Linkin Park's Compassionate Thrash

Linkin Park started up five years ago in Los Angeles, where Shinoda and guitarist Brad Delson, both twenty-three, were high school friends. DJ Joseph Hahn, also twenty-three, met Shinoda when both were studying illustration at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. They used to call themselves Hybrid Theory, until another band with the same name threatened to sue. Their vastly superior new name was chosen in tribute to Santa Monica's Lincoln Park, although they've since found to their delight that practically every town in America has its own Lincoln Park. Bennington, twenty-four, joined two years ago. He and his wife had just bought a house in his hometown of Phoenix, when a friend tipped him to the Linkin Park demo tape. Bennington flew to L.A., started jamming with the band and never left.

Delson, a UCLA grad who almost picked law school over the band, is Linkin Park's musical heart and is probably the main reason the band doesn't get lost in the shuffle of rap-metal bands. Onstage, he wears a big, clunky pair of headphones, but what he's listening to on them remains a fiercely guarded secret. ("Actually, I'm listening to the Lakers play," he confides.) His personal tastes range from Santana and Dave Matthews to artier DJ fare such as Tricky, DJ Shadow and Massive Attack. Hahn, the band's turntablist, also favors esoteric techno and hip-hop, especially Aphex Twin, Mixmaster Mike and Kid Koala; he's currently crazy about the Deltron 3000 album. Bassist Phoenix, twenty-two, and drummer Rob Bourdon, twenty-one, give the songs much more punch than the competition. Bourdon, a gentle soul even by drummer standards, is a funk maven who grew up on his folks' James Brown and Earth, Wind and Fire records. "Basically, I just like to bang the shit out of the drums," he admits.

"When we started, we wanted to play something that we weren't hearing," Shinoda says. "The first show I went to was Anthrax and Public Enemy. They did 'Bring the Noise' together, and I was like, 'That's the most amazing thing I've ever heard.' Everybody in our band — and our fans, too — has just been raised on different styles of music. Everybody's mixing everything. When you hear Redman do a song with Roni Size, or Busta Rhymes with Ozzy, you know something's happening."

Of course, in the past few years, rap-metal bands have spawned like gypsy-moth caterpillars. "By now, metal is rap metal," Shinoda says. "OutKast's new album is rap metal — they have some awesome guitar solos." But Linkin Park's approach is distinctive enough to have struck a chord with the audience; their album made a shockingly high debut, at Number Sixteen, and hit platinum at warp speed. Now they find themselves dealing with the sudden bum-rush of fame. For instance, there is the minor matter of autographing breasts. "I don't sign breasts," Shinoda insists. "It's too creepy, especially when you don't know how old these girls really are. I did it the first few times I was asked, maybe five times, before I decided on the no-breast rule. But some of the other guys . . ."

"I figure I've signed enough boobies in my life to be done with boobies — to sign, I mean," Bennington adds. The Linkin Park dudes are not much for rock & roll road excess; they don't even have any booze in their tour rider. "We have boundaries," Shinoda says. "If one of us wants to drink or smoke, we do it in the club, not in the bus, so people who don't want to drink or smoke can hang out in the bus." Bennington adds, "We're not a bunch of straight-edge goody-two-shoes, but we do have responsibilities to ourselves and our families and the people in this group, and we respect that. If you're getting wasted, you should be spending that energy out there meeting your fans. I love to get compliments from the janitors in the clubs - 'Dude, thanks for not destroying the place, I can go home early tonight.'" The band's big road vice is gambling, whiling away the hours on the bus playing blackjack, poker and acey-deucey. The roadies usually win.

"I guess our cover's blown — we're not big, scary assholes," Shinoda says with a sigh. "People should just feel comfortable being normal. You don't have to put up a huge front to be in a band." Bennington interrupts him: "I do. Every day when I get ready, I look in the mirror and say, over and over again, 'Must become action figure. Must become action figure.'"

Bennington's special vice is clothes. He started the tour with fifteen pairs of shoes, but the reality of road life has forced him to downsize to his three favorite pairs. Offstage, he's virtually unrecognizable from his madman stage persona, guarded and thoughtful when discussing his own painful past: a childhood of sexual abuse, cocaine addiction in his teens.

"I think that's where a lot of the anger in my songs comes from," he says, choosing his words carefully. "I've never written a song about it, because I don't think it should matter to people. But I don't hide it, because I don't think you should ever be ashamed or afraid of who you are, or anything that's happened to you. Life is good, man. You can either feel like a victim all the time, or you can get off your ass and do what you want to do. If it helps kids to hear me talk about it, if they can relate, that's cool. But I'm just a regular guy, you know? There's no leotard and cape under my clothes. I shit, I piss, I drink too much and throw up, just like everybody else."

The next night, in Pittsburgh, Linkin Park are looking forward to a weekend off, their first in months. After the show, they're hitting the bus to make it to Newark Airport by 8 a.m. and fly home to L.A. for a couple of days. Tonight is the kind of gig the band has already grown too big for: The management is trying to shoo all the kids out at ten so it can turn the club into an over-twenty-one dance party at eleven. But the kids want to hang out after the show and soak up the vibe, and so does the band. When the management pushes the kids out the door, Linkin Park move out to the loading dock. Even though they all know the flight schedule, and even though they've all agreed to get on the bus and take off as fast as possible, the dudes are still hanging out on the sidewalk two hours later, signing ticket stubs, making small talk and freezing their asses off. Tonight, Linkin Park are the hardest-working band in America, and they're just letting the moment last.

[From Issue 865 — March 29, 2001]