Soap Opera of the Year: Fred Durst Acts Up

2003 was a banner year for Fred Durst for all the wrong reasons: a string of A-list romances that may have existed only in his mind, a lackluster new record, and don’t even get us started on the live shows. He may be oblivious at best and obnoxious at worst, but the Limp Bizkit frontman has a plan -- as well as the celebrity posse and the power -- to pull it off, and that’s precisely why he's here to stay.

 

On March 21, 2003, as the skies over Baghdad blazed like the mother of all laser shows, Fred Durst, patriotic American, advocate of liberty, and indefatigable self-promoter, posted his thoughts about Operation Iraqi Freedom at Limpbizkit.com. "We can't protest any longer," he counseled. "We have to support our country now, because we are at the point of no return. Go USA! Go freedom for Iraq! And on that note, our new CD is gonna hit you with a similar impact!"

It sounded like typical Durstian chest-puffing, but on September 23, Limp Bizkit's fourth album, Results May Vary, hit stores, and the impact was just as he had predicted: Buildings crumbled. Looting erupted in every major American city. Experts wondered whether the man who appeared in the album's first video, "Eat You Alive," was the real Fred Durst or one of his many known body doubles.

Okay, maybe that's how it happened in Durst's heavy-ass dreams. In the real world, the infrastructure remained intact. Looting was confined to Kazaa and other file-swapping services. And while Limp Bizkit's previous two albums had truly leveled the Billboard Top 10 upon arrival, Results May Vary merely sideswiped it, selling 325,000 copies in its debut week.

Ever since Fred Durst's emergence as rap rock's red-capped king in 1999, the opposition has been calling for regime change: music journalists who chafed at his misogyny; hip-hop purists who belittled his simplistic rhymes; fans of Creed, Slipknot, TapRoot, and every other band that he'd sparred with. In the past, the singer had answered such challenges with multiplatinum fuck you's. In 2003, though, he was starting to look a little vulnerable. Was it time, finally, to break out the Haterade and toast the demise of Fred Durst?

"Fred's always had an interest in polarizing people and provoking strong reactions," says Jordan Schur, president of Geffen Records and Limp Bizkit's longtime executive producer. Indeed, with his bombastic stage patter and knack for baiting fellow musicians, Durst, a self-avowed redneck from Jacksonville, Florida, has always seemed more professional wrestler than rock star. Like a WWE grappler, the 33-year-old former tattoo artist also understands that a fighter's entrance into the ring is every bit as important as the main event itself, and he kept the public focused on Limp Bizkit's latest album with more than a year's worth of nonstop melodrama.

A quick follow-up to 2000's Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water became impossible after the departure of original Bizkit guitarist Wes Borland in late 2001, especially when the band's 22-city search for a replacement proved fruitless. In the summer of 2002, however, Durst surprised fans with an announcement: More than 20 new songs had been recorded with producer Rick Rubin, and an album would be arriving as early as December 2002.

By January 2003, though, Durst didn't seem to be in much of a hurry. Instead, he was writing and producing tracks for Britney Spears' new album, and asserting, in a trio of love-struck website postings, that the two were romantically involved. When Spears appeared on MTV's Total Request Live in February, however, she was lip-synching a different tune. "I asked her tongue-in-cheek, 'Where's your boyfriend Fred Durst?'" says TRL host Carson Daly. "And then she did this whole I-don't-even-know-him thing, which was not true at all." Durst responded to the snub by going on Howard Stern's radio show to divulge Spears' crotch-grooming preferences. The pop star's camp was not amused. "It's sad that he's decided to make up stories," her people responded, "and the situation feels very junior high school." (Their recording sessions have never been released.)

In the wake of such steadfast denials, Durst cooled on Britney ("She's got a great ass -- that's all") and focused on Angelina Jolie ("She is one hot motherfucker!"). For several months, Durst praised the virtues of the Tomb Raider star to reporters, blog readers, concert audiences -- anyone who would listen -- but finally acknowledged the futility of his efforts. "It's just not going to happen," he told the London Sun in August. "We exchanged a few words a couple of times. She was really cool about it."

Anyone who caught Durst's appearance at February's Grammy Awards was already familiar with his unique oratory style. With the U.S. on the verge of invading Iraq and an unofficial gag order discouraging presenters from mentioning the conflict, Durst stepped up to the mic and misspoke straight from his heart. "I just really hope we are in agreeance that this war should go away as soon as possible," he declared. And with those words, he somehow managed to annoy millions. Was he for the war, or against it? For proper English, or against it? Eventually, an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary explained that agreeance is a real word, but by then, no one cared.

