The Corey Feldman/Limp Bizkit Show I Went to Last Night Was Hindered Ever So Slightly by FELDMAN NOT PERFORMING!

At least he offered no excuse!

At the risk of being immodest, I look great!

I don’t know exactly when or why I became morbidly fascinated by Corey Feldman’s musical career. I find Feldman mesmerizing because he’s had such a tragic and eventful existence but also because he embodies a show business archetype I love writing about. 

Like many of my other trash culture obsessions, Feldman is a narcissistic maroon who has no idea how the world sees him. He has no idea how ridiculous he is or just how vast the gulf is between his bloated self-image and reality. 

In Feldman’s tormented psyche, he’s Thriller-era Michael Jackson, and his adoring public can’t wait to see his signature moves. Inside Corey Feldman’s brain he’s also a Jim Morrison-like rock star irresistible to sexy women. Feldman sees himself as a storyteller, musician, activist, dancer, actor, and all-around American folk hero. 

Corey Feldman might be best known as an actor but he sees himself as a modern-day troubadour who travels our great land sharing the gift of song with adoring fans. 

The world has roundly rejected Feldman’s music, yet he persists. He continues in the face of mockery, judgment, ridicule, and notoriety. There’s something almost admirable about Feldman’s delusional faith in himself. 

As the climax of Corey Feldman Month many years back, I attended a marathon Corey Feldman show at a club. It was a surreal and awesome experience. 

So when I saw that Feldman would be opening for Limp Bizkit as part of a “Loserville” tour at a big outdoor venue in my neighborhood I knew that I had to go. 

I was more excited about seeing Feldman than Limp Bizkit, but Fred Durst and the gang were huge cultural figures when I was in college. I know of Durst primarily as a filmmaker. He wrote and directed The Fanatic, which brings together the following fixations: movies about filmmaking, John Travolta, vanity projects from pop stars, autism, and The King of Comedy. 

I also know Durst from his prominent appearance in Karrine Steffans’ notorious memoir as a dude who gets his knob slobbed by a woman skilled in the erotic arts and finally as the stars/villains of the Woodstock 99 documentary series. 

That lent a poignancy to Durst telling the crowd that he wanted to party like it was 1999. When Fred Durst and I were children, 1999 was the future. With the possible exception of 2000, it was the most futuristic of future years.

Last night, 1999, was something else. It was no longer a shimmering future radiating promise. It was now the past. It was now history. It’s a past that is both safe and triumphant. It’s a past where Limp Bizkit is one of the biggest, most notorious bands in the world. It was a time when the band could start a riot and turn fans into feral, destructive beasts just by playing a snotty rap-rock anthem. 

Ah, but I am getting ahead of myself. Before we get to the Bizkit, we first have to address Feld-Mania.

I hope you guys are sitting down because what I am going to say will shock you to your very core. If you’re standing while reading the next sentence, you’ll probably faint from sheer surprise and hurt yourself in the fall. I’d somehow be legally responsible for the tumble, so I want you to be prepared. 

Corey Feldman let me down. I paid fifty-five dollars and trudged out in a torrential downpour so that I could see perpetual amateur Feldman and his band (which may or may not consist of members of his sex cult at this point) perform as an opening act for Limp Bizkit. Feldman never performed. 

Feldman was there. He showed up deep into Limp Bizkit’s set. That almost made it worse. 

Though Riff Raff was billed as the evening’s host, that slot was filled by Jon Carnage, a goofball in a shiny suit. Carnage joked that Bill Gates was preventing Corey Feldman from performing using weather. 

Then again, no other explanation was offered for his absence, so I’m going to have to go with Bill Gates ruining his set through the weather. That seems a little far-fetched but then Feldman has enjoyed a very colorful experience.  

Durst admonished the crowd to thank Feldman for being there. He muttered something oblique about sometimes things just not happening. If you’re Corey Feldman, I’m guessing things don't happen all the time due to drugs, ego, and/or all-around flakiness.

Why didn’t Feldman perform? Was he worried that Limp Bizkit would have difficulty following such an explosively gifted act, the same way that the Rolling Stones were blown away by James Brown in The T.A.M.I Show?

