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-- by Corey Moss, with additional reporting by Peter Wilkinson
For someone whose band has conquered the world, Chester Bennington bellows,
"So insecure!" pretty convincingly onstage night after night.
With the best-selling album of 2001 in Hybrid Theory, a permanent
home near the top of the Billboard 200 albums chart and a Best Hard
Rock Performance Grammy for "Crawling," Linkin Park should reek of
confidence.
But Bennington remembers when things were different. When Linkin Park had
few believers. When nearly every record label had passed on signing the
band, some of them multiple times.
"We did probably 36 to 40 showcases before we got signed," Bennington said
backstage at the First Union Arena in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he
and vocalist Mike Shinoda, guitarist Brad Delson, bassist Phoenix, drummer
Rob Bourdon and DJ Joseph Hahn would headline the Projekt Revolution Tour
hours later.
"It's like a cycle, too," Bourdon added. "The more showcases you do, the
more you get rejected. It's like, if you're the 21st person to see us, you
know the band has been rejected 20 times. It got worse and worse."
Obviously, Linkin Park survived and are now armed with one of the most
rousing success stories in music history. Not only have they captured the
hearts of the rock, hip-hop and electronic universes, they are the
inspiration for a myriad of young bands that refuse to listen to industry
executives who claim rap-rock is expiring.
Still, Linkin Park remain humble. Rather than take the credit they deserve,
they thank their fans for hearing what record labels did not.
"There were a ton of kids, every day, tons of e-mails coming in, and we
would get online and talk to them," Bourdon said. "There was a really good
response on the Internet. We knew that we were not insane, that we weren't
the only ones liking our music."
"The only way you can really maintain your sanity and keep a clear
conscience about what you're doing is when people react to what you're doing
from a fan level and not an industry level," Bennington added.
Before Linkin Park would even play a single showcase, they spent half a
decade putting together the right lineup, toying with a genre that was still
in its infancy and working hard to build a national fanbase.
It all began when Bourdon and Delson were in high school and played together
in a band called Relative Degree. "We set a goal to play one show at the
Roxy [in West Hollywood]," Bourdon said. "That was our big goal, so we wrote
12 songs, rehearsed for a year, played that show at the Roxy and then broke
up. That was the end of Relative Degree."
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Photo: James Minchin
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