Linkin Park, Kerrang! January 23, 2008
PHOENIX, ARIZONA, 1992. A thin, wiry kid – 115 pounds of sinew and bone – sits in a friend’s house, “the place where we used to crash,” he says now. Around him is the detritus of a normal day: wraps of speed, opium, booze and weed.
Suddenly the door bursts open, members of the “Mexican Mafia” swagger into the room, guns at their side. Someone starts to say something; the butt of a gun to the side of his head the reply. Someone else gets pistol-whipped for good measure, the better to keep order.
They want money, these gangsters, and they get it. Pointing guns, they sweep through the house taking cash, what meagre valuables there are, and the bike parked out front. The bike belonging to one Chester Bennington, sitting cowering inside. His internal monologue: “This isn’t cool. I’ve got to change my ways, I’ve got to stop the drugs. I’ve got to change my life.”
The story that led him to that life had been just as ugly.
“I STARTED getting molested when I was about seven or eight,” says Bennington, now. “It was by a friend who was a few years older than me. It escalated from a touchy, curious, ‘what does this thing do’ into full-on, crazy violations. I was getting beaten up and being forced to do things I didn’t want to do. It destroyed my self-confidence.
“Like most people, I was too afraid to say anything. I didn’t want people to think I was gay or that I was lying. It was a horrible experience. The sexual assaults continued until I was 13.”
Thoughts whirring around his head, he would sit alone in his room, his parents having divorced when he was 11 years’ old. His older brother and one sister had left home, his other sister was never around. Left in his father’s custody – a police detective pulling endless double shifts – he was virtually ignored, no-one to confide to.
“It was an awful time. I hated everybody in my family: I felt abandoned by my mom, my dad was not very emotionally stable then, and there was no-one I could turn to – at least that’s how my young mind felt. The only thing I wanted to do was kill everybody and run away.”
Instead, he drew pictures and wrote poetry – reams and reams of the stuff, all in the form of songs, all with verses, with choruses and all with the intention of making sense of his feelings. On the stereo in the background would be Depeche Mode and the Stone Temple Pilots; in the future would be Grey Daze, Bennington’s first band, and then would come the music that would save his life.
“The relationship I had with that band was the first time I felt I had a connection with anybody. I knew those guys would back me up. From then on, I started getting some confidence back. The problem was, I also found a good way to escape the abuse of my past. Getting high, drinking a lot and having sex with a lot of great girls is a pretty good escape.”
And so, what started out as a way to fit in, a way to block out his childhood, soon became a raging habit. “I took everything. I got really, really bad. Until I was 16, I was doing a ton of LSD and a lot of drinking. Then, when we couldn’t find acid, we turned to speed because it was cheap and it worked really, really well. I got really bad, really quickly. On a normal day, my friends and I would go through an eight-ball. We were smoking it in bongs – I was doing bong-hits of meth. It was ridiculous. Then we’d smoke opium to come down, or we’d take pills, or I’d drink so much that I’d shit my pants. It was not pretty.”
GANGSTERS OR not, Bennington’s wake-up call was inevitable. Aged 17, he moved back in with his mother who was so shocked by his emaciated, drugged-out appearance that she banned him from leaving the house. He took to drinking heavily and smoking weed to ward off the cravings from his speed-ravaged body. Soon he was, he admits, “a full-blown, raging alcoholic. In later years, the drinking would come to take over my life.”
Yet despite all this, Grey Daze would continue to gather momentum. They would open for any national act coming through Phoenix, they could sell out 2,000 seater venues on their own, they could, as Bennington remembers, “Sign autographs from the minute we finished playing until they closed the venue”.
They released two albums to huge local acclaim – but, crucially, to very little national interest. “We had a grungey sound and, though I’m proud of the songs, there wasn’t anything super original about most of them,” says Bennington. It was a lack of interest that led to arguments, the gradual dissolution of the band inevitable.
So it was that, aged 22, Chester Bennington found himself married, working at a digital services firm, and with a future that pointed anywhere but towards music. He didn’t know it, but his 23rd birthday would change his life.
HUNDREDS OF miles away, in Los Angeles, were five musicians who could not have cared less who Chester Bennington was. Ensconced in a practice studio, all they wanted to do was to work out how to blend hip-hop and rock, and to have fun while they were doing it.
Centred on the childhood friends Mike Shinoda and Mark Wakefield, they had met when Wakefield introduced Shinoda to members of his High-School hardcore band – drummer Rob Bourdon and guitarist Brad Delson. Soon Delson’s college roommate, guitarist and bassist Dave ‘Phoenix’ Farrell, was hanging out with them too, before a college friend of Shinoda’s – Joe Hahn – also joined in. Their name: Xero.
