make the movie we want to make and the one you want to see”.
“The doc will still probably end up on mainstream platforms but keeping with the spirit of Buddyhead and The Icarus Line we are going to whip up the unfiltered directors cut version first. We’re dealing with hundreds of hours of footage and thousands of still images so having the time to assemble this properly is paramount. Another huge part of the process will be conducting interviews with all the musicians and artists that we crossed paths with to get their side of the chaos. And there’s even a couple stories that have to be animated. All these elements are important but take time,” he added.
