Back in the days of LimeWire and landlines, Buddyhead was the best place on the internet.
Launched in 1998 to showcase co-founder Travis Keller’s photography, it evolved into a music website full of brutally honest reviews and the kind of industry gossip that provoked legal threats from KoЯn, Courtney Love, and Axl Rose. Later, Keller and co-founder Aaron North started a record label that released albums by groundbreaking artists like At The Drive-In, The Dillinger Escape Plan and North’s own band, The Icarus Line.
The pair were the world wide web’s proto-pisstakers, a reputation they cemented with a series of pranks on the era’s biggest musicians. For instance: spray-painting “$uckin’ Dick$” on The Strokes‘ tour bus, or their “Torture Device” crank calls to Tenacious D’s manager, or the time Keller stole three of Fred Durst’s baseball caps before auctioning them off for a rape charity, after a woman was assaulted during Limp Bizkit’s set at Woodstock ‘99.
Unsurprisingly, the pair made plenty of enemies in the industry, and a huge amount of fans outside of it. But as the radical pockets of the early internet were subsumed by social media, the site began to fizzle out. Keller spent the following half decade on heroin and almost died, but he’s still here—and, like the rest of us, now seems to spend most of his time on Instagram, posting memes that excoriate the reality of living in America in 2025.
He also heads up an art collective, American Primitive, with filmmaker Joe Mendel and former Icarus Line frontman, Joe Cardamone, and is currently crowdfunding On the Lash, a documentary cut from 250 hours of mini DV tapes he shot between 1998 and 2005.
I caught up with him to find out how you even start editing something like that.
VICE: How’s it been going through all that old footage, because I found watching some of it almost unbearably sensual?
Travis Keller: At first it was really hard because there’s a lot of friends that aren’t here any more, who have passed or that we’re not really close with.
I spent all of 2020 putting the tapes in. You have to do it in real time. It’s physical media—you push play, push record, wait. You gotta watch the tape. That was a lot of my pandemic, which was a little heavy because it’s my life; I lived it.
Then, once I started going through it a little bit more and showing Joe [Cardamone], it’s kind of like everyone’s become characters now and I love it again. And I’m excited to put this movie together. I’ve got past it being heavy.
Have you got an idea of how you’ll balance those different tones within the story?
It’s not really a documentary, it’s more like a fever dream. You won’t see anyone old. You’re not going to see me now. Everyone’s going to be cool, like they were 25 years ago. I don’t want anyone to be reminded they’re watching a documentary. You’re not gonna see 2025 Dave Grohl in our movie, telling you how it was. I want people to stay in that world.
It’ll only be stuff from that time, aside from some narration from people that were there. Some of the story only we can tell, and some of it, people we toured with or whatever, they can tell it better than we can.
We’re going to be pretty honest about everything. I mean, my story ends up on heroin for six years and almost dying. We’ll address all of that as much as it’s interesting, because it’s part of our story, for sure.
I think this kind of history-making is important, to show people that there’s more to that time than The Strokes and Limp Bizkit.
I’ve always documented my life. I come from the world of skateboarding, that’s what connected me to music. Skateboard videos always had a million different artists of all genres on the soundtrack. And that’s what connected me to photography and filming, because as a skateboarder you got to prove that you stuck something, that you landed the trick.
When I moved to Los Angeles, I was still skateboarding, but I landed in the middle of the punk scene. The Icarus Line were booking shows and they were already touring and putting records out, so I just shifted the attention to that. And this is like my punk rock skateboard video.
A lot of this seems to revolve around The Icarus Line. I’ve heard you talk about how they’re the last true rock and roll gang.
I don’t think they ever gave people like them deals again. They were on a major label with songs that were like, nine minutes long. They were going for art. It was the death rattle of that. Kurt Cobain was one of the last big ones—the labels were just like, ‘We’re not going to give junkies money any more.’ If you look up bands nowadays, most of them, their parents have Wikipedia pages. It’s always kind of been like that, but it’s a lot worse now.
It was funny seeing a Cobrasnake photo of you and Joe the other day, because it feels like there’s a forgotten history of this time that’s been concreted over by ‘indie sleaze.’
Another reason we want to tell our story is to explain what the world was like, how we made flyers and put out records and booked shows. Joe would get a job at an indie record label and use their landline and call people up long distance because it was expensive. We were the last gasp of that.
It’s an in-between time. There’s the beginning of the internet, but there’s still old world media. We traversed both. It’s a highly undocumented era compared to nowadays. A lot of the early internet has been erased now, and a lot of our story has been lost because it was in articles or magazines that weren’t digitized.
Hopefully it’ll be inspiring to a whole new generation, because we came from a world that doesn’t really exist any more. The kids these days were just raised under different circumstances; they were all born with cellphones. Not to say that that’s bad or good, it’s just different. This was right before everyone had a camera in their pocket. I had to lug a DV camera around with tapes and batteries and all that shit. It was a hassle.
