Photographer Andrew Bennett told a story where Eddie Van Halen and Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst had an altercation after playing together.
Andrew Bennett recently published the book ‘Eruption in the Canyon: 212 Days and Nights with the Genius of Eddie Van Halen’, in which he documents the time he spent filming and photographing the iconic guitarist and his bandmates between 2004 and 2006.
The initial idea was to make a documentary about that period, but ultimately the group was not satisfied, which led to a legal battle between Van Halen and Bennett over the distribution of the material.
Well, in one of the anecdotes in the book, collected by Ultimate Classic Rock, Bennett shares a story that Eddie told him about an incident that took place in 2001, and that unites two bands as disparate as Van Halen and Limp Bizkit.
“Eddie once bought an assault vehicle from a military auction,” Bennett writes. “It has a shine gun mount on the back and is not legal. Eddie drove that assault vehicle through L.A., into Beverly Hills, then parked and left it running on the front lawn of the house Limp Bizkit was rehearsing in. He got out wearing no shirt, his hair in a Samurai bun on top of his head, his jeans held up with a strand of rope and combat boots held together by duct tape. And he had a gun in his hand.”
“That asshole answered the door,” Bennett recalled Van Halen explaining. “I put my gun to that stupid fucking red hat of his, and I said, ‘Where’s my shit, motherfucker?’ That fucking guy just turned to one of his employees and starts yelling at him to grab my shit. … Eddie Van Halen stood on the front lawn of a residential home in Beverly Hills in broad daylight, smoking a cigarette while holding a gun on Fred Durst as he went back and forth from the house to the assault vehicle, lugging amps and guitars.”
According to the photographer’s account, Eddie Van Halen continued to point the gun at Fred Durst while they were loading the amplifiers and guitars into his assault vehicle.
In the absence of confirmation from those involved in this bizarre story, it should be remembered that in 2003 Durst told MTV that Eddie Van Halen was one of eleven guitarists who inquired with Limp Bizkit while preparing their album ‘Results May Vary’ (2003).