СТАТЬИ
The Magnitude of Their Revenge and the Worst-Case Scenario
By David Fricke
Chester Bennington answered the phone on March 20th, 1999, at his home in Phoenix. The guy on the other end of the line, Jeff Blue, vice president of A&R at Zomba Music in Los Angeles, came straight to the point: "I'm going to give you your big break. I have a great band for you." The band was called Xero, and they needed a singer. The date happened to be Bennington's twenty-third birthday; Blue called him in the middle of a surprise party.
The next day, Bennington -- whose L.A.-- based attorney had recommended him to Blue -- received a Xero package in the mail: a demo with the group's previous singer and one with just the instrumental tracks. Blue told Bennington, "I want your interpretation of the songs." Bennington wrote and recorded new vocals over the band's playing and sent the results to Blue by FedEx.
Two days after that, Bennington was in L.A., formally auditioning for Xero at their Hollywood rehearsal space. He arrived with his favorite microphone, some clothes and the blessing of his wife, Samantha, who had stayed behind in Phoenix. He had also quit his job as an assistant at a digital-services firm.
"There was a lot of fear," Bennington admits, smiling with love and relief at Samantha, seated next to him in a cozy booth in a restaurant across the street from the beach in Santa Monica. "We had a lot to lose - our credit to destroy, a relationship to destroy." Both are in fine shape. Chester and Samantha, who were married in 1996, just bought a new home down in Redondo Beach and are expecting their first child, a son, in May.
"But when I got that tape," Bennington says, "we looked at each other and went, 'This is it, this is the one. It's gonna happen, even if it takes five years.' " He was way off. Three years after he took that phone call, Bennington - a slender dynamo with black-rimmed eyeglasses, a ring piercing his lower lip and a shrapnel-laced howl that sounds like it comes from someone twice his size -- is the singer in the hottest new band in rock.
After he joined, Xero changed their name to Hybrid Theory. They are now called Linkin Park.
The arithmetic is breathtaking. Released by Warner Bros. in October 2000, Linkin Park's debut album, Hybrid Theory, has sold 6 million copies in the U.S. and more than 11 million worldwide. Twelve songs of compact fire indivisibly blending alternative metal, hip-hop and turntable art, Hybrid Theory was the best-selling record in America last year -- trumping albums by Jay-Z, 'NSync and Britney Spears -- and still sells nearly 100,000 copies a week.
Linkin Park -- Bennington and founding members guitarist Brad Delson, rapper Mike Shinoda, drummer Rob Bourdon, DJ Joseph Hahn and bassist David Farrell, a.k.a. Phoenix -- are also up for three Grammys on February 27th, including Best Rock Album and Best New Artist. The band's maiden DVD, Frat Party at the Pankake Festival, is a Top Ten seller, and an official fan club, launched in November, already has 10,000 members. "Each week, we're in awe," Bennington, 25, says with a deep gulp of air.
Executives at other record companies must be in tears. For three years, Linkin Park were rejected by every major label in the business and by a lot of indies, as well. Warner Bros. passed three times before finally signing the band in late '99. Blue, who gave the group a development deal in 1997 after seeing just one show, recalls a Xero club date in Los Angeles packed with A&R scouts. They had all fled by the third song. "The place was empty," says Blue, now a vice president of A&R at Warner Bros. and the executive producer of Hybrid Theory. "You could hear crickets." When Bennington arrived in 1999, the band played forty-two showcases for labels and, the singer says, "got turned down by everybody."
It is hard to imagine how the suits blew it. At a soundstage in North Hollywood, where Linkin Park are rehearsing for their current Project: Revolution Tour with Cypress Hill, they romp and roar with an invention and intensity free of gangsta affectation and devil-metal posturing - closer to classic Faith No More than mere electric Eminem. Delson, a wiry paragon of concentration who wears a bulky set of headphones as he plays, colors his power chords in "Crawling" and "Papercut" with ringing harmonics that betray his affection for U2 and the Smiths. Hahn scratches custom-pressed discs of his own samples (he does not use other artists' records) with ambient brawn, often charging behind Delson like a second guitar. Over Bourdon's tumbling funk in "Runaway," Bennington and Shinoda shoot and share rhymes like they're joined at the lip, their bodies rocking in spasms of conviction.
