If you are familiar with the work of the Limp Bizkit group, then you have clearly noticed a musician who stands out among them. This is Wes Borland - the most original member of the team and a very talented composer. According to the print edition of Total Guitar, it is ranked 37th in the ranking of “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”. He has a custom for each performance to take a ceramic Lucy rabbit with him for good luck.
Biography
Wes Borland (full name Wesley Lowden) was born on February 7, 1975 in the city of Richmond (Virginia), in the family of a clergyman. In early childhood, the guy received a serious brain injury, which slightly affected the psyche. However, this did not stop him from mastering many musical instruments - guitar, bass, piano, drums, percussion, cello and violin.
Wes Borland’s family traveled from place to place (possibly due to the fact that the guy was offended by peers), and he often had to change schools. From childhood he was an outsider: he did not communicate with anyone and was immersed in his rich inner world.
When Wes turned 12, he passionately wanted to make friends with a drum kit. However, the parents were not attracted by the prospect of listening to the rumble of drums for days, so Borland was solemnly presented with a guitar. One of the priests of the father’s parish, who understood all the intricacies of blues and country, undertook to teach the boy.
And then an interesting story arose in the biography of Wes Borland: when he entered the musician named Douglas Anderson, it turned out that the guy does not know a single note. After all, the priest taught him to play by ear, but he himself did not understand musical notation. Therefore, in the educational institution, the future rock star had to sweat pretty. It was there that Wes Borland became acquainted with the blues genre and fell in love with it.
Career
The musician got his first serious experience in the Krank band, but after a while he ended up in Limp Bizkit. It all started with the fact that Fred Durst, who managed to work as a tattoo artist and lawn mower, in 1994 decided to create a unique group. The trick was that the music was supposed to include both rap and hip-hop, and hard rock.
Fred succeeded, and soon Wes Borland joined the team he assembled. The Limp Bizkit group ("Softened Cookies") was born in Jacksonville and quickly became known throughout America. They were distinguished from millions of other teams not only by their aggressive manner of performance, but also by various experiments with sound, and Wes Borland’s eerie stage appearance. Throughout its existence, the Limp Bizkit group has become a Grammy nominee three times, and the discs have scattered around the world with a circulation of up to 60,000,000! That's just inside the team, everything went not very smoothly.
Disorder
In '96, a conflict arose between Fred Durst and Wes Borland, an occasion - an updated sounding of the group. The fact is that DJ Lethal just joined them, the presence of which, in fact, added Limp Bizkit new colors, which, perhaps, caused a discord between the comrades. Borland refused to continue cooperation, but Fred and the company had a serious accident, and Darst suddenly realized that without Borland he would have a very hard time. So Darst managed to convince Wes to return.
Care
After years of performances and studio work, the old conflict suddenly flared up with renewed vigor. In 2001, the official statement of Borland appeared on the Web that he was leaving the team. And shortly before that, the musician, along with his brother Scott, created a solo project Big Dumb Face. However, after only vinyl, the group ceased to exist. Then there was the band Eat the Day, about which there is no official information. After these experiments, a more successful project was born, founded jointly with Danny Lanner under the name The Damning Well. This group managed to write a soundtrack for the Underworld movie and broke up, like the previous ones.
Soon, Wes Borland poured offers for cooperation with fairly well-known teams, but he refused. Then there was a temporary collaboration with The Crystal Method, where he was not only a guitarist, but also a co-producer.
In 2004, Borland again found himself in the same boat with Darst, for the sake of recording the album The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1), but they again quarreled. The odds were so strong that Fred drove Wes out of the team via the Myspace blog. Borland was offended and decided that since he was not good enough for Limp Bizkit, let them do without him.
Solo career
Leaving the group, Wes did not sit quietly, and soon put together another project called Black Light Burns. In 2008, he worked as a session guitarist with Japanese rockers X-Japan. Around the same time, the musician managed to visit the ETP FESTIVAL in company with the band Marilyn Manson. In 2013, Wes Borland took part in recording a track for the League of Legends gaming tournament called Hybrid Worlds along with Riot Games.
The return of the musician
In early 2009, Wes Borland and Fred Durst realized that they had to compromise and make peace. Therefore, they forgave each other all the insults and reunited. The guys just realized that they must exist as a group in such a composition of five people in order to do something worthwhile. After 2 years, the world was presented with a new album "Limp Bizkit" called Gold Cobra.
Wes Borland Discography with Limp Bizkit
- Three Dollar Bill, Yall $ - 1997.
- Significant Other - 1999.
- Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water - 2000.
- New Old Songs - 2001.
- The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1) - 2005.
- Gold Cobra - 2011.
Useful hobbies
An interesting fact is that Wes Borland is the best image maker and couturier for himself: he creates original costumes and expertly applies makeup. By the way, the second hobby comes from childhood, because as a little boy, the musician dreamed of making up actors for horror films (who loves to watch at his leisure).
Personal life
In 1998, Wes Borland decided to say goodbye to a single life and married with Heather Macmillan. The couple had a very peculiar honeymoon, because they did not go to rest at the resort, but made a pilgrimage to the best attractions in the USA. After a year, the musician decided that he needed to adjust his lifestyle, so he quit smoking.