Wes Borland Explains How He Once Quit Limp Bizkit Before They Got Signed
Limp Bizkit guitarist Wes Borland recently recalled one of those days when he didn’t want to wake up; everything was fucked and everyone in his band sucked. Apparently the first Limp Bizkit album, Three Dollar Bill, Yall, almost didn’t have Borland on it after he briefly gave up and quit the band to go back to working in a coffee shop.
In a recent interview with Disrespectfully Podcast (that was reported on by our friends at Metal Injection), Borland recalled his brief time quitting the band around the time they were trying to record that first album:
“It wasn’t very long, It happened pretty quickly. We did a couple of regional tours. We actually… Fred and I have had an interesting history of trying to get along with each other, up until, like, the last seven years, and now we’re awesome. But It took us really growing up, because of egos and just like different ideas of what the band should be.”
“Right before we got signed, I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to do this.’ And I went back to working at a coffee shop. And they got different guitar players and sort of reformed the band. They got signed. I’m out. My brother – Scott Borland – was originally in Limp Bizkit too, on keyboards, and he was like, ‘If you’re not doing I’m not doing it.’ But, we were young and stupid, and just like, you know, knuckleheaded people not being adults.”
With Borland gone, the band recruited a new guitarist and got signed and started working on the record. But it was almost as if the universe kept trying to give the band signs that moving on without Borland was a bad idea:
“They got signed, bought a van & trailer, drove out to LA to start making their record without me, without my brother, at DJ Lethal’s house, who was in House Of Pain at the time, he was going to produce. And the guy driving, one of their friends — I kind of knew him a little bit too — but in the middle of Texas, he flipped the van, went off the road, flipped the van.
“Everybody, everybody… like Fred’s feet went through a window, destroyed. Everybody was cut to ribbons. The guitar player flew out of the window. They showed up in LA… they were in the hospital, they showed up in LA on crutches to start recording. And the people in LA that were doing the record were like, ‘What is happening?’
“Then the guitar player, in the middle of the night, stole all the gear — all the guitar gear — and rented a car and drove back to Florida. Then it was just like, they started calling me and going, like, ‘Do you want to do this again?’ And I was like ‘No. I don’t want, I don’t want any part of it,’ you know, being stubborn.”
“I think finally they went to New York, and were trying to record in New York with some people, and I finally just went, ‘Yeah, I’ll come up to New York and we’ll try’. And that’s when we started writing the first record. It’s been wild, like wild. When I think back, I don’t think about like the old days, but how many terrible, weird things happened to get us where we were.”
It’s hard to imagine an alternate timeline where Limp Bizkit continued on without Borland, but I can’t imagine them having the same success without him. You’ll remember that Limp Bizkit did put one album out without Borland after he briefly left the band, namely their 2003 album Results May Vary. Yeah, that title was quite appropriate. Results definitely did vary. Considering that’s generally regarded as the band’s worst album, it seems likely that a Borland-free Bizkit wouldn’t have gotten off the ground in the late-90s the way they did. So it’s probably best that Borland and Fred Durst are back 2 gether now.