“We would write a lot more than we played,” says Shinoda now. “A lot of bands rush their songs, and go out and play a ton of shows; we spent weeks and weeks on the music, and probably only played one or two shows a month.”
“We definitely weren’t polished but we had a lot of potential,” adds Farrell. “We only really played shows as an excuse to get our friends together for a party afterwards. In the early stages, it wasn’t about getting a record deal. But the more we played, the more we realised we might have a chance.”
Their demo began doing the rounds of LA’s A+R men, most of whom passed on Xero quickly. One though, Zomba’s Jeff Blue, heard enough to persuade him to keep in touch with the band. But despite this, Wakefield began to drift away. Now working in management with the likes of Deftones, his amicable departure left Shinoda in something of a predicament.
“I never pretended I could carry the vocals on my own,” he admits. “I had these great melodies in my head, and I couldn’t get them across. I wanted to find someone who could do them justice.”
They handed their demo to Blue, among others, and asked him to send it out. Then sat back and hoped for a bite.
CHESTER BENNINGTON picked up the phone, on 20 March, 1999 – his 23rd birthday – and found Jeff Blue on the line. “I'm going to give you your big break. I have a great band for you,” he said. “I’m going to mail you a demo.”
“He told me he they had a hip-hop meets rock thing going on,” says Bennington. “I wasn’t really into the hip-hop thing but I told him to send it anyway. The music was really cool and the band were very talented but I knew I could do it better. I went into a studio and cut my vocals over their demo the very next day. That was a Saturday and on Sunday I called Jeff Blue back and said: ‘I’m done, when should I come out?’ He laughed and said: ‘No, we need you to record some vocals before sending it to us.’
“I was really cocky, so I put the tape in my stereo, pushed the phone to the speaker, played him 15 seconds of the song and went, ‘Is that good enough for you?’ He went, ‘When can you be here?’ The next day, I was on the steps of Zomba Music at 9am, waiting for the doors to open.”
But though Blue thought Bennington was the man for the job, the band had other ideas. Having already lined up a set of auditions with other singers, they were reluctant to just hand Bennington the mic.
“It was really awkward because, as I met them, they were auditioning people,” says Bennington. “In between the auditions, I would sing with them but then we’d have to stop because another guy would turn up. I just had to sit there and watch them audition someone else. I was thinking, ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!’
“They seemed very indecisive, as though they were always looking for something a little better. Personally, I thought I was the best thing they were going to find. I had been in a band for along time and we had been quite well known, so I thought I was a big deal. I thought I was doing them a favour and they were looking at me like as just some other guy they might consider. I thought they were crazy, I seriously contemplated telling them to fuck off.”
His bemusement can only have deepened on seeing his competition.
“There was one guy who never wore shoes, and he told us he wanted to do stand-up comedy during our show,” laughs Shinoda. “When I met Chester, my first impression was that he seemed smaller that I thought. He was really skinny, with glasses, and he was wearing this awful butterfly collar shirt that hung all over him. It made him look like a cheesy guy from an Arizona nightclub bar. But his vocals on our demo were incredible. He sang like a fucking beast, the same way he sings now.”
The job was his.
FROM THEN on, they worked feverishly on their music. Now known as Hybrid Theory, they rehearsed intensively. Shinoda would first work with Delson on the music before he and Bennington would write lyrics – often dredging up painful memories from Bennington’s childhood.
“There really wasn’t any room for bashfulness,” says Shinoda. “Some of his lyrics addressed that stuff [the sexual abuse], so when he and I were talking about the songs, he told me about it. It was a weird way to get to know each other, but that’s how it happened.”
Bennington, meanwhile, was homeless in LA. Despite owning a house in Phoenix, he was forced to sleep on his new bandmates’ sofas, in his car and then at a rehearsal studio.
“It was tough,” says Bennington. “I was fucking miserable. The only thing that was keeping me going was knowing we had something special going on. I knew this was the one.”
He, Shinoda and the rest of the band would go online when not working on their music, posting mp3 files and generating interest from fans on internet message boards. But, despite favourable responses there, Hybrid Theory still couldn’t get a record company interested.
“We played over 50 showcases for label guys,” says Bennington. “We got turned by everybody multiple times. We were thinking: ‘You guys have to be out of your minds, we’re awesome!’”
And then they got their break – old friend Jeff Blue was hired by the Warner Brothers A+R department and made Hybrid Theory his first signing. Their luck was about to change… or so they thought.
TO DATE, Linkin Park’s debut album has sold over 24 million copies worldwide. Last year it was certified Diamond (10 million copies) in the US alone. But when they signed to Warner Brothers in 2000, the record company weren’t even sure they wanted them on their books.
“[Some people there] hated us,” says Bennington. “I don’t mean that lightly. Literally fucking hated us.”