A lot of what I associate with that era feels like a shift from this punk rock attitude to this kind of trolling stance that’s now common on the internet.
The early 2000s, we were fighting this culture war. It was us versus rap rock—that was the corporate answer to punk. We had this scene in LA, and it became worldwide once we started playing festivals and meeting other bands.
We knew all these people that were so talented, so we were always trying to shed light or draw attention to things that we thought were cool. We always tried to be your older brother driving to school, like, ‘Hey, check out this cassette of this band.’ That’s what we grew up thinking you were supposed to do.
A lot of people took the shit-talk as if we were negative dudes, or whatever, which maybe we were a little bit. But it really came from a place of love. We were so in love with art, and knew what we liked so much that we were protective of it. So we were just like, ‘Listen to these other dudes, rather than these posers, these corporate bands.’
Obviously, it’s pretty apparent we lost the war. But looking back, how could we have won? We were up against a Goliath of money and payola.
Let’s talk about your Instagram; it’s obviously fairly different to the old Buddyhead site, but you’re certainly not getting more conservative with age.
I’ve always had the same views, but it took the pandemic and for time to stop to figure out what my views are, to find a name for it, which was communism. A lot of people are scared of the word ‘communism,’ but it really just means ‘empathy.’ It means making sure all your people are taken care of.
I just read books like The Jakarta Method, which is the story from the CIA’s own documents about how they go around the world and murder anyone that wants healthcare or unions. They spend billions of dollars murdering communists. If it doesn’t work then why are they doing that?
If you look at how China and Russia were before communism, they were feudal slave states. After communism, the USSR became the number two world power, beats America in the space race, which is crazy. In ten years they did what we would do in 100.
The point is getting everyone on the same page. What I’m doing is spreading class consciousness and educating people on how things really are. There’s more of us than there are of them. Communism means, instead of the CEO getting all the fucking loot, it’s distributed to the workers.
For me, it’s all about connecting with people. That’s what I get off on. If it’s memes or a music video or a photo or a zine, or this movie. I really just want to reach through the screen and connect with that person. Human connection is why we all do this. All of them are equal to me. The meme is the lowbrow, the film is the highbrow, but it’s all the same shit. There’s another person at the other end that’s feeling something or getting some information.
Is that why you went down the crowdfunding route, rather than trying to get traditional backing?
We didn’t really know anything; we’d never made a movie before. I called up everyone I’d ever known that had ever made a movie or been involved with one. One of the first people I called was Shepard Fairey, the artist, because he was involved with the Banksy movie. So I just approached him and that’s how he became one of the producers.
We’ve probably spent the last six months going around, seeing what the temperature is. We’ve got a couple streaming services that are down to see a first cut, but now we’ve just got to get there. We kind of just got tired of the song and dance, so we went back to our roots: just give us money and we’ll make this movie that we want to make.
I think there’ll be a book that comes with the film that’ll be an archive of the site, with extra photos. I’m doing a photography book before the movie, and I think Joe’s even working on a book about The Icarus Line, breaking down each album. I can’t even speak to that, but he’s got a plan. If people care, we have more shit.
I was weirdly moved by the footage of LA just twinkling away in the trailer; kind of made me want to jump on a plane and fly to the West Coast.
We’re kind of like unofficial ambassadors of LA. It heavily influences everything we do and we’re always repping it if we can, consciously or unconsciously.
LA and the time period are as much characters as anyone else in the movie. That shot you’re talking about with the skyscrapers, if you look up at the skyline in downtown now, it’s like four times as big as that.
I don’t think we could really exist and do what we do anywhere else. We have such an interesting network of friends and resources here.
As far as scenes, LA is pretty splintered, it always has been. It’s a huge, sprawling place. Literally 50 cities and a million cultures all crammed together. To combat that, we’ve recently opened a DIY venue that’s similar to the ones we grew up on.
We were tired of always having to hang out in bars, so we built this space called Lost Angeles. It’s in downtown LA, in the Pico-Union district. It’s like no man’s land, where we can be as loud as we want and no one will bother us.
We make a lot of music videos as American Primitive, which is me, Joe from the Icarus Line, and his brother Sean. So it’s a place for us to make music videos, do photoshoots, stream on Twitch.
It feels a little like we’re trying to build up everything that we’ve lost again from scratch.
People are hungry for something different. I don’t even think most of them know what it is, but I think independent voices and places are one aspect of what we need, so I’m trying to do my part.
I think people are finally ready for independent voices. Three years or so ago, I didn’t think so. People were like, ‘Oh, you should do the website again.’ And I was like, ‘Dude, no one goes to websites at all, except to buy shit.’
That’s why I’m bringing the site back, and why we’re doing this movie is there’s a lack of independent voices in music, art, film, even politics, and we want to fill that void again. To be a hub for different voices that we dig. So yeah, some things never change, I guess.
If you fancy it, you can donate to the ‘On the Lash’ crowdfunder here.
Follow Adam Christopher Smith on Instagram @yungtolstoi
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