Was Feldman back on the pills? Was he recovering from cosmetic surgery? Had bad blood developed between Feldman and Durst? Did the feds figure out that the whole “tour” is just a front for a sex trafficking operation involving his “Angels?”

We’ll never know!

Because Corey Feldman NEVER PERFORMED we were instead treated to the musical stylings of an interracial gangsta outfit so boring that I never even picked up their name. 

Nobody was there to see them, yet they inexplicably had as much stage time as the headliners. I’m pretty sure they played their entire catalog twice, then followed it up with instrumentals for all their songs, followed by remixes. Then they started making up new songs on the spot to fill time. 

Riff Raff was listed as the host. Instead, he performed three neon pop-rap songs about automobiles he either owns or hopes to own. Then, he introduced Limp Bizkit.

I’ve seen recent pictures of Durst where he looks like a mountain man who has turned his back on society and our sick modern world, but last night, he was rocking the classic look, complete with signature baseball hats. 

Two important cultural figures are synonymous with red baseball hats. Fred Durst is by far the more innocuous of the two. 

Loserville was an oldie’s show. It was a blast from the past that found a bunch of fifty-somethings with children, mortgages, and bad backs collectively reliving a past when they were young and brash and overflowing with energy and outrage at a world that still seemed new conquerable.

Limp Bizkit was a very dangerous band in that their irresponsibility at Woodstock 99 undoubtedly resulted in serious injuries if not death. There was no element of danger to last night’s show. Durst and the boys played the same songs they did at Woodstock 99, but they induced fuzzy nostalgia and a yearning for a more innocent time rather than destructive rage.

When Durst expressed a profane desire to fuck shit up, he was reconnecting with the much younger man he used to be. Durst is separated by that incendiary figure by time and experience.

Durst isn’t that man anymore. His crowd work highlighted that a man who once personified incoherent white male rage is just somebody’s dorky dad. 

The musician and filmmaker shouted out his son and gave himself props for being a great dad. He mostly stuck to the two pillars of lazy crowd work—extensively referencing the geographical location where the concert takes place—and winking nods to drug use. 

Marijuana is pretty much legal, so it was adorable when Durst behaved as if smoking a joint AT A ROCK AND ROLL CONCERT represented a subversive act of rebellion. 

Here’s the thing: when I go to a show, I want to enjoy myself. I want to have a good time. I don’t want to stand sullenly with my arms judging people who are having a good time. 

So even though I’m not a Limp Bizkit fan, I had a lot of fun regressing back to my high school and college days with a bunch of similarly nostalgic codgers.

I shut off my brain and let Wes Borland’s angry power chords and Fred Durst’s caveman-simple lyrics rock my 48-year-old world. 

Only someone with a heart of stone who has lost their love for life could stay seated while Bizkit played golden oldies from a previous century while their die-hard fans slammed against each other in an old-time tradition known as a “mosh pit.”

When I rented a chair, the woman asked me if I wanted a free pass to the mosh pit. I said hell yeah. As a sad, lonely autistic teen desperate for human contact yet uncomfortable in my own skin, mosh pits were a godsend. 

I thought about moshing last night, but I am a 48-year-old husband and father. It would be really embarrassing if my wife had to wait on me due to injuries sustained in the mosh pit at a Limp Bizkit concert. I would look even more ridiculous than usual!

Limp Bizkit took the crowd on a magical journey to the 1990s. If Feldman had played as promised, we would have traveled even further, all the way back to the 1980s. 

I’m not going to the Gathering of the Juggalos this year or possibly ever again, but I got a taste of it last night, particularly the part about the artist you want to see not performing for reasons you can’t begin to fathom. 

I would have appreciated an explanation in lieu of a performance by Feldman, but none was forthcoming. 

I never thought I would write these words, but Corey Feldman let me down by not behaving in a professional manner. 

That made me thankful for the comparative responsibility and professionalism of a band notorious for being irresponsible and unprofessional during their career-defining performance at Woodstock 99. 

The hosts referred to us as “losers” because the tour is called Loserville, but if we were really such “losers,” would we be paying money to see Corey Feldman perform, only to have him skip the gig for no damn reason whatsoever?