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Is Corey Feldman really on tour with Fred Durst?
[Editor’s note: No, not anymore—but Feldman did go on tour with Durst and his band Limp Bizkit this summer, hitting 24 cities between July 16 and the end of August, and we’re going to talk about this tour in the historical present tense, like the historical event that it was. Or “is.”]
It’s July 2024. Corey Feldman is on tour with Limp Bizkit, and three other, less famous artists: Riff-Raff, Bones & Eddy Baker, and N8 Noface—a one-man screamo act whose label touts him as “the Chicano Flannery O’Connor.” Loserville is an amphitheater tour, and most shows have sold out. Before surcharges, tickets range from $51 for a spot on the lawn to $1,400 for a front-row center seat. The show is produced in association with Live Nation Entertainment, a Beverly Hills–based company listed on the New York Stock Exchange that made over $22.7 billion in revenue last year and is the biggest producer of live events in the world.
Corey Feldman is singing? He’s not the master of ceremonies or something?
Corey Feldman and his band open the show, and perform for almost exactly 30 minutes, starting most nights at 6:30. (The master of ceremonies on this tour is Riff-Raff.)
This is Corey Feldman the ’80s teen movie star? Edgar Frog from The Lost Boys? The kid with the ear in Stand By Me? I didn’t know he sang.
What Corey told me was that when his parents started taking him to auditions around Hollywood at age three, he was too young to learn lines, but could learn songs. So for him, singing actually predates acting.
How old is he now?
Fifty-two.
And why is Corey Feldman on tour with Limp Bizkit?
The short answer is because Fred Durst hired him.
Fred Durst, the singer in Limp Bizkit? The guy with the red hat?
Yes. And kind of.
If Fred hired Corey, then Fred is…in charge here?
Yes.
This is the author of “Nookie”? The guy who wrote “Break Stuff”?
Yes. Fred is Limp Bizkit’s frontman, but also Limp Bizkit’s manager. He’s producing and managing the tour, and he directed a Spinal Tap–ish promotional short film starring all the performers, as well as the video for “The Joke,” a self-aware track Corey wrote specifically for this tour. He’s in charge of everything from making sure everybody gets paid, to directing the load-in—telling all the huge, tatted, focused guys in all black where to stack the amps and stuff. He’s unbelievably hands-on for a rock star who's sold 40 million albums, and it was surreal to watch him do things like get on people’s cases backstage for not having their pass visible.
Why did Fred want Corey Feldman on the tour?
When I asked Fred this, he said, “What did Corey say?”
Then he said this:
“My hope is that people who might not know who he is get to discover him. And the audience on this tour is so young. We’re having a resurgence where I can ask, ‘For how many people, is it your first time seeing Limp Bizkit?’ The whole place raises their hand. This is a whole new generation of people discovering Limp Bizkit without it being marketed to them.
“And I’m such a fan of Corey’s acting and what he did back in the day. I was like, ‘Man, bring your band out here, and expose your music to this new audience.’ And if they like his music, they can look his name up, and they’ll find Goonies, Stand By Me, Lost Boys, Dream a Little Dream. Because every night I ask people in the audience, and they haven’t seen those movies—and those movies are legendary. Those performances are unreal, bro. Unreal.
“So I said, ‘We have this opening slot. It’s a hard one. And I got some other people wanting to do it, but maybe you might want to do it.’ He goes, ‘That’d be awesome.’ So, cut to—we’re here.”
You talked to Fred? Because it seems like he doesn’t do a lot of, or actually any interviews anymore.
Yes. I talked to Fred while Metallica’s agent and Doctor Ice from the seminal hip-hop group Untouchable Force Organization (or UTFO, Fred’s first concert) and the booking director for City Winery and a dozen other NYC showbiz power players and Limp’s entourage all stood there watching us. He talked about Corey and how this was Limp’s first tour with floor seats (which means no open floor, which means no mosh pit, to Fred’s disappointment: “I miss that bounce”), but also about being a white kid ostracized for loving Black culture in rural Southern 1980s America, and then growing up to be the frontman of a preeminent but also widely despised ’90s frat-rock band.
We didn’t talk about the $200 million lawsuit Fred and Limp Bizkit just filed against Universal Music Group, accusing the label of having deprived them of a career’s worth of royalties through shady accounting practices, because it was July, and they didn’t file the suit until October.
Does he still wear that red hat?
No. But a percentage of Limp’s live audience does, or at least did at the shows I saw in Jersey and Bethel, New York.
Bethel. Bethel sounds familiar.
Bethel is where the first Woodstock was.
Ahh. And long ago, did Limp Bizkit not play another, very different Woodstock festival?
Yes. In 1999. Twenty-five years and 48 hours before the show I saw.
Did you see that Netflix doc about—
Yes. And I promise we’ll get to all of this. But let’s start with the show in Bethel.
Okay. So where are you now?
I’m walking from the parking lot up the gated road to the back of the Bethel Performing Arts Center. Other than the peaked roof up ahead and the winding road behind me, there’s woods and hills in all directions. The air has a weak tang of manure from the local farms and a stronger smokey smell from the campground here. (Hank Williams, Jr. played here last night, and today’s Friday, so some of his fans are still hanging around.) Occasionally a golf cart comes down the road with either a kid or a deeply tanned older guy at the wheel.
Up ahead are the odd sounds of a tech tuning Limp guitarist Wes Borland’s guitars: striking the first couple chords of their best-known songs, retuning, replaying, then unplugging, and then a minute later plugging in the next guitar and starting over again. Further up ahead are the gleaming rooftops of three Prevost deluxe tour buses.
Parked in long spaces next to three tractor trailers, the Provosts have a resting-power look to them, like a top-of-the-food-chain predator that’s gone to sleep. Their hydraulics have been let down, so the bumpers almost touch the asphalt. Even in the sun the windows are deeply black, and there’s a fat cable coming out of a little hatch under each driver’s window, running into a power station at the end of each long space. There’s almost alleyways between the buses, like in a train yard. One has a folding chair out in front of the door, but no one’s there. On the opposite side of the lot are some cones, a few very expensive cars, and a huge head-tatted guy in all black, parking a camo-painted golf cart with suspension and off-road tires. On the far right is a trailer-towing tour bus that looks more like a Greyhound and an RV that's older than most of the RVs at the campground here.
On the left is the venue’s back entrance, a pointless series of planters and sandstoney brick walls leading to with some stairs. A pink laminated 8 foot by 12 foot 8 by 12 inch sign that reads “LIMP BIZKIT” is taped to the bricks. The sign has Limp’s logo—bitten from Major League Baseball’s, but instead of a batter it’s a figure throwing its hand out in a hip-hop gesture. These signs are posted throughout the venue, with words under the logo to tell people where stuff is (like “Stage” or “Catering”). The one by the back entrance says “Everything,” with an arrow pointing at the stairs.
