OK, OK, I admit it. I once held a strong opinion of Limp Bizkit. I didn’t dig most of Three Dollar Bill Y’all, and this upset a number of my friends who appreciated the raw approach of the record and the fact that it represented the last time that Limp Bizkit didn’t sound or feel like sellouts.
The height of my interest in Limp was during their Significant Other days, because they seemed to be going against the grain of everything that was going on in music at the time. The impromptu rooftop performances that were shut down by the cops in almost every city were an awesome idea (although not original) and the band seemed genuinely pissed off during those days.
Like Limp or not, their Woodstock ’99 performance was easily one of the best of the notorious festival, and when Fred Durst climbed up on the plywood to surf about 10 feet into the audience, it was a pretty memorable moment in music. Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water had some good guitar tracks, although I quickly lost interest when every time I turned on the radio or TV I heard “keep rollin’, rollin’, rollin’.” Most of Freddy’s lyrics on the album were pretty wack, yo.
So let’s flash forward to the present, Wes Borland, the talented guitarist behind all of Limp’s tracks, has left the band on “amicable” terms with the rest of the band. Yeah, right. Either Wes just realized on Limp’s slow slide down the popularity scale that he was the best part of the band, or Fred and his fat ego pulled apart the band. Maybe it was a little bit of both, but what is certain is that Borland’s strange onstage attire and oddly tuned rhythms were Limp’s trademark, and now he’s left the band to pursue “other projects.”
If those other projects are his goofy, Tenacious D-esque “Big Dumb Face” group, then Wes really wants to fall into obscurity quickly. Jack Black and Tenacious D are comedians, Wes Borland isn’t. He needs to avoid the funny stuff and find people that are interested in playing the kind of music that he is capable of. He’s a talented guy, and if he commits himself to a genuine project with the right people, then he’ll have a shot at showing up his former band.
For months it felt like the split was coming. All summer Fred was conducting interviews and talking up the next Limp record as sounding “post-nuclear” and once went as far as to say that the record would sound like a cross between “Pantera’s Vulgar Display Of Power meets Pink Floyd’s Off The Wall.” No, that was not a typo; Fred said Off The Wall.
No one said that he knew a lot about rock history, but all of Fred’s interviews about the record seemed phony, and the truth is probably that Wes had written no music and that Limp was on the rocks. That’s another question that will probably go unanswered, but the next big question is, what’s Mr. Durst going to do now?
The guy can’t play an instrument, can’t sing, is a poor lyricist and is backed up by some average musicians. Durst recently announced that he would go to shopping malls and high schools across the country looking for the “illest guitarist known to man” to replace his departed music writer Wes Borland.
I for one really doubt that the illest guitarist known to man would want to play music with or for Fred Durst. Fred is now treading in that touchy area that the former members of Rage Against The Machine found themselves in. As much as Fred and his little rhymes are important to Limp’s image and sound, Wes Borland was Limp Bizkit, much like Zach De La Rocha was Rage Against The Machine. The former members of Rage got lucky, they got Chris Cornell, former lead singer of Soundgarden as their backup. I really doubt that Limp will be as lucky in finding a replacement.
So what should they do? Call it quits.
They left a nice little legacy, but things just won’t be the same without Wes, and there is great danger in putting control of the music into Durst’s hands. If Fred can find the “illest guitarist known to man” and sell a million records, then more power to him, but I don’t think he’s going to be able to do it. Without Wes, he doesn’t have the goods to keep the record sales up or the fans interested, but as Fred would say in the cover song that put his band on the map, “I gotta have faith.”