The first problem was the name Hybrid Theory. Another recent signing to Warners, a band called Hybrid, were considered the next big thing, forcing Hybrid Theory to change their name to Linkin Park. The next problem was their music. As they started pre-production work with Don Gilmore, the producer told them he didn’t like any of their songs.
“Well, actually he liked two – Points Of Authority and With You,” says Bennington. “We basically had to write a new record in two months. We stayed at Mike’s house around the clock and wrote that album.”
But there were further – and far more serious – problems ahead. Bennington claims he was told he "the star" and that Linkin Park should be his band. Shinoda would be relegated to just being the keyboard player or, worse, jettisoned. Bennington resisted immediately: “I said, ‘Fuck you guys. Are you serious? I’ve only just got into the band, and you’re telling me to start a coup against the guy who writes all the music? It’s <i>his</i> band. If he could sing, I wouldn’t have a job. You fucking idiots, what’s wrong with you?’
“Then they wanted to bring in this other rapper, a reggae guy called Matt Lyons. After that, they told Mike to try and rap like Fred Durst. It was like, are we on the same fucking planet here? Suck our dicks!”
“We cut off all communications with the label unless absolutely necessary,” adds Shinoda. “At the end of it all, we stood our ground and essentially told everybody, ‘We’re going to do this all on our own, our way. If you don’t like it, you can drop us, we’ll take that risk’. When we finished that record, I felt like we had run a marathon. I remember thinking, ‘I can’t believe we did that.’ It was exhaustion and pride.”
FOUR MONTHS later, on 23 October 2000, the band found themselves in Washington State just outside Seattle. Their debut album would be released the next day and, thanks to the support of the Warner Bros radio pluggers, its songs had been riding high on the airwaves. Bassist Phoenix Farrell, who had missed the recording process after temporarily leaving the band to fulfil a commitment to his old band Tasty Snax, had rejoined.
Parked outside a 24hr record store, waiting to go in on the stroke of midnight to buy the first copy of their new album, they started dreaming about what Hybrid Theory might sell in its first week of release.
“I thought it would be awesome if it sold 3,000 copies,” says Farrell. “I thought that was something to build on. But Chester said he thought it would sell 8,000 copies. My gut reaction to that was panic. You’ve got to set your expectations high but you don’t want to be stupid.”
In fact, by the end of that first week, Hybrid Theory had sold 47,000 copies, “and we all just went, ‘Holy shit!’” says Bennington.
For the next 12 months, if you wanted to get in touch with members of Linkin Park, you would have to have scoured the globe for them. In the 365 days following the release of Hybrid Theory, Farrell estimates that the band played a shade over 300 gigs. “We were averaging about five or six shows a week and then travelling too. I think I only spent about 30 nights in my own bed that year.”
And everywhere they went, they were hailed as a success story, as the leaders of the nu-metal movement. It was not a tag that sat comfortably on their shoulders.
“We never liked it. People lazily slapped that label on bands like us, but we never shared much in common with most of the bands we were grouped with,” says Shinoda. “We didn’t have the same interests, goals, musical influences, or sound. I felt like we weren’t from the same scene.”
Elsewhere, including in this magazine, there was other criticism – that Linkin Park hadn’t earned their success, that they were a flash in the pan, that they were a boy-band put together by their label.
“Certain people hated us,” remembers Bennington. “They said, ‘Who’s this fucking Backstreet Boys rock band? Look at these white kids singing and rapping about how hard life is!’ I felt I had to defend myself against that stuff, we had to fight from that point on.”
“Those rumours were totally untrue, but it’s what happens when a band finds success; this was our first taste of it,” says Shinoda. “We tried to tell ourselves that it was complimentary, that they were just saying, ‘it’s too good to be true,’ but to be honest, we were a little bitter that magazines like Kerrang! would have our backs one minute and then would turn on us quickly without doing their proper research on a bullshit rumour.”
BUT THERE were deeper problems than just that. As their tour rumbled on across Europe and then the rest of the world, they hit morale-snapping lows.
“We followed winter around the globe for almost a year, it was raining or snowing everywhere we went, and we were getting exhausted,” say Shinoda.
“To be touring in front of larger and larger crowds across the world was incredible,” adds Farrell. “The experience was simultaneously rewarding but absolutely draining too. I’m glad I did it, but I never want to have to do it again.”
More worryingly, Bennington was beginning to feel ever more estranged from his new bandmates.
“I was drinking a lot then,” he admits. “I was smoking pot and that segregated me from the rest of the band because they didn’t smoke. I didn’t feel like I was connected with the guys, we didn’t feel like close friends. Also, my then wife and I were at each other’s throats constantly. It was a pretty miserable experience.”
So fragile and notorious were Bennington’s moods that the rest of Linkin Park would actively avoid speaking to him about anything inflammatory, further forcing him to the sidelines.