Up those stairs is Corey’s manager, Michael Debarge. We’re in the process of texting each other when we spot each other.
“Corey is very excited to meet you,” he says.
He says Corey’s on his way, and that a tour of the grounds has been arranged for all of us, and that we should stand here in the really hot parking lot and wait for a touring cart.
We wait, chatting by the dumpsters.
As the night, the tour, and the making of this article went on, DeBarge would unveil the depths of his industry knowledge, and reveal himself as one of the power players on tour. Of course he didn’t start out saying anything intimidating or too suggestive, but after 10 minutes, he said this:
“I hope this isn’t a hit piece,” he says. “I trust you.”
And having established this, he begins to talk about the tour and Corey’s role in it.
“Man, this tour almost didn’t happen!” he says. “There’s another big problem every day. Corey keeps hitting these things head on. But he’s not about to let the fans down.”
This article is not supposed to be about Michael Debarge and his vast Dumbledorian network of connections in Hollywood, New York, radio, and show business in general, so for now let’s just say that he’s a longtime music industry figure who entered Corey’s career in a really significant way in 2016, when Corey performed on NBC’s Today Show with another of DeBarge’s clients, Doctor Ice. You may or may not remember this appearance, but according to Debarge most everyone in the business remembers it, because it spiked Corey’s streaming numbers so dramatically.
This article is also not meant to add to the nonstop fusillade of mockery Corey’s endured over the years—for dressing like Michael Jackson as a teenager, or for agreeing to perform his earnest song called “What’s Up With Youth” on Howard Stern’s show in 1992 without realizing that Stern would surround him with dancing strippers and little people and a general freak-show atmosphere, or for dropping an album called Former Child Actor on Crazy Bastard Records (liner contact: [email protected]) in 2002, or for dancing like MJ at a Limp Bizkit show in 2015 while the band played a rock-out cover of “Billie Jean,” or for that appearance on The Today Show the following year, which also featured a lingerie-clad-all-female backing band he called Corey’s Angels, with whom he no longer performs.
One thing this article is meant to do is highlight some of the things about Corey and his career that DeBarge points out to me, like the fact that his Today Show performance on NBC—an appearance people have been making fun of online for close to a decade—was, at the time, the most-viewed and highest-rated performance in Today’s history, and still is, with over 10 million views.
Another purpose of this story is to examine, through the wraparound-sunglasses lens of Limp Bizkit and Corey Feldman’s respective arcs, the idea of humor as an essential part of human endurance, not least for guys like Corey and Fred, who’ve both enjoyed success and derision in practically equal measure.
And another, tertiary purpose is to make clear that, overall, as a truly lifelong industry veteran, Corey knows why he’s on this tour, and deeply understands Seinfeld’s showbiz axiom that the audience makes most of the decisions.
“We’re two guys who have both been kicked around a lot,” Corey tells me later in the band’s dressing room, which reeked of Aqua Net and upstate New York Chinese takeout.
“People didn’t want to give us credit for the things we did, or wanted us to look at us like we were the butt of the joke. The whole Loserville thing is us leaning into that.”
He’s sitting on a loveseat under a big flat-screen, surrounded by open wardrobe trunks and people getting dressed.
“Most places, I can sell out shows if we have the proper location and the proper advertising. That was never the issue. The issue was, are they taking it seriously or are they here to harass me or to take it as a joke?
“It’s funny, the timing of this,” he continues. “There’d just been this new internet troll rumor, ‘Corey Feldman’s whole career is not real. It’s a fraud. It’s a joke.’ They’re stringing together all these clips of me over the years, with mishaps onstage and stuff.
“It’s like, if you think I’m going to stick around for 30 years just to make fun of myself, that’s pretty ridiculous. But if that's what they want, then that’s what I’ll give them. Hence ‘The Joke’ was born.”
In hip-hop terms, “The Joke” could be called a diss track, an edgy response to a building issue. In this case, the target is anyone in Corey’s audience who views his music career in purely so-bad-it’s-funny terms. Lines like “They say, ‘This music sucks a lot’/You mean that song that you just bought?” might sum it up. But Corey takes it further, adding circusy music and a clown costume.
Out in the parking lot, Debarge confirms that it’s been a hard tour—for Corey, for the band, and for Debarge himself, who in his capacity as Corey’s manager has had to deal with everything and everybody, every day, for 30 days so far, with 30 more ahead.
For starters: Their van, which costs $2,000 a day to rent, was not there when the tour began in Wisconsin, which was an issue because there are, according to Debarge, “no Ubers in Wisconsin.”
Corey solved that problem by driving the band in his RV (yes, that one, from the parking lot.) Eventually the bus was delivered, but its trailer doors didn’t lock, so every night they have to pull the RV up against the back of the trailer, so the RV’s bumper is touching the trailer doors, so no one can get in and steal all the band’s gear. The bus’s A/C has also crapped out. It’s been that kind of tour: Corey’s drummer wasn’t allowed into Canada because he couldn’t get a work visa in time, and so Corey had to play drums and sing at the sold-out show in Toronto two nights ago. Because of this, they had to scrap the whole set and improvise. They played “Stand By Me.”
Corey walks down the stairs a few minutes later with his security guard and his girlfriend, Adrien Skye, who’s also a backup singer in his band.
Corey looks like Corey Feldman. He’s wearing a blue velour-ish suit, a fedora with a pink ribbon, shoulder-length hair, and big gaudy Bonoesque sunglasses. He gripes a vape with his left hand and extends his right. His forehead is lined, and his voice is huskier than it’s sounded in recent interviews, but he’s grinning and energized. He says he wore the suit for GQ.
His security guy is ex-military and looks it, glaringly. He’s dressed like a Secret Service agent on vacation with the president, in khakis and a shirt with boats on it—and also a fanny pack across his chest, with the pack part down by his hip, so his hand can rest on the zipper.
Since no one else on the tour had security, this seemed odd, at first.
The touring cart never arrives. But two smaller ones eventually do, so Corey and I sit in the back bed seat of one while security rides up front, and the kid at the wheel asks us if we’d like to see the Woodstock monument, where I stopped to take a leak half an hour ago.
We zip out of the lot and up the paved path, past the quiet, shaded, empty venue, to the top of the hill, where there’s a midway with food and merch tents under big flags that say what each tent is selling. Past them, a view opens of the Catskills. Below is the long green hill where Woodstock took place. Down to the right is where the stage was. Down to the left is the monument—a slab with some plaques and other signs, and people behind a split rail fence. We’re heading there now.