Instead, audiences were too busy arming themselves with projectiles in preparation for Limp Bizkit's first series of live appearances in nearly two years, opening for Metallica on the Summer Sanitarium Tour. Of course, Limp Bizkit shows have always been chaotic affairs: At Woodstock '99, crowds responded to Durst's encouragements to "smash stuff" by tearing up TV camera towers and giving one another head injuries; at a concert in Sydney, Australia, in January 2001, a 15-year-old girl died in the crush of a Bizkit mosh pit. On the Summer Sanitarium dates, instead of venting their energy at one another, concertgoers aimed it at Durst. During a July concert at suburban Chicago's Hawthorne Race Course, the crowd greeted Limp Bizkit with chants of "Fuck Fred Durst!" and showered the stage with plastic bottles. In return, Durst screamed homophobic slurs, called the audience "fucking pussies," and challenged them to a fight. After just six songs, the band ended their set.

Then the real fight started. In October, Westchester, Illinois-based attorney Michael J. Young filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 172 co-plaintiffs who attended the show, demanding that Durst and Limp Bizkit refund them $25 each. "These people paid good money to see this performance, and they got ripped off," says Young. "I don't think it's fair that Fred Durst gets to keep all the proceeds that he earned, when he didn't perform like he was supposed to perform." Their complaint alleges that "Fred Durst insulted all in the crowd and the city of Chicago repeatedly and without end," and, to make matters worse, "Limp Bizkit never reappeared to finish the one-and-a-half-hour performance it had advertised and contracted to complete." In other words, they felt the show was extremely offensive, and it ended much too soon.

Judging solely from his stage antics, Fred Durst ought to be recognized as the greatest rock agitator since Johnny Rotten. "If he was putting out shit stuff and just being over the top, that'd be one thing," says longtime Durst pal Pauly Shore. "But it's about music and selling albums." And, as always, the Weas is right: In September, after numerous title changes (including the apt Bipolar, the cryptic The Search for Teddy Swoes, and the all-time best name for a rock record ever, Panty Sniffer), at least as many missed release dates, and the late-inning addition of ex?Snot guitarist Mike Smith, Results May Vary finally materialized. "[When] Wes Borland left, Limp Bizkit needed time to regroup," says Jordan Schur. "We made one record without a guitar player, and those were really Fred's songs. Then we found a guitar player, so we wanted to make another record. Then we ended up taking the best of both records, and the whole thing just took a minute."

It took critics much less time to dismiss it. "Limp Bizkit limps another step closer to obsolescence," declared USA Today's Edna Gundersen. "Does anybody still care?" asked Caroline Sullivan of London's Guardian. Actually, Results May Vary isn't all that horrible -- it's competent, radio-friendly product by a band determined to cover its bases. Beat-heavy tracks like "Gimme the Mic" and "Phenomenon" deliver the clean crunch that Limp Bizkit went platinum on, while "Underneath the Gun" and "Build a Bridge" aim for the power-ballad crowd, with new guitarist Smith supplying corny guitar-hero licks that the less populist Wes Borland would never stoop to. And while Durst's sad-sack self-absorption is more out of control than ever, you still might find yourself singing along to lyrics like "Heartbreak is a headache / Like a toothache / Or an earthquake." Three weeks after its release, Results May Vary had sold more than 500,000 copies -- a modest number compared to Chocolate Starfish, which went platinum in just seven days. Clearly, Durst was no longer flavor of the month, but he hadn't been knocked off the menu entirely, either.

Those closest to Durst argue that his detractors are looking at all the wrong indicators. "Limp Bizkit's music is very emotional," says Peter Katsis, the group's manager and a senior VP at the entertainment company the Firm. "It's not an intellectual experience that some journalist can expound on. This is rock'n'roll straight from the fucking gut."

Because Durst has been angry at Spin ever since an August 1999 cover story gently mocked his pickup lines and, in his opinion, overemphasized his frequent use of the word yo, neither he nor his gut would comment for this piece. But Katsis was more forthcoming. "I believe that critics had nothing to do with breaking any of this new hard music," he says. "Now, you probably won't print this, but I truly believe that a lot of critics hold resentment [toward Fred] because of that."

