Metallica’s 2003 Summer Sanatarium tour caused quite a stir at the time, the metal titans’ decision to take out nu-metal openers upsetting their longtime fans. The band had just released St. Anger, mind you, so Metallica didn’t exactly have fan sentiment in their corner.
Spirit Adrift’s Nate Garrett was among those Met fans put off by the opening acts — Mudvayne, Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit — so he and a friend decided to take matters into their own hands at the tour’s St. Louis stop by throwing sandwiches at Limp Bizkit. Yes, sandwiches… AT Limp Bizkit.
Limp Bizkit would break up just a few days later.
Talking with the Metallica-centered Speak N’ Destroy podcast, Garrett recalled the incident in detail:
“So yeah we got tickets, we’re 15-years-old—I think Lane might have just turned 16—or maybe not, because my grandparents drove us from Oklahoma to St. Louis. And we went and saw Metallica and me and Lane were on the floor. We hated every single opening band…
“It was Mudvayne opening who was actually by far the best band, other than Metallica. We were 15-years-old, like ‘dude these guys are pretty cool’ I remember the singer kind of reminded me of Phil Anselmo and I was a huge fan of Pantera at the time, I was like, ‘this is OK.’ But then Deftones played: Not into it. Still not into it.
“And then Linkin Park played, and really not into it. Never into it. And then Limp Bizkit played. And actually funny story there which I do want to tell. When we first got there, security, we ran right up to the front—we’re like like 15 ready to go.
“We’re gonna stand in the front for all eight hours or however long it takes. Security had these sandwiches wrapped in tin foil, and there was like, shitty peanut butter sandwiches and cheese sandwiches, and they’re handing them out to people. And my friend Lane is like destroying fools trying to hoard as many of these sandwiches as he can, in his t-shirt and in his pockets.
“He’s handing them to me and I’m like ‘dude’, he was just being obnoxious as fuck… I’m like, ‘Dude, what the fuck are you doing? We already ate.’ And he just looks at me with this grin on his face and he’s got all these sandwiches and he goes, ‘Dude. Limp Bizkit‘s playing later.’
“Okay, so we start like just getting as many of these things as we can and we stuff our pockets. We’re like, running into older like heshed out Metallica fans and giving them sandwiches. We’re kind of like building an army or whatever. Limp Bizkit starts playing and we just start we start tearing off pieces of sandwiches and crunching them up into these little like tin foil sandwich balls, and just fucking destroying.
“It was like relentless just destroying… to the point where like Fred Durst keeps stopping the set. He threw homophobic slurs at us, which was kind of his M.O…. We had like a small army of these dudes in their 50s in battle jackets and stuff and we kept fucking them up. They had to keep stopping the set, and we ran out of sandwiches. I was pulling coins out of my pocket, I remember hitting the bass player, like his pickups, and you could hear it through the PA, he had active pickups, I guess. You could hear these coins hit his bass.
“Fred Durst was so mad that he started crying—like the cry anger thing you know—and the bass player had tears in his eyes, and they cut the set short. And I swear to god two shows later—we saw him in St Louis. I think it was two shows later in Chicago, Limp Bizkit broke up in the middle of that tour, and they were gone for years.
“So you can thank us for that. The first time I saw Metallica, we broke up Limp Bizkit. And this is before Metallica even played and we’ve already broken up Limp Bizkit. It was a great day.”
Gotta wonder: has Fred Durst heard Nate’s story yet? It’s hard to imagine he doesn’t remember the incident. So much for Spirit Adrift ever opening up for Bizkit.
You can listen to the full chat below.
[via Metal Injection]