Buddyhead’s Travis Keller Recalls Stealing Fred Durst’s Red Hats and the Fallout That Followed

In a new interview with Vice, Buddyhead co-founder Travis Keller revisited one of the site’s most infamous stunts—raiding Fred Durst’s office at Interscope Records and stealing several of his signature red hats.

For those unfamiliar, Buddyhead was a notorious online zine and label in the late ’90s and early 2000s, known for taking shots at bands not just through online rants, but through wild real-world antics. Their targets included the likes of The Strokes, The Vines, and of course, Limp Bizkit.

But few moments were as bold—or as absurd—as when Keller and company snuck into Fred Durst’s office back in 1999, during the peak of Limp Bizkit’s fame.

“One of them [the closets] was just red hats, top to bottom… like, no joke. It was like a cartoon. So we grabbed like three of those and I just shoved them down my pants.”
– Travis Keller to Vice

At the time, Durst was not only the frontman of Limp Bizkit, but also the Senior VP of A&R at Interscope, where he helped sign bands like Staind and Puddle Of Mudd. Keller says an Interscope rep let them into Durst’s office while he was out of town, giving them a brief window to take pictures in front of gold records—and nab a few iconic red New Era caps.

Keller later auctioned the hats off for $1,000 each, donating the proceeds to a rape crisis charity in protest of Durst’s performance at Woodstock ’99, where Limp Bizkit’s chaotic set became a focal point of controversy amid reports of sexual assaults and rioting. The band’s behavior onstage, combined with the festival’s dangerously poor conditions, made them a lightning rod for blame—though later documentaries have painted a more nuanced picture.

Not surprisingly, the stunt didn’t sit well with Durst.

“He started responding in Kerrang! and the British rock press, saying he was gonna hire people to beat us up… there was like a month or two of not really going out a lot in L.A.”
– Keller

The Buddyhead vs. Limp Bizkit beef didn’t stop there. Keller recalled meeting a woman years later who told him that she had been Durst’s receptionist at the time—and that Buddyhead’s online antics had upended her life. The site frequently posted the Interscope office number online and encouraged fans to prank call Durst.

“She would get like 200 calls a day… ‘Tell Fred Durst he’s fat.’ ‘Tell him Limp Bizkit sucks.’ Just all these 14-year-old kids.”
– Keller

Travis Keller is currently crowdfunding a documentary about the rise and fall of Buddyhead via Indiegogo, aiming to tell the full story behind one of rock’s most reckless and outrageous DIY media collectives.

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