Faith No More’s Keyboardist Throws Stray Jab at Limp Bizkit, ‘Who Wants to See Them Play?’

Faith No More’s Keyboardist, Roddy Bottum, shared in an interview that if he had the choice, Limp Bizkit wouldn’t have supported the band on tour in 1997, remarking, “Who wants to see Limp Bizkit?”

It’s not every day you see Limp Bizkit catching strays like it’s the early 2000s, but Faith No More’s Roddy Bottum, nu-metal’s number one hater, wants to keep the spirit alive despite the genre’s resurgence.

In a new interview with Alternative Nation promoting his biography, The Royal We, the keyboardist gave his thoughts on the Fred Durst-led band supporting Faith No More back in 1997.

Supporting their 1997 album The Album of the Year, Faith No More would bring on the up-and-coming Limp Bizkit, who, admittedly, were greatly inspired by the rock band at the time.

“I didn’t know about them. At that point, I was sort of dealing with a lot of problems in my own life, and I didn’t really take a role in choosing – or helping to choose – the bands that were opening up for us. Which is a shame,” Bottum said.

The keyboardist would go on to explain why he took such a passive approach at the time, and why he regrets not voicing his concerns ahead of time.

“I think at some point, it gets easy to let people make those decisions for you. And shame on us and shame on me that we let that decision be made for us. Because who wants to see Limp Bizkit play?” he continued.

While it sounds absurd to us now, at the time, Limp Bizkit were far from the endearing act we see them as today. Throughout the tour in 1997, Faith No More fans would routinely boo Limp Bizkit, including during a September 1997 concert at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, where the crowd booed them off stage. Surprisingly, the crowd weren’t taking to nu-metal back then, which would later be egg on their face as the genre would become one of the leading sounds in rock and metal for a period afterwards.

The Album of the Year tour would also mark Faith No More’s final tour before originally breaking up in April the following year.

Fans of Faith No More probably aren’t too surprised to still see Bottum slight the band, though. In a 2015 interview with Noisey, Bottum would go a step further to label Limp Bizkit, Korn and even Linkin Park as “bad music”. The man is nu-metal’s number one hater, much in the same way Frankenstein looks at the monster he created, which makes the dramatic irony here all the more tasty.

Either way, I’m sure people who got to see Faith No More and Limp Bizkit tear up a stage in 1997 probably count themselves lucky in retrospect.