Corey gets approached so fast it makes me think someone has been watching us with a telescope, waiting for him to show up. It seriously takes like 90 seconds. We step out of the cart, walk around the split rail fence, and a guy moves in next to him, selfie-cam at the ready.
“Hey! Corey! Man! Can I get a picture?”
“Of course,” Corey says, knowing that security is already hovering behind the guy, who without asking puts his arm around Corey—and, of course, a group of people have appeared to film this surreal three-way interaction, while another, separate group of people hang back on their phones, texting out word that Corey Feldman is here.
Back at the cart, we’re decompressing, and the kid asks if we’d like to see where the stage was. Adrian and Debarge stay at the overlook, while we off-road down toward the intersection, then get out and walk around a henge of fieldstones covered in lichen, the foundation for the original Woodstock stage.
We talk about random things.
Woodstock ’99 comes up. Corey didn’t see the Netflix doc, but remembers watching the coverage on MTV. Corey’s security guy suggests that the issues arose from using volunteers and temp workers for crowd control instead of law enforcement.
After a pause, still thinking about the selfie-cam guy, I tell a story about Steve-O. I once shadowed him before a gig in Syracuse, New York, and I’ve still never seen people react to another celebrity like they did to the formerly-self-destructive Jackass star. I tell Corey about people handing their infant children to Steve-O and then asking for a photo.
“Oh yeah,” says Corey. “Babies. And pets!”
He puts out his hands and extends his fingers.
“There’s something,” he says, “about touch.”
We head back to the monument, where more carts are pulling into the lot, and a dozen new people stand at the fence, none of them not filming Corey. The word “piranhas” comes to mind.
Corey waves. They wave. Corey has the same easy, unafraid smile he pretty much always does. He says there’s nowhere in the world he’s not recognized, and that today’s reactions are comparably mild.
He hits the vape.
The cart drives on and we all move closer together. As we approach, people say his name.
“You have to understand,” he says, “this has been happening since age five.”
Durst and Corey don’t agree on everything, but do agree on where they met: the Playboy Mansion, sometime in the late ’90s. Corey says Durst asked to check out his music, which was great news. (Durst says Corey asked him.)
“At the time that meant a huge amount,” Corey says, “because Fred was vice president at Interscope Records. He was on top of the world, and my career is on the sputtering last fumes of whatever that moment was.”
Corey’s assessment of his circa-late-’90s career is fair, especially compared to the ’80s, when he was a Bieber-level star and a millionaire before he turned 15. At age five, he danced on TV with Dick Van Dyke and was cast in The Bad News Bears, then was almost cast by Stanley Kubrick as Danny Torrance in The Shining. (After that, people around town sometimes mistook him for the kid who had played Danny, and even back then Corey obliged.) He was on Family Ties and The Love Boat, and then began racking up one of the most successful strings of culturally beloved and still-money-making-feature-film appearances in Hollywood history.
You know this, and you know you love these movies: Gremlins (1984), Goonies (1985; he met Michael Jackson on set), Stand By Me (1986; he met and shot a unreleased music video with River Phoenix during filming), The Lost Boys (1987; the first of nine films he’d make with Corey Haim, the other of the so-called Two Coreys), License to Drive (1988), The ‘Burbs (1989), and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ($202 million box office, in 1990.).
The ’90s brought harsh change: drugs, legal issues, the first charges against his friend Michael Jackson—whom he maintains was never inappropriate with him—and Phoenix’s death (on Halloween night outside the Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard, while Phoenix’s teenage brother Joaquin called 911.) It also brought professional ignominy, in the form of projects like Dream a Little Dream 2 and Lost Boys: The Tribe (both of which made $0.00 at the box office, because they went straight to video).
He’s worked steadily in film and TV throughout the 2000s, although his highest-profile projects have been a Two Coreys reality series that ended up documenting the duo’s rift and Haim’s relapse (he died of pneumonia in 2010 after battling addiction for years), and a 2020 documentary in which Feldman asserts that both he and Haim were sexually abused as child actors by industry figures whose names the film named. This spring he appeared on The Masked Singer, disguised as a seal; in interviews he said it was nice to be judged purely based on his singing, and not as Corey Feldman.
Through all of this, he’s never stopped playing music, something he’s been doing his whole life—starting out on pots and pans, then graduating to instruments belonging to his bass-player father. At age 11 he started writing Weird Al–inspired sketches and songs. Age 11 is also when he saw a TV special called Motown 25.
“That’s when my life changed,” he says. “Because I saw Michael dance.”
This was 1983.
This was when (and where) MJ debuted his moonwalk, a move popularized by street dancers from a new subculture birthed in the South Bronx, although its origins go back, at least on film, to performers like Bill Bailey (Black) and Charlie Chaplin (very white).
Corey had already taken tap, guitar, and piano, but “nothing stuck” until he saw MJ. He says he could suddenly dance like that. The next year he danced to “Billie Jean” for a charity event at the Rose Bowl.
This is when Corey started making music, performing like MJ, and getting hate for it. Hate, and some love.
Years later, either at backgammon night at the Playboy Mansion or Hef’s annual Midsummer Night’s Dream party, Corey meets Durst. Eventually Fred comes to Corey’s home studio for an all-night session with Scott Page, saxophonist for the ’90s incarnation of Pink Floyd, and together they record a song called “Seamless.”
“He asked me to play it on this tour,” Durst says. “I’m like, man, I don’t remember!
(Durst and Corey have danced for one another during their sets. Yes, look it up.)
“Seamless” isn’t released until years later, on Corey’s 2016 double album, Angelic 2 the Core. That album’s release is also the point where Debarge appears in Corey’s life in a professional capacity. They go back much further, though. Corey is more than a decade older than Debarge, but they both came up in the shadowy world of Hollywood-kid stardom.
Debarge was a child performer (Sesame Street, Star Search) when Corey was exiting the Hollywood glory days of his teens. He remembers meeting Corey back in the day, but Corey doesn’t remember meeting him. Debarge stopped performing and started producing other artists. He was good at it, and good at the business side of the business. He could produce, promote, manage, and scout talent—and still does all these things today.
(Fun fact: Epic Records—once the workplace of MJ’s manager Frank Dileo—hired Debarge to get Elvis’s “Blue Christmas” back on the charts; this past January it hit number one on Billboard’s Rock Streaming Songs chart.)
They formally met on a job: In 2016 Debarge got a call from his cousin, recording artist Melissa B, who was working with Corey on Angelic 2 the Core.
One track had real potential, but the featured rapper they’d hired wasn’t a good fit.
“There’s something here,” Debarge recalls Melissa saying. “You need to come here and finish this for him. Like, ASAP.”
