Limp Bizkit were arguably the biggest band in the world back in their late ’90s and early 2000s heyday, to the point that they were “annoyingly in everyone’s face,” according to guitarist Wes Borland.
In a new Metal Hammer feature looking back at the band’s career, Borland and singer Fred Durst both recalled the height of the band’s fame and the backlash that came with it.
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Durst remembered, “I felt like I was a target, public enemy number one. I didn’t know how to deal with it. Wherever you went, it felt like eyes were on you and like your life isn’t your own anymore. You sort of think, ‘Fuck all these people.’ If people had to find out every last detail of your life and what you jerk off to at night, people might hate you too.”
Borland added, “In the space of six years, I went from a nobody, no one knowing who I was and having complete anonymity, to having to move to Los Angeles because I had 20 kids on the doorstep of my house in Florida looking in my windows.”
The guitarist, who quit the band in 2001 only to return in 2004, went on to say, “I just think it took a lot of people time to get over how annoyingly in everyone’s face we were for that period. When you’re that overexposed, where no one can get away from you and you’re like, ‘Uh, I’m so sick of seeing this person all the time.’”
He concluded, “Now, people can enjoy the band for what it is. I love being in Limp Bizkit so much now. I love every show, I love going on tour, I love everybody in the band. But it took all these years for me to look back on that and go, ‘God, I love this, and I love playing those songs.’”
