Eddie Van Halen helped change the way that the guitar was played there can be zero arguments on that front. He forged a path that has influenced six string slingers for the last five decades, and as he was one of the first to do so, Eddie Van Halen could be rightly seen as aGodfather of shredding.

Let’s face it, Eddie Van Halen was a musical genius but like most people who are marked with brilliance, he was also tinged with a slight shading of madness.

He was never afraid to speak his mind, such as how he felt Jimmy Page was asloppy guitar player and how he didn’t like the recording of Eruption because he made a mistake that seemingly only he ever noticed, as well as putting the no-brown M&M’s rule on the band’s rider to make sure the venues were paying attention, in a stroke that other bands would do well to learn from, but still there was the other side. The side that would make you worry about Eddie Van Halen’s sanity.

Such as the time that he stayed awake during hip surgery and helped the doctor drill the hole, but that’s a story for another article.

Today I’m looking at when Eddie Van Halen met Limp Bizkit frontman, Fred Durst, at a party and it was suggestedthat they jam together.Limp Biscuit were looking to replace Wes Borland and someone decided that these two would be a match made in heaven.

They weren’t.

When some at the jam started smoking weed, Eddie Van Halen took offense and left, leaving his gear behind. The next day he decided to go and get it back and, according to Andrew Bennett in his book Eruption in The Canyon, the following event allegedly took place;

“Eddie’s bought an assault vehicle from a military auction. It has a shining gun mount on the back and it’s not legal. Eddie drove that assault vehicle through LA into Beverly Hills, then parked and left it running on the front lawn of the house Limp Biscuit was rehearsing in. He got out wearing no shirt, his hair in a samurai bun on the top of his head, his jeans held up with a strand of rope and combat boots held together by duct tape. He had a gun in his hand.”

According to Bennett Eddie told him that;

“(When he)… answered the door I put my gun to that stupid red hat of this and said ‘Where’s my gear?’ That guy just turned to one of his employees and start yelling at him to grab my stuff.”

Bennett then rounded off the anecdote bysaying 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.

Did it happen or is it pure fabrication?

In my research for this article I’ve not been able to find a definitive answer, but as I already said, Eddie Van Halen had a genius that sometimes bordered on madness, so it wouldn’t fucking surprise me…