“I felt like I was doomed to be this lonely person,” says Bennington. “I thought I would never have a fulfilling relationship with anyone. I thought the only friends I had were Jack Daniels and Mary Jane. At that time, I never performed a show completely sober, I was always smoking weed right up until the moment we went onstage. Immediately after we finished the show, I’d go and get hammered.”
AS 2001 became 2002, Linkin Park’s schedule became ever more relentless. Remarkably, in the precious downtime they had, Mike Shinoda managed to remix most of Hybrid Theory for the Reanimation project – pulling in contributions from the likes of Black Thought, Jonathan Davis and Aaron Lewis while he was at it. And, while the project was occasionally criticised by rock fans as a cash-in, the album met with critical acclaim in hip-hop circles.
“I thought I was just going to do a remix or two, and other people were going to do all the work,” remembers Shinoda. “I ended up overseeing the whole thing and juggling over 30 artists’ work and schedule. I vowed never to do it again!”
Barely pausing for breath, the band went straight back into the studio with Don Gilmore, this time to record their second album Meteora – with the success of their first album a weight hanging around their necks.
“There was pressure on us,” admits Farrell. “No matter what we did, we knew it would probably be considered a disappointment. Clearly, there was no way we could repeat the insanity of Hybrid Theory.”
Its release, on 25 March 2003, was greeted with both commercial and critical success – though there were those who claimed that rather than develop their sound, Linkin Park had found a successful modus operandi and stuck to it. It’s something, retrospectively, that Bennington admits too.
“Within the band, we call Hybrid Theory and Meteora Volumes I and II,” he says. “They’re very similar in a lot of ways. There’s almost a formula to them, you can tell what each song is going to do next.”
“But, on the other hand,” counters Shinoda, “we wanted to further define and evolve our sound as well. A song like Breaking The Habit, for example, could never have existed on Hybrid Theory; it was a more mature song, lyrically and sonically. When I listen to that album now, I think it has its strengths and weaknesses. There are things that sound really stiff to me now but I love it for the period in time it represents for us.”
Then, once again, Linkin Park hit the road, without stopping for another two years.
“FOR FOUR or five years, we went at a hundred miles an hour,” says Farrell. “At the end of that, we needed a break. By the end of 2004, we were about to burn out.”
While Mike Shinoda found time to both oversee the band’s mash-up collaboration with rapper Jay-Z and to release his own solo record, Fort Minor, the rest of Linkin Park found themselves worn out as they finished the Meteora touring cycle.
It was perhaps Chester Bennington who was in the worst position. Trapped in a marriage that was no longer working, and drinking more and more heavily, he was in a bad way.
“I wasn’t leaving my house. I’d shack up in my closet in the dark and shake all day. I’d wake up and have a pint of Jack Daniels to calm down, then I’d pop a bunch of pills and go back in my closet and fucking freak out for the rest of the day. I was a mess. I was falling through windows, having seizures and going to hospital the whole time. It was fucking ridiculous. I was a total wreck.
“Eventually I just gave in. I had to give up and ask for help. If I had tried to do it on my own, I wouldn’t have made it. But everybody came to my rescue.”
He sobered up, divorced, and remarried, opening himself up to the rest of his band during emotional counselling sessions in the meantime. Forced to examine his behaviour over the past few years, he crumpled in front of his bandmates.
“I had no idea I had been such a nightmare,” he says. “I didn’t realise how much my drinking and drug use was affecting the people around me. It was a shock and I’ve done everything possible to stay sober since. That’s made a huge difference to my relationship with the band. We all hang out now because they actually want to be around me. That’s a huge deal for me.”
THE NEW atmosphere in the Linkin Park camp led to a renewed creativity. Though the writing process for third album Minutes To Midnight was both lengthy and complicated, what emerged on the other side was a new band, “a band free to do what we like,” as Bennington puts it.
While Shinoda admits there was an obvious temptation to repeat the formula – and thus the success – of their first two albums, he says Linkin Park are in a far healthier place for redefining their sound along side new producer Rick Rubin.
“We sold 35 million records of that old sound,” he says. “Saying that we wanted to leave it behind and make something new and equally good was horrifying but thrilling. We were prepared for complete backlash. ‘Where’s Hybrid Theory? Where’s Meteora?’ and we got some of that but, finishing that album, was the first time since Hybrid Theory that I had that particular mixed feeling of exhaustion and pride.”
It’s an album that went to Number 1 in 23 of the countries in which it was released, whose singles have gone Top Ten in virtually every territory and whose sales have taken Linkin Park’s total album sales past the 45 million mark.
As they once again stride out across the globe, from continent to continent, enormodome to enormodome, Chester Bennington stops for a minute to look back.
