Send Porn Stars, Funk and Money: The Limp Bizkit Story
Who wants to speak to me?” Fred Durst regards his cell phone with suspicion. “Adam Sandler?” The Limp Bizkit leader has been chatting with producer Rick Rubin, his friend, and now he thinks his chain is being yanked.
“Oh, uh, Adam … hey, how are you, man?” Durst says, sitting bolt upright. “What? I don’t lick ass! …. Oh, kick ass — thanks, man!… Yeah, I know…. We’re from Florida — Jacksonville, the really shitty part.”
It’s Adam Sandler, all right — and he wants a Limp Bizkit track for his new film, Big Daddy. Durst has already seen the picture: “Man, I was about to cry at one point, I swear.”
The sight of Fred Durst Hollywood-schmoozing is as incongruous as the $8,000 Rolex Submariner that hangs off his tattoo-covered forearm. (Durst gave his mom a similar timepiece on Mother’s Day.) Or the sight of Limp Bizkit chowing down at a pricey San Francisco Chinese restaurant, where well-heeled rubes ogle photos of former patrons like Sammy Davis Jr. and George Bush. Then again, where exactly do Limp Bizkit fit in?
This here is rock’s redheaded stepchild, the rude, crude combo that discerning listeners love to hate. The lightning rod for much of the hostility is Fred Durst, sixty-six inches of tightly wound cracker with a scrappy goatee, steely blue eyes and a free-floating belligerence. His is the kind of face you see on The Jerry Springer Show, getting berated by baby mothers, or on Cops, getting an asphalt massage. It’s still a little shocking to see such a mug haranguing you on MTV, but that’s where Durst’s formidable constituency has put him, and he’s not going anywhere.
Since their first hit single — last year’s funny-at-first desecration of George Michael’s “Faith” — Limp Bizkit have been viewed as the living embodiment of all that’s beer sodden and brain damaged in post-adolescent American manhood — in other words, a perfect match for Adam Sandler.
Being a populist pariah has its compensations. Tomorrow, the Bizkit — Durst, guitarist Wes Borland, drummer John Otto, bassist Sam Rivers and DJ Lethal — will take in a special preview of The Phantom Menace at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, and Fred Durst is flying his new girlfriend up from L.A. for their first proper date. “I can’t comprehend all this stuff,” says Durst, eyeing the Cantonese smorgasbord before him. “A year ago we were begging for an extra bag of Doritos on our backstage rider, and now …” He gazes out at the panoramic view of the San Francisco sunset and shakes his head in wonder.
Limp Bizkit’s second album, Significant Other, is expected to outstrip the 1.5 million sales of Three Dollar Bill Y’Alls, their debut, and sold 635,000 copies its first week alone. The reviews are good, the summer tour is selling out, and when MTV isn’t playing the single “Nookie,” it’s reporting on the gridlock-causing guerrilla shows that Bizkit are springing on the nation’s major cities. Somehow, between Dollar Bill and the new album, Limp Bizkit have managed to raise their game the way the Beastie Boys did between Licensed to Ill‘s frat jams and the boho freakdown of Paul’s Boutique.
To add to the band’s euphoria, Korn singer Jonathan Davis has arrived in San Francisco for the Phantom Menace junket. It was Korn that lifted Limp Bizkit out of Florida, taking them on the road again and again, giving them music-business hook-ups. The connection has often landed Bizkit with unfavorable comparisons to Korn, but Davis thinks that’s in the past. Now that he’s heard Significant Other, he views Limp Bizkit as peers, not poor relations. “With this album, they’ve truly established that they’re Limp Bizkit,” he says. “We’re like proud parents,” he adds with a broad grin.
Davis offers to take his surrogate sons to the O’Farrell Theater, a San Francisco strip club of national renown. Only Durst accepts, and he is not disappointed. The pneumatic pulchritude on show in the club’s many rooms has him glassy eyed. He asks one girl, “Do you guys eat pussy?” Durst’s manager furnishes him with sixty dollars for a private lap dance. Afterward, he glows. “The girl said, ‘I saw you on MTV today,’ ” Durst reports. “So I said, ‘That’s right — I’m one of the Backstreet Boys.’ ”
Davis gives Durst a quick lesson in strip-club savoir-faire: He tables a Croissandwich-size wad of twenties and lets the ladies come to him. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Korn’s “Got the Life” is pumping over the PA.