Around Hear

About three years ago, Travis Keller created a Web site to display his photography. An avid music fan, Keller soon posted an interview with Ink & Dagger, a band that included several of his friends from the Los Angeles area, and expanded to reviewing discs once record labels added his site to their promo mailing list. By 1999, the fledgling site, known as Buddyhead.com, featured Q-and-A sessions with big-name punks Green Day and All, rock gods Radiohead and Kansas City’s own The Get Up Kids, and people started taking notice.

Soon, Buddyhead spawned a weekly radio show (Monday nights, 9 to midnight Central, broadcast on www.killradio.org), broadened its coverage to include other artists and photographers, and posted some sharply insightful humor pieces, including an “interview with a punk rocker” (who likes only “the first album” from every band mentioned) and its 33 “Rules of Rock” (number eight: “Don’t play funk. Don’t even joke about playing funk”). The site now gets two million to three million hits a day, and Buddyhead recently rated a mention in Spin.

However, that article hints at how far Keller’s site has strayed from its origins as a virtual gallery, for better or worse. Spin focuses nearly entirely on Buddyhead’s gossip section, which famously made public Fred Durst‘s e-mail address and phone number (eventually prompting a vaguely threatening response bearing the subject line “Time to pack up your shit” from flawlessfd@earthlink.com) and which regularly skewers musicians, big-name and obscure alike. Faithful readers might have been stunned at Keller’s revelation in the Spin piece that the gossip page might end up on the chopping block, but he clarifies this was a spur-of-the-moment response inspired by frustration.

“It kind of bummed me out,” he says. “We do a lot of good interviews, artist features and photographs, and then Spin focuses on how we put up Fred Durst’s phone number, which didn’t take much. I mean, it’s cool that we’re getting notoriety, but it almost seems like [the gossip page] was too easy to grasp compared to the other stuff.”

Keller says the site will soon add new photography and CD reviews (this section was last updated in February), but if the latter section were scrapped, few bands and labels would shed tears — they’ve already shed plenty after suffering merciless lashings from Keller or his main cohort, Aaron Icarus. Local groups have hardly been immune to their venom: The Anniversary “somehow managed to make a record without one shred of originality”; the now-defunct Hillary Step “gets an A in the class of white kids playing wussie music for other white kids.” The Get Up Kids’ Matt Pryor proposed in this space roughly a year ago that Buddyhead’s beef was personal and that it was predisposed toward negative reviews for groups it saw as Get Up-related (Kansas City/Lawrence area acts, bands on the Kids’ Heroes and Villains imprint and its parent label, Vagrant).

Keller, who couldn’t be reached for comment for the previous article, contends there’s nothing personal about Buddyhead’s harsh reviews of emo-leaning bands. “It’s never a malicious thing,” he says. “There’s always some kind of wit to it…. Well, maybe there are a few that are malicious.” (Keller’s and Icarus’ suggestions that less-than-worthy bands be “shot in the back of the head one by one” or subjected to a variety of groin-related abuses have generated plenty of heartfelt “stop the violence” letters to the editor, which are in turn posted and mocked.)

Regardless, a few local bands have escaped Buddyhead’s wrath. Shiner‘s Starless and Making Love EP both earned relative raves, and Icarus gave The Casket Lottery‘s Moving Mountains the highest begrudging praise an emo record could receive from Buddyhead, admitting “this is the best that genre possibly has to offer.” Midwest bands don’t bear the brunt of Buddyhead’s criticism, Keller maintains, any more than the site singles out certain labels for criticism (a charge numerous pop-punk imprints have leveled against the site).

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“There’s no label where I would say I like all their bands,” he says. “Like Tooth & Nail: They’ve got some bad bands, but then Frodus (featured in the current Buddyhead issue) is one of my favorite groups. There just aren’t any labels that consistently put out all good stuff.”

Eventually, Buddyhead hopes to become such a label, with a roster that includes The Icarus Line, Swedish avant jazz group Text, Ink & Dagger and an At the Drive-In/Murder City Devils split single. Ink & Dagger broke up, Text doesn’t often venture inland, and At the Drive-In, in addition to being on hiatus, is officially signed to another label, so The Icarus Line, which plays The Bottleneck on Friday, June 15, with The Eyeliners and mi6, is the lone Buddyhead group currently touring. Given that lightning-rod Aaron Icarus has made his share of enemies with his creative yet brutal put-downs, it might seem a thankless task for the Line to greet angry scenesters at each stop, but Keller says there haven’t been any real confrontations.

“It’s mostly confined to message-board flaming,” he says. “People say they’re going to beat us up, but we’ve never been punched or anything. People take things too seriously. The whole point of our site is to make people check themselves. If you can’t laugh at yourself, come on, what are you doing?”

Even if the group were ostracized, Keller says, The Icarus Line is uniquely qualified to deal with such a situation. “The Icarus Line has never been accepted by any scene or label,” he says. “They’re an outcast band as it is.”

Similarly, Buddyhead, by choice, eschews association with any scene or label. “We don’t want to be pigeonholed,” Keller says. “If people think we’re hardcore, we’ll do a hip-hop interview. We don’t want anyone to say, ‘Oh, Buddyhead is this.’ I don’t ever want to be classified by a couple words.”

Buddyhead remains fairly open to new approaches because, as an independent Web site, it has no parent company to satiate with consistent content. (That’s contrary to a wildly implausible theory, started on Buddyhead’s letters page by a fuming fan of a dissed band, which suggests Fox funds the site as an attempt to make inroads with the punk crowd.) “We don’t really cost any money,” Keller explains. “Our only costs are our server, digital tapes and photography supplies, and we balance that out with ads and T-shirt sales. We didn’t have any backing, which is why when all the dot-coms went away, we stayed.”

So while dozens of music-themed sites enter the spacious Internet graveyard, Buddyhead thrives, despite warnings from spurned label heads and musicians that the site has lost all credibility. True, not many surfers stumble onto Buddyhead and head directly to Keller’s pictures, but the sheer volume of hits the site receives suggests at least some of the viewers peruse the full issues. Of the prospect that many of Buddyhead’s readers come only for the gossip, a scenario that would somewhat trivialize a project to which Keller devotes the majority of each day, he says only, “It’s our fault,” and not in an apologetic or dissatisfied tone. He doesn’t rue his decision to add attractions that distract from the site’s initial purpose any more than he loses sleep over bashing groups or causing trauma for Fred Durst’s secretary. “I don’t really have any regrets about anything I’ve ever done,” he says, “Buddyhead included.”