WES BORLAND Recalls Quitting LIMP BIZKIT Before They Got Signed & How Chaos And Near-Misses Led Them To Fame

For Limp Bizkit guitarist Wes Borland, success didn’t come without its fair share of turbulence. In a recent interview on the Disrespectfully Podcast, Borland opened up about the band’s early struggles, his own hesitations about joining, and the string of misfortunes that ultimately led him back into the fold.

Borland, who famously left Limp Bizkit in 2001 before later rejoining, revealed that he had actually quit once before—right when the band was on the verge of being signed. Despite their regional touring success in the mid-’90s, tensions between Borland and frontman Fred Durst led him to step away just as they began working on their debut album, Three Dollar Bill, Y’all$.

“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,” Borland recalled.

“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,” he added.

With Borland out, Limp Bizkit moved forward with other guitarists, secured a record deal, and drove to Los Angeles to begin recording. But things quickly took a disastrous turn.

“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,” Borland recounted.

“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 players, 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.”

The album’s initial singles, “Counterfeit” and “Sour,” failed to gain much traction, leaving the band’s future uncertain. But everything changed with the release of their cover of George Michael‘s Faith.

“So we had like two singles that came out that didn’t do well, that didn’t really hit. And then ‘Faith’ came out, and we made a terrible video for ‘Faith’. And then Fred was like, ‘We’re trashing this. We’re gonna do like a Mötley Crüe-style tour video that shows us, like our footage on tour. And he brought a film crew out, and the video was just us on tour. I think, the combination of doing the cover of ‘Faith’ and people seeing actually what the shows were like, that’s when it really hit, and that’s the first time… We were recording our second record at the time when ‘Faith’ came out. That was just like, the last ditch to see if we could get any traction.”

By the time ‘Faith” gained traction in late 1998, Limp Bizkit was already recording their second album, and the last-ditch effort to generate momentum had worked. From there, the band skyrocketed to mainstream success, which goes on to prove that sometimes, chaos and near-disaster are just part of the journey.