“After everything we’ve been through to get here, we’re in the best place we could possibly be.” He stops for just one more second. “We couldn’t be enjoying ourselves more.”
© Tom Bryant 2010
Suddenly the door bursts open, members of the “Mexican Mafia” swagger into the room, guns at their side. Someone starts to say something; the butt of a gun to the side of his head the reply. Someone else gets pistol-whipped for good measure, the better to keep order.
They want money, these gangsters, and they get it. Pointing guns, they sweep through the house taking cash, what meagre valuables there are, and the bike parked out front. The bike belonging to one Chester Bennington, sitting cowering inside. His internal monologue: “This isn’t cool. I’ve got to change my ways, I’ve got to stop the drugs. I’ve got to change my life.”
The story that led him to that life had been just as ugly.
“I STARTED getting molested when I was about seven or eight,” says Bennington, now. “It was by a friend who was a few years older than me. It escalated from a touchy, curious, ‘what does this thing do’ into full-on, crazy violations. I was getting beaten up and being forced to do things I didn’t want to do. It destroyed my self-confidence.
“Like most people, I was too afraid to say anything. I didn’t want people to think I was gay or that I was lying. It was a horrible experience. The sexual assaults continued until I was 13.”
Thoughts whirring around his head, he would sit alone in his room, his parents having divorced when he was 11 years’ old. His older brother and one sister had left home, his other sister was never around. Left in his father’s custody – a police detective pulling endless double shifts – he was virtually ignored, no-one to confide to.
“It was an awful time. I hated everybody in my family: I felt abandoned by my mom, my dad was not very emotionally stable then, and there was no-one I could turn to – at least that’s how my young mind felt. The only thing I wanted to do was kill everybody and run away.”
Instead, he drew pictures and wrote poetry – reams and reams of the stuff, all in the form of songs, all with verses, with choruses and all with the intention of making sense of his feelings. On the stereo in the background would be Depeche Mode and the Stone Temple Pilots; in the future would be Grey Daze, Bennington’s first band, and then would come the music that would save his life.
“The relationship I had with that band was the first time I felt I had a connection with anybody. I knew those guys would back me up. From then on, I started getting some confidence back. The problem was, I also found a good way to escape the abuse of my past. Getting high, drinking a lot and having sex with a lot of great girls is a pretty good escape.”
And so, what started out as a way to fit in, a way to block out his childhood, soon became a raging habit. “I took everything. I got really, really bad. Until I was 16, I was doing a ton of LSD and a lot of drinking. Then, when we couldn’t find acid, we turned to speed because it was cheap and it worked really, really well. I got really bad, really quickly. On a normal day, my friends and I would go through an eight-ball. We were smoking it in bongs – I was doing bong-hits of meth. It was ridiculous. Then we’d smoke opium to come down, or we’d take pills, or I’d drink so much that I’d shit my pants. It was not pretty.”
GANGSTERS OR not, Bennington’s wake-up call was inevitable. Aged 17, he moved back in with his mother who was so shocked by his emaciated, drugged-out appearance that she banned him from leaving the house. He took to drinking heavily and smoking weed to ward off the cravings from his speed-ravaged body. Soon he was, he admits, “a full-blown, raging alcoholic. In later years, the drinking would come to take over my life.”
Yet despite all this, Grey Daze would continue to gather momentum. They would open for any national act coming through Phoenix, they could sell out 2,000 seater venues on their own, they could, as Bennington remembers, “Sign autographs from the minute we finished playing until they closed the venue”.
They released two albums to huge local acclaim – but, crucially, to very little national interest. “We had a grungey sound and, though I’m proud of the songs, there wasn’t anything super original about most of them,” says Bennington. It was a lack of interest that led to arguments, the gradual dissolution of the band inevitable.
So it was that, aged 22, Chester Bennington found himself married, working at a digital services firm, and with a future that pointed anywhere but towards music. He didn’t know it, but his 23rd birthday would change his life.
HUNDREDS OF miles away, in Los Angeles, were five musicians who could not have cared less who Chester Bennington was. Ensconced in a practice studio, all they wanted to do was to work out how to blend hip-hop and rock, and to have fun while they were doing it.
Centred on the childhood friends Mike Shinoda and Mark Wakefield, they had met when Wakefield introduced Shinoda to members of his High-School hardcore band – drummer Rob Bourdon and guitarist Brad Delson. Soon Delson’s college roommate, guitarist and bassist Dave ‘Phoenix’ Farrell, was hanging out with them too, before a college friend of Shinoda’s – Joe Hahn – also joined in. Their name: Xero.
“We would write a lot more than we played,” says Shinoda now. “A lot of bands rush their songs, and go out and play a ton of shows; we spent weeks and weeks on the music, and probably only played one or two shows a month.”
“We definitely weren’t polished but we had a lot of potential,” adds Farrell. “We only really played shows as an excuse to get our friends together for a party afterwards. In the early stages, it wasn’t about getting a record deal. But the more we played, the more we realised we might have a chance.”
Their demo began doing the rounds of LA’s A+R men, most of whom passed on Xero quickly. One though, Zomba’s Jeff Blue, heard enough to persuade him to keep in touch with the band. But despite this, Wakefield began to drift away. Now working in management with the likes of Deftones, his amicable departure left Shinoda in something of a predicament.
“I never pretended I could carry the vocals on my own,” he admits. “I had these great melodies in my head, and I couldn’t get them across. I wanted to find someone who could do them justice.”
They handed their demo to Blue, among others, and asked him to send it out. Then sat back and hoped for a bite.
CHESTER BENNINGTON picked up the phone, on 20 March, 1999 – his 23rd birthday – and found Jeff Blue on the line. “I'm going to give you your big break. I have a great band for you,” he said. “I’m going to mail you a demo.”
“He told me he they had a hip-hop meets rock thing going on,” says Bennington. “I wasn’t really into the hip-hop thing but I told him to send it anyway. The music was really cool and the band were very talented but I knew I could do it better. I went into a studio and cut my vocals over their demo the very next day. That was a Saturday and on Sunday I called Jeff Blue back and said: ‘I’m done, when should I come out?’ He laughed and said: ‘No, we need you to record some vocals before sending it to us.’
“I was really cocky, so I put the tape in my stereo, pushed the phone to the speaker, played him 15 seconds of the song and went, ‘Is that good enough for you?’ He went, ‘When can you be here?’ The next day, I was on the steps of Zomba Music at 9am, waiting for the doors to open.”
But though Blue thought Bennington was the man for the job, the band had other ideas. Having already lined up a set of auditions with other singers, they were reluctant to just hand Bennington the mic.
“It was really awkward because, as I met them, they were auditioning people,” says Bennington. “In between the auditions, I would sing with them but then we’d have to stop because another guy would turn up. I just had to sit there and watch them audition someone else. I was thinking, ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!’
“They seemed very indecisive, as though they were always looking for something a little better. Personally, I thought I was the best thing they were going to find. I had been in a band for along time and we had been quite well known, so I thought I was a big deal. I thought I was doing them a favour and they were looking at me like as just some other guy they might consider. I thought they were crazy, I seriously contemplated telling them to fuck off.”
His bemusement can only have deepened on seeing his competition.
“There was one guy who never wore shoes, and he told us he wanted to do stand-up comedy during our show,” laughs Shinoda. “When I met Chester, my first impression was that he seemed smaller that I thought. He was really skinny, with glasses, and he was wearing this awful butterfly collar shirt that hung all over him. It made him look like a cheesy guy from an Arizona nightclub bar. But his vocals on our demo were incredible. He sang like a fucking beast, the same way he sings now.”
The job was his.
FROM THEN on, they worked feverishly on their music. Now known as Hybrid Theory, they rehearsed intensively. Shinoda would first work with Delson on the music before he and Bennington would write lyrics – often dredging up painful memories from Bennington’s childhood.
“There really wasn’t any room for bashfulness,” says Shinoda. “Some of his lyrics addressed that stuff [the sexual abuse], so when he and I were talking about the songs, he told me about it. It was a weird way to get to know each other, but that’s how it happened.”
Bennington, meanwhile, was homeless in LA. Despite owning a house in Phoenix, he was forced to sleep on his new bandmates’ sofas, in his car and then at a rehearsal studio.
“It was tough,” says Bennington. “I was fucking miserable. The only thing that was keeping me going was knowing we had something special going on. I knew this was the one.”
He, Shinoda and the rest of the band would go online when not working on their music, posting mp3 files and generating interest from fans on internet message boards. But, despite favourable responses there, Hybrid Theory still couldn’t get a record company interested.
“We played over 50 showcases for label guys,” says Bennington. “We got turned by everybody multiple times. We were thinking: ‘You guys have to be out of your minds, we’re awesome!’”
And then they got their break – old friend Jeff Blue was hired by the Warner Brothers A+R department and made Hybrid Theory his first signing. Their luck was about to change… or so they thought.
TO DATE, Linkin Park’s debut album has sold over 24 million copies worldwide. Last year it was certified Diamond (10 million copies) in the US alone. But when they signed to Warner Brothers in 2000, the record company weren’t even sure they wanted them on their books.
“[Some people there] hated us,” says Bennington. “I don’t mean that lightly. Literally fucking hated us.”
The first problem was the name Hybrid Theory. Another recent signing to Warners, a band called Hybrid, were considered the next big thing, forcing Hybrid Theory to change their name to Linkin Park. The next problem was their music. As they started pre-production work with Don Gilmore, the producer told them he didn’t like any of their songs.
“Well, actually he liked two – Points Of Authority and With You,” says Bennington. “We basically had to write a new record in two months. We stayed at Mike’s house around the clock and wrote that album.”
But there were further – and far more serious – problems ahead. Bennington claims he was told he "the star" and that Linkin Park should be his band. Shinoda would be relegated to just being the keyboard player or, worse, jettisoned. Bennington resisted immediately: “I said, ‘Fuck you guys. Are you serious? I’ve only just got into the band, and you’re telling me to start a coup against the guy who writes all the music? It’s <i>his</i> band. If he could sing, I wouldn’t have a job. You fucking idiots, what’s wrong with you?’
“Then they wanted to bring in this other rapper, a reggae guy called Matt Lyons. After that, they told Mike to try and rap like Fred Durst. It was like, are we on the same fucking planet here? Suck our dicks!”
“We cut off all communications with the label unless absolutely necessary,” adds Shinoda. “At the end of it all, we stood our ground and essentially told everybody, ‘We’re going to do this all on our own, our way. If you don’t like it, you can drop us, we’ll take that risk’. When we finished that record, I felt like we had run a marathon. I remember thinking, ‘I can’t believe we did that.’ It was exhaustion and pride.”
FOUR MONTHS later, on 23 October 2000, the band found themselves in Washington State just outside Seattle. Their debut album would be released the next day and, thanks to the support of the Warner Bros radio pluggers, its songs had been riding high on the airwaves. Bassist Phoenix Farrell, who had missed the recording process after temporarily leaving the band to fulfil a commitment to his old band Tasty Snax, had rejoined.
Parked outside a 24hr record store, waiting to go in on the stroke of midnight to buy the first copy of their new album, they started dreaming about what Hybrid Theory might sell in its first week of release.
“I thought it would be awesome if it sold 3,000 copies,” says Farrell. “I thought that was something to build on. But Chester said he thought it would sell 8,000 copies. My gut reaction to that was panic. You’ve got to set your expectations high but you don’t want to be stupid.”
In fact, by the end of that first week, Hybrid Theory had sold 47,000 copies, “and we all just went, ‘Holy shit!’” says Bennington.
For the next 12 months, if you wanted to get in touch with members of Linkin Park, you would have to have scoured the globe for them. In the 365 days following the release of Hybrid Theory, Farrell estimates that the band played a shade over 300 gigs. “We were averaging about five or six shows a week and then travelling too. I think I only spent about 30 nights in my own bed that year.”
And everywhere they went, they were hailed as a success story, as the leaders of the nu-metal movement. It was not a tag that sat comfortably on their shoulders.
“We never liked it. People lazily slapped that label on bands like us, but we never shared much in common with most of the bands we were grouped with,” says Shinoda. “We didn’t have the same interests, goals, musical influences, or sound. I felt like we weren’t from the same scene.”
Elsewhere, including in this magazine, there was other criticism – that Linkin Park hadn’t earned their success, that they were a flash in the pan, that they were a boy-band put together by their label.
“Certain people hated us,” remembers Bennington. “They said, ‘Who’s this fucking Backstreet Boys rock band? Look at these white kids singing and rapping about how hard life is!’ I felt I had to defend myself against that stuff, we had to fight from that point on.”
“Those rumours were totally untrue, but it’s what happens when a band finds success; this was our first taste of it,” says Shinoda. “We tried to tell ourselves that it was complimentary, that they were just saying, ‘it’s too good to be true,’ but to be honest, we were a little bitter that magazines like Kerrang! would have our backs one minute and then would turn on us quickly without doing their proper research on a bullshit rumour.”
BUT THERE were deeper problems than just that. As their tour rumbled on across Europe and then the rest of the world, they hit morale-snapping lows.
“We followed winter around the globe for almost a year, it was raining or snowing everywhere we went, and we were getting exhausted,” say Shinoda.
“To be touring in front of larger and larger crowds across the world was incredible,” adds Farrell. “The experience was simultaneously rewarding but absolutely draining too. I’m glad I did it, but I never want to have to do it again.”
More worryingly, Bennington was beginning to feel ever more estranged from his new bandmates.
“I was drinking a lot then,” he admits. “I was smoking pot and that segregated me from the rest of the band because they didn’t smoke. I didn’t feel like I was connected with the guys, we didn’t feel like close friends. Also, my then wife and I were at each other’s throats constantly. It was a pretty miserable experience.”
So fragile and notorious were Bennington’s moods that the rest of Linkin Park would actively avoid speaking to him about anything inflammatory, further forcing him to the sidelines.
“I felt like I was doomed to be this lonely person,” says Bennington. “I thought I would never have a fulfilling relationship with anyone. I thought the only friends I had were Jack Daniels and Mary Jane. At that time, I never performed a show completely sober, I was always smoking weed right up until the moment we went onstage. Immediately after we finished the show, I’d go and get hammered.”
AS 2001 became 2002, Linkin Park’s schedule became ever more relentless. Remarkably, in the precious downtime they had, Mike Shinoda managed to remix most of Hybrid Theory for the Reanimation project – pulling in contributions from the likes of Black Thought, Jonathan Davis and Aaron Lewis while he was at it. And, while the project was occasionally criticised by rock fans as a cash-in, the album met with critical acclaim in hip-hop circles.
“I thought I was just going to do a remix or two, and other people were going to do all the work,” remembers Shinoda. “I ended up overseeing the whole thing and juggling over 30 artists’ work and schedule. I vowed never to do it again!”
Barely pausing for breath, the band went straight back into the studio with Don Gilmore, this time to record their second album Meteora – with the success of their first album a weight hanging around their necks.
“There was pressure on us,” admits Farrell. “No matter what we did, we knew it would probably be considered a disappointment. Clearly, there was no way we could repeat the insanity of Hybrid Theory.”
Its release, on 25 March 2003, was greeted with both commercial and critical success – though there were those who claimed that rather than develop their sound, Linkin Park had found a successful modus operandi and stuck to it. It’s something, retrospectively, that Bennington admits too.
“Within the band, we call Hybrid Theory and Meteora Volumes I and II,” he says. “They’re very similar in a lot of ways. There’s almost a formula to them, you can tell what each song is going to do next.”
“But, on the other hand,” counters Shinoda, “we wanted to further define and evolve our sound as well. A song like Breaking The Habit, for example, could never have existed on Hybrid Theory; it was a more mature song, lyrically and sonically. When I listen to that album now, I think it has its strengths and weaknesses. There are things that sound really stiff to me now but I love it for the period in time it represents for us.”
Then, once again, Linkin Park hit the road, without stopping for another two years.
“FOR FOUR or five years, we went at a hundred miles an hour,” says Farrell. “At the end of that, we needed a break. By the end of 2004, we were about to burn out.”
While Mike Shinoda found time to both oversee the band’s mash-up collaboration with rapper Jay-Z and to release his own solo record, Fort Minor, the rest of Linkin Park found themselves worn out as they finished the Meteora touring cycle.
It was perhaps Chester Bennington who was in the worst position. Trapped in a marriage that was no longer working, and drinking more and more heavily, he was in a bad way.
“I wasn’t leaving my house. I’d shack up in my closet in the dark and shake all day. I’d wake up and have a pint of Jack Daniels to calm down, then I’d pop a bunch of pills and go back in my closet and fucking freak out for the rest of the day. I was a mess. I was falling through windows, having seizures and going to hospital the whole time. It was fucking ridiculous. I was a total wreck.
“Eventually I just gave in. I had to give up and ask for help. If I had tried to do it on my own, I wouldn’t have made it. But everybody came to my rescue.”
He sobered up, divorced, and remarried, opening himself up to the rest of his band during emotional counselling sessions in the meantime. Forced to examine his behaviour over the past few years, he crumpled in front of his bandmates.
“I had no idea I had been such a nightmare,” he says. “I didn’t realise how much my drinking and drug use was affecting the people around me. It was a shock and I’ve done everything possible to stay sober since. That’s made a huge difference to my relationship with the band. We all hang out now because they actually want to be around me. That’s a huge deal for me.”
THE NEW atmosphere in the Linkin Park camp led to a renewed creativity. Though the writing process for third album Minutes To Midnight was both lengthy and complicated, what emerged on the other side was a new band, “a band free to do what we like,” as Bennington puts it.
While Shinoda admits there was an obvious temptation to repeat the formula – and thus the success – of their first two albums, he says Linkin Park are in a far healthier place for redefining their sound along side new producer Rick Rubin.
“We sold 35 million records of that old sound,” he says. “Saying that we wanted to leave it behind and make something new and equally good was horrifying but thrilling. We were prepared for complete backlash. ‘Where’s Hybrid Theory? Where’s Meteora?’ and we got some of that but, finishing that album, was the first time since Hybrid Theory that I had that particular mixed feeling of exhaustion and pride.”
It’s an album that went to Number 1 in 23 of the countries in which it was released, whose singles have gone Top Ten in virtually every territory and whose sales have taken Linkin Park’s total album sales past the 45 million mark.
As they once again stride out across the globe, from continent to continent, enormodome to enormodome, Chester Bennington stops for a minute to look back.
“After everything we’ve been through to get here, we’re in the best place we could possibly be.” He stops for just one more second. “We couldn’t be enjoying ourselves more.”
© Tom Bryant 2010
