I couldn’t bring myself to put a picture of Fred Durst in this post so we’ll just have one of me reading a good book. And believe me, I tried finding funny pictures of Fred Durst to put up there — little memes and cartoons. But, I…I just couldn’t do it. But that’s beside the point. Look, sometimes you can learn things in unlikely places, e.g., if you see some video of someone putting fireworks on their pogo stick and they end up blowing off their feet you should say to yourself, “Okay, I’m not ever going to do that.” You live and learn, folks. Yes, sometimes you’ll witness how someone operates in life and it can positively change you for the better. I have one such example that involves a Mr. Fred Durst.
Many years ago I had a friend in the radio business. One day he and a fellow radio jock got it in their heads that they were going to do their own music video television show.
And indeed they did.
It was called Planet Buzz. The two guys were in charge of everything: they shot it themselves, edited it themselves, and went out and got all the advertisements. They worked their asses off at it.
Being that it was a music video show they also had to obtain the videos they wanted to play. This meant that they had to get in touch with all the labels and tell them, “Hey, we got this new show, send us some of your videos.”
And indeed the labels did.
Now, my buddy was like me. He liked bands like Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree, Samael, Anathema, etc. Even though he was working at a local rock station that played the hits from bands like Disturbed and Trapt, people still knew that he was the metal guy. That’s why some people would approach him and ask things like, “hey, why aren’t you playing any Anathema? Why aren’t you playing any Emerald Oracle?”
And the reason he gave them was very telling and made a huge impact on me. He told these people that he got in touch with bands like Anathema. He got in touch with the labels that carried Fates Warning and Eldritch. He reached out to all those people and they all said the same thing, “yeah, we’ll send you some videos.” But you know what they did? They took their sweet fucking time sending shit out…if at all.
On the other hand, he said, he didn’t have to wait on material from Interscope Records. At the time that this was going down, Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit was made Senior Vice President of A&R at Interscope. Whenever the Planet Buzz guys would get in touch with the people at Interscope the would be greeted to a package of videos waiting for them at their door…the next day.
Cause Durst made sure that his stuff went out. Cause he wanted it to be seen. And it wasn’t just his band he was taking care of. It was all the rock bands on Interscope Records.
So in response to the people that were bitching and complaining about why Planet Buzz weren’t playing their favorite bands, well, you can blame your favorite bands and your favorite bands’ labels. When someone asks you to send something, fucking send it. Don’t wait around to make a trip to the post office just because it’s on the way to somewhere else.
I learned from Fred Durst. Every time someone would ask for a shirt, a CD, a contract signed, a picture sent–I sent it.
Fred Durst got his videos played and he got his bands exposure while the other guys were still waiting around just to make a trip to Walgreens so they can buy some more padded envelopes.
Get it done!