She played him the track.
“I totally understood what he was going for,” remembers Debarge.
Hours later, he showed up with Doctor Ice. It took one session; the track, “Everybody,” was Corey’s first real hit, reaching number 13 on one national chart. Debarge ended up finishing the record, then promoting it for free. He didn't become Corey’s manager then but began taking an active role in his career.
“I did what had to be done,” he says. “And I wanted to show him that it could be done.”
Fred and Corey have both endured more than their fair share of criticism and out-and-out hatred over the years, but they’ve had very different reactions to it. Corey seems interested in addressing accusations, correcting records, and winning skeptics over, whereas Durst seems to have always sought out hate and haters, aware of both the hip-hop/show business axiom that disses, beefs, and conflict equal publicity, and that maintaining underdog status in the eyes of the 2 million people who bought Three Dollar Bill Y’all is a smart career strategy. Also, Fred actively fucks with people. Onstage, Corey ends shows with the words “I love you.” But back in the ’90s, Fred used to start by crawling out of a giant toilet bowl.
Corey’s joining a tour called Loserville, or writing “The Joke,” might suggest he’s coming around to Fred’s point of view, but he maintains they’re different.
“Fred encourages it,” Corey says. “That’s why he calls things Loserville or Family Values.”
We’re at sound check now, an hour before showtime, onstage, facing 4,500 empty seats.
“I try not to look at it,” he continues. “What’s the point? Can you convince them of anything otherwise? No. I’ve been doing this for 30 years. Touring and putting out records. All I can do is show up and try to entertain.”
He’s center stage, testing a Strat, one of two guitars he’ll use during the show. He strums with his ear down, listening to both the guitar and the sound coming through the PA.
“Okay!?” he asks, looking stage left, to his keyboardist-DJ and saxophone player. To his right are his guitar and bass players. Directly behind him is the drummer. Between drum and bass is Adrian, standing at a lone mic, in a skirt and tube top that seems to be made of colored plastic triangles. The setting sun is blazing down on the stage from a gap between the venue’s back wall and the roof, and it’s too bright to really see.
Corey’s not sweating, even though his suit jacket is still buttoned. He has to hear everyone play parts of individual songs, then play the parts together, and make sure nothing’s shrieking or muddled.
He puts down the Strat and picks up a purple Eddie Van Halen–brand guitar, with a whammy bar and a bright red button just under the pick-ups that kills whatever signal the guitar is producing. Kind of a kill switch without the switch.
When I say the only other guitarist I’ve seen use one of these big red buttons is Buckethead, he grins.
This is the guitar he’ll use for “The Joke.” The joke in “The Joke” when he performs it live, Corey says, is “a musical joke—the fact that I’m not a good guitar player.”
You have maybe seen social media posts alleging that Corey can’t really play. So did Durst, who at a later Loserville show dragged a chair onstage to sit on and authenticated Corey’s chops.
(Corey can play that guitar; I stood there watching and hearing him do it. And let me say that the trending controversy, Fred’s ever-trending reaction to it, and the never-ending dialog my editor and I had to have about this is further proof of its power, bringing the song’s chorus to mind: “The joke, the joke, the joke is on you.”)
Out in the venue, security people are setting up their checkpoints. Inside people wear polo shirts. Outside and entrance people wear crossing guard vests. All carry flashlights. Some have stools. One section of lawn is busy with foot traffic and cart movement. Lawn-seating ticket holders are starting to set up lawn chairs. The closed black curtain behind the band seems to insulate and reflect the heat, and so it’s hotter yet onstage.
Behind that curtain, security is setting up Corey’s water, oxygen, and vapes on a tall, wheeled cart. Corey’s whole sound check takes like 20 minutes, and then Corey goes back to his dressing room and waits for the curtain call. It’s 30 minutes to showtime.
Since this is really Limp’s show, everyone except Limp plays in front of the curtain. The curtain hides Limp’s massive symmetrical stage set, which has a pair of stairs leading up to two platforms that house John Otto’s drum set and DJ Lethal’s DJ booth. (DJ, of course, stands for “disc jockey”—the guy at the block party who played the music while the MC hosted—but more on this later.) Behind that is a billboard-size mural of a cityscape and “LIMP BIZKIT” in a 10-foot font. The colors are muted in the dark, but in a rich, earthy way where you know they’ll pop when the stage lights go on.
Debarge and I stand in the shade offstage right, next to the big wheeled case that holds Borland’s eight guitars. They all appear to be King V’s (seven right-handers and a lefty he retooled himself). Fifty feet away, on the exact other side of the stage, is a tall, thin case that holds two 5-string Fender Jazzmaster bass guitars that belong to Sam Rivers (Otto’s cousin).
By 6:20, Corey is backstage, in an MJ outfit that only he (or Jackson himself) could pull off. He’s dressed not like Bad- or Dangerous-era Jackson but in a black fringe-covered outfit like the one Jackson wore in the video for “Scream,” from his second-to-last studio album, HIStory: Past, Present, and Future—Book 1. (There was never a Book II.) He’s got on sparkling loafers and big shades. He’s standing in the dark, next to security, head in his clasped hands.
The curtain opens at 6:30. (There’s a clock.) Even in the dark you can feel the sun hit.
“Ladies and gentleman…Corey Feldman…”
The kick drum starts and he walks out onto that overexposed stage. His arms are out in greeting.
“GOONIES NEVER SAY DIE!” someone screams.
The first song is “Comeback King,” a recent, beat-heavy track with a metal-y edge. Corey goes right out in front of the speakers to the stage’s edge, a few feet from a row of photographers leaning on the railing. At stage right, a small pack of fans pump their fists along to the drum. There’s a big woman in a Corey tank top spinning her hair, and a kid in an Edgar Frog T-shirt.
But overall there’s maybe 100 people there, counting security.
Still, Corey endures. Among the fans at stage right are a father and son. The son wears a Limp shirt and a not-loving it look, but the dad has a Corey shirt and sings the whole show, even “The Joke.” Corey spots them early on and walks out to the furthest corner, security close behind. He points to the dad who is pointing to him. He ends the song and comes backstage, where security waits with the a tank and a mask. Ten seconds later he’s running back out.
The space between the roof and back row is blazing, and pretty full of people either walking or in lawn chairs. People begin to get in line to file in.
Another track and he runs backstage for a quick change. He returns in a suit of colored triangles that matches Adrian’s outfit.
He hits some Michael moves, including some identical to the ones in the “Scream” video.
Something happens during the second-to-last song. Debarge explains later that the problem involved a prerecorded beat that was playing too fast, and Corey and the band had to keep up. It doesn’t sound good, and after it’s done, Corey runs offstage, vocally unhappy.