"We hit a lot of roadblocks - we could have easily given up," says Delson, 24, during a chicken-dinner break at a nearby Popeyes. "But we said, 'We know what we have is great. We're gonna keep going until someone else thinks so.' It should be inspirational for people to know that if you really go for something and are willing to bust your ass, then you can make it happen."
It is clear, in their manner and chatter, that Linkin Park are wrestling with the magnitude of their revenge. Hahn, a twenty-four-year-old Korean-American who conceives and directs videos for the band, talks about success with a guarded tone. "It has been a blessing to get to this point," he says before rehearsal, trying to steady himself in a broken chair. "But when you're an outsider looking in, it seems like a bigger deal than when you're in it. It's like when you graduate high school: You wait for that day to come, and when you actually get there, you're like, 'OK, what next?' "
Farrell, 25, turns to Hahn in mild surprise. "I don't know if you remember this," the bassist says, "but three or four years ago, we asked ourselves, like every other band, 'What do we want out of this?' We all went home and wrote down goals. Mike came back with his list of goals, and one of them was 'I want to win a Grammy.' We were like, 'Wow, that's crazy. It's cool, but it's crazy.' "
Bennington, who had already done hard time with a Phoenix band called Grey Daze, is a charming mix of bull-elephant certainty and childlike astonishment. Before Hybrid Theory's release, he made a bet with Myra Simpson, national promotions manager at Warner Bros. "She had a triple-platinum Stone Temple Pilots plaque," says Bennington, a huge STP fan. "She said, 'If you go gold by Christmas, I'll give it to you.' I said, 'Cough it up.' " He laughs. "I was joking."
Sure enough, Hybrid Theory was gold by Christmas 2000. "And I got my STP plaque," Bennington says, beaming. He slept with it in his bunk on the tour bus every night. "Nobody touched it."
"I'll tell you the worst-case scenario." Shinoda, 25, is sitting under a patio umbrella outside a Starbucks. The rapper - a second-generation Japanese-American whose father, as a young boy, lived in a U.S. internment camp during World War II -- is explaining how he juggled his course load at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, with shows and rehearsals in the growing-pain days of Linkin Park.
"I'd do classes from nine to four, four to seven and seven to ten at night," he says over the swish of traffic from the Ventura Freeway half a block away. "I'd go from there to band practice in Hollywood for two or three hours, then all the way back to my parents' house and work on paintings until I couldn't do it anymore. Then I'd get up in the morning and do it all again."
"A week could be awful," Shinoda goes on, "especially if we had a show on Friday. I'd try to get my friends to come, and they'd go, 'Screw you, I've got a triptych due on Monday. I can't get the second or third painting done if I go to your show.' "
Everyone in Linkin Park has a version of that story - of balancing school, jobs and the DIY demands of being in an unsigned band. Bourdon, 23, waited tables, worked in a bowling alley and studied accounting at Santa Monica College. Hahn also attended Art Center, where he met Shinoda, but left after a year to be a freelance illustrator, designing monsters and robots for the movies. Delson split his time between UCLA (where he received a degree in mass communications), songwriting in Shinoda's bedroom and an internship at Zomba Music, where his boss was Jeff Blue. "Brad took in the entire atmosphere of what it takes to get an act signed," says Blue. "He helped me send out Macy Gray demos and set up her showcases."
Linkin Park are not only one of the best-educated bands in new metal (Farrell, a native of Massachusetts and Delson's roommate at UCLA, holds a degree in philosophy); they are surely one of the best organized. Each member, according to his expertise, is in charge of some aspect of the group's artistic and business interests. As Hahn puts it, "We're the only guys that really get it. This is our career, and we take it seriously."
He and Shinoda are the visual generals; they created the drawings for the cover of Hybrid Theory. Delson and Bourdon specialize in finance and marketing. Bennington designs a clothing line and writes all of the lyrics with Shinoda. Farrell, who left the band before the making of Hybrid Theory but returned just prior to its release, writes a regular tour report for Linkin Park's Web site -- no small chore: Linkin Park played 324 shows last year, almost a gig a day.
Excerpted from RS 891, March 14, 2002