Without the support of the music press, Limp Bizkit turned to MTV for its earliest media exposure at a time when other bands had rejected the tastemaking music channel. "In the early days, Rage Against the Machine wouldn't be associated with MTV," says Schur. "Tool wouldn't be associated with MTV. The cutting-edge-rock genre basically ignored it. But we thought MTV was cool, and we thought we could make it a little cooler as far as our shit goes."

Whatever Limp Bizkit did for MTV, MTV certainly returned the favor: Beginning with Durst's self-directed video for "Faith," the band became a TRL staple, and several million album sales followed. Next, Durst began applying his Midas touch to other bands with misspelled names. Skeptics scoffed when Interscope made him a vice president, but then he signed multiplatinum acts Staind and Puddle of Mudd.

Through his video work, Durst also got one Adidas-clad foot in the film industry, though his plans to dominate Hollywood are proceeding slowly. Of the five films Durst has been attached to direct since 1999 (including the bully revenge drama Runt and the skateboarding feature Lords of Dogtown), none has yet made it to production, but his associates say it's too soon to write him off. "People think directing is about getting that initial opportunity, and it's not," says Fight Club director David Fincher, who's been mentoring Durst in his cinematic pursuits. "It's about doing something with that opportunity. And Fred is a guy who is going to fucking work. I mean, this is not a guy who wants to be a director so he can get good tables at restaurants. That's the thing I like about Fred -- he's an insanely hard worker."

Or is it that all his hard work just makes him seem more insane? In October, while Durst could be seen sensitively devouring Halle Berry's face in the video for Bizkit's cover of the Who's "Behind Blue Eyes" (a promo clip for Berry's horror film Gothika), the frontman was logging overtime trying to insinuate that he and the Oscar winner-turned-Bond girl had become an item. He bragged about the intensity of their onscreen kiss and then told MTV News, "Someone has come into my life that I really feel like, for once in my life, that I really, really bond with like I've never bonded with anybody." (Emphasis blatantly added.) But when Berry later announced that she and her husband of two years were separating, Durst dropped all talk of his mystery someone and insisted that he and Berry were just friends.

Though Durst's knack for being seen with the right celebrity pal at the right time seems undeniably Faustian, people who've seen him in action chalk it up to something more like pathological confidence. "Fred can walk into a room and establish a rapport with anyone," says MTV's Daly. Rachell Burns, a tattoo artist who gave Durst one of his earliest breaks in the body-ink business, would agree: "I hooked him up at a shop in Jacksonville, and within 15 minutes, he had insulted every motherfucker in the shop. He was like, 'I can tattoo circles around you, you, you.'"

Sometime during the past year or so, Durst found time to get a pair of new tattoos of his own. Now, for all eternity, Elvis Presley and Kurt Cobain reside cheek to cheek, in monochromatic splendor, just above Durst's hairy heart. "Kurt Cobain!" says Travis Keller, cofounder of the rock-gossip website Buddyhead.com. "It's like Hitler getting a Jesus tattoo. I mean, dude, everyone knows what you're really like."

A modestly cynical interpretation may be that by putting two icons of rock'n'roll emotion on his chest, Durst hopes to obscure his own calculating soullessness. An even more frightening notion: Durst really believes that he, Kurt, and Elvis are three of kind. But there's a charitable explanation, too: Durst is just a fan and either too clueless or too unconcerned with what others think to worry about the implications. Instead, he just pays tribute to his heroes and aspires to their greatness. Is he aiming too high? Sure. But when you believe in yourself like that?when you're a self-described "crazy, crazy man with a crazy, crazy plan" (and, yes, some talent) there's no way a single flop, much less a modest hit like Results May Vary, can derail your career.

On his cover of "Behind Blue Eyes," Durst pays tribute to Pete Townshend's azure orbs, but a more fitting analogue may be another swaggering hothead, Ol' Blue Eyes himself. Which isn't to suggest that Fred Durst has the mellifluous pipes of Frank Sinatra, or even Frank Sinatra Jr. But the intense ambition, the survivor's knack for brand extension and reinvention -- those things he's got. In the early 1950s, after Sinatra's alleged connections to communists and the Mafia had cost him his recording deal, his movie contract, and his radio show, he reemerged as an actor in From Here to Eternity and won an Oscar. The one-time teen idol then jump-started his music career by performing songs for swinging adults instead of swooning teenagers, and his recording career lasted another 40 years. Limp Bizkit may not be facing their final curtain, but when they do, Durst has the backup film career in place, along with lots of loyal and powerful friends throughout the entertainment industry ready to lend a hand, you dig? So mark your calendars, haters. Come 2050, Fred Durst is definitely going to be over.