He returns for one more track and then it’s 7 p.m. He ends the set the way he ends all his shows, telling the crowd, “Thank you! I love you!”
Afterward, Debarge and I are sitting out on the dining patio eating dinner and I’m trying to get Durst to look past his assistant and see me looking at him, and then security approaches.
“Corey would like a word with you, brother.”
There’s concern about the near-empty house and the technical issues and how all this could be made to look in this article.
Another dressing room conversation with Corey about these concerns doesn’t seem to help, because this is when people on the tour started saying “hit job.” They kept saying it, to me, as in “I hope you’re not just here to do a hit job” and “People are saying you’re here for a hit job” and “[Name of powerful show business person] thinks you're doing a hit job.”
(And I guess this is when the rumor started that I was there not to report on Corey at all, but to confront Durst on the 25th anniversary of Woodstock ’99—right here at the site of Woodstock ’69. So the meaning of hit job changed.)
Something has shifted. I’m asked to give back the VIP pass Debarge gave me in exchange for a sticker that a security person tells me is only good until 9:30. It’s 9:27 when this happens.
But this turns out to be a good curse, because Corey is apparently so worried about becoming the subject of a hit job that DeBarge takes it upon himself, after the show, to ask Durst to consider participating in an interview with GQ. “I almost was about to beg,” Debarge tells me later. “But Fred couldn’t have been any kinder about it.”
The next morning, as I’m waking up at home after sleeping off a long day and 500 miles of Catskills-road driving, I get a text from Debarge:
COME TO JERSEY
FRED WILL TALK TO YOU.
Why is Corey Feldman on tour with Limp Bizkit?
Because Fred asked him, and Fred literally runs this show.
Is this section more about that?
Well, it is much less about Corey Feldman.
Was the New Jersey show different from the Bethel show?
It was a lot different. And so were the others, according to Debarge. He says every show since Bethel has seen a bigger, more stoked audience for Corey’s opening set. So Bethel looks to have been a turning point.
Why?
For one thing, with Fred’s blessing, Corey’s showtime got moved back. This small change seems to have shifted things. Plus, the social media controversy surrounding Corey’s guitar playing was getting clicks and eventually more press than any other aspect of the tour. Or maybe Corey just has more fans in New Jersey. Either way, a lot more people were there. By the time he came out, fans had packed the front and sides of the stage, and they were as enthusiastic as the dad who Corey sang to back in Bethel.
There are a lot more people in the seating area, and the 7,000 seats are mostly full by the time Corey wraps his set up.
During the set, I sit in one of the front-middle seats they give to press, deep in the sea of fans, thinking of all I’ve seen since exiting the turnpike two hours ago.
Loserville’s crowd is…interesting.
Cruising the parking lot was like a sonic version of visiting a big family reunion. You could hear not just three decades of Limp tracks, but almost as many years of remixes and mash-ups of those tracks—as well as 30 years of music Fred’s created outside the band, in collaboration with everyone from Lil Wayne to Tommy Lee to George Clinton to Method Man to Christina Aguilera to county rocker Hardy. (Someone was even playing the indie-rock soundtrack to I Saw the TV Glow, an A24 release wherein Fred plays the Black trans protagonist’s unsympathetic father.)
What was apparent in the parking lot is that '90s kids now have kids who like ’90s music and fashion: This means Nirvana and Guns N’ Roses T-shirts, chokers, big pants, thick sneakers, backwards fitted hats, a few nods to the short but vivid late-’90s heyday of rave culture (bright beads, pacifiers) and isolated appearances of ’90s skate turned streetwear labels like DC, Zoo York, and Ecko (a brand Fred once modeled for). A bootleg Loserville shirt riffs on early G’N’R merch, depicting Fred as a skeleton.
Inside there’s more: parents and kids wearing shirts they bought that day, but also parents wearing their original and now vintage Limp shirts, escorting kids wearing Limp shirts from Spencer’s or Hot Topic that are supposed to look vintage, even though the kids weren’t even born when Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water came out.
Corey’s fans wear Corey merch from different eras, or shirts with images from his movies.
These fans are, as Corey takes the stage, as enthused as the Limp fans here tonight will be for Limp, if not more. Three Corey-aged guys in front of me chant his name as he steps out, arms raised, waiting for the kick drum. When it starts, one girl starts spinning her hair, as the guy with her punches the air in time. Corey walks out in step with the drum, striking poses on the way, then goes into a song called “Comeback King.”
People sing along, and you can see him see his crowd, then respond to their excitement. After the first verse he moves out, past the monitors, to the edge of stage left, security in tow. There’s maybe 50 arms with phones and hands out, and he leans over the pack, singing, fist-bumping. He sings another verse and does the same thing at stage right. By the end of the 30 minutes most of the house is full and, it’s fair to say, enjoying the show. Corey steps out one last time.
“Thank you!” he says. “I love you!”
An older lady is doing the I’m-not-worthy bow. The three guys have turned around to try and get everyone to chant “Encore!” One looks familiar.
The curtain closes on Corey standing center stage, hand high, flashing the symbol for victory.
Did you ever actually sit with Fred, because TBH the Corey details are really starting to—
During the opening acts, I’m texting with Debarge about getting backstage, and finally, as N8 Noface is setting up, Debarge walks out and brings me back past the checkpoints and into the catering room, where Corey stands, beaming. He thanks me for coming and wants to talk about this show versus Bethel. I want to, too, but I also want to get to the buttermilk-chicken station, and I’m almost there when an assistant comes over and says Fred is ready.
We walk down a hall just behind the now-very-loud stage, then past doors marked with pink signs (“Sam,” “John, “Lethal,” “Wes,” “Fred”) and into a wood-paneled, post-and-beam-ceilinged hunting-lodge-style chamber which is serving as a green room tonight.
Fred is sitting at the other end of the room on a big leather couch next to a big leather chair. Doctor Ice is also on the couch. Along the wall are members of Limp’s entourage and the aforementioned mix of prominent-to-extraordinarily-powerful industry people. They all go quiet and stand there watching us talk. I keep wishing Riff-Raff would walk in, but he doesn’t.
At first I sit in the leather chair, but then I have to move and sit right next to Fred, because Dennis Arfa has walked in.
Fred says, “Dennis!”
Arfa says, “Hey, buddy!”
Arfa reps Metallica, Billy Joel, and others. Fred calls him “the legend.”
After Arfa sits down, Fred talks for half an hour about music, comedy, and skateboarding.
He talks about humor as a response to such hate, how it shapes what he does, how he likes to keep them guessing, how all this ultimately led to him creating Loserville, and how, growing up as an outcast, this approach possibly saved his life, and the lives of others.
Fred describes his high school experience like this:
“I always had to be funny and be a jokester, because I got beat up so much that I was either gonna take a gun to school and take care of these motherfuckers, or I was just gonna keep making more fun of them. So I just kept making more fun of them.”
(This cracks Arfa up.)
Fred was born in 1970, grew up in rural North Carolina, and before he fell in love with hip-hop culture he was a skateboarder. It was 1977 and skating was seen less as an alt-sport and more as a criminal act, like graffiti. Not 20 years old, it was already banned in a dozen American cities.
There were few skaters and no parks where Fred lived, but his cousin lived in Jacksonville, Florida, home to Kona, a mecca akin to CBGB or the Apollo for skating, and which like those cultural epicenters served as a gathering place for top pros and industry execs. One of was former Dogtown legend Stacy Peralta, who in the ’80s created the seminal Bones Brigade skate team and directed a series of iconic VHS videos, which mixed footage of the team’s otherworldly athletic feats with very non-pro-sports stuff—handheld camera work, punk rock music, behind-the-scenes antics, skits akin to pro wrestling. Durst grew up watching these videos, and later saw their influence everywhere.
“Skateboarding is where all pop culture came from, during that period,” he says. “All the skate videos and things were what MTV copied. I’d just go, ‘Shit! MTV is a long skateboard video! What’s going on here?’”
He would later apply this DIY ethos to all things Limp, and still does.
Durst kept skating; he still does. But in the next decade, he found a new love: hip-hop.
This was probably bound to happen. He was an alt-kid, the ’70s had ended, and his middle school was 80 percent Black. So were his best friends, some with family in New York, where a vivid culture was rising from the scorched third world of the South Bronx.
This was hip-hop, manifesting in dance (breaking), art (graffiti), and especially music: rap. Disc jockeys and MCs threw parties. Some were at paying venues, like Albert Einstein Jr. High ($1.50 w/flyer). But more often, they happened at whatever park or court had electrical outlets. These were more open, free-form, and whoever wanted could get on the mic or step out on the portable dance floor. As with double-dutch, these gatherings could get competitive, and turn into “battles.” These battles produced champions, including two East Flatbush teenagers, Fred Reeves and Shaun Fequiere, who adopted the names Doctor Ice and Kangol Kid, and who in 1983 created the Untouchable Force Organization, or UTFO.
And it all started at these parties. Tapes of those parties made it out of the projects and eventually into the eight-cell, dual-deck boom boxes of kids from very far away. Kids like Fred Durst.
“The Black neighborhoods in the town I grew up in, they had relatives all up the coast to New York, so I was getting cassette tapes from WBLS and KISS FM, Chuck Chillout, Red Alert—
“—Mr. Magic?” asks Doc.
“Yeah!” says Fred.
“To get turned on to this stuff, in the early ’80s—hearing these long-ass mixes, loving the music, loving the rap. Hearing about these rappers before other people did. It wasn’t just Sugar Hill gang, but Kool Herc. Treacherous 3. Disco 3, before they were the Fat Boys.”
“That’s right!” says Doc.
“Hearing this stuff…I go, ‘I love this! This is my shit!’”
By middle school, he was a devout listener and collector of what the white music industry termed “danger music.”
Then something happened.
One day around 1982, Fred visited his friend and mentor, Billy Wright (RIP).
“My friend from New York brought this back,” Durst remembers Wright telling him, while holding up a small white Casio keyboard. “You can make beats on this thing!”
Here Doc cuts in.
“Kangol had one of those!” he says, referring to UTFO’s cofounder. “It was a little toy-lookin’ thing. If you knew music and scales you could really have a ball.”
And then, quickly and briefly, Fred and Doc start to beatbox. Fred’s beatboxing is low and bass-y, Doc’s high and snare-y.
“Blew my fucking mind,” says Fred. “And I went, ‘OK!’ Then I started rapping.”
He started breaking, too.
None of this went over well at home.
“My adopted father was a racist police officer,” Fred says. “He hated me and everything I did. It just kept driving me closer to it.”
Durst got heavy into the culture, making tapes and dressing like a b-boy, acquiring 10 maroon Puma track suits (Doc preferred blue), perfect for spin moves on a dance floor. Eventually he formed a breaking crew that went on to do a side-stage performance when the Fresh Fest Tour came to town, headlined by rap gods Run-DMC (who’d later collab with Limp).
None of this went over well at school. By 10th grade he was getting regularly beat up by groups of white Southern high school sports guys who called him “n-gger lover.”
Durst made fun of them, and was good at it, because he’d also always loved and studied comedy, especially abstract stuff, like Andy Kaufman and the eccentric pop duo Sparks (see their 2022 doc, with testimonials from Sparks cultists like Beck, Björk, Patton Oswalt, and Duran Duran), and especially This Is Spinal Tap.
Durst joined the Navy after high school, then moved to Jacksonville, “tattooing Taz and Tweety Birds” to make money. Now he was in a city seeing shows: rap, punk, metal, country, and another genre critics dubbed “nu metal,” a mix of aggressive alt-rock and hip-hop.
He put Limp together in 1994. A year later, a venue called the Milk Bar (RIP) booked a rising nu-metal act called Korn. Durst met the band after the show and invited them back to his place for free beer and tattoos. There he gave them a tape. Eventually Korn invited Limp on tour.
In 1997, Flip Records and Interscope released Limp’s debut, Three Dollar Bill Y’all, a possible reference to “Money (Dollar Bill Y’all),” the 1983 track by Jimmy Spicer, a Brooklyn-born, genre-blending, hip-hop pioneer. Limp’s debut featured the single “Faith,” a cover of a decade-old Billboard number one single (and MTV hit) by George Michael. Durst directed the video. The album went double-platinum.
Limp toured the world. Durst moved to California and started playing backgammon on Sundays at the Playboy mansion, where he met Corey.
Two years later, Limp Bizkit played Woodstock ’99.
Musicians, journalists, and executives blamed, and still blame, one frontman for what happened at Woodstock ’99.
(A frontman, FYI, who told the crowd, more than once, to not let anyone get hurt.)
“He instigated the whole damn thing,” Korn’s Jonathan Davis later said in an interview. “I was right there watching it.”
“I didn’t take into account what a jerk Fred Durst is,” said former Flip Records executive John Scher, one of Woodstock ’99’s promoters, in a 2022 Netflix documentary about the festival. “He was enjoying it.”
The other promoter behind Woodstock ’99 was Michael Lang, who’d produced the first Woodstock, as well as the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont six months later, where Hell’s Angels hired to work security killed a member of the audience.
“It was really a dark moment in music, and instead of stopping the show, Fred Durst stoked the flames,” author and music writer Jon Weiderhorn opined in another doc.
Please note the word “flames.” While the fires didn’t break out until the night after Limp played, fire-stoking metaphors became central to describing Woodstock—and to blaming Fred, Limp, and their hit “Break Stuff” for everything that happened.
(YouTube “Woodstock '99” today; you’ll never guess what comes up first.)
TV news intercut fire footage with footage of Limp’s set from the day before. Break Stuff is the name of a detailed podcast about the festival. “Match, Kerosene, Boom”—a quote from then ABC News reporter David Blaustein, describing Fred’s conduct at the show—is the central chapter title of the Nexflix doc.
“[T]he tension that had been building up with the crowd—it was a hand grenade,” a security guy said in the doc. “During ‘Break Stuff’ is when that hand grenade actually exploded.”
And of course the doc’s 2022 release reignited the whole thing, and a quarter century later, Fred was shit-baited all over again. In the 2019 Rolling Stone listicle “19 Worst Things About Woodstock ’99,” the entry for “Sexual Assaults” [no. 18] reads in part: “According to reports, even more sexual assaults took place during Limp Bizkit, after Fred Durst infamously incited the crowd with ‘Break Stuff.’”
“He was riling up the crowd,” said Scher. “Fred could’ve quieted them down in a minute.”
Unlikely. The riots more likely occurred because the people running Woodstock ’99 treated the 200,000 people who’d paid them to go see it like dogs at a discount death kennel.
That’s a bit strong, don’t you think?
Please consider: At check-in, security took everyone’s water. Inside, water was for sale for $4 (in 1999) or via a troughlike network of fountains, which gave people trench mouth, because the water had shit in it, because the Port-o-Potties were overflowing by the end of the first night. So were the garbage cans. Much of the campground was on a tarmac, so the water and garbage and chemshit didn’t go anywhere. Although organizers had gone to the trouble of building a 12-foot steel-and-plywood fence around the venue to keep gatecrashers out and painted it with doves and flowers and the word “Peace,” they hadn’t done anything to provide any shade for people standing outside in the 90-plus-degree heat, and there wasn’t real security, but instead temp and seasonal people in shorts and yellow t-shirts that said “Peace Patrol” in the Ben & Jerry’s font. It took until the third night to bring in real police. Two murders and eight rapes were reported.
All the while, Scher and Lang pretended nothing was wrong, perhaps unaware that MTV had broadcast the whole thing live.
“We’re happy,” said Scher at a press conference, a few hours before the blaze. “We haven’t had any tough incidents.”
When a reporter shared some different observations, like the fact that the “Peace” wall and the sound tower had been torn down, Lang argued that the plywood was removed by souvenir hunters, “just to have a piece of Woodstock.”
Then they had the mayor of Rome, New York, come out and say, “It’s been a memorable, exciting concert for all those involved.” He invited Lang to come back and host Woodstock III.
(Unfun fact: Lang later tried and failed to throw Woodstock III in 2019 in Watkins Glen, New York. He died in 2022.)
It’s maybe worth noting that 25 years later, on the Loserville tour, Limp’s set typically starts and ends with “Break Stuff.” That night in Bethel, Fred put it in the middle. He didn’t say anything about the anniversary from the stage, but one of Limp’s entourage told me people (not Fred) had been making inciting-a-riot jokes all day.
Backstage in Jersey, 30 minutes before showtime, I ask Durst about Woodstock.
“Y’know what?” Durst says. “I’m gonna have some fun answering that. Not in this interview, but I’ve got something coming.” (It wasn’t clear what he meant by this; at press time, he had not spoken about Woodstock publicly again, so if he has something coming it is presumably still coming.)
He goes on:
“I mean, it sucks if anyone is getting hurt anywhere. We didn’t see that.”
He’s heard about the Netflix doc. He hasn’t watched it.
“One thing I’ll tell ya. I saw the promoter backstage. Someone introduced me. And he says, ‘Oh. You’re in Limp Bizkit. I never heard of you guys before. But I hear you’re pretty popular. So I’m glad you came.’…He doesn’t even know what we do or who we are. At all.”
“Was that at Woodstock?” Arfa asks. (This was the only time he chimed in.)
“Yeah,” says Durst.
“Was that Michael Lang?”
“I forget which one.”
“He was clueless,” Arfa says.
“Whoever he was, he wasn’t very nice. He was a little patronizing. But who cares? We just did what we got paid to do, which was play a show.”
Durst’s assistant steps in and says it’s 20 minutes to showtime, then steps out. Fred starts writing a set list on his phone.
“I don’t even know what I’m gonna wear! Dennis, what should I wear?”
“I like what you’re wearing,” says Afra.
He’s wearing a blaze-orange hat, a lime green Riff-Raff shirt, and pink shorts by Gecko Hawaii, one of Riff-Raff’s sponsors, whose rep keeps leaving out piles of Gecko gear for everybody.
The assistant comes in and says the show starts in 15 minutes and that the other guys are in position, and then instead of stepping out he stands there, glaring mostly at me.
It’s a great show.
Otto and Lethal are already up on the set piece by the time the curtain drops, revealing the full house and packed lawn. The stage is blacklit, which brings Limp’s mural to life. The cityscape looks 3D now, and “LIMP BIZKIT” looks to be chiseled into the back wall.
Rivers walks out from stage right in a white suit. Borland follows on the left in black and a gold helmet wreathed in beads. He’s got the old left-handed King V.
Doc, Corey, N8, Eddy, Bones, Debarge and I are standing by Borland’s guitars, guarded by his guitar tech, a tall man in a long dress.
Lethal, who chooses the walk-out and set-transition songs, has dropped “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins.
Fred is wearing the same hat and shirt and shorts. When he walks out onstage and when the blacklights hit him, he lights up like a tropical fish.
“How you doing?” asks Fred. “We are the Limp Bizkit cover band. We’re gonna do some of Limp Bizkit’s tasty tunes tonight. Ladies and gentleman, without further ado, I’d like to introduce you to this fucking dope rif—“
Wes’s first chord of “Break Stuff” blasts through the amps. The crowd makes a bursting sound.
Fred does what he’s done onstage for three decades: He starts out standing, shifting geriatrically, voice nervous, almost falsetto. But then he starts to sway, then step, then walk, then gun along to the lyrics, rap-tapping the space in front of him. When the drop comes he goes into a low roar, jumping with his feet out, like a skater in the air.
Spotlights come on—thin hard beams of white that hit the stage, then flip out into the crowd, hitting energized people, some with kids on their heads.
Rivers walks up the steps to play along with Otto. Wes darts back and forth. Fred bobs and sings, occasionally striking poses, holding the mic out. The crowd always knows its part: “It’s just one of those days.”
Halfway through the track, the band takes it down. Fred walks forward.
“Helloooooooooooooooo,” he says to great response. “This is the weirdest stage I have ever seen in my life. What specifically is this area for right here?”
He walks out between the monitors and the stage front, and does a dance that few will recognize as the Charleston.
“If it’s your first time at a Limp Bizkit concert, lemme see your hands.”
Most go up.
They go through the old favorites, as Fred introduces his bandmates. Between tracks, Lethal plays Bon Jovi, Credence, Pantera, and a rap track I’m embarrassed to say I had to ask Doc Ice to identify.
“Rakim,” he says. “God of hip-hop.”
Next is “N 2 Gether Now,” a 1999 Bizkit track recorded with Method Man, produced by Houston-then-Brooklyn legend DJ Premier. Fred brings out Eddy Baker. The crowd doesn’t have a “Break Stuff”–level reaction, but the song is perfect, their harmony natural, and they flow so well together you can’t believe Eddy was eight years old when the track dropped. It’s a beautiful five minutes, and they move through the song as one. Afterward, when Eddy’s walking offstage, he spots Doc and literally starts jumping up and down. They hug. “It happens,” Doc says.
“Any requests?” Fred asks. “I hear Pauly D is in the house.”
A backstage kid runs out to do something to Fred’s monitor, and Fred yells “Give it up for my son, Dallas Durst!”
The crowd gives it up.
Fred says, “He hates it when I do that.”
Fred makes his way down the ramp Corey went down earlier, then brings up a young woman with a sign that reads “Wes Borland is a legend.”
Wes gives her a hug and a guitar pick.
Then he brings some kids onstage. Like 20 kids, 12 and under, mostly boys—fished out by the huge head-tatted guy from the parking lot—seated in front of the monitors, facing the band. Many of them have on Loserville shirts. One is wearing a Nirvana smiley-face shirt I had in ninth grade.
“Whatever you do in your life,” says Fred, “never do what we’re doing.”
Their one cover is “Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine, pretty much the ultimate rap-rock band, and as Wes takes the yowling solo, I can’t be the only one thinking of Rage’s letdown of a reunion tour in 2022—no press, a circa-1998 set list, frontman Zach de la Rocha in a chair with a knee injury for half the shows before the band canceled the rest of the tour and reportedly broke up, for good, again.
Is this cover, like opening with “Break Stuff,” a possible statement? A message? If so, who is the message meant for? Rage/Zach? (Late-date America needed you, and you sat down, so we’ll stand up—we, the losers)? Or the critics and other ’90s snobs who saw Rage (who followed Limp that night at Woodstock) as the smart-serious-principled rap-rock band and Limp as the fratty-dumb-silly-bad one? And if so, is the message really: Look whose band is still here and whose isn’t? I didn’t ask.
At the song’s peak, the kids onstage jump up, some joining him with fingers raised: “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!”
For “Full Nelson,” Fred brings up a fan he’s DM’ed with, Jay Rhymes, whose enthusiasm makes even Fred a little wary. “You’re very comfortable onstage,” he observes.
It works out. Durst matches the guy’s insane energy while they go back and forth: “Why is everybody always picking on me?”
The ender is “Take a Look Around,” with the refrain:
So why you wanna hate me?
So why you wanna hate me?
So why you wanna hate me?
‘Cuz hate/Is all the world has seen lately.
As Wes’s final chord subsides, Lethal plays “Careless Whisper” by George Michael, a song with an ’80s saxophone lead so iconically cheesy that a guy on YouTube goes around playing it in person.
The curtain drops and a focus of techs swarm the stage.
Durst hugs Corey on his way to the door.
When Fred contacted Debarge last December to ask about Corey potentially opening for him on a tour called Loserville and Debarge relayed the offer, Corey says he wasn’t sure how to take it.
“That took me a minute,” says Corey. “Then he said ‘Think of it like the Goonies, man. You were a rag-tag group of kids who had to fight your way back. You were the underdogs. That’s how your music career’s been. That’s how my music’s career’s been.’”
Soon after, Corey wrote “The Joke,” and Fred directed the video.
“Even if my stuff hits differently, it’s still authentic. For me,” he says.
It’s now 11:30 p.m. and techs are wheeling packed road cases into the tractor trailers backed up to the loading dock. If all goes well the load-out will be done in time for the caravan to roll out at 2 a.m., bound for Mansfield, Massachusetts.
Fred is on the couch back in the green room, coughing into a towel. He’s worried. About this cough, this cough medicine he’s taking, and the show he has to do in 22 hours, produced and managed by him. He keeps asking everyone what they thought of tonight.
Asked for closing comments, he says, “I just hope it’s working out good for Corey. If this is about Corey.”
It is working out very good for Corey. In October, when Fred announces a run of UK Loserville dates beginning in Glasgow in March, N8Noface, Bones and Riff-Raff are on the bill, but Corey is not. But by the time Loserville concludes in August, Debarge—who, remember, made this story happen—is fielding multiple film offers and overseas touring opportunities for Corey, plus an endorsement deal so big his client’s total Loserville take would fit inside of it, moneywise.
That’s Corey. For Doctor Ice, there’s plans to get him into the studio, then out on the road, with special guests. (A UTFO reunion isn’t possible—too many guys have died.)
It’s time to go. It’s an hour back to New York and the boss has more to do.
“It’s not easy out here,” says Fred. “It’s a lot of work. It’s not glamorous. You can live glamorous, but you won’t come home with any money. It’s still fun, it’s still wild, but I’m very nervous, because I care. When I stop caring, I’ll stop doing it. That’s all, man. That’s it. I just want everyone to have a good time.”
Doc, Fred, and Debarge get a picture for their socials.
Before we say goodbye, Doc takes out his phone and drops a beat.
Fred nods along, 40 years after watching Doc onstage with UTFO.
Doc nods along too, then starts tapping the air. As a young teen he started out breaking, but with Kangol’s encouragement finally got on the mic.
Then he starts to rap—
You never knew something so butter, could come from the gutter.
I’m Doctor Ice the Diamond, the cutter.
Like Jacob’s the jeweler and Rick is the Ruler—Boogie Down.
Chris is the Teacher, but Doc’s gonna school ’ya.
Y’all ’bout your sneakers and beepers, your Dutches and reefers.
We ’bout our 8 tracks and speakers, our Luthers and Arethas.
My work is never in vain, I’m born to exert.
Even when I’m buried, I’m still a diamond in dirt.
—then stops, quick as he started.
Forty years.
“Bro!” says Fred, extending his hand, “Shit is hard!”
Doc takes it, giggling. Fred laughs.
“That’s the Loserville